Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and the opportunity and the privilege to come to the floor and address you here. It is also a bit nostalgic to step in behind Duncan Hunter. I remember many times standing here on the floor of the House debating issues, and a lot of them were national security issues, including our immigration issues, with Duncan Hunter's father. And this transition has been very good to see a young man, a young marine, stand here in the well and speak to you and talk to you about our national security issues from the experience standpoint of a marine who has served in Afghanistan and now one who serves in the United States Congress. I very much appreciate the addition to this Congress that he is.

I lament what we have seen happen today, this activity that this Congress has gone through; the Department of Defense authorization bill that saw at least 144 or so vote against it. Most of those that voted against the authorization bill, including me, support, of course, the Department of Defense and our national security and all of our men and women in uniform and all of our veterans all the way back to many wars prior to today. The Department of Defense authorization bill was used as a political tool by the left to advance a left-wing agenda that should be appalling to the American people if they understand the motivation of this idea of inserting hate crimes into the Department of Defense authorization bill.

It's a piece of legislation that had passed off the floor of this House a piece of stand-alone legislation. Many of us opposed it. It is activist legislation that sets up and creates sacred cows, people who get special protected status, people who are identified by their alleged, hopefully private, sexual behavior or thoughts. This is a bill that the United States Senate couldn't figure out apparently how to debate on its own and send back over here to the House amended or simply send it to the President. So they polluted the Department of Defense authorization bill with it.

I would be very happy to yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from California who I think has an opinion on this matter.

Reclaiming my time, I so much appreciate the gentleman from California. I'm looking to this new leadership that's emerged into the new Congress, and Duncan Hunter is one of those people. The statement that he has made, I concur with. I have looked at the Department of Defense authorization bill with hate crimes legislation, which is, in fact, thought crimes legislation, built into it, slipped into it as a, not quite a poison pill, because there were liberals over here today, and I would be happy to yield to any one of them that want to stand up and defend themselves, liberals over here today that maybe for the first time voted for the Department of Defense authorization bill because it had this hate crimes legislation in it, the thought crimes legislation in it. Their radical social agenda in some cases overcame their resistance to supporting our military. And so it was a double-edged sword that was put in here, a rotten sword, the wrong, wrong thing to do.

I looked at it from this perspective: that if we are going to let them put into the Department of Defense a piece of legislation that's so contrary to the rule of law, so abhorrent to equal justice under the law, it turns out to be holding the Department of Defense hostage; it's almost like somebody kidnapped the Department of Defense bill and required that in order to pay off the kidnappers, the ransom note was the hate crimes bill. That's what happened. I don't think anybody is going to stand up and defend that today. They wanted to avoid that debate. They wanted to force a vote. And President Obama, of course, supports the hate crimes legislation. So he will sign the bill, and it will be law in the United States of America. And then we will be asking juries and judges to discern not the act that might be committed that's a crime, but the thought that was in the head of the perpetrator and the victim. And it is not the basis of the law going all the way back to English common law to determine what's in the head of the perpetrator or the victim when a crime is committed because an individual is a sacred life. All life is equal under the law. Whether you're a little-bitty baby or whether you are a senior citizen with a terminal illness, those that value those lives under the law are valued equally.

The father of Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania as a Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania, said this: Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed. We measure the life and say that it is the measure itself, and an act committed against a person's life, and it could be murder, it could be assault, it could be rape, it could be a number of different acts actually against a person's property, and now this hates crime legislation for the first time would increase the punishment against someone because the victim may have perceived that they were

of a different sexual orientation. So for the jury or the judge to get into the head of the perpetrator and the victim for the first time and value the victim who might be, because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity, a special protected class of people, different from everybody else, so a crime committed against a self-alleged homosexual would be punished additionally.

If there were, say, two people who were equally victims of a crime, one of them was a self-alleged homosexual, the other one was not, the penalty for the assault on the homosexual would be greater than the penalty for the assault on the person who did not declare their sexuality. Mr. Speaker, that's a principle that we should not cross.

As we debated this issue in the Judiciary Committee, I brought an amendment. Now I will argue that the way the language reads and the definitions of sexual orientation and gender identity are so broad that anyone's proclivity could be included in this, whether they are crimes or whether they are not. So I brought an amendment that would strike out inclusion of special protected status for pedophiles. You would think it should be clear. We should be willing not to protect special protected status for pedophiles. The Democrats on the committee argued against it. And it went on a recorded vote to vote against excluding pedophiles as a special protected class. The result of it, Mr. Speaker, was special protection for pedophiles and all other paraphilias that are listed in the American Psychological Association.

That came to the floor of the House of Representatives. We had a debate on it here. The gentlelady from Wisconsin (Ms. Baldwin) had a definition. She said it only includes heterosexuals or homosexuals. That was her language in the committee. That would not include then, of course, bisexuals. I think that might be trouble for her analysis. But Alcee Hastings, the gentleman from Florida, stood over at that microphone, and he read a list of about 30, I will call them paraphilias. And he said this language protects all of these behaviors, I believe all philias whatsoever, are protected. Alcee Hastings. I couldn't believe it, Mr. Speaker.

I couldn't believe it, Mr. Speaker. So after the debate was over, the vote was over, I went over and I personally asked him, Did you really say what you said? Did I hear you right? Did I miss a word? Somehow is there a misunderstanding on my part?

He said, No, that's what I believe.

That's what is in the Congressional Record. It is in the Congressional Record in the Judiciary Committee. It is in the Congressional Record on the full record on the floor of the House of Representatives, in the debate and the effort to offer amendments that would exclude these behaviors. And some of these, many of these behaviors are crimes. Hate crimes legislation protects some acts that are criminal because they are under this list of paraphilias that are part of the sexual orientation or gender identity of the alleged victims or maybe even the perpetrators.

It is a horrible piece of legislation. It addresses crimes of violence, which means an offense that has an element that threatens the use of force against property of another that might be the property of someone with a particular sexual orientation or gender identity.

This is bad law. It is bad legislation. It is a bad, bad precedent for a country that has built its strength upon the rule of law, Mr. Speaker, and now this pill has been slipped into the Department of Defense authorization bill. And there were dozens and dozens of Members of this Congress that voted ``no'' on the bill exclusively because of the hates crimes legislation, the thought crimes legislation that was injected into it. And they will be characterized now in campaign ads as being against our national defense.

We know, and the totality of the record of the Members of Congress here is understood, but it was a raw political move, and it was a bitter thing to see happen.

I am not worried myself; I will speak up, Mr. Speaker, so I am not worried myself.

I do have a couple of other subjects that I want to shift to.

Mr. Speaker, I am shifting over to the health care debate. This is the chart of HillaryCare. This legislation emerged in 1993. At the time President Bill Clinton gave a speech on the floor here of the House, September 22, 1993. He laid out the principles for a national health care act, for a complete government takeover of all of the health insurance and the health care delivery system in the United States.

This is the flowchart that came from that legislation. I will at least give him credit for honesty. And I will give he and Hillary credit for at least writing a bill. Some of us were nervous that a lot of it happened behind closed doors. But they did write a bill, and they tried to push it on Americas, and Americans rejected the National Health Care Act in 1993 and 1994.

This is the flowchart that comes off of The New York Times that was published at the time. Black and white, a little fuzzy. They didn't have the graphics that we have now. They didn't have color in their newspapers like we do now. But I do have the chart that we have for the new bill now.

This, Mr. Speaker, is the new chart. The black and white that is on this new chart for H.R. 3200, the black and white are existing programs. The color are the new programs that are created by H.R. 3200. So you can see some of the things that exist. Let's see, the Office of Minority Health exists. The Office of Civil Rights exists. The National Coordinator For Health Information Technology exists. But the new ones in color are created by the bill.

There are a lot of them, and I can bog us all down in this, but I will take you down to the part of the bill that gives me the most heartburn. And there is no cure offered for my heartburn if this bill should pass. We have private insurers in America. This black-and-white box here, that represents 1,300 private insurance companies in the United States of America. It is a lot of companies, a lot of competition; 1,300 private health insurance companies.

They are offering in the area, the best estimates we have, about 100,000 different policy variations. That is this box here, traditional health insurance plans.

The private insurers and all of their plans in this box, under the bill they would have to qualify in order to be qualified health benefits plans. That is this purple circle here. It looks rather benign, but it is not benign. Getting qualified for all of these 100,000 policies with the 1,300 companies into these qualified health benefits plans will be done so by the rules of the bill, and the rules are written by the Health Choices Administration and the commission and the commissioner.

This would be one of the most powerful positions in government, the health choices commissioner. And you're wondering why are they not calling him a czar?

Mr. Speaker, that is because we are full up to here with czars. I am going to call him the commi-czar-issioner, the person who would be writing the rules, with his huge staff, and he would make the determination which, if any, of these 100,000 health insurance policies would qualify to go into the purple circle of the qualified health benefits plans.

While those decisions are being made by the health choices commi- czar-issioner, we would also be creating under the bill a public health plan. That's the public option. That is the public option that--I believe today Speaker Pelosi said there are the votes to pass a public option plan here in the House of Representatives. If that is the case, I don't know why she is waiting. They will lose some Members I am convinced of that, Mr. Speaker, but the health choices commissioner will be writing rules that have to be met in order for the private carriers to qualify, all the while they are looking at setting up the Federal health insurance plan that will take billions of dollars of capital to get it established, and they will write their plans with certain restrictions and with certain premiums designed to compete with the private sector.

Remember, the President said we have to provide some competition. We don't have enough competition in the health insurance industry.

I would suspect that he couldn't answer the question how many companies do we have today? How many policy options do we have today? Mr. Speaker, I have just told you, 1,300 companies, 100,000 policy options, and the President's argument is we have to provide

a little more competition so there is a little more variety. The government can do that because health insurance companies aren't doing that job?

What would happen would be billions of dollars would go in to create this new Federal health insurance plan. And then if it couldn't compete with the private sector, the rules would be written differently for these private plans. Many of them wouldn't qualify. They would set mandates and require that policies cover a whole series of things. What about pregnancy for someone who is a grandmother? If everybody has to pay for those kinds of things, the premiums will go up. Those are the kind of mandates that make health insurance premiums go high.

The government would write the rules so they can compete with the private sector is what would happen, and they would tap into the pockets of the taxpayers in order to have the capital to jump-start the health insurance plan. And then as they move forward, regulating private insurance companies and subsidizing the public option, the government plan, the Democrats' health insurance plan, it would squeeze out the private plans.

Now, how can I say that this is what would happen with some confidence? None of us have a crystal ball. But I have a little bit of history, and I take you back to 1968 when, at the time, the only flood insurance in America was provided in the private market by the property and casualty companies.

In 1968, this Congress passed the Federal flood insurance program. When that program was passed, in order to compete, they started to write regulations. The regulations that they wrote in part were requiring national banks who gave loans for real estate to require that those policies, the Federal flood insurance policies, be purchased by the borrower. So there was a mandate that people had to buy flood insurance. They wrote the rules, the premiums and regulations.

And today, since 1968 when there was no Federal flood insurance program and all flood insurance was private on that day when they came to the House in 1968, today a person in America cannot buy a flood insurance policy from anyone except the Federal Government. The only thing left is Federal flood insurance. There are no private carriers out there. The Federal Government has swallowed up the entire private flood insurance industry.

That is an example of what might happen with the health insurance industry, and what I think is likely to happen with the health insurance industry.

In examining some of the policies around the world, I would point out that in Germany they tell us they have the oldest national health care plan in Germany, that they have provided health care for their people since Otto von Bismarck's time. I don't know whether they tell us that or I recall reading that from history. Ninety percent of the health insurance in Germany is the public option; 10 percent is the private option. The people that buy insurance outside of the government insurance plan are those that are entrepreneurs, self-employed, more well-to-do. They want a policy that gives them a little extra coverage and takes a little better care of their health. At least that exists; 90 to 1.

Really, this is something that is the President's plan? He would like to have this public health plan swallow up 90 percent of the private health insurance in America? I think so. He is on record saying he wants a single-payer plan.

When you think about how that goes, a single-payer plan, and if we provided, let's say, funding to buy insurance, to help people buy insurance that couldn't afford it, and that would perhaps be a voucher that goes in, that one can control to buy health insurance, the argument then becomes: How big should that voucher be? Let's just say poor people would get $3,500, and the more wealthy they were, the less money they would get. And if that were ever established, the next argument is: Where is the threshold? What is the means testing?

Pretty soon the number would go from $3,500 to $7,500 to a $10,000 subsidy for people's health insurance premiums. And then at a certain point, I will hear the argument from over here, if we are still around on that day, we will hear the argument, well, it costs too much money to administer vouchers and to give refundable tax credits to people so they can afford to buy health insurance, why don't we wipe out that whole bureaucratic mess and simply have people show up at the public clinic and we will take care of them accordingly, and their medical records can be managed by the government along with their health care.

I can give you some examples of what happens when you end up with a National Health Care Act, Mr. Speaker. That would be the average time waiting for a knee replacement in Canada: 340 days. The average time waiting for a hip replacement in Canada: 196 days.

I talked to an individual, ran into him at a home improvement type of store. He is a legal immigrant from Germany. He told me he had a hip replacement. He waited in line for at least 6 months for a hip replacement. Finally, he was put in several lines around Europe. He went from Germany to Italy, where they gave him a hip replacement. That was one of the ways he could move more to the front of the line.

We had an individual that made a presentation to us. He was a doctor from Michigan who practiced both in Michigan and in Canada. When he first went to Canada to work the ER, a young man came in with a torn meniscus and some ligament damage. The doctor looked at it and said, You need surgery right away. I will schedule you for tomorrow morning. He was used to working in the United States.

Little did he know, and he found out quickly, he couldn't schedule him for surgery in Canada for the following morning. He couldn't even schedule him for an examination. The specialists that approve the surgery had to be scheduled first. So this young man, with his knee torn up, waited for 6 months for the specialist to examine the knee and approve surgery, which was scheduled another 6 months later.

So the reconstructive surgery for this young man who was incapacitated, couldn't work, was 6 months for the exam, 6 months to get the surgery scheduled, and then all of the rehab that it takes after the muscles atrophy over a 12-month period of time. A full year from the injury where, this doctor, who has good credentials and has spoken to this Congress and I find to be a very credible individual, in the United States that surgery would have taken place the next day, in Canada, it took place 365 days later. We don't need this kind of health care in America. The argument that we have too many uninsured is something that we just simply need to address with some facts.

I know it's hard on the people on the other side when they have to deal with facts. When the President says that we have too many uninsured, and the arguments that you have constantly made that there are 44 to 47 million uninsured. Sometimes you round it up to 50 million, but 47 million is the largest legitimate number that we hear that are uninsured in America.

Somehow they have gone past the idea--first, they want to establish the idea that everybody has a right to health care. Well, that's not in the Constitution. We can make your argument as to this right to health care. Out of the compassion of the American people, we can decide that we don't want to leave anyone behind, and we can decide that we want to make sure that everyone has access to health care. In fact, everybody in America has access to health care. That question is answered.

The only argument that remains is that there are too many that are uninsured, 47 million. So here are the enlightenment facts, Mr. Speaker: 84 percent of the people in the United States have a health insurance policy. In fact, they're happy with it. They don't want it changed. They don't want to lose it. This is the pie chart. All of the people here in blue are insured, and almost all of them are happy about the insurance that they have.

All of these little slices here, these are the 47 million people who are uninsured, and they go down through these categories. I'm going to go from right to left--yellow, black, orange from the bottom. Illegal immigrants, 2 percent. That's part of that 47 million. I don't want to give them insurance off the back of the taxpayers, especially if we're borrowing the money from our

grandchildren and the Chinese. Then we have legal immigrants.

This is a slice in black. They are the ones that are, by law, barred for 5 years from being able to access public benefits. You come into the United States, you should be able to take care of yourself. That's one of the standards. That's another 5 million people, 5.2 million illegals, 5 million legals. Then you have individuals who are earning more than $75,000 a year. That's the list up here in orange. That number is a number that presumably, if you're making more than $75,000 a year, you can write a check for a health insurance policy. So they do have an affordable option. They just aren't exercising the option.

Then in green, those eligible for government programs. That's 9.7 million. That is these people here, 3 percent. They're eligible most generally for Medicaid, but they don't sign up. But they're on the list, 9.7 million. We're adding up to 47 million as we go. Here are those that have coverage eligible under their employer. That's around 6 million people. These folks opted out or didn't opt in to their employer-provided health coverage, health insurance coverage.

So all of these lists that we have, from illegal immigrants to new immigrants, $75,000 or more and could buy their own insurance, those who are eligible for government programs and don't sign up, those who are eligible for employer programs and don't sign up--all of that, you subtract that from 47 million and, Mr. Speaker, you come up with a number that is 12.1 million Americans who don't have health insurance and don't have affordable options.

I have another little chart that shows this. This is the breakdown of this group here. This spectrum from yellow to--well, red or orange has been put now on a chart. This is 47 million. Here is how we show this. These are the different categories that I said: illegals, legals, those that are eligible for Medicaid, those eligible under employers, and that full list. But here in orange, 12.1 million people, less than 4 percent of the population of the United States, and we're going to change here in the House of Representatives, working with the Senate and with the effort of the President and likely his signature for less than 4 percent of the population?

Let me look at this. This sliver right here, that's 12.1 million Americans, this piece, and that's less than 4 percent of the population of the United States. The President's proposal and the liberals' and the Progressives' proposal, the Democrats' proposal is to transform 100 percent of the health insurance industry in the United States and 100 percent of the health care delivery system in the United States to try to reduce this 12.1 million number down to something less than that, maybe something less than 6 million, but certainly not down to zero.

The President stood here and tried to tell us that the proposal would not fund illegals, but his Democrats have voted down the amendments in Energy and Commerce and in Ways and Means that would have required proof of citizenship in order to access these benefits that are written into H.R. 3200, the bill. So it's pretty hard for the President to be critical of those who make allegations about his veracity when the facts show otherwise, Mr. Speaker.

I hope that that dances along the edge of the rules adequately and still carries forth the message. I'm trusting the American people to be intelligent, well informed, objective, not selfish and be able to self- sacrifice, to reach out and help others, but remember to preserve our freedoms. If we sacrifice our freedoms, if we throw over the side that vitality that makes us great, the dependency takes away our vitality. Urgency and need add to our vitality.

Free market capitalism has been a driving force in this country. Yet to date, according to The Wall Street Journal, a third of our private sector has been nationalized within the last year. A third of it. When you add three large investment banks that are nationalized, AIG, the large insurance company, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, eight large huge entities swallowed up and nationalized, which means the Federal Government controls them. That's a third of our private sector, and this health care industry here is between another 14.5 percent and 17.5 percent of our GDP. The range is somewhere between the two.

But if you add those numbers up to what's already been nationalized, you are up to over half of the private sector of the United States. We need to remember that going to Western Europe and looking for ideas and seeking to conform to the ideas that are driven in Western Europe diminish our freedoms. They don't enhance our freedoms. We are a unique people. There is something unique about being an American. We aren't simply an extension of Europe. We are our own people. We're free people that came here to live free or die. I love the motto of New Hampshire: ``Live free or die.'' That has been the case for hundreds of years here in the United States.

We've skimmed the cream off the donor crop from every civilization that sent us people. It was hard to get here. The people that had a dream got here. When they came here, they built on their dreams. They built on our dreams because we have freedom. We have got to expand our freedom, not diminish it. We shouldn't be expanding our government. Now we have got to shrink our government. We have got to find a way to have a private sector that can have the kind of growth necessary to ever pay off this national debt and save people their freedom so that they're not underneath the thumb of a national health care act.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence, 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 6 o'clock and 53 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, October 9, 2009, at 10 a.m.

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

I want to thank my friend, Dennis Kucinich, for bringing this resolution to confer honorary citizenship on Casimir Pulaski. This is a rare honor and only having that happen a small number of times before in five separate incidents of people of the highest standard in the history of the United States and those that exemplified our values: Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg, William and Hannah Penn--William Penn, of course--and also Mother Theresa and the Marquis de Lafayette.

I think it's very interesting that this proposal comes before this Congress as--I'll put it this way--Casimir Pulaski was endorsed and recruited into the military by the Marquis de Lafayette, and he was endorsed and, of course, promoted by George Washington. Now, when you're endorsed and promoted by people of that caliber--and now here we are more than two generations hence--I think that's a very high standard. And I want to maintain a very high standard for honorary citizenship.

It has been a slow process for me to get to this point of conviction on this because the standards are so high. When I see Mother Theresa, that's a really high standard. And I don't propose that Casimir Pulaski belongs in the league of any one of these individuals, but he belongs in this category of approval today.

So we've heard much of the history: a ``freedom fighter'' is the best way to describe him, and the Father of the United States Cavalry; a person who was killed in battle, died 2 days later aboard a ship, the Wasp.

And I would also submit that we are here at least within a short period of time at a low point in U.S.-Polish relations. I won't embellish that in this discussion any further, but I am hopeful that this resolution which I expect to pass today sends the strongest and warmest message to our friends in Poland that we are allies, we are all freedom fighters together, and we'll stand together. And we'll stand together in the spirit of the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington, whose life was saved by Casimir Pulaski, and in the spirit of Casimir Pulaski himself.

I thank my friend Dennis Kucinich for bringing this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and honor of addressing you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And I also appreciate the opportunity to listen to my good friend and colleague, Dr. Gingrey from Georgia. I think he's actually putting out a few more words per minute than he usually does. This is a passionate subject matter for him, and the bills that he's introduced and the foundation that he's laid, I think, is an excellent rebuttal to the statement that was made earlier in the 5 minutes by the gentlelady from California who said, Republicans, where is your plan on health care?

Well, we have many, many plans on health care. And we have many, many ideas on how to address this. And they are consistent. They are consistent with human freedom and the instincts of humanity. They're consistent with

the marketplace, consistent with the foundation of what has made this a great country. And on the other side of the aisle they seem to be consistent with managed economies and managed societies, the kind of societies that have always failed, the kind of societies that have drained away human ambition and put countries, entire nationalities in a position where, I believe it was Ronald Reagan that said, In the Soviet Union they pretend to pay people, and in the Soviet Union, people pretend to work.

There's something about human nature that we understand over here on this side of the aisle, and we want the best out of all of us. And so I'd take us back to the broader structure of what has been delivered here on the House. There's really only one bill out here that has passed out of committees and is before the American people as the subject matter to be discussed, and that is, here in the House, H.R. 3200. And I have, first, Mr. Speaker, a diagram of the previous bill that came out in 1993 and '94 that was known in many ways as HillaryCare. And so I have an observation here that I will post. This, Mr. Speaker, is the flow chart of HillaryCare. This is out of the archives of the New York Times. And it also is very close, if not identical to the flow chart that was on the wall of my office back in the early and mid-nineties, actually all the way through the nineties.

This is the flow chart that was laid out when the previous attempt to take over health care, for the government to take over the American health care system, was made. Here, on this floor, a few feet behind where I stand now, at the time President Bill Clinton came to the floor, September 22, 1993, and he did the unprecedented thing. He asked to address a joint session in Congress to speak of a subject matter that wasn't about war. That was the unprecedented component of it. But it was about the Federal Government taking over 100 percent of the health insurance and health care delivery system in the United States of America. That is a huge reach, and it was something that mobilized the American people in opposition. There were good reports on President Clinton's speech immediately after he gave it, because he, like our current President, had an ability and retains that ability to be a compelling speaker and to move people with the force of his words and not necessarily the force of ideas, but the tone and the force of the words themselves.

So President Clinton, in the aftermath of that September 22, 1993, speech right here to this joint session of Congress, his numbers moved and it looked like he had perhaps broken the dam and there was going to be a National Health Care Act that would transform and take over the entire health insurance industry and the health care delivery system in the United States.

We know how that came out, Mr. Speaker. We look back on that 15 years ago, we know how it came out. And that was there was a push-back across the land. I don't know that we actually used that expression in those days. But I recall Harry Louis and I recall Senator Phil Gramm, who, right down this hallway at the other end of the doors that you and I are facing, Mr. Speaker, at the other end of this Capitol Building, stood on the floor of the United States Senate and he said, This National Health Care Act will pass over my cold, dead, political body. That was Senator Phil Gramm. And a lot of people thought that his political body was going to be cold and dead and that we would have HillaryCare in America.

It didn't take 15 years to find the results of that, Mr. Speaker, because the American people rejected the idea that the freedom that they had to purchase their own health insurance and the freedom that they had to make many of their own decisions with their doctor in the marketplace would be taken away, and it would be government run and government owned.

This is the flowchart that described it better than anything else. I would submit as we look at these stacks of bills, an 1,100-page bill in H.R. 3200, the health care bill that has passed out of committee and is here waiting to come to the floor of the House, you can't understand the language; I don't care how good a lawyer you are if you have some diagrams. And you have to be able to look at the flowchart and track through the diagrams to find out what the language does, draw some pictures, so to speak. And even then I believe it is impossible for a single individual to analyze this legislation and be able to predict the pitfalls that are created by the vagaries in the language. There are many.

But this was enough to scare the living daylights out of the American people and me. And in fact, Mr. Speaker, this flowchart was one of the significant components that drove me to take time away from my private business, the construction business that I started in 1975.

And, Mr. Speaker, I seldom tell the story about that background, but I think for the sake of those who are listening--and we all want to evaluate the background of the people that are making recommendations for all 306 million Americans. For me, Mr. Speaker, I grew up in a lower-middle class family. My father was a law enforcement worker, a manager of the State police radio station, middle-level management. So he had pressure from the Governor on down and then he had some people who worked underneath him. Great reverence for the rule of law, a profound work ethic that something had to be going on all the time and you had to constantly be making progress.

That was my background. No business background.

But by 1975, Mr. Speaker, I had concluded that if I were going to control my destiny, it didn't pay for me to sit back and wait for the government to send me a check. The eagle wasn't going to fly for Steve King unless I did something to make the nest and get the eggs laid and hatch those eggs out. I had to take care of my own destiny.

So one day in June of 1975, I decided that I didn't have a lot of alternatives, but one of those was to take a risk and a chance and start a business. And I decided it was the best alternative. And so by August of that year, I had borrowed a hundred percent and gone out and bought a bulldozer, and that was the business, it was the foundation of the business. I don't know how many hundred pounds of welding rods I burned on that machine and how much repair work I had to do just to put it out on the job for the first hour. By the way, it broke down again in the first half a day and back to the shop it went, and I had to tear it completely down, rebuild it again and try again.

Many of us who have started businesses got knocked down over and over again, picked ourselves up again, and in the process of doing that were forced to learn the components of running a business. And anybody that started out with--I'll say for me it was a negative net worth in a highly capital-intensive business and had to meet payroll and meet the government regulations. And by the way, back then--I did a count. I had 43 government agencies that regulated my business. I had to answer to 43 government agencies, and if any one of them stepped in at any time and declared me to be out of compliance, they could either levy a fine or shut me down.

Government was then the biggest fear that I had when I started the business. I wasn't worried so much about whether I could do the work or I could repair the machines or whether I could drive the truck. I wasn't even so worried about whether I could market the service that I had decided to provide. All of those things were going to take time and effort, and all of those skills had to be improved upon. But the one I was most concerned about was how do I possibly meet all of the government regulations that I don't even know.

And there isn't any one single contact go-to point that any person who is starting a business to find out how many regulations you're going to have to meet, what will be the nature of that regulation. If you just stacked it all up, stacked up all of the paperwork and the regulations for 43 agencies that regulated me at that time, if I had known that, that would have been enough to scare me completely out of business before I ever went into business.

I lay this background to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I met payroll for over 28 years, over 1,400 consecutive weeks, and I paid myself last, if at all; and I paid my employees first and then I fed the kids. But we got through those

years, and we had our ups and downs. And I would never categorize it as a magnificent success except that being a business owner, a founder and a manager had laid the groundwork for me to understand the components of the other businesses in the country and gave me the tools that I had the flexibility to raise my family in a fashion that I thought was far more constructive than it might have been if someone else were telling me when and where I was going to show up to work. And it also gave me a burning desire to try to clear some of the path for others that might want to do the same thing.

So regulation has always been, I'll say in the last couple of generations anyway, the number one concern of business. What will government do not for us, but what will government do to us.

So this was 1975 when I began. We had our ups and downs, Mr. Speaker. I had barely gotten a position that I was even there to be a target of the farm crisis in the 1980s. But I went through all of that, and many of us got hammered flat over and over again and got back up. And some of my neighbors didn't make it. And some of them, their spirit was destroyed even though they made it. Those were tough years.

And the floods in 1993 and the other experiences along the way that I could chart on my financial statements, the ups and downs, all are triggered with some kind of an event.

But the experience of dealing with government and the experience of having to be my own accountant, mechanic, truck driver, my own sales manager, my own human resources manager, my own equipment operator, sometimes my shovel operator, sometimes the wrench operator, sometimes just the person who is the superintendent that steers everybody else when things are working and it's all in tune, that's when you're the least busy. I went through all of that.

I had to also deal with lawyers and insurance men and also, of course, our bankers. All of that laid a background and I think a knowledge base that's been so very useful here in public life.

But of all of the things that I mentioned, the one that's concerned me the most from the beginning, and the greatest impediment to people who might be entrepreneurs that want to establish and found a business, are government regulations. And this spider web of government regulations that were created by HillaryCare was enough to--didn't scare me out of business because it didn't pass over Senator Phil Gramm's cold, dead, political body, but it was enough to scare me towards politics, if not completely into politics. And I think it was enough to scare the living daylights out of the American people, and they killed HillaryCare.

Now we have the modern era. Fast forward 15 years, Mr. Speaker. The previous chart, Mr. Speaker, was black and white. This is in full living technicolor. This is a 2009 version, the most recent version of a government takeover of the health care industry; and I mean, Mr. Speaker, the health insurance industry and the health care delivery industry in America. This 17\1/2\ percent of our Nation's economy and this flowchart with this full color is scarier yet.

Now, I don't mean that it's actually scarier by functionality, because marginally it at least leaves the opportunity for health insurance companies to survive for a while. But, Mr. Speaker, it certainly sets the scene for the destruction of every private health insurance company in the United States and the elimination, potentially, of every health insurance policy in the United States. In fact, H.R. 3200 compels that every health insurance policy within 5 years be approved by the health choices administration commissioner.

This bill sets up a new health choices czar. It calls him a commissioner because Americans are full up to here with czars, but this is a health choice administration commissioner. I don't know that he's a czar; I don't know that he's a commissioner; I don't know if he's a commissar. So I have called him the Health choice administration's commi-czar-issioner. And he would be the person who heads up this commission through which every health insurance company here, the private insurers, everything in white on this are existing. Those in color are newly created agencies, departments, and functionalities.

Thirteen hundred private health insurance companies. That sounds like a big number. Some of those companies have names for the different States that they operate in. But, Mr. Speaker, 1,300 health insurance companies here and the 100,000 potential, I'll say existing, policy variations here, the traditional health insurance plans, would all have to be qualified by this new commi-czar-issioner's board in order to provide through this period of 5 years to qualify, in order to provide the qualified health benefits plans.

So every health insurance policy in America would have 5 years to be approved by the new health choices commi-czar-issioner. And the regulations would be written by them. So we have a piece of legislation that sets up a commission that would write new regulations, the commission to be named later, to write regulations that would be named later that would control the destiny of 1,300 health insurance companies and 100,000 health insurance policy varieties, options that the American people have.

All of that would have to jump through the hoops to be created later after the legislation has passed by people to be appointed later, including the health choice administration commi-czar-issioner.

So for the President to make the promise to the American people that if you like your health insurance policy and your doctor, don't worry, you get to keep it--if you noticed, he had to change the language when he stood here and gave his address to the joint session of Congress--I believe that was September 8. That's within a day, Mr. Speaker, and his language changed to actually be: ``Nothing in this bill will force you to give up your doctor or your health insurance policy.''

Well, I don't know that that's true because something in this bill may force those companies out of business and may disqualify your health insurance policy, and it may discourage your doctor to the point where he decides that he wants to go drive a taxi cab like they do in Cuba. If you want to meet a doctor in Cuba, take a taxi. You'll get in the back seat of a 1954 Chevy with a five cylinder Russian diesel in it, and the guy behind the wheel might be a doctor. They have a lot of doctors in Cuba. It pays better to drive a taxi cab.

So this reach that we have of taking the private insurance companies, 1,300, and force their 100,000 policies to go through new regulations to be written--and we know there are going to be fewer than 100,000 policies--so people will lose their policies.

I hope the President, Mr. Speaker, turns on C-SPAN and understands what I'm saying. He can't say it any more, Mr. President. If anything more like this passes, people will lose their policies, and they're likely to lose their doctor.

And you haven't told the Speaker of the House that she can't support something like this if she's going to be consistent with the intent of the language that she used herself.

So, Mr. Speaker, I'll submit that this, the recharacterization, needs to revert back to the language of the bill. And we need to understand what happens when bureaucrats make decisions. And by the way, we sometimes just need to listen to the people on the other side of the aisle. They're for single-payer government takeover. A hundred or more of them have signed a letter saying they would vote against a health care bill if it didn't have a ``government option.'' Excuse me, that's not the right quote. The quote is a ``public option.''

Mr. Speaker, a public option is a government option. It is a government takeover of the health care industry eventually. And, by the way, this is the purple circle of the 100,000--it won't be 100,000--but those that are left of the original 100,000 policies and the 1,300 companies. This purple circle, the qualified health benefits plans, that will be the private sector that actually meets the regulations after 5 years.

Fewer companies, fewer policies. We don't know how many, but we do know this: the government then would produce a public health plan. That's the second purple circle here. They would be under this health insurance exchange. So envision that as maybe an Internet site you would go to that

had a series of bureaucrats behind there that would make recommendations, evaluate policies, and let you look at the government option versus the private sector option.

But this public health plan, this government option, has to be set up with Federal taxpayer dollars. You can't start an insurance company without capital. Where is it going to come from? The American taxpayers. And where does our money come from now after we have long past burned through the tax revenue for the 2009 fiscal year? It comes from the Chinese and the Saudis. And we are borrowing money from foreign countries. We are borrowing money to buy things from them, and now we would be borrowing money to start up a health insurance company. In any case, it would be national debt money, billions that would be the capital foundation to set up an insurance company so that there would be conceivably 1,301 health insurance companies. One more company.

The President's view was, we need more competition in the health insurance industry. So, if 1,300 companies is not enough, set up a Federal company. That will be the difference. And we will borrow money and put billions into it. And now this enterprise, this Federal enterprise that is in direct competition with the private companies has to succeed.

Well, if it can't sell policies, it can't succeed. So how does the government go about doing this? Well, they set the premiums low enough and the benefits competitive enough that they can get people to buy the policies, otherwise they are an irrelevant entity.

So I guess you would say that's fine, except we need to understand this. The regulations that would be written for the government plan would be regulations that are written so the government plan can compete with all of these private plans, which means that the regulations would be written to favor the government plan. And the premiums the government would charge would be premiums that are designed to be competitive, and I'm going to say likely cheaper than can be offered in the private sector. And so the result of that will be that either we are going to have to subsidize the government plan health insurance company, or we are going to have to regulate these private sector businesses out of business.

It's how government operates. We have several models that we can look at.

The simplest and most stark of them all is the National Flood Insurance Program. If you want to know, Mr. Speaker, how health insurance will go if we have the government option, look at the National Flood Insurance Program. We had a government option on Federal flood insurance. In 1968, this Congress passed legislation that established the National Flood Insurance Program. We had property and casualty insurance companies in the private sector that sold flood insurance. But when the government got involved, they set new premiums and new regulations, and they still couldn't crack into the market well enough. And so then they passed a regulation that required that a real estate loan through a national bank had to include flood insurance. And when they put that mandate on the national banks, they required the flood insurance to be purchased--from where? The Federal Government. With premiums set by? The Federal Government.

Today, it is impossible to buy flood insurance in America from anyone other than the National Flood Insurance Program because the Federal Government has squeezed out all of the competition, and the Federal Government owns the entire territory.

We have today--I say ``we,'' the Federal Government has a monopoly on flood insurance. And their operation is pretty wobbly because they are $19.2 billion in the red. That's billion with a B, Mr. Speaker. The National Flood Insurance premiums don't reflect the risk. They've pushed out all the competition. They've lowered the premiums. And now what are we doing as a result? We are building more and more and developing more and more real estate in floodplains because the premiums for the flood insurance are cheaper than the risk. And so people can do that, and we create more risk accordingly.

The markets, Mr. Speaker, can restrain and bring about rational decisions. Bureaucrats make mistakes over and over again. That's the Federal flood insurance. That's what will happen to this Federal health insurance if it should get passed.

In addition, we have the school loan program. Twenty-five years ago, that was completely private. The private lending institutions set up the school loan program. But today, thanks to some very liberal Members of Congress, it looks like the steps have been taken that will, within a very short period of time, squeeze out what is left of the private school loan program, the school loan program, where I will predict that within 5 years from today, if there isn't a dramatic difference in the elections that are taking place in this country, there will be nothing but government student loans. There will no longer be any private student loans.

This is a country that was built on free enterprise. We are a proud and independent people. We are slowly settling into dependence.

We have handed over the private sector flood insurance. And by the way, in the State of Florida, they have State hurricane insurance now that owns that market, because they decided government could do it better than the private sector.

Over and over again, we give up our freedoms and we forget about the underpinnings of American exceptionalism and the markets and personal responsibility. I heard the gentleman from Ohio say last night, I believe it was, that if you get sick, you may have to go into bankruptcy to pay your bills. He then asked the question, is that freedom? Well, yes, actually. This is a country that if you're going to have freedom, you have to be willing to take some risks. You have to have the freedom to succeed, and you have to have the freedom to fail.

Now, I'm all about, and many of us are about reaching out to our neighbors and our friends, and we don't want people that have been responsible to have to pay a consequence because they happen to be very misfortunate. But by the same token, I don't want to take away the personal responsibility from the American people.

I remember when Jimmy Carter was running for President. He said this profound thing. Well, for Jimmy Carter, this was a profound thing. He said, the people that work should live better than those that don't. Now I don't know whether he actually lived by that or set policy by that. But I remember when he said that because it caught my attention. This was maybe 1976 or so. The people that work should live better than those that don't. The people who step up and take responsibility should at least have a modicum of benefit for taking that responsibility.

But the effort over on the Democrat side of the aisle seems to be take all the responsibility away from the people because I think they disrespect the ability, the work ethic, the character, the morality, the discipline, the education, the intellect and the core values that we have as American people.

We can rise above anything. Mr. Speaker, we are not a regular people here in America. We're Americans. We're not just an extension of Europe. That was the base of our original population. We are far different from that. We are a people that are the recipients of all the best that came from Western civilization. But we have got also the cream of the crop from every donor civilization.

The vitality that it must have taken and the dreams that it must have taken to be able to get on a ship and find a way to barter your way for passage or pay the passage to come across here. My great grandfather multiple times over came over here in 1757 from England. He served as an indentured servant in a livery stable and paid off his passage. He was the father of 17 kids, and their dreams were realized. And multiple generations arrived here that way. That's part of what is the core of who it is to be an American. It is not a normal, regular thing. We're not just an extension of Europe or any other country. We have a special vitality, because it has been hard to get here, and you had to have a dream to come here. The people that didn't have a dream stayed home in their own country. And some of them sat back and didn't work and didn't excel.

Many came here for religious freedom. Many came here for economic freedom. And many more came here for religious and economic freedom. That beacon of the Statue of Liberty was in the minds of the American people and an inspiration for the world long before the statute was put up at Ellis Island. We are a unique people that have relied upon this freedom. Our vitality has been an inspiration for the world.

We sit in the Congress and we begin to erode these freedoms one after another after another and trade them off for a dependency. If we take this false clarion call that somehow we can push the expenses for this, the debt for this, off on to the succeeding generations, what moral standard would anyone have to make a declaration to the little kids growing up in America and those children not born, that we, our generation, in our time, have somehow a right to put them in debt in the first place? And secondly, what right do we have to put them in debt because we want to give everybody in America not health care--not health care--because everybody in America has access to health care. The argument is we want to give everybody in America a health insurance policy created by the government.

Think how this works. This single-payer national health care plan is the goal of the President of the United States, the goal of the Speaker of the House and the goal of the leadership here. And I know that there is reference made to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Conyers. I went back and pulled a bill that he had introduced on health care in 1981. It's getting to be a while back now, 28 years ago. I know Mr. Gingrey referenced him in his earlier speech. But I read the bill. That bill I read. It was about 167 pages. It sets up a United States health services department, an agency.

It says in there that every human being, every person, in the United States, legal and illegal, whatever their status might be, whatever their proclivities might be, has a right to quality, timely and respectful health care, a right to this in 1981. It's pretty astonishing to read that.

Now you can have that concept, I guess, and that is the concept of the chairman. But to follow this thing along, he also declares that everybody has a right to this health care, legal and illegal, but in addition, all health care workers will be salaried employees. So he sets up a national company to manage all the health care in America, and no worker can be there working off a fee for service. The brilliant surgeons that are creating new ways to save lives and improve the quality of lives, and new surgical techniques and new equipment, they would all have to be paid at the end of the month just like the person who is, let me say, maintaining the building.

It takes away the incentive. You have forgotten completely about the difference between being an American and being a regular dependent soul in a social democracy in Western Europe, for example.

We have got to remember: We are Americans. We are a distinct group of people. That kind of idea of socialized medicine is anathema to freedom-loving, freedom-breathing people. If we bargain it away, it's never to be retained again, not in this generation, not in any other.

I will conclude and go to the gentleman from Missouri.

There's a lot at stake here. The future of America is at stake. And it is not just this national health care act. It is the socialized medicine that lies underneath it. It is the cap-and-trade which pushes our industry to India and China. It's the comprehensive amnesty policy that they are preparing to deliver. If any combination of these three should become law, they will try to ram the rest of them through. And that, Mr. Speaker, sounds to me like the end of American freedom.

I will stand and fight it every step of the way, as will my friend from Missouri (Mr. Akin) to whome I will be very happy to yield whatever time he may consume.

If the gentleman would yield, how would you compare those results to the results of dealing with the Pelosi Congress today?

Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Missouri, and I hope we can continue this dialogue. You've inspired me to go with this other chart. Some say 50 million uninsured. The highest number I generally hear is 44 million to 47 million, but this is the 47 million uninsured chart.

Now, the President has said there are two things that are very compelling that cause us to have to go down this path of a national health care plan.

One is we spend too much money. We spend about 14.5 percent of our GDP on health care. The average of the industrialized world is 9.5 percent.

So we may spend too much. We could fix almost all that with tort reform and allowing people to buy insurance across State lines. The too much question, spending too money can be fairly easily resolved. The other component of this is too many uninsured.

The gentleman from Missouri.

I'd suggest it's probably the predecessors to Merkel, Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, or maybe even they, themselves. In fact, I heard an actual dialogue with Chancellor Angela Merkel, We spend too much on health care. They have that look-over-our-shoulder tendency, as if global norms would be right. I remember one of those contributors to global norms would be the health care industry in Iraq. When we went in there in March of 2003, the average annual expenditure for health care per person in Iraq was fifty cents per year. So I suppose you could add that into the global average.

We do spend a lot of money. We get great results. And I haven't heard the American people complaining all that much about their results, because they are great results. But if we want to take the cost down, then we take care of medical malpractice.

I talked to an orthopedic surgeon--and my days blend together, but I believe it was yesterday--that out of his small little operation they spend more than a million dollars a year in premiums for malpractice and in unnecessary--unnecessary tests in order to avoid the litigation. Defensive medicine, over a million dollars a year out of what he considers to be a small practice; what I consider to be he's a great contributor to our society and to our civilization. That's multiplied across the country.

When I hear numbers that come from representatives that are part of the health insurance underwriters in America and they tell me that 8.5 percent of the overall health care costs are malpractice premiums, litigation, and defensive medicine, those three things in that category, and I multiply .085 times the gross receipts for the cost of health care, that comes to $203 billion a year unnecessarily spent because the trial lawyers have that corner of the market fixed, and there's no will on Harry Reid's side of this Capitol building or Nancy Pelosi's side of this Capitol building. In fact, there's a huge will to resist addressing malpractice and the reform of lawsuit abuse. That's the best and most important thing we could do.

We evaluate these bills on the part of a 10-year plan; $203 billion a year. If we could fix it all, that's over $2 trillion. The President, in fixing the health care industry that he says costs too much money, only proposes to fix it by putting another $1.6 trillion into it. So we simply fix the malpractice and we have been able to fund all the other ideas which I don't agree with. That's a component of this. It needs to happen.

And then we have the uninsured, Mr. Akin. I would like to raise the issue about the uninsured. These 47 million--now, this chart has got somebody else's software that did it, so I will tell you the numbers that I remember that I have vetted to be accurate.

Starts out with 47 million uninsured. We need to fix this because there are too many uninsured in America. So what are they comprised of? All people who don't have affordable options? No is the answer, and here's what it's comprised of.

These are the illegal aliens. This chart says 6 million. Mine said 5.2 million. Then you have those that are here in the country legally that the law bars from benefits. That's the 5-year bar. It's a matter of solid Federal practice. They add up to 10 million--10.2 million, actually.

Then you have those who earn more than $75,000 a year. That's about 9 million people. And, presumably, they could write a check and buy themselves at least catastrophic insurance. They are not in a position where we need to tax somebody that makes less to take care of those people that are making more.

Then you go on down the line. Those that are eligible for government programs; that number is actually 9.7 million. Most of that is people that qualify for Medicaid but don't bother to sign up. And then you have those that are eligible for employer insurance, roughly 6 million people, that either opt out or don't opt in to their employer-offered plan.

So once you add up all of these people and you subtract these numbers that I believe are not the target of this dialogue and rhetoric or the bill, you end up with 12.1 million Americans that don't have affordable options. That's less than 4 percent of the population.

This is what it looks like, Mr. Speaker. This is the entire population of the United States here, 306 million people, maybe 307 million by now, and these are the categories that I have mentioned: illegals/immigrants; those with $75,000 a year; those that qualify for, generally, Medicaid; those under an employer's plan. But over here, this little sliver in red, those are the Americans without affordable options. Less than 4 percent; 12.1 million people.

All of the rest of these people, not only are they insured, but they're happy with what we have.

A tiny little sliver. Even though 12.1 million people are a lot of people, they're still a small percentage of the American population. And to upset a hundred percent of the health insurance industry, perhaps destroy a hundred percent of the health insurance industry and change the delivery system for the best health care delivery system in the world, all of that--this is an excuse for a government takeover. It's not a reason.

And if there's anything that my father taught me, he said, you know, Son, there's a difference between reasons and excuses. And I'm you're dad and I will tell you I know the difference. And I don't have to explain it to you. I will just label them as such.

Well, this is an excuse, and I will label it as such. It's not a reason, not a reason to upset the entire industry, but an excuse because the people on this side of the aisle believe in Big Government. They don't believe in the American people, and they are sapping our vitality.

Reclaiming, I thank the gentleman from Missouri. Initially, I put this concept out here, Mr. Speaker, that the circumstances that are going on this way are that for a long time those that are in the income-earning and productive years of their lives have been paying for the health insurance, the health care of those that are retired. We've decided to do that. It's a matter of public policy. And I don't hear an objection on the part of the people that are paying their taxes on their payroll to support Medicare. In fact, I don't hear a complaint very much on the funding that goes into Medicaid at the lower-income side. And, generally, the younger people are beneficiaries of Medicaid.

So you have on the low-income side Medicaid funded by the working, producing, tax-paying Americans, and on the senior citizen side you have Medicare funded by the working, producing, tax-paying citizens. But in the middle, those working, producing, tax-paying citizens today at least have the freedom to choose a policy of their choice, buy a policy of their choice or not buy a policy of their choice. And this bill, H.R. 3200, takes that away.

And the subliminal message that I have not heard articulated that seems to be viscerally understood is that the people that are paying for Medicaid and Medicare out of their paycheck because they're going to work every day and managing and planning, now the government is saying, You no longer have the freedom to choose your own. You have to pay for everybody else's. You've been doing that a long time, but now we want to take away your right to buy your own health insurance policy. And that sticks in the craw of the American people because it diminishes freedom.

Reclaiming again, I completely agree. As I'm listening to the gentleman from Missouri, the engineer who sees things in black and white and finite formulas that work out or else they can be checked and balanced, a logical approach is, let me say, that's the engineering approach. As I'm listening to this, it's triggering in my memory some of the things about what it was like to start and run a business for 28 years and what the motivations are. Now my business, a construction business, seasonal business. I looked at it, and I look at it from this concept: I wanted to have people that I could rely on. I wanted it to be a career. So I set things up where we would keep people on all year long, even though it was a seasonal business. And when things freeze up in Iowa, and it gets cold, there is frost and the temperatures go down, we move people into the shop where we would rebuild our equipment.

Sometimes we would take on some custom work, fixing somebody else's, but we kept them around. I kept people around 12 months out of the year. I want them to have a health care package. I want them to have a retirement plan. I want them to have a vacation plan. That's all fine when you pay the payroll, but when the government

interferes--for example, the unemployment tax, and if they would offer unemployment benefits and sometimes they gave unemployment benefits to somebody that just didn't want to work. But it was sometimes impossible for me to fight it.

So even though I had my reading at zero, if you're not willing to fight that, many others would see it go up to 9 percent, and they'd pay the percent of their payroll to unemployment because government regulation had decided they knew better than the marketplace. As I said, the year-round work part of this, keep people working year round. Well, the incentive is, if you're going to pay unemployment at the top rate anyway, you might as well lay people off rather than keep them working when you don't really need them. So instead, they become piecemeal workers rather than career employees.

Then the Federal Government decided, you shall pay union scale, Davis-Bacon wage scale, and we'll decide what those categories are. Now you have people jockeying for a position, undermining the efficiencies, and the Federal Government looking over your shoulder, telling you how to run your business. All of that still has created inefficiencies by government regulation that bring about the illogical, irrational business decisions until you consider the government regulation. Then it becomes rational within those rules.

To throw this health care thing on top of it, employers that have capitulated and decided they're going to use people as piecemeal workers rather than career employees because of too much regulation, they're going to also decide, I'm not going to pay this health insurance. I am just going to pay the premium. I'm going to add it on to the price of the work I'm doing, and it undermines the relationship between employers and employees. That's a component of all this.

I wanted to throw out before our time ticks down, in what I believe is about 6 minutes, a little subtle segue, Mr. Akin. I think most of America should know what this little subtle segue is. This is a pervasive influence of the corrupt criminal enterprise ACORN. ACORN has developed since 1970, 39 years, to be this insidious operation of now, according to a Government Reform report issued by Mr. Issa of California on July 23, 361 affiliations, affiliations that have been engaged in shaking down lenders across this country in 120 cities.

Put this in your mind, Mr. Speaker. This of Chicago, Chicago politics, Chicago hardball politics. The make-a-deal--this is shakedown. The head of ACORN who recruited President Obama and is proud of their relationship has bragged about going into lenders' offices and shoving the banker's desk over against the wall and surrounding him with ACORN people and intimidating that lender into making bad loans in bad neighborhoods.

These are the people that are undermining American freedom more aggressively than any other. They're in many, many walks of life. Their influence is pervasive. They are at the core of the mortgage meltdown crisis. The intimidation factors, the shakedown in the cities of the lenders and at the same time the lobbying effort where they spent millions in this Congress to push to lower the underwriting standards on the secondary market of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The chairman of the Finance Committee, Mr. Frank, has been engaged in lowering and fighting off the increased capitalization requirements of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and that was lobbied by ACORN. If you look back through the financial crisis in the community level, it is ACORN at the core of that. The President of the United States has been at the beginning of this. His entire political career he has been part and parcel, tied to ACORN, and he has said so, and the videotape is available.

The crimes that they were promoting and supporting in those five major cities, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, San Bernardino, California, and San Diego, California. All of that at an organization, and the President claims that he is not paying attention to this. I will submit, he knows who Joe Wilson is. He knew who Professor Gates was. He got involved in Officer Crowley's law enforcement up near Harvard, but he says he doesn't know what's going on in ACORN, even though I have seen the videotape of the President speaking to ACORN, telling them, We walk this walk together. ACORN was involved in promoting a whole series of crimes within these five cities, including: promotion of child prostitution; illegal immigration; violations of the Mann Act; helping to facilitate mortgages for a house of ill repute and telling them how to avoid taxes, report only 10 cents on the dollar and then qualify for the earned income tax credit, tapping money out of the taxpayer; and the child care tax credit for little children prostitutes.

And were these mothers that were sitting behind the desk at ACORN when we saw the face of them? I heard children playing in the background. They're recruiting girls to be prostitutes while girls are being raised in the background. Those things happened, and there are some similarities in five cities across America. And that's not the full spectrum. The voter-registration fraud, the voter election fraud. Today in the State of Nevada, ACORN, as an entity, is under prosecution right now. The trial is going on right now about ACORN's fraudulent voter registrations, and Troy, New York, fraudulent votes--Mr. Speaker, this has got to stop.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 26 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, October 2, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlelady from Florida for yielding.

This is one of these privileges in serving in the United States Congress to come to the floor and join together as a State delegation, our entire Iowa delegation, to celebrate a life so well lived as that of Dr. Norman Borlaug. I believe all of us knew him in some capacity or another, and we certainly watched his career.

I want to say this about Dr. Borlaug. First, he did go to school at the University of Minnesota, and for my Minnesota friends, I can't even imagine what it would have been like if he would have had a full Iowa education. That's part of the banter that goes back and forth across the State lines.

He was also an NCAA wrestler, which is something that goes along with I can't imagine if he had actually wrestled for the Hawkeyes and what that might have been. However, where are the Aggies today? They've got some bragging rights, too. Minnesotans have bragging rights, Aggies have bragging rights. Dr. Borlaug was on the faculty of Texas A&M for 20 years. They all deserve credit for helping shape the life of Norman Borlaug: his birth and his upbringing in Iowa, his education in Minnesota, his faculty involvement at Texas A&M, and his global reach upon starting the Green Revolution; and, as a couple of Members have said, saved the lives of a billion people, a billion people with a ``B.''

Dr. Norman Borlaug swept aside the fears of the Malthusians and proved that this planet will produce a lot more food than was previously imagined, and that was before we got to this point of some of the genetic tools that we have within the laboratory today.

So, Mr. Speaker, I want to say that you cannot overemphasize the impact of Dr. Norman Borlaug's life. He is a treasure, and his life and his commitment is a treasure for the entire United States, for all of us. I join Mr. Latham, and I believe the Iowa delegation, in calling upon the State legislature and the Governor of Iowa to request that his statue be placed in the United States Capitol where it most rightfully belongs, and it would stand there in good stead with any other statue from any other State and the entire United States of America, a life well lived; and

we are here celebrating that life of Dr. Norman Borlaug.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor and a privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And having listened to the dialogue that was presented by my colleagues, often I will be able to see them on C-SPAN and then I'm inspired to come over here and take up the

other side of the argument. They have inspired me for a number of years now, especially the gentleman from Ohio, who has headed up some of the dialogue that has brought, I think, significant philosophical disagreement, although personal disagreement seems to be nonexistent, at least from my part.

And the strong sales pitch that they've given on the government option compels me to lay out the facts on this case; and I'll say present it to you, Mr. Speaker, from a different perspective. The first perspective is this: this is, this perspective, Mr. Speaker, is the old HillaryCare perspective. This is the flow chart that is the basis of the facts on the original national health care act bill that was put together as a result of President Bill Clinton's speech here in the well on September 22, 1993.

And out of that came sometimes closed-door meetings, some would say secret. I really just think they were just closed-door meetings that were headed up by Hillary Clinton, now Secretary of State. And as that plan to take over the entire health care system in the United States in 1993 and '94 took shape, this is the flow chart that grows from it. This is the flow chart, this is actually out of The New York Times, Mr. Speaker, is the source of this document. But I had a similar one that I hung in my office for quite a long time.

And to see this government that was created by that proposal back in '93 and '94 was enough to scare me out of the private sector and into politics to try to engage in saving Americans from this disaster that was coming, that was delivered to us and served up by at that time President and Mrs., I'll say the first man and the first lady of America, for that period of time in the early nineties.

Now, when you have the living daylights scared out of you and you're scared out of the private sector and into politics, it's kind of good to be in a position to seek to, let me say, put the brakes on such a disastrous policy. This is a black and white policy, Mr. Speaker. It was back in those days when we didn't have newspapers that were in full color. The Internet was just forming in a way, but we see all of these new government agencies that are shaped here. And we have some of the things that stand out on it.

Let me say, two cases of ombudsmen that are there to be liaisons between people and government because government is so impossible to deal with we have to give them ombudsmen. And then each one of these is a government agency. The acronyms, many of them I don't recognize anymore. I knew most of them, probably not all of them at the time because this is such a maze and a menagerie. HMO provider plan is one of them. And the accountable health plan. Accountable. So this, black and white, not full color version, is a pretty scary proposition; and Harry and Louise and others scared this right out of the United States Congress.

When Senator Phil Gramm stepped out on the floor of the Senate right down that hallway and he said, this legislation will pass over my cold, dead political body, he meant it. A lot of people thought that it wouldn't hold up to be true and that Phil Gramm would get run over. Instead, the American people stood with Phil Gramm and many others and they rejected this national health care plan.

Well, fast forward 15 years, Mr. Speaker. Here's the black and white version, rejected. Here is the modern technicolor version. And I expect that we will have an opportunity to defeat this scary legislation. It's scarier because we can see it now in full color. In the black and white are existing government agencies and programs. And so we can see as we look across here, these are existing Departments, Treasury, Veterans, Defense Department. Here are existing, well, let me say government-run operations. Here are CMS, Congressional Medicaid Services, here is Medicaid. There's SCHIP. Big debate we've had on that. Here's Medicare.

Down here are where I'd bring your focus. Let me predict also that we have a chance to kill this, and in about 15 years we'll see the 3-D color version of this. It will come up and it will be you'll put on your 3-D glasses and there will be the display, and government will be so big and complicated you can't understand it in two dimensions. It's multiple dimensions. But this is for us to be able to understand. And anybody that read the bill and didn't look at the flow chart is a brilliant person if they can track all of this. If you read the bill, follow the flow chart you have to still be a brilliant person to understand what they're doing.

But I'd direct your attention down to the private insurers, Mr. Speaker. This is 1,300 companies today. The President has said there are two principles that we need to address and fix in this health care in the United States. One of them is that we don't have enough competition among health insurance companies. So we have 1,300 health insurance companies. The gentleman from Ohio said we just need to have the government option, one more. I haven't quite heard the President say; 1,301 companies selling insurance is the magic number. In fact, he would cringe if he had to be confronted with such an idea that adding one more, it being government, to 1,300 companies is somehow constructive. It's not. It's destructive to the private sector and the American people know it.

But these are the private insurers in this little white box existing. And they would be, under this bill, forced into--all of their health insurance policies would have to meet the traditional health insurance plans. In order to qualify, these traditional health insurance plans would have to meet the new government standards. There are approximately 100,000 different varieties of health insurance policies available in the market across the 50 States. Now, you can't buy them from State to State. We need to be able to buy health insurance across State lines. That would put all 1,300 companies in competition with each other, and it would put all 100,000 policies within reach of any American.

But instead, they want to shut that down and set up a government-run option, government regulated health insurance company, and that is these two purple circles here to bring your focus, Mr. Speaker. The qualified health benefits plans. And this would be these 1,300 companies, 100,000 policies that would have to be approved by the new government agency called the Health Choices Administration. Yeah, they're all about choice and all about change.

Health choices administration commissioner. The commissioner, he's not called a czar. He's called a commissioner. The reason he's called a commissioner is because we're full up to here with czars. And so he would be the central planner for all public health insurance and private health insurance in America. A czar, a commissioner, a ``commissar,'' I call him a ``commi-czar-issioner.'' He would be the guy with all the juice that could make all the rules if he could just direct his new Health Choices Administration that would be empowered by legislation proposed by the people on this side of the aisle that the President will find he gets anything in it, a title that looks like a national health care plan of any kind, a path to his goal, which is single-payer, and we know it and we've seen the video tape. The videotape doesn't lie. It might get edited slightly, but the President's for a single-payer plan.

That is the socialized medicine model. We know that. Why don't we just be honest about it? I mean, if the President would step up and say I think that the United States of America can actually run socialized medicine better than any other country in the world, better than any country ever has, then he could make his case as to why. But instead they want to say it's not socialized medicine, just the same way they wanted to argue that amnesty wasn't amnesty. Well, even if you're the President of the United States, you don't get to redefine the English language.

This is about the health choices commissioner calling these shots, Mr. Speaker, and the very idea that socialized medicine could be called something else. In fact, when we declared it to be the House Democrats' health plan, the public option--they want to call it the public option plan, we want to call it the government plan. The government plan is the government health insurance plan that would eventually replace most, if not all, of the private health insurance in America. They wanted to censor that.

In fact, this chart was banned from being mailed out under our franking

mailing privileges because it was deemed to not be accurate because it called it the ``organizational chart of the House Democrats' health plan.'' So I just posted it on my Web page and said, Come and take it. This is the truth.

By the way, this has been clearly and carefully vetted. Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas on the Ways and Means Committee, he went down and carefully examined every component of this bill, put his staff on it, and challenged them to make sure it was all correct. This chart has withstood all criticism. This is a chart that shows what's going on with health care here in the United States.

The points that come from the President are health care in America costs too much money, and we have too many that are uninsured, and that we need more competition in health insurance.

I think I pointed out that competition is not what we need more of, but if he's right on that, we can provide the maximum amount if we just simply allowed everybody to buy health insurance in America wherever they choose and simply go around these State mandates.

So, for example, a similar policy in New Jersey that would cost a young man, 25 years old, $6,000 a year can be bought in Kentucky for $1,000 a year, and that's the difference in the mandates.

So yes, vote with your feet. Surely you'd think about moving to Kentucky. Business will go there. They need to come to Iowa, too, by the way, Mr. Speaker. But we can solve a lot of this health insurance competition simply by allowing insurance to be purchased across State lines by providing for the portability so people can take it with them. That solves the problem of competition in a far more effective way than the President's proposal of starting up and running and putting taxpayer dollars into a Federal health insurance policy.

The best example I know of to describe what will happen if we have a Federal health insurance policy can be what happened with the flood insurance in America. In 1968, this Congress passed a National Flood Insurance Act, and what it did was it put the Federal Government in competition with the property and casualty companies that were selling flood insurance at the time. And then the Federal Government decided we need to be able to compete in this marketplace and so we'll keep low premiums and we'll require the loans on real estate that are given through national banks to include Federal flood insurance. That was 1968.

This is 2009. There is no private property and casualty flood insurance property available in America because the Federal Government has crowded out all the competition, and now they own the flood insurance in the United States. It has been nationalized, and the flood insurance program has a $19.2 billion deficit--in the red. The only way to get that back--well, they can't get it back. They just simply borrow money from the Chinese or the Saudis and drive us further into debt and pay the deficit of a bad business model. That's what's going on with health insurance.

Now I'm going to make just one more brief point, and I see that the gentlelady from Minnesota has arrived to add her dynamics to this debate.

These are the uninsured in America, Mr. Speaker. I have to edit this a little bit because my numbers aren't all the way I'd like them: 47 million uninsured. I have 44 to 47 million. So I simply start out with a high number, 47 million of those uninsured, and then said, Let's break this down. Let's break this down and find out who really are these people? And do we really want to provide for a government plan out of the taxpayers' dollars to fund this universe of 47 million who don't have health insurance?

So we start around the top. These are the illegals. That number is 6 million in this chart; it was 5 million in my other chart. These are the people that were here under the 5-year bar. Noncitizens who were barred by law from public benefits, that number was 5.2 million. But they add up to 10, 10 million people, the legal and illegal who are disqualified by law from public benefits.

Then you go to those who are earning more than $75,000 a year. That's 9 million. Presumably they could write a check for a premium for their own health insurance but they've opted not to.

Then you have those eligible for health insurance under their employer, roughly 10 million--9.7 is the number I recall. They've opted out, perhaps. They're eligible and didn't sign up, or they opted out.

Then we have those that are eligible for government benefits. That's generally going to be Medicaid people. And that's actually the 9.7 million, and it's 6 million that are eligible by employers but don't sign up.

Now, take all of these numbers that come pretty fast, Mr. Speaker, and I can just tell you what the math is: 47 million minus those that are disqualified for the reasons that I've given leaves us this number: It's actually 12.1 million people that are Americans without affordable options. That's the universe of people that really we're trying to address.

Here's the real chart. This is all of the American people right here, 306 million people, and here are all of the categories of folks that I've listed that I don't believe we should be subsidizing their health insurance: the immigrants, the illegals, those that are already qualified under Medicaid and don't bother to sign up, those that are making over $75,000 a year, those that qualify for an employer plan and opt out. That's all of these people along this spectrum from blue to yellow.

Then we have all of these covered Americans here which are 84 percent of the American people. Who are we really trying to address? Americans without affordable options. Here they are. Less than 4 percent. And for less than 4 percent, the proposal from the people on this side--and I am not going to accuse them of being rational, Mr. Speaker--the proposal is that we tear asunder the entire health insurance industry in America and the entire health care delivery system in America--the best in the world by many standards--in order to get at this less than 4 percent that are Americans without affordable options.

There would not be a rational person that would declare that to be rational behavior, Mr. Speaker.

I would be happy to yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota to pick up from wherever it is I might have left off.

Reclaiming my time, I just so appreciate the analysis that's been delivered, Mr. Speaker, by the gentlelady from Minnesota. I think about what this is like to be a parent and to deliver your child to a public education system that had this kind of a Federal mandate laid out.

I think back to the days when education was actually local. I often think about where I live. There's a country school just across the road from my

house. I actually missed going to the country school by about 5 weeks because of the circumstances involved. And I regret I didn't have that experience. But I grew up around people that did--many of them.

At that time, it was about four miles by four miles, the school district, and the people that owned the land paid the taxes and they hired the teacher and they approved the curriculum. And they bought the coal and hauled it in and carried the ashes and clinkers out. And if they didn't like the job the teacher was doing, they fired her and hired a new one. And if they weren't happy with the curriculum, they changed it. That was local control. And it reflected the values--the moral, academic, and religious values of the people that were paying the taxes.

Today, we have a growing Federal reach that reaches way down into the heart of our educational system from K through 12 and wanting to get into preschool--and is, in some ways--and they want to go clear back to the womb and they want to inject themselves into the unborn children as well with Planned Parenthood, to set them up as somehow the protectors of young children, when they're the people that abort little babies.

We had a debate and a vote here on the floor of the House, and it was an amendment offered by Congressman Pence of Indiana that would have unfunded Planned Parenthood. And that's what this Congress has an obligation to do. We've got to get there. We've got to get there eventually. No organization that provides abortion services or counseling should have Federal taxpayer dollars involved.

$300 million, as Mrs. Bachmann has said, $300 million out of a billion in receipts, fungible money, poured into, you might as well say, one pot of money and sets them up with clinics in our schools so the young girls can go in and out of there and be recruited in the hallways by an organization that's vested in what? Promiscuity. Promiscuity is what Planned Parenthood is invested in.

If you doubt that, Mr. Speaker, I would just submit this proposal. Pull promiscuity out of the equation and see what's left of Planned Parenthood? See what they call for services that are there. There's very little that's left. Without promiscuity, you don't have a birth control program and you don't have an abortion problem and you don't have all of this counseling that goes on with it either.

They are a destructive purpose in this society, and it is something that no taxpayer should be compelled to fund, whether it's in this country or whether it's overseas.

I yield to the gentlelady.

Reclaiming my time, I agree with the gentlelady from Minnesota. I regret that I didn't bring a similar sign for Planned Parenthood, but I did bring one for ACORN.

As we talk about 501(c)(3)s, not-for-profit organizations, ACORN might claim that they are filed as some kind of a not-for-profit organization. That was one of their reports. We see at least 45 of their affiliates that are filed as 501(c)(3)s, not-for-profit organizations. We see that ACORN's money flows into a central account, and then it's distributed from that central account out to the entities as ACORN needs them.

One big pot of money, one big cookie jar with a lot of Federal dollars involved, State dollars involved, donor dollars involved, tax avoidance dollars involved, and what is ACORN involved in? Other enterprises that are--I'll call them unethical and immoral, Mr. Speaker. And I will go down the list of some of the things that I recall that ACORN has been involved in.

By the way, the linkage with some of what's coming out of Planned Parenthood I think is useful. And I think that's a constructive linkage to make. This segue from Planned Parenthood to ACORN is one that is a natural segue.

Never was it envisioned by a limited government to be funding such huge, behemoth national and international organizations for the purposes of breaking down the core of our society and turning it into an immoral mass of people. They have attacked our institutions, and they have worked within our schools and the educational institutions and the institutions of government and the institutions also of the media.

I did happen to bring my poster of the President and ACORN to help add some clarity to this matter. As critical as the United States Senate, the United States House of Representatives, and the public has been of ACORN--and they deserve every bit of it and a lot more, Mr. Speaker--there hasn't been enough focus on the involvement of the President with ACORN.

His political start was with ACORN. That's by his own self-admission. He said, You've been here from the very beginning. I've been with you from the beginning. Some of the statements from the leader of ACORN ties that back in. I believe her first name is Madeleine, the last name is Talbot, the head organizer of ACORN in Chicago; she has said that she and Obama were working together in this cause from the beginning.

President Obama headed up Project Vote. Project Vote is indiscernible from ACORN. They are one in the same. And that's ACORN's position on it as well as any objective analysis that's taken place.

So he made his reputation with ACORN. ACORN was ``Get Out the Vote for President Obama.'' He paid

them to get out the vote even though they registered it as--let's see-- as production and lighting.

Clearly, according to law, they cannot be a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization if they advocate for candidates in a partisan fashion. One might argue that some of the activities were not partisan.

I will make this argument. This is a picture I took at ACORN's headquarters in New Orleans; 2609 Canal Street in New Orleans. This is the weekend before the Fourth of July. I stood across the street with a 300-millimeter lens.

It was this year. It was after the election in the fall of 2008. So this would be on or about July 1st or 2nd, 2009. I took this shot of the window. This is about the second floor of this most fortified building in the neighborhood in New Orleans, the ACORN headquarters, and in the window is this huge--we call them barn signs-- this huge campaign poster: Obama for President '08. Easily it can be seen right here.

This no Photoshop, Mr. Speaker. I mean I'm here on the floor of the United States Congress. I took the picture personally.

Hanging over on this side is the ACORN banner that one can easily see. This is ACORN's headquarters. The doors are barred, the windows are barred, but you can see through the bars to see that they're still advertising for the election of 2008, and that is a violation of their not-for-profit status.

That picture itself, Mr. Speaker, should be enough to get the IRS to go in and do a complete forensic examination and audit of ACORN and all of their 361 identified and other unidentified affiliates if we're going to have any integrity in this country.

When you are a partisan organization and you are collecting donation dollars, Federal tax dollars and political subdivision grants that are coming in, and they are coming in to a series of affiliates, maybe as many as 361 different ones, you commingle that into accounts, and you deploy thousands of people across the country to register voters and you brag about it--an issue in a press release that ACORN did says that they registered 1.3 million new voters when, in fact, the number of actual legitimate voters was closer to 450,000.

If the gentlelady will yield, I will lay out the picture of this of the way I think it is in America with the ACORN investigation.

There have been investigations going on within some States for voter registration fraud primarily. Now, those States string up to--we used to have a total of 12, then 14, and now as many as 20 States over time. In only one case do we have an investigation of ACORN as an entity.

Let me reclaim and capture the breadth of what is going on here in America, and then I will yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, it's this: In over a cumulative period of time from about 1990 until today, which is coming to be almost two decades, there have been a string of smaller investigations that took place within the States. As we speak, though, ACORN is under trial in Nevada for direct violations of Nevada's voter registration laws that prohibits paying commissions for registering voters.

So, for the first time, ACORN, as an entity, is on trial in a State. It looks like there is a very strong case on the part of the prosecution. There have also been as many as 70 convictions of ACORN employees, for election fraud, mostly.

There are new indictments in Florida, 11 individuals indicted that worked for ACORN; six were arrested, five were on the loose. I haven't heard if they collected them or not. Those are some of the things that are taking place.

But now this Congress fully understands, having voted twice in the United States Senate and once on the

floor of the House to reject funding to ACORN, fully understand that ACORN is a corrupt, criminal enterprise, almost an economy unto itself that draws in money from many different sources, the fungibility of it poured into usually a central account and distributed out to the active entities of the 361 affiliates of ACORN to conduct partisan political exercises, shake down lenders.

Madeline Talbott has bragged about that, who is the mentor of President Obama as he went into ACORN and Chicago politics back in the early nineties, as the gentlelady from Minnesota said. So they have been involved in shaking down lenders and using the Community Reinvestment Act, which was written to prohibit lenders from drawing a red line around certain districts that they didn't want to loan money into.

And ACORN has been involved with red-lining themselves and shaking down bankers to force them to loan money into their red-lined districts. They contributed significantly to the mortgage lending meltdown that we had. They have been corrupting the election process. They're promoting child prostitution. In five cities, we have them on videotape.

And by the way, $1 million of embezzlement covered up for 8 years by Wade Rathke, whose brother was the embezzler in-house. And when the board rose up to make an issue of it, they fired the board of directors. This is a completely corrupt, criminal enterprise.

And I'm advised that the Catholic Church has ceased their contributions into ACORN. I'm very happy about that. It's easier for me to put money in the collection plate on Sunday.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas, who always has a unique and accurate viewpoint, my friend Louie Gohmert.

Mr. Gohmert, can you draw a distinction between this language that you read in H.R. 3200 in the health care bill and the language that would perhaps enable ACORN to be the ones that are counseling on, let me say, mortgage loans for houses of prostitution, or how to avoid taxes by underreporting income that might come in as cash by the work of a prostitute, or an ability to file a tax return that would qualify someone who underreports their income for their earned income tax credit, or the ability to claim child prostitutes as dependents? Do any of those things seem to also fit in this similar authorization language that allowed ACORN to do all those things that I listed that might also qualify them to be the loan counselor as well as now the health insurance counselor under this exchange that is here?

I will pick up on that. This part that I think is not understood by the White House is that this economy that we have is not simply a giant chain letter that is generated by government borrowing and government spending. A chain letter is a Ponzi scheme, and underneath it there's not substance there.

We have an economy that's based upon our natural resources and adding value to our natural resources, and the intellectual basis that contributes to the value that we add to our natural resources, you have to produce things that have value. The most essential ones are the things that are necessities for life, and the services that build around that are the services that make it more efficient to produce the necessities for life.

The recreational spending is disposable income. All of this is real, and it's founded on production. But government, government has no ability to do that. Government obstructs production, and they add a weight on to the legitimate economy.

We have two sectors of the economy: the productive sector, which is the private producing sector I have described, and then in my less charitable moments I describe it as the parasitic sector, the sector of the economy that sucks the lifeblood out of the producers.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

And that is as if it's a bargain. And there are some better ways of saying that out there, and they don't come to me immediately, but if it has to be the bargain that we have to adopt a national health care act in order to get the waste, fraud, and abuse cleaned up, if the American people's demand that Congress clean up corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse has to be held hostage to somebody's government medical plan, I think that tells you what's going on.

This operation has got to go. That is the ACORN logo. And this man has been part and parcel of it for nearly 20 years. And his political life, his public life cannot be separated from ACORN and from Project Vote and from the full continuum of history of his political life, including having been hired by ACORN, worked for ACORN, done so as a pro bono attorney for ACORN, been a trainer of ACORN's workers, having hired ACORN to get out the vote but it was misrepresented in his document and, additionally, having hired ACORN, move the Census to the White House from the Commerce Department, then back from the White House to the Commerce Department when the public outcry got so great, but left a link and a liaison so that they have oversight in the White House anyway. And twice now the Census Bureau has said, well, we're not going to use ACORN with our census workers.

I didn't believe them the first time. I don't know that I believe them the second time. But it's certain that they must have confessed they weren't telling the truth the first time or they wouldn't announce the second time that they were going to sever their relationship. The U.S. Treasury has now said that they don't want to use ACORN to counsel them for the tax services that are out there. The list goes on and on and on.

ACORN and all their affiliates are a pariah. This is their logo on the shirt of the President of the United States. He is part and parcel. And we've got to dig through this all the way. This United States Congress and four to six committees in the House and committees in the Senate have to launch complete investigations and hearings. The IRS has to do this. The Department of Justice has to do this. The American people demand it, and so do I, Mr. Speaker, and so do the speakers here on this floor.

I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota and the gentleman from Texas for their contribution.

I thank the gentleman from Texas and the general from Georgia for their leadership on these issues. And once a week, at least, we see the judge from Texas down here laying out the conscience of the Congress. And this ACORN issue is something that has burned within me for several years.

I looked back through some of the Records, and I introduced an amendment to unfund ACORN in 2007. Back then, we couldn't get any traction. And as much as has been filled out on the case of ACORN, as much as we learned about ACORN during the last Presidential election-- and I think it was very useful because that was a time that America started to pay attention, Mr. Speaker. And we remember that ACORN announced that they had filed 1.3 million new voter registrations during the Presidential election cycle in 2008. And now they're advertising that people should send them a check and help fund their operation to go down there and demonstrate against Sheriff Judge Arpaio, the tent city, pink underwear Sheriff Arpaio. I think that that is a persecution that's going on. But they're trying to raise money to do that.

And the mailing that they have--and it's an Internet document. They still claim that they registered 1.3 million new voters. Well, the numbers are closer to 450,000 legitimate voter registrations. And ACORN has admitted to over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registrations. Now, one is too many for me. And we've seen the hue and cry of somebody who was in 2000 driving to vote in Florida, and perhaps they were going to vote for Al Gore, and a mile and a half away they went through a checkpoint to see if they were sober and had a driver's license, and they claimed that to be voter intimidation.

If one person lost their nerve and didn't want to go through the police checkpoint because they were drunk or didn't have a license, that was a voter intimidation on the part of the folks that were on Al Gore's side back in the year 2000.

ACORN can produce over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registrations, and America can't get up in arms until we see child prostitution promoted in five ACORN offices across this city, in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., in Brooklyn, in San Bernardino, and in San Diego, California, and more to come.

And now they're under a lawsuit. ACORN decides they're going to go out and punish people that have brought out the truth if they can and use the court to intimidate.

Now, when ACORN makes a statement that, well, we only produced over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registration forms, never fear, it was all in the exercise of trying to get somebody's good vote in there, but no bad votes came out of that, no fraud came from that. Oh, really.

They're being investigated. You say 12 States, then 14 States. Today it came out 20 States.

Today the trial of ACORN started in the State of Nevada. ACORN, as an entity, has been indicted by the prosecution in Nevada, and they have their chief organizer in Nevada is testifying against ACORN saying, Here's our pamphlet, our policy. We were paying commissions and paying a bounty for voter registrations. And, additionally, it came out in the news that in Troy, New York, they have dozens of fraudulent votes that were cast on absentee ballot that were promoted by ACORN.

Now, if there's anything that chisels away and cuts off the underpinnings of our Constitution it is fraudulent election process. And when the American people lose their faith that we have a legitimate process, the result of that will be, then, nothing holds together. You can't expect the President, the United States Senate, the United States House, or any system of government to be consented to by the people if the people don't believe they've consented in a national, legitimate ballot. That is the Banana Republic measure. And there is no entity in America that has been more active or aggressive in the history of this country and undermining the underpinnings of our Constitution than ACORN, a criminal enterprise and an entity in and of itself in many other enterprises than the fraudulent votes.

But I think at that component of this, I would yield back to the gentleman from Texas. I have a little bit more to say about ACORN hopefully a little bit later.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

I was thinking about the description of what is big money and what is $1 trillion and how do you put that into a concept now. Some of us from the part of the country I come from, we think in terms of corn. So to put that into perspective, the State of Iowa, the lead State in corn production, is going to have a good crop this year. It's going to have the best average yields that we have ever had, probably a few less bushels than we have produced though in the past, and we are going to raise about $10 billion worth of corn, maybe a little less than that, but about $10 billion.

Now all the corn that Iowa raises, just the value of that $10 billion, if we do that for 10 years, that's $100 billion. We do that for an entire century, that's $1,000 billion, $1 trillion. So 100 years of all the corn we can raise in Iowa is $1 trillion. A full century of all the corn that we can raise in what it's worth today, or what it was worth when I figured this, the markets have gone down a little bit, that is $1 trillion.

Now to take care of Obama's deficit created by his budget this year, that is $9.7 trillion. You can just think, 970 years of all the corn that Iowa could raise committed just to taking care of the deficit created by his budget would be just about right. And if you want to look at the deficit that exists today, and you add that to Obama's budget, that's over $20 trillion between the existing national debt and the debt created by President Obama's budget. So that would be all the corn that Iowa could raise at today's production in market values from the birth of Christ until today, and you would fall a little bit short. That's how much money the United States Government owes as a result of this profligate spending that is going on.

And the Federal Reserve component of this, I am very happy to see there are 290 cosponsors of Ron Paul's bill, H.R. 1207. I am among them, and I'm confident that my colleagues on the floor are as well. There is a hearing coming up on Friday to dig into this. That is a step along the way. From my standpoint, I would be very happy to sign a discharge petition. I don't think that things move very quickly through this Congress. When you have the most ethical Congress in history, I don't know how that could be defined that way, but there's a lot that doesn't happen around here. There's a lot of deliberation that doesn't take place around here, a lot of debate that doesn't take place.

The rules are written in the Rules Committee up there in that tiny little old room that doesn't leave room even for our staff to come in. We have to go up there and genuflect before the Chair of the Rules Committee and ask if we can bring an amendment down here to debate it on the floor of the House. They will say ``yes'' if they think it embarrasses Republicans. That's the only way they will say ``yes.''

The deliberate destruction of the greatest debating body in the history of the world here in the United States Congress has taken place because of the rules that have been ripped asunder by the Speaker of the House after 221 years. And the gentleman from Georgia has a sign: ``This leadership team will create the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history, Nancy Pelosi, November 16, 2006.'' I don't know how you say that in Georgia, say what? This is the least deliberative body it has ever been.

An open rules process that we had for 221 years that allowed every Members of Congress to force a debate and a vote on a subject matter of their choice within the appropriations process has been utterly suspended since 2007.

The American people deserve better. We deserve, yes, a hearing on H.R. 1207, on the Federal Reserve. But we deserve also to have open debate and force votes so Members have to go on record, because the wisdom of America is processed through 435 congressional districts. And we all have our networks out there. If that debate is stifled here, if amendments are shut off by order of the Speaker, then the wisdom of America is shut off by order of the Speaker.

This country cannot reach the next level of its destiny if it denies the wisdom of its people, and that is the wisdom of its people as processed through this Congress is how it was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. I yield back to gentleman from Texas.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

I would submit this idea, I would rather call it the Geithner corollary than the Rangel rule because it gets deeper, and when you think about how much deeper it gets, it doesn't quite show on this poster. And I'm reaching back and dusting off my memory

But it strikes me that the employment that Tim Geithner was involved in reimbursed him for the taxes that he was going to have to pay from income tax liability, for the payroll tax, the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid taxes, for the several years that are listed there. The reports that I have read--I believe it will also include The Wall Street Journal report--that Tim Geithner was written a check by his employer to be reimbursed in advance for the tax liability he would incur and signed an agreement multiple years in a row that he understood that he had this tax liability.

So not only did he not pay the taxes until the pressure was on--and they waived the penalty which, apparently, they pre-applied the Rangel rule with Tim Geithner, but he had actually profited by not paying his taxes because he had been reimbursed by his employer in advance for the liabilities that you see on the poster that Judge Carter has put up.

So this is a bridge too far from my standpoint. If you have a tax liability and your employer's writing you a check to pay those taxes, you cash the check, put it in your kids' retirement fund--I'm going to presume that's what happened. That's any equity that we don't spend when we die goes into our kids' retirement fund. And so you profit from this and avoid the taxes; that's a double operation there.

So I will label that Geithner corollary to the Rangel rule, and that would be if you're nominated for a high position of, let me say, confirmation position before the United States Senate, and you find yourself, you have a tax problem, if you are able to settle this issue out of court and do so without interest or penalty--he owed $17,230 in taxes but they waived the penalty, so apparently he paid the interest, not the penalty, from that language. I want to make sure that is clear.

If you get that all done, and if America's patience and appetite will believe the idea that Tim Geithner is so smart that we can't get along without him regardless of whether he could remember to pay his taxes and regardless of whether it was an ethical decision or not, if we remember America's appetite for that was completely satiated by the time Tom Daschle was appointed and his tax problem emerged, then America said, Enough, I can't tolerate anymore of these appointments by the President that will be confirmed by the Senate that have people that have been avoiding taxes.

So now we have the lead tax writer in the United States Congress, Chairman Rangel, that has stimulated a bill that's been introduced by Congressman Carter, the Rangel rule, precedent that if any taxpayer admits their mistake and pays their back taxes, no penalty or interest should be assessed, especially if you're up for an appointed position to be confirmed by the United States Senate, especially if America can be convinced that your skills are so valuable that out of 306 million people there isn't a single soul that can match up to the job that you might do, regardless of the problem you might have of being paid in advance to pay your taxes, cashing the check, putting into the equity account for your kids' inheritance, and then along comes the old ``uh- oh'' from Georgia, that is, the ``I guess I better pay my taxes'' Geithner corollary.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

If this is going to be the most open and ethical Congress in history, this Congress has got to have an opportunity to read the bills. This leadership team will create the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history: Nancy Pelosi, November 16, 2006.

I will say this: Yes, there were bills that were hustled through this Chamber when Republicans were in the majority, but I have never seen anything quite as egregious as the cap-and-trade bill that came through this House of Representatives. That bill was presented to the floor of the House, scheduled for debate the following day, and at 3:09 a.m., a 316-page amendment--

Did I say a.m.?

I'm sorry, I meant to say 3:09 a.m. I appreciate that correction. I must have had some kind of chronological dyslexia in order to come up with such a thing.

However, 3:09 a.m., 316-page amendment, and I can say with great confidence that no one read the bill. I don't have to ask anybody in this Chamber if they read the bill. I know no one read the bill. I was here on the floor engaging in the debate when Congressman Gohmert from Texas asked a parliamentary inquiry and he said, Madam Speaker, is there a copy of the enrolled bill in the Well? The answer was kind of, maybe, sort of. And we looked at the kind of, maybe, sort of stack of paper that was there, and there was a basic bill of around 1,100 pages, but the kind of, maybe, sort of didn't include the 316-page amendment.

And so after a few more inquiries, they pointed to another stack of paperwork, and Congressman Gohmert went down to look at that paperwork, and he came back and said, Madam Speaker, parliamentary inquiry, that is not even the amendment. It was a different stack of paper.

And so after 35 minutes of turning this thing around, the most significant question was again asked by Louie Gohmert of Texas, and there was a lot of dialogue going on. Joe Barton of Texas was engaged in this thing; I give him that. And anyway Louie Gohmert asked the question, after about 35 minutes of suspension of the debate on the cap-and-trade bill, he said, Madam Speaker, parliamentary inquiry: If the House of Representatives passes a bill that doesn't exist, is it possible to message a bill that doesn't exist to the United States Senate?

Well, today we know it must be possible because we passed cap-and- trade, a bill that didn't exist, and it got messaged to the Senate, and I think it probably began to exist sometime after it was messaged to the Senate. It was an appalling thing that the American people would have to watch, and Thomas Jefferson has to be rolling over two or three times. He spoke about a lot of things, 72 hours, 3 days to read the bill.

I also put out a great big pat on the back for Congressman Brian Baird for leading on this, as well as Greg Walden and John Culberson, and I have signed the discharge petition and the bill, and I'm looking for the rest of the signatures on the discharge petition so it can come to this floor. That is a piece of bipartisanship that this Congress can pass that will leave a legacy for a long time to come.

And if we're so afraid of the legislation that might get passed that we can't give anybody an opportunity to read it and we wonder why people go to TEA parties in America, that's why. They're really uneasy about what they've seen: $700 billion in TARP; eight large private- sector corporations nationalized; along with then a $787 billion stimulus package rushed through Congress--it had to happen right now-- and sat on the President's desk for 5 days before he signed it, and still most of it is not spent.

And with that, they watched cap-and-trade move through here in a hurry-up, rush job, when not one soul in this Congress or across this country read the bill before it passed. And then they see a hurry-up rush for a national health care act that takes away our freedom.

No wonder we have TEA parties. No wonder the American people come out. It's just a wonder that they could be so peaceful, and we've ended up with almost no, let me say, almost no violence of any kind in all the TEA parties that we had. Respectful people that exercised their right to freedom of speech and assembly and a right for redress of their grievances, and they did so in the traditional fashion envisioned by Thomas Jefferson himself.

So many generations have taken place since Thomas Jefferson, but his wisdom remains, and I certainly support H. Res. 554. Encourage everyone, including the Speaker, to sign that discharge petition. Let's get that thing out here on the floor, do the right thing for Democrats and Republicans.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized for the privilege and the honor to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

As we wrap up this congressional week and I listened to the gentleman from Ohio, the gentleman from Utah and the gentleman from Arizona talk about missile defense and our national security, what I have heard over this last hour is a technical, tactical, strategic explanation of why America has taken the positions that we have, the decisions that have been made in the previous administrations, and I think a clear and stark analysis of what apparently is a huge diplomatic mistake made by the President of the United States.

I would make the point that those who defend him seem to always revert back to a default position of, The President must have gotten something for it. They speculate that there must be a quid pro quo to pull the rug out from underneath the Eastern Europeans--in particular, the Poles and the Czechs--who in their headlines, as I believe Mr. Franks said--the headline in one of those papers said ``Betrayed!'' To betray the Poles and the Czechs, the United States of America, the integrity of our Nation and the confidence in our national security have been diminished in a way that probably can't ever be rebuilt.

But those who defend that decision will argue, Well, the President is a smart negotiator. He is a brilliant man. Therefore, we have to trust his knowledge and his judgment because he must know something that we don't. Yet I haven't heard one of these imaginative characters that can defend anything and advocate for anything come up with a single thing that would be worth doing what the President did. What could possibly be worth giving up the integrity and the credibility of the United States? What could possibly be something that could come out of any negotiations with Iran or Russia that could emerge as a plus on this side that would offset the loss of international credibility, the word of the United States and our commitment to our allies, let alone giving up the strategic position of being able to take out Iranian missiles shortly after they leave the launching pad, instead of leaving this 5- year window, as Mr. Turner just said?

If your President is so much smarter than you are that he must have gotten something accomplished behind the scenes that's so valuable that even you can't conceive of what it might have been, I don't know if you call that a rational thought or a religion. But, Mr. Speaker, we're in a situation here where the United States and the world is in a very, very dangerous place. This globe is a giant chessboard; it's a giant Monopoly game, and it's a giant Risk game that's going on. It's a giant poker game that's going on. And there are some poker players, chess players, Risk and Monopoly players out there that are really good and really smart, and they spend their time trying to figure out how to outmaneuver the United States. It has taken place ever since the dawn of the Soviet Union, and the Monopoly game here in the United States broke the Soviet Union, and they imploded.

Now we have Putin over there on the chessboard, at the poker table, and he is making moves on this global chessboard that seek to reconstruct what he can of the former Soviet Union. It's been in his interest to cause Iran to be a thorn in our side and for us to think that we could ask Putin to, well, be open and do us a favor and maybe he could talk real nice to the Iranians and they would stop their nuclear endeavor--after all of these years and these billions of dollars spent and the great diplomatic risks that they take?

These people are not going to just simply tip over their king and walk away from this chessboard. For the President to think that dialogue is diplomacy and that you can accomplish things just because you talk about it is an inherently left-wing, myopic European view, and it's something that I've heard from their mouths in the discussions that we have over in that part of the world.

We have with us Mr. Bishop from Utah who has significant insight into that part of the world, the politics of Western Europe as well as geography of that part of the world--Iran, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and also Western Europe. I have asked the gentleman if he would stick around long enough to impart some of that broader view to explain the forces that are at play in this dynamic, the forces of Russia, the forces of Iran, the Islamic effort that's there, the Israeli position that's there, the threat that comes from Iran threatening to annihilate and wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.

And by the way, this move, in my view, brings it closer and closer that Israel likely will have no choice but to at least attempt to take out the nuclear capability of Iran. Their survival might very well be at stake. So this move that might look like its a move designed to pacify the Russians might

well end up being something that compels the Israelis to make a military strike. And it may well be a tool that, once removed, the missiles are in the Middle East, and this is a decision that is now made that moves us to the inevitability that there will be military action take place as a result of a pacifist action on the part of the President.

This is what comes when you go to--let me call it the Neville Chamberlain School of Diplomacy or capitulation, for remember when he returned from Munich waving a letter saying that he had achieved ``peace in our time.'' Well, that peace in our time didn't last long. I was thinking about the situation of how it was that Hitler actually negotiated with the Russians for a while and that ended up with Poland being divided and a global war as a result.

I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Utah. I am interested in your perspective on this global chess, poker, Monopoly, Risk game that's taking place.

Briefly reclaiming my time, a question forms in my mind, and I'd like to take advantage, Mr. Speaker, of the expertise which I will assign to the gentleman from Utah in his understanding of history. And I'm looking back upon those events in the 1980s and this event that's coming up for the 20th anniversary this November 9, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

When I watched that happen on television, I saw literally the Iron Curtain crashing down. Every time a hammer blow landed, every time they hit it with a chisel, every time they knocked another chink or pulled a section of the wall down, that was the Iron Curtain being deconstructed. Demolition of the Iron Curtain that took place began on November 9 of 1989.

Now, at that moment the pundits in the news media didn't understand what was taking place. They didn't see that as the Iron Curtain. They saw it as the family reunification plan. And therein lies the large flaw that took place on the part of the liberals. They didn't understand the dynamic that had taken place. But Ronald Reagan understood it at that moment. I'm not convinced that his immediate successor understood it to the depth that Ronald Reagan did.

But this question has always lingered in me. I thought that it proved to the world that free markets and free enterprise and freedom would always prevail over communism, socialism, despotism, totalitarianism of any kind because of the dynamics that come from the creativity and the productivity and the freedom that comes from the human spirit and the checks and balances that exist in the marketplace.

Yet I didn't hear them capitulating in their argument. They just suspended

their arguments for a little while. And then front-and-center, full- blown, proud, global Communists disappeared.

But where did they go is the question? Did they go back and lick their wounds and change their ideology and come back as free enterprise capitalists? I don't remember their doing that. But I wonder if the gentleman from Utah has any thoughts on what happened to those front- and-center Communists from 1989. Where are they? Some have passed away but some are still with us. What are they doing today and what do they believe in, and how does this fit into the equation?

I yield to the gentleman from Utah.

Reclaiming my time, I very much appreciate the diplomatic gentleman from Utah for his contribution to the knowledge base and the decisionmaking process that we do here in this Congress. And I would suggest that he's a little overly humble when he says he doesn't know the answer to what happened to those Communists. When I think about the discussion that we've heard about Ukraine, Georgia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, South America, Mr. Speaker, all of these areas are discussed in a book written by Colonel Robert Chandler called ``Shadow World.'' It's 500-and-some pages long. And Mr. Chandler takes the situation of the world at the end of the Cold War, and that would be at the implosion of the Soviet Union, and he begins to identify the leading personalities in the world, those leaders and those ideologies within the countries that are, let me say, Communist interests, hardcore Communist interests.

And he takes the person around the globe to every populated continent and talks about the core politics of each of those countries, including these countries that have been mentioned by Mr. Bishop of Utah and especially Venezuela and North Korea and some of the other countries in South America, also Putin in Russia and how things unfolded and Gorbachev's position as well.

It is a very, very educational compilation of what happened after almost 20 years ago when the Berlin Wall went down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down, and the people who were holding up that part of the world, the left side of the world, those on the east side of the Berlin Wall, who had a managed economy, who had the central planning that set up 5-year plans for the collective farms, those that told everyone else when to go to work, what raw materials to deliver. And if you remember, Ronald Reagan and some of the others made the joke that, well, people in the Soviet Union pretended to work and the Soviet Union pretended to pay them. But eventually that house of economic cards collapsed.

A question was before us as a Nation, and that question was, while the Soviet Union was developing a missile capability to eclipse our own capability here, such a devastating force of ICBMs that there was nothing the United States could do to survive such an attack, that mutually assured destruction was going down the path of a destruction that would be so bad in this country that civilization itself may not survive.

The question that was before us was articulated best by the former Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who, as she stepped down from that position in the early 1980s, said this contest that's going on, this Cold War, is the equivalent of 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? That was the most succinct example of what was taking place in that Cold War in the 1980s.

We know how it played out now. We look back on that, and almost 20 years ago the Soviet Union could no longer hold their economics together. They couldn't keep their military out even in places like East Germany. So they opened up the border with Hungary. People flowed around through Austria and Hungary. And at a certain point, there wasn't any merit in guarding the Wall anymore because people were streaming around the end. And so they went over the top and began to sit up on top of the wall with hammers and chisels and saws and anything they could get their hands on. And, yes, some broke bottle of champagne, and there was family reunification.

But it was the Iron Curtain crashing down nearly 20 years ago that should have been a lesson for the whole world that free enterprise always defeats a managed economy, because no matter

how many smart people you put in positions of power, they can't micromanage an economy that is a combination of everybody's individual productive and economic activity every day.

The invisible hand, as Adam Smith famously described, and actually didn't, about how free enterprise works with providing the incentives and managing the supply. So it works like this: If the grocery store runs out of bread, the store owner understands he has to have more bread or otherwise people will go someplace else to shop. And if there's a cheaper, better bread at the neighboring store, that store owner is not going to sell his bread. So that's how bakeries get started, how grocery stores grow and shrink, how chain stores begin, how manufacturing begins.

Our control, our managed economy is this: Free enterprise drives our economy. And the buy, sell, trade, make-gain culture that we have that's part of what made America great, one of the central pillars of American exceptionalism is free enterprise. When we have that working for us in this country, Americans are more productive than anybody else in the world.

Our job here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, is to get government out of the way and to provide the kind of tax and regulatory structure as minimally as we can so that the result is the individuals in this country will see our average annual productivity go up. And if people are rewarded for their productivity, they will produce more. If you tax them and punish them and regulate them, they will produce less. So in places like the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, they just simply suppressed the productivity by taking away the rewards.

I can give you a simple example that stands out in a very stark way. And that is Communist China, a country of more than a billion people, about the same geographical area of the United States, having trouble in a lot of ways competing in the technological and educational side of this. But some years ago, they decided they were going to let their farmers, who are less controlled now than they were, be able to get engaged in the honey business without having government interference. So, in other words, government doesn't appoint themselves a few thousand beekeepers and have them deliver all that honey for a set price. They let them compete on the open market.

And what has happened? China almost immediately began exporting honey and competing against the honey here in the United States because they had some people that could be beekeepers. That's like a little microcosm of free enterprise that sprung up out of China because they took the regulations away, took their managed economy away and let people produce all they could produce and sell all they could sell and keep a significant share of the profits.

Well, here in this country, we've had that as a tradition across the breadth of this economy, and it's diminished significantly, Mr. Speaker.

So the vitality of free enterprise brings about the best in us, the highest productivity, the most innovativeness in us. It gives us an incentive to extend each of our educations. It gives the inventors an incentive to invent. It gives the people that are producing and doing the experiments on pharmaceuticals an incentive to produce better medicine. And those who invent better surgery techniques get to cash a bigger check.

Well, even though they are humanitarians driven by a desire to do good in their work, when you really need to reach back for that extra adrenaline when it gets late at night when the rest of the world is tired, or maybe you don't feel very good because you are exhausted, that extra incentive of profit makes a difference and a reward for it in a society that appreciates it.

Around the globe, there is a line of scrimmage between freedom and the suppression from freedom. So when the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) humbly said he didn't know the answer, I think perhaps he didn't know the answer that I wanted him to give--that will happen--but he understands very thoroughly how the rearrangement that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Cold War, some countries and philosophies lined up on the side of the freedom. Those countries are among those countries where we already had the holes dug to place the missile defense shield, Poland, Czechoslovakia.

Mr. Speaker, have you failed to notice that the people who have achieved their freedom most recently love it and adhere to it the most? The Poles love their freedom. The Romanians love their freedom. And the Czechs love their freedom. They remember what it is like to live under the boot heel of the Soviet Union. They remember clearly within their own families the fear of the occupation that took place before, in many cases World War II, and certainly during and after it.

I recall in a trip over to that part of the world with Mr. Bishop a conversation with a man about my age whose father's first military operation he was engaged in was Auschwitz, not at Auschwitz to liberate Auschwitz, but at Auschwitz fighting for the Russians. Those things don't pop up easily in our history books, but this broad global concept of who is on what side of this line of scrimmage, who is on the side of freedom and who is on the side of suppressing freedom, we need to understand this.

These forces know instinctively what is at play out here on the globe. And so we wonder, what is the chess board that Putin is playing on? The Monopoly board that Putin is playing on? He is not about advancing freedom; he is about diminishing freedom. The freedom in the Soviet Union, I should say Russia, and some of our satellite states, has diminished since Putin stepped into control.

We met with significant leading personalities in Russia, and I am going to avoid saying their names because I don't need to turn more heat up on them; but you would recognize many if not all of them, Mr. Speaker, and they told us that there really no longer exists a free press in Russia, not a newspaper that they can count on that has any influence that is free to print what it wants to print. There is not a free legislature in Russia any longer either. They are the people who are controlled by Putin, and they don't have free markets. We know that the Mob has taken over a lot of that economy, and there is a payoff that goes on inside of all of that.

So a Russia that had an opportunity to take a step up after the implosion of the Soviet Union now is stepping into the darkness of the left again, moving towards a communist state, taking away the freedom of its people and their ability to effectively have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom of the press and freedom of their economy. Those things have been significantly diminished under Putin, and they understand that and they see that.

The leaders of freedom in Russia today would have believed that the Russian people would have stepped up by now and gone to the streets and taken their country back. It has not happened. I would encourage that they do so, that they take their country back. We thought it was happening during the days of Yeltsin when he climbed up on the tank. Good things happened there, but we should not forget that we are the vanguards of freedom here in the United States of America for the world. We are the inspiration for the world.

And when it looks like the model for our diplomacy is simply capitulation to Russia, under the belief that our community organizer in chief somehow is a master of foreign policy, well, he is the manager of foreign policy and he is the Commander in Chief of our military, and certainly I stand with our military, and I want to help coach him on the foreign policy a little bit.

I don't know why the press has not been more critical of the President's foreign policy. This huge plunder of just announcing that he is going to pull the missiles out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, take that shield away, and almost at the same time you notice that the information was leaked out about the nuclear capabilities of Iran, which we have just heard in the previous hour, Iran developing the capability, that they have the capability to develop a bomb now and they are in the process we know of developing the capability to deliver it.

And it doesn't take very much of a missile to drop one into Israel, and it

only takes one weapon dropped into Israel to annihilate the entire country. And they have said that is what they intend to do.

We look at the President of the United States, his foreign policy experience seems to have, before he became the Commander in Chief and the chief architect of our foreign policy, his foreign policy experience comes to this: having been raised in part in Indonesia at a young age which would give him some sense of the culture but probably no sense of the global, military, cultural dynamics, but raised at least in part in Indonesia.

A President who has once traveled to Kenya, and once traveled to Pakistan. I don't know quite how that happened, but it was announced. And beyond that, the foreign policy experience for our Commander in Chief and the chief architect of our foreign policy seems to be a trip to Germany to give a speech during the campaign. That is not anything that has ever happened before that I know of during a Presidential campaign, but it looked at the time like he wanted to be President of Europe, the United States, and the world.

In any case, very, very limited on foreign policy experience. And the lessons of history, the lessons so well drilled into us by Neville Chamberlain's School of Appeasement when Chamberlain came back from the trip to Munich and waved the letter in his hand, the letter that Hitler had signed, and he said: I have guaranteed peace in our time.

That was the image of Chamberlain getting off the plane from Munich. And what happened? Within weeks the Nazis invaded Poland. They carved it up with the Russians, and we were off and running in a global war that cost tens of millions of lives. They remember that in that part of the world. They are afraid of being brought back into another war. The Poles remember being run over by the Nazis and the Russians, and then occupied by the Russians for all of these years up until 1990 or so.

This is a very sensitive situation that is going on. When the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) mentioned the Ukraine and Georgia, the importance of the sovereign state of Georgia should not be diminished.

We should understand that this chess game that I have talked about, the central square on the chess board for Putin is Georgia. That is the nexus through which the energy flows, the energy that is produced in gas and oil wells east of Georgia, east of the Caspian Sea, roughly 1.2 million barrels of oil going through Georgia by pipeline on a daily basis, 1.2 million, a train that has constant tankers of crude oil being hauled through the nation of Georgia on their destinations to the tanker ships and the Black Sea, and the natural gas that flows in pipelines through Georgia to other places in Europe.

Georgia is the nexus. Think, Mr. Speaker, of an hourglass, and on one side of that hourglass is a lot of the production of oil and natural gas that is east of the Caspian Sea, flowing through this nexus of Georgia with pipelines, rail lines, and coming out the other side at the Black Sea and going on to land-based places around Western Europe.

Think of the Russians shutting off the natural gas to Germany a year ago January. Think what that meant when they did that. And to have the Germans take the position that it really didn't affect their foreign policy toward Russia because they only got 30 percent of their natural gas from Russia.

Can you imagine if Hugo Chavez had 30 percent of the natural gas coming into the United States and he turned the valve down and shut off our gas in January? Our furnaces would have gone dark on us, and our houses would have gone cold. If that had happened, what would we do? Would we accept that? If we didn't have the power to do something about it, would we capitulate to the demands of Hugo Chavez?

My answer, I think we would say yes. I think if we didn't have the power or another alternative, we would have to negotiate.

I am going to suggest that the Germans are negotiating with the Russians because they can't do a confrontation, and Putin knows it. That's why he shut the energy off that was flowing through Georgia for 4 days. He sent a message to Europe that he can do that anytime he pleases. When he shut the gas off that was flowing through into Germany, that said clearly that Putin can do that anytime he pleases.

So if someone controls your energy and they can shut the valve down anytime they please, you end up being a little nicer to those folks unless you produce another alternative. Well, the alternative that is being produced is building a new pipeline around to the North Sea. And where does it come from? Russia. That puts them in more control. My answer would be: I don't want any of that; let's develop our own energy sources and not be dependent upon those energy sources that are coming from Russia. But that has been Putin's strength. When energy prices went up, he found himself sitting on a lot of cash. That is unusual for a country whose energy falters; but because Russia has a lot of energy, they have had a significant advantage.

But, Mr. Speaker, we should remember when the Berlin Wall went down in 1989 and the Soviet Union imploded within the next couple of years that the people that were Communists, Socialists, Marxists, Maoists, they didn't go away. They didn't look at the model of this dynamic vigor of the United States economy that is driven by our people and decide they wanted to be more like us. Some did; not many.

Most of them went underground for a little while and then tried to get back in power. The former Communists are there seated in the legislatures across that part of Europe today. In small numbers, and in some cases they don't get to call themselves Communists because that has been stained by the history of it, but they still believe the same thing. They still want to manage. They still believe that their elitist mind-set can tell the rest of us what to do. They want to take away the freedom of individuals to make their own choices economically and militarily and politically and culturally. And, in fact, persecute the churches while they are at it.

We need to understand Communists haven't changed. They might have taken on different names. They might have declared themselves Social Democrats or to be Progressives. They might just be the Democratic Socialists of America that are supporting Progressives in this Congress, but they are the same people with the same ideology.

And us freedom-loving people, I should say we freedom-loving people, need to understand that there are basic principles of Americanism, and free enterprise is one of them. And those who undermine free enterprise are undergoing anti-American activities because they are undermining our vitality and our freedom and are taking away our ability to take this Nation up to another level of our destiny.

That is part of this equation that is taking place here as the President of the United States--whom I happen to have this portrait of. I think it is a flattering one actually and well done as far as the artwork is concerned. The President of the United States brings an ideology to the task of community organizer in chief. With a limited foreign policy experience of having traveled, lived shortly in Indonesia and traveled to Pakistan and I understand to Kenya, and beyond that his trip to Germany to give his speech there with the Autobahn Bismarcks--I think that is the victory monument or the triumph monument that's there in Berlin--with that in the backdrop, not the Vandenberg Gate which he tried to do, that is not a lot of foreign policy experience to be playing on this global chessboard with the world's number one economy, the world's number one military, and with the destiny of the world hanging in the balance if you make a mistake.

No one has a crystal ball, but this is a very high-risk endeavor taken on by our Commander in Chief. And those who are experts on the military side of this, it's not quite universal, but there has been a broad criticism that has been made. And I have no idea. My imagination cannot tell me what he could possibly have gotten for capitulating on the missiles in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

And so, Madam Speaker, that brings me to the subject matter that has, I will say, riveted the American people over the last couple of weeks, and that

is the issue of ACORN, ACORN being the place where the President got his start in politics, where Barack Obama first engaged in community organizing, and his community organizing being part of--the most high profile that he did was Project Vote, the get-out-the-vote effort. And Project Vote that he worked for is a very close, indistinguishable-from affiliate of ACORN.

So ACORN in Chicago has always had a broad and deep connection. It has always been very active there. From the early days when ACORN originated in Arkansas and emerged across the rest of the country, ACORN has had a very solid presence in Chicago. And the President of the United States might, in his most candid moments, confess that he wouldn't be very likely to be the President of the United States if it hadn't been for ACORN, ACORN's ability to register voters and get out the vote and bring about the kind of leverage within the inner city that allows ACORN to influence votes at the inner city level.

Now, ACORN is a corporation, and its structure is something that seems to be a little bit mysterious. It has been often reported that they're a 501(c)(3); that's not for profit. That means they can't engage in partisan political activities. And we have seen as a report from the Government Reform Committee that ACORN has up to 361 affiliates; in fact, they list 361 affiliates in their report. Some of those may not be active affiliates, and there may be some affiliates that didn't get picked up in the report done by the Government Reform Committee. But ACORN has turned into a spiderweb of this conglomeration of affiliates.

So when I speak of ACORN, Madam Speaker, I'm speaking of ACORN and all other affiliates, think 361 corporations, a third or more of them being 501(c)(3) not for profits, some 527 organizations, and some 501(c)(4) organizations, and other corporate structures, organizations that share, in many cases, interlocking boards of directors and an interlocking mission that reaches out and has become a vacuum that sucks up taxpayer dollars in many of the States and from the Federal Government.

They have received over 53 million Federal tax dollars since 1994, and I think that's a small piece of it until we examine all of the affiliates. Many of the States have contributed to ACORN in one way or another by reentering into contractual agreements with them; ACORN and ACORN Housing, for example, essentially in the business of brokering low-income housing.

So these are some of the things that ACORN has done. They've contributed to the toxic mortgage situation that brought about the economic meltdown just a year ago, and they've done so by shaking down lenders, by demanding contributions from lenders. What large major investment bank has not written at least one fat check to ACORN?

Madam Speaker, I'm going to suggest that they have shaken down many of the banks that have been bailed out. And we should take a look and see which banks received TARP funds and look there and see which banks also contributed money to ACORN. And we need to bring all of the finances together of the private corporations that are part of this funding for ACORN as well as government. It's not enough just to audit what government sent to ACORN. It's important that we go to the private corporations as well and see what has happened.

But we know that ACORN has gone in and intimidated lenders. Lenders have written checks in order to, let me call it, ``influence'' ACORN to stop demonstrating in their banks so that they can actually do business. We know that ACORN personnel, including Maude Talbot--her first name actually escapes me, but Talbot is the last name, the head of ACORN in Chicago who has claimed Obama as her own--have bragged about going in to intimidate lenders in their offices and talked of other circumstances about shoving the lender's desk over against the wall, surrounding the loan officer, screaming and yelling and chanting at him until such time as he would get tired of that behavior and commit to loaning certain amounts of money into these areas in their neighborhoods. That's a shakedown, Madam Speaker. ACORN was involved in that.

And we know while they were shaking down lenders, they also were here in Washington, D.C., convincing this Congress that we should pass legislation to lower the standards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on their secondary lending market. And when that happened, it lowered the standards that undermine the foundation of requiring credit for loans. And when that happened, it laid the foundation, in fact, it eroded the foundation for credibility and credit and it began the downward spiral of the mortgage lending crisis. And at the core of that, as you look through it, you will see ACORN there over and over again shaking down lenders, coming to Congress, undermining the underwriting requirements that Fannie and Freddie required in order for them to purchase these bundles of mortgage-backed securities that were being created by individual bad loans in bad neighborhoods that were promoted by ACORN, who was getting checks from the lending institutions and getting agreements from the lending institutions to provide blocks of money that would be loaned into neighborhoods that ended up being bad loans.

ACORN is at the core of the financial meltdown. And by the way, the President of the United States was at the core of ACORN as a lot of the genesis of this was being generated; headed up Project Vote, later on hired ACORN to work for him to get out the vote during the Presidential campaign. So the President of the United States started out with ACORN. He trained their trainers. He represented them in court to undermine, by the way, the integrity of the ballot box, in my view. And that's a Motor Voter issue, which we would disagree with philosophically. Headed up Project Vote.

The actions of ACORN in Chicago have been tied together integrally with the President of the United States all the way through. And here we are now with ACORN helping to, on film, apparently facilitate child pornography and being willing to work with and advocate for what to do with illegal immigrant children brought into prostitution rings in five cities in the United States at a minimum, that being Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; San Bernardino, California; and San Diego.

Madam Speaker, that was appalling to this Congress. It finally got us to the point of revulsion where we could finally vote to shut off funding going to ACORN and their affiliates. And that vote was a vote of 345-75 here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Just the day before, I didn't think it was possible, but the American people saw the character and the culture of ACORN in that film, those five films that took place inside those five cities, and we understand there are more that have not been released yet. And what happens? Finally, some of us that have been calling for investigations are starting to get a little bit of movement.

But what needs to happen, Madam Speaker, is an all-out full court press on ACORN and all of their affiliates. We need to have the Department of Defense unleash their investigators to trace down, through all the activities of ACORN and all of their affiliates, and work in cooperation with IRS investigations of ACORN and all their affiliates, track every dollar that comes into the affiliates and every dollar that goes out. The commingling of funds, the transfer of funds, we need to have the Department of Justice go back down into the embezzlement that took place of nearly $1 million out of ACORN by the brother of the founder of ACORN, covered up by the founder of ACORN.

Brothers do that, I understand. One of them commits a crime and apparently the other one covered up the crime, which is a crime itself. And then they misappropriated funds that were pension funds in order to backfill the hole that was created in their accounting by the embezzlement of Dale Rathke, all of this covered up by his brother, Wade Rathke. And they covered it up and held it away from the functioning board of directors of ACORN at the time.

We have ACORN producing over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations, complicit in the beginning, and part and parcel of the mortgage lending crisis, embezzlement/coverup by its top officers, and now we have ACORN helping to facilitate child prostitution rings and setting up houses of ill repute and helping to facilitate loans to

do that, and advocating that the, let me just say, pimp and the prostitute not claim all of the 13 or 14 presumably illegal children that they were going to bring in from El Salvador into Baltimore, but just to claim three of them so it wouldn't raise the levels of suspicion. And then they could qualify for the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, child tax credit up to three children, $1,000 a year per child, and then the earned income tax credit, which would probably add another $3,000 to that, most likely, given the advice that they gave, to game the taxpayer for a check for a cumulative of about $6,000, and just as a matter of fact and a matter of course.

ACORN would help with the income tax filings. They would help with gaming the taxpayer. They would help with a loan for the house of ill repute, and they would turn a blind eye, at a minimum, to illegal immigration. This is Baltimore. But in San Diego, they advocated to help with that. We have friends in Mexico. You have to trust us. We'll get this done for you. Unbelievable. No conscience.

We saw the culture of it. But all the parts that we've been talking about up to the part of the prostitution, people would deny it. We had defenders over here on this side of the aisle, but now they can't deny it because once you transpose the image of facilitating child prostitution as a matter of culture within the corrupt criminal enterprise of ACORN and their affiliates, once you expose that, none of the rest of this is unbelievable. It's entirely plausible, and it is, in fact, entirely real.

ACORN has created now a closed, contained economy within itself where its tentacles reach out and suck in and draw down Federal money, State money, contribution money, shakedown money from banks and other lending institutions and corporations to keep ACORN off their back, do the shakedown endeavor. And once that money gets drawn in, then it becomes something that gets commingled. And as it's commingled, then it goes out to further their political enterprise, corrupting the election process in the United States. And if there is anything that I am aggressive on defending, it is the integrity of the ballot box, and they have assaulted the integrity of the ballot box.

The President of the United States grew up in ACORN. He hired ACORN. He worked for ACORN. He hired ACORN. He is a player and a coach. He wore their jersey and now he is the equivalent of the owner. And he had set them up to do the census, and twice now the Census Bureau has announced that they aren't going to use ACORN to help with the census. Why would anybody think ACORN can count people better than they can get people registered to vote? Four hundred thousand fraudulent registration forms. Can't we imagine that ACORN would pay a commission for everybody that the census workers could count?

And if they paid people on commission, they would just simply fill out forms and expand the numbers, or count people two, three, four, five, six times. Even if they set up expectations and not a quota, the result ends up being the same, even though it's not as stark a violation of the law. You can't have American people counted by people that can't even handle a voter registration form with an expectation that it has an even even chance of being a legitimate voter registration form.

Madam Speaker, when they take your vote, when they undermine the integrity of the ballot box, that's more important itself than the Constitution, because even though the Constitution guarantees the rights that we have, the only thing that guarantees the Constitution itself is a legitimate election process. If the American people lose their faith in a legitimate election process, the whole thing comes crashing down.

If we don't believe that our vote counts, we can't accept the decisions of government. I mean, think what would happen if we elected a President of the United States, or Members of Congress, United States Senators, Governors of the States, and the American people believed that they were not the elected President, Governor, or Congressman, but they were simply those that happened to be on the side that was gaming the system.

We wouldn't accept their decisions either. If we don't accept the decisions that are made by government, then the progress of civilization comes to a halt and digresses, and we fall into the depths of a totalitarian state eventually as well.

Legitimate elections are the underpinnings of our Constitution, and the guarantees in the Constitution can't be sustained if we lose our faith in the election process. The worst thing that can happen in this country from a policy standpoint would be to see the integrity of our ballot box further eroded by organizations like ACORN. So this is very important. It is very important that the President of the United States stands up and takes a position on ACORN.

Did you notice he was really quiet about some things? He was quiet about Van Jones. Van Jones, the former Green Jobs czar, quit on a Friday night. I guess it was a Saturday morning, at 12:01 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Curiously, the President had nothing to say about Van Jones. Curiously, the press had no questions for the President on Van Jones, and he is a self-alleged Communist. Yet Van Jones drifted from the scene because he became too toxic.

There was a little incident up in Massachusetts of a professor from Harvard who was trying to break into his own house and who had a police officer called to his location. The President saw fit to engage himself in that and to hold a beer summit between Professor Gates and Officer Crowley.

Now we've had the United States Senate vote to un-fund ACORN. We've had the House of Representatives vote to un-fund ACORN. We have the Treasury Department starting an investigation. At least it's implicit in their press release that's coming out. We have the Justice Department looking to see if they've written any checks to ACORN but not investigating ACORN and their affiliates thoroughly. We have a number of ranking members of full committees on this Hill who are doing what they can with the resources they have.

We don't have a single full committee Chair who has announced investigations and hearings into ACORN at this point. We've got Congress doing a slow walk right now on ACORN. We have the President of the United States, who could get himself injected into a lot of different discussions but who has not yet really made much of a peep regarding ACORN.

Now, if the Senate says un-fund ACORN and if the House says un-fund ACORN, why can't the President say un-fund ACORN? That's what I'd like to know.

If the President of the United States would step forward and say to this Congress, Investigate at my request, and I'll turn over all the resources of the entire executive branch of government to drill down through ACORN and all of their affiliates, and will chase every dollar, every director and every employee who has committed an illegal activity and will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law and will bring about perp walks and prison time for people who are breaking the law, it would happen--it would happen overnight. But he has not. He sat in his ivory tower, and alluded a little bit to the inappropriate actions that might have taken place and about how we should, maybe, get to the bottom of it. They are not yet serious, Mr. Speaker.

They are not going to be serious until the American people make it the highest priority that they have. It's hard to make it the highest priority when you're watching your health care on the chopping block in the United States Senate, when you've watched our national security be diminished significantly by pulling the missile defense shield plan from Poland and Czechoslovakia, when you're not keeping faith with the people who have most recently achieved their freedom--that's the Eastern Europeans--and when you're putting the United States at risk and are empowering Ahmadinejad and empowering Putin and are setting up a tone of going wobbly at a time when we need to be the strongest.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 19 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Tuesday, September 29, 2009, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

I very much appreciate you recognizing me to address the House of Representatives and you today. As we near the close of this week and I listened to the emphatic presentation of the gentleman from New York and the more low-key, but I think equal conviction, presentation of the gentleman from Minnesota, it caught my ear that the gentleman from New York gave us a definition of socialism. He said, Socialism is when the government controls the means of production. I'm going to tell you that I believe that is a closer definition to communism than it is socialism.

Yet, I think the people who are the self-professed socialists in this country know who they are, and I think we should know who they are. They are the members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The Web site dsausa.org is the central source, the most important and influential source of socialist thinking in America.

They write in there--and I have a whole series of documents since the gentleman made the statement about what socialists are. I have spent a little time probing around in this Web site location. And I find out some things in there that I think the public should know, Mr. Speaker.

It tells about the organization. It says that, We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit. Socialists reject private profit. Now that didn't seem to be what I heard the gentleman from New York say.

They also reject alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, which certainly I also reject, environmental destruction and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, and a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality and non-oppressive relationships, like having to work ``for the man.''

These socialists have a difference. On the Web site dsausa.org, there is a link that opens up and it says--first, it leads with, We are not Communists. Now I have always been very suspicious of any group that would start out with: I'm not a Communist. But the Democratic Socialists of America, that's how they start it.

They say, We're not Communists. Communists want to control everything. They want to nationalize everything. They want to nationalize not only the major corporations, the industry refining industry, the automobile manufacturers, the banks, the insurance companies, the lending companies. The Communists want to do all that and they want to nationalize small business: the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, to keep it simple, Mr. Speaker. That's communist by the definition of the socialists on dsausa.org Web site for the Democratic Socialists of America.

They also contend on those Web site links that they are a political party and they do support candidates, but they just don't actively ask them to carry around with them the socialist label. You'll find at the Web site dsausa.org that the people who are their candidates are labeled themselves and by the socialist Web site as progressives. That would be the blue posters we saw within the last hour. The Progressive Caucus. And we wonder what progressives are.

Well, they are socialists. They have a far bigger influence on this Congress than the public is aware. There are 75 members of the Progressive Caucus that are listed on their Web site.

Now, there was a time that you could have gone to the socialist Web site and opened up the link and read down through the list of the members of the Progressive Caucus who are, every one of them a Democrat in this Congress, and every one is claimed by the socialists as being the legislative party and arm of their political activism.

You cannot disconnect progressive and socialist. You can't give them a different definition. And if you wonder about the heritage and the genesis of progressives, their Web site was hosted by the socialists up until a few years ago. And when it became known publicly that the socialist Web site was actually managing the progressives' Web site-- and you can go down the list: Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Stalinist, Communist, Socialist, Progressive. You see where I've gone. It's less egregious to be a progressive than a socialist. So they took another step away.

Socialists took a step away from communism because communism had a

bad name. And they stepped away from it and they defined themselves differently and put it on their Web site. They said, Well, we're not communists because we don't want to do all these things. But they also say progressives are socialists. They're our people. And they used to host their Web site. Now the Progressive Caucus does their own Web site. But they advocate directly from the legislative agenda of the social Web site. Facts easy to find at dsausa.org.

Now what does a socialist do that's different than a communist? That's the question. Communists want to nationalize everything. They want to control the means of all production. They want to nationalize the corporations because the corporations aren't running consistent with their belief. And they want to also nationalize the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Small business. That's communists.

Socialists, right on their Web site, speaking presumably for the progressives as well, that they're anticorporate. They don't want to go nationalized to small business because they believe that small business can actually function okay without being repressive of the worker and can produce hair cuts and set up beer upon the bar and maybe hand you a sandwich out through the deli without them having to be involved as government in any means except to oppressively tax the profits that come. And then if you set up a sandwich store and it turns out to be a sandwich chain and it gets big enough, then they're going to want to nationalize it.

That's what socialists do. They want to nationalize corporations, large corporations. And it's all in the Web site. It's not a mystery. We have to do our reading. Dsausa.org. That's the socialist Web site.

When the gentleman from New York says, There's a difference; they're not socialists because they're not calling for controlling the means of production, well, I have to say, gentlemen, your names are on the list. I read it in the Web site. It's there. It exists. It's a matter of fact.

When you're anti-free enterprise, that puts you in the camp of the people who are on the hard core left. It's a philosophy that's been rejected by Americans.

By the way, you can also go to this Web site and read in here, dsausa.org, the people who advocate and support the progressives in this Congress and have not been repudiated by any progressive that I know of. You can also go to that Web site and you can see the agenda they have about nationalizing the major corporations in America. The nationalization of the Fortune 500 companies, for example, is written about on the Web site. They say, though, that they don't have to do it all at once, not in one fell swoop, that it can happen incrementally.

So you have an active political party with 75 Members in the House of Representatives and one Member in the United States Senate, a self- professed socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders, who are part of a movement to nationalize major corporations in America. And now we've elected the most liberal President in the history of the United States. And what has he done?

He has in the term that he has had so far, and this is only September, he has nationalized three large investment banks: AIG, the largest insurance company in America; Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac; General Motors and Chrysler. Eight huge entities nationalized and now under the control of the White House.

And how did he do that, and how was it brought about, the economic crisis, the crisis that Rahm Emanuel said we should never let go to waste? The President and others utilized the crisis to nationalize the largest entities they could get their hands on.

I recall looking at a picture of President Obama standing next to Hugo Chavez, and they asked what I thought. I said, well, my reflection is that there are two huge nationalizers here. Hugo Chavez has been nationalizing right and left in Venezuela, but in the previous 30 days, he had only nationalized a Cargill rice plant, a Minnesota proud, privately held company, and nationalized that rice plant down in Venezuela. He simply said, I don't like the way you are running your rice plant; I will run it. And they will decide what the production is and what the people get paid that work there, and what they are going to pay for the product, and they will take their margin out that goes in to run the Government of Venezuela.

Well, what is going on with General Motors and Chrysler and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG and the three large investment banks, what is different about that? You are paying back TARP funding. That is one thing. But you have the President of the United States involved in, or at least his direct appointees, involved in the day-to-day management, for example, of General Motors. The President fired the CEO of General Motors, don't forget. He hired his CEO of General Motors. He put in place all but two of the board members of General Motors. And then he appointed a car czar who didn't hold up to the standard, apparently, because he never made a car or sold a car. I suspect he had driven and ridden in them. But the car czar didn't quite meet the standard and so he appointed a new car czar.

And the CEO of General Motors admitted he was on the phone with the car czar sometimes multiple times a day. That is not what you would call disinterested. I wish the President took as much interest in ACORN as he did in General Motors. If that would happen, maybe we could get the President to the position where he would have a public comment on ACORN, after we have watched this saga unfold from across the country.

The films on ACORN have emerged in Baltimore; here in Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; San Bernardino, California; and then San Diego, California. The pattern that we have seen, people posing as a prostitute and as pimp walking into ACORN's headquarters in each of those five cities and proposing that ACORN help them set up a house of ill repute so they could funnel teenage girls, young girls into child prostitution. And what did the ACORN people do in each of those five cities? They helped facilitate this. They helped facilitate child prostitution, setting up a house of ill repute. It was a promotion of prostitution of children.

The first film I saw that was in Baltimore, there were two women that were telling the young girl who was posing as a prostitute and the fella who was posing as a pimp how they could best circumvent the law in order to get it done, how they could best circumvent the tax laws, and how they could game the taxpayers, all under this process, telling them how they could qualify for the earned income tax credit. If you make $96,000 a year, just report $9,600 a year, then you will get the earned income tax credit, which is a check from the Federal Government out of the pocket of the working people in America into the pockets of somebody running a prostitution ring advocated by ACORN.

And they told them, If you are going to have 13 prostitutes, you really should just claim three of them as dependents. And if you do that, then you can qualify for the child tax credit, which is a thousand dollars a year.

So that counseling at ACORN that came about spontaneously after they rummaged around through their records to come up with the right kind of label for these young girl prostitutes and to call them performing artists, and that would fit, and you could game the Federal Government, circumvent, defy the law, break the law, and not only turn your house of prostitution into a profit center, but also be able to draw down funds from the Federal Government.

These are some very effective people at taking our tax dollars, Mr. Speaker, when it comes from them as a matter of instinct how you game the system, how you avoid taxes and cheat the government, and how you reach into the Federal coffers, the people's money, and draw that down for your own.

What a corrupt demonstration was taking place in Baltimore and in the other cities. But in Baltimore, the women who were working in there, the two women that were working at ACORN that were telling the young girl posing as a prostitute how to bring in young girls, 14-year-old girls plus or minus a year, how to bring them in, how to get this done and how to game the system, these women, I don't know if they were mothers, the ones working

for ACORN, but I could hear children playing in the background in the tape as if they were right behind the wall. The door was open behind them into presumably another office, and you could hear children playing in there.

Could it be in the middle of raising children we have people who are advocating for child prostitution? Could it be that the children who were making the noise that we could overhear on the tape, could they have been the actual children of the women who were advocating child prostitution as representatives of ACORN? I suspect that is the most likely scenario, although I haven't confirmed it.

That is the part that bothers me perhaps as much as anything else, that a worker for ACORN that could be a mother that had children within earshot could be advocating for child prostitution. And what would be the difference between bringing a girl in from El Salvador, bringing in a baker's dozen of girls from El Salvador illegally, put them up in a house of ill repute with money borrowed by the advocacy and the brokership of ACORN housing, we presume, to help fund and set up the capital base and loan that would be a business enterprise? And what happens when those kids that we could hear playing, what happens when they get to 13 or maybe 12 or 14? Do the ACORN workers just turn around and funnel them right into that house and put them to work?

The lack of outrage on the part of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the people who have for years railed against child labor and have pushed so hard for child labor laws, 75 of them voted to continue funding to ACORN. Seventy-five Members of the House of Representatives voted to continue funding for ACORN even though the tapes in five cities confirm absolutely that there is a culture of that type of corruption, child prostitution, within the doors of ACORN.

Who could imagine that out of 120 cities where ACORN has a presence, that they were able to do the sting operation on all of them that were helping to facilitate child prostitution or susceptible to doing that. I can't imagine that they went to 115 other locations and the people at ACORN said, Get out. I don't want to have anything to do with illegal behavior; and, by the way, I am going to call the police. We don't have any evidence that happened anywhere except Bertha Lewis told us that, who has consistently given us misinformation over the media airwaves. Mr. Speaker, I think America needs to know that she is the CEO, in effect, of ACORN, known formally as ACORN's chief organizer.

We have a great big problem in this country, and the biggest part of this problem, in my view, that undermines our country the most is not the child prostitution component. That is the most repulsive, but the biggest problem is ACORN's involvement in corrupting our election process. They have, for election cycle after election cycle, been complicit in false or fraudulent voter registrations. They bragged that they had produced 1.3 million voter registrations in the last cycle. That is on a document that they are using to raise money to go down and protest Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County.

The document that they are using as a fund-raiser says we registered 1.3 million voters, and we need you to write us a check so we can continue to go in here and try to intimidate people who are standing up for the rule of law. That is how I would interpret it. They didn't produce 1.3 million registrations. On closer analysis, the number comes down to be less than half a million. But they did produce, by their own admission, over 400,000 fraudulent voter registration forms, false or fraudulent. To be more precise, voter registrations turned in.

Now imagine, the integrity of our vote. The franchise that every voter has is predicated upon the integrity of the voter registration rolls. That's why we register voters. If we didn't care how many times people voted, we wouldn't register them. We would just say, Go ahead and go vote. If you think you are an adult, walk in there and do so as many times as you like. But we do care. One person, one vote, and that is all that can be allowed, and we can't allow the process to be corrupted and we can't allow people to vote in multiple jurisdictions. One person, one vote per election. That's why you have to declare your residence. That is why you have to register, and that is why we have to go through the voter registration rolls and verify that they are legitimate registrations.

By the way, if you don't care about that, if you don't care about the integrity of the election process, you might be, Mr. Speaker, among those kind of people that would advocate for things like motor voter registration. Or if you go in and get a driver license's, they will say to you, Do you want to register to vote? That person might answer, No comprende. It happens thousands of times in America. People get a driver's license, whether or not that is legitimate, and they sign here, now you are registered to vote. That happens thousands of times in America. All they have to do is assent to that. Yes, there is a check box that asks if you are citizen. But if they can't understand the language, how could they possibly know that they are checking the right box and that they are guilty of perjury if they put down the wrong information? We know this happens tens of thousands of times in America. I suspect the number is a lot larger.

Why would an organization promote fraudulent voter registrations--I'm talking about ACORN--and why would they brag about it?

I can only come to this conclusion: If you can corrupt the voter registration rolls so badly that they didn't have any value any more, then anybody could vote and the election process would be who can herd the most people through the most polls the most times, and that is kind of the logical progression of it.

Who can imagine that with over 400,000 fraudulent registrations that we didn't have a fraudulent vote take place in America? ACORN would tell you that. Well, we may have gotten a little overzealous in our voter registrations, but we didn't have any fraudulent votes.

Please. With 400,000, why did you spend millions of dollars to register voters if there was no advantage, if you didn't think that you could game the system?

I will submit they benefit from confusion, especially in close elections, and I believe they benefit also from fraudulent votes. And when you have a fluid registration system, then you can have people on buses that go back and forth across State lines, jurisdictional lines, county lines, and vote multiple times. Once the ballot is cast, there isn't a means by which you can go back and prove it unless you have a video camera sitting in the polling place and you can show the full act of someone walking into the polling place and acknowledging their name and address, going in and voting, and seeing the same thing take place with the same face in another place. This is almost a perfect crime. In the means of trying to actually catch them, you really need confessions.

As we went through the election process in the year 2000 when there were all kinds of allegations that were made, Mr. Speaker, I sat for 37 days and drilled down into this and chased every rabbit trail I could find on the Internet. I was on the phone and I had a network of communications on my e-mail, and I found example after example of stealing elections. That happens to be the title of John Fund's book, who will be speaking in this Capitol shortly.

I found example after example, 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations turned in by ACORN, and still we can't pass a law that requires the person that hands those registrations over to the voter registrar, and in my State it will be the county auditor, we can't require them to identify themselves so that at least when it turns out to be fraudulent you can go back and say, Well, that was Sally Smith or Joe Jones that did that, and here's their address and here's their identification document when they turned this in.

And it's because there has been a concerted effort to undermine the integrity of the ballot box. And it isn't every Democrat, but that's where the chorus comes from, that's where the arguments come from, that's where the push comes from.

Now, that's not just Motor Voter that took place under Bill Clinton back

in the nineties; we've got same-day registration taking place all across America in many, many States, including mine, same-day registration.

My Governor, Governor Culver, was Secretary of State; and in the middle of an election when he was Secretary of State, he advised people, If you don't know what precinct you live in, if you didn't get around to voting or changing your registration if you moved, or if you just moved in, don't worry about that, go to a polling place wherever you can, find one and go in there and vote. And we'll just call it a provisional ballot if anybody calls you on it, and we'll sort those ballots out later.

Can you imagine? We have 3 million Iowans, and I don't know the total of votes, perhaps 1.5 million, thousands of them went anywhere that was convenient and asked for a provisional ballot and cast it. And the ability to sort that all out and argue over the integrity of them, it overloaded our system.

Now, I come from a State that is the first-in-the-nation caucus. We have the great privilege to have the first bite of the apple to make a recommendation to the rest of America on whom we would like to see nominated for each political party, Democrats and Republicans, first- in-the-nation caucus. It's a high responsibility to maintain a high level of integrity. We were first-in-the-nation caucus, last in the Nation to certify the vote because our then-Secretary of State, now Governor, gave information to the voters all across the State that they could just go anywhere, further corrupting and confusing the system.

Now, add this up; Motor Voter registers anybody that will agree when they're asked, Do you want to be registered to vote. Who's going to say no? Especially if you think you're in the country illegally, you don't want to say no--you might think it's a responsibility to assent to registration.

So we've got Motor Voter registration, we've got same-day registration where somebody can just drive across the board into, name your State--Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin all come to mind--drive across the border, walk in, register to vote and vote on the spot. You don't have to prove residence to speak of. You maybe have to have somebody attest to who you are. There's a limit to the number of people that the bus driver can bring in and attest for, but it corrupts the process, Mr. Speaker.

And so I'm watching this country, this country that I love, this country that I was raised from the standpoint of, Eat your cold mashed potatoes, there are people starving in China. You've been born in the greatest Nation in the world and you hit the jackpot because God chose to have you born here in the United States--and I'll say especially in Iowa, from my perspective--a Nation that had never lost a war, that stood proud, that stood for freedom, that had the blessing and the gift of the Founding Fathers and the Declaration and the Constitution and the rule of law and all the pillars of American exceptionalism.

This great Nation that went through manifest destiny from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, settled a continent in the blink of a historical eye. And we did it founded upon the values that are in our Declaration and our Constitution and our values of faith and our work ethic, with these unlimited natural resources, low or no taxation, no regulation when Americans settled this continent.

We built a culture and a civilization built on--I'll use the Superman term, ``Truth, justice and the American way,'' and now I am watching it corrupted in the electoral process by an organization like ACORN. Four hundred thousand fraudulent voter registrations turned in, and still they count them when they brag about how many they registered, they count the fraudulent ones too. It's like saying I made $2 million last year, but not bothering to mention that you stole $1 million from the bank. That's the equivalent of their brag.

Now, we saw what ACORN did in five cities when confronted with child prostitution rings and illegal immigration. They promoted it, and they said, Game the system and you can get a check from Uncle Sam in the process. We've seen what they've done to corrupt the voter registration process and the election process. We've seen them get involved politically as a partisan organization over and over again. Nobody in this country believes that ACORN is out here to get out the vote for Republicans. They are a partisan organization that gets out the vote for Democrats. They are the machine. They are the foundational machine across the country that gets out the vote for Democrats. We all know that, but it can't really be challenged.

And so as I look at their activities, and I understand that they say--well, I guess they changed their definition a little bit, 501(c)(3), that's what it says on a press release I just picked up, Mr. Speaker. There is apparently some intention that the IRS is going to take a look into ACORN. The first thing the IRS needs to do, Mr. Speaker, is take a look at ACORN's corporate filings and verify that they are a 501(c)(3). 501(c)(3) is a not-for-profit status, and if you violate that not-for-profit status, then your income becomes taxable.

And so I'm suggesting--no, I'm stating flat out--ACORN is a partisan organization, a get-out-the-vote organization for Democrats. They take millions of dollars and use them for partisan purposes. They were hired--an affiliate was hired by President Obama to get out the vote for him at the cost of--if I remember the number exactly, it was close to $832,000. There is strong evidence that the President's fundraising list, once people maxed out to him, it was handed over to ACORN so they could use it to raise money.

We know that they've drawn down at least $53 million in Federal tax money that will be posted on the 990 form as grants from government; $53 million since 1994. I suspect the number is a lot larger. But if anybody would like to come down and defend ACORN, I would welcome you to come down and do that. If anybody thinks anything I've said here is even marginally factual, let's fine-tune it just a little bit. But I'm standing on the solid ground of fact. And the facts are this; 501(c)(3) organization, self-professed--it's in the press release, it has to do with the IRS now talking about investigating similar organizations, not specifically ACORN.

But if you're not for profit, it also means you're a nonpartisan, and you are barred by law from participating in partisan activities. Partisan activities would be, Mr. Speaker, advocating for a particular candidate or political party. So, working on a campaign, putting up yard signs, door hangers, running ads that advocate for candidates-- especially by name--would all constitute violations of the not-for- profit status and make their income taxable.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I have here an interesting little picture. And the good part of this picture is that I don't have to wonder about the source; this is a picture that I took. This picture was taken in early July, before the Fourth of July. This is a picture of ACORN's national headquarters. They're at 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. I walked up to the door. The door looks like a jail cell. It's got a glass business door entry behind it, but it's black bars and welded steel with an outdoor lock on the outside. This is the most fortified building in the neighborhood. This is the second or third story where you see the bars here yet in the second or third story.

Mr. Speaker, right behind the glass at the national headquarters of ACORN is a poster here and it says, ``Obama '08,'' a campaign poster for President Obama proudly displayed in the front window of ACORN's national headquarters. I don't know how you could get any more definitive evidence that it's a violation of the 501(c)(3) not-for- profit, no partisan activity if you're going to hang a partisan campaign sign in your window and leave it there, let's see--6, 7, 8 months after the election, it's still there. Does anybody imagine that it wasn't there before the election? And by the way, if anybody wonders if this is real, they can see over on the right-hand side, this hangs outside the glass, this is the ACORN banner, the ACORN logo, it's their logo on there. They fly that flag like we fly Old Glory.

So here's the flag, the glory of ACORN, the ignominy of it all, and here's the Obama poster. There are other posters behind there; I can't verify that they are Obama posters; it doesn't matter. This one is in the window. They're advertising for a political candidate. It's clearly a violation of the law. And it's blatant and it's open--and curiously, it's unnecessary. How sloppy can they be?

And so I think I've tied together the corrupt election process, the corrupt promotion of child prostitution rings, and also illegal immigration, which, out of the San Diego office especially, when the ACORN worker said, you've got to trust us; we have to work with Mexicans, I can bring people in through Tijuana, we'll help set this up for you. Child prostitution, violations, and then clear violations of voter laws.

In fact, there have been as many as 70 convictions for voter registration violations of ACORN employees. ACORN, as an entity, is under indictment in the State of Nevada. In the last couple of weeks they have put out, in the State of Florida, 11 warrants for arrests to pick up ACORN employees for voter registration violations. They did pick up 6 of the 11; the last I saw the news there were five still on the loose. And that was before the prostitution emerged from the film that was taken by the two intrepid reporters--whom I'm quite pleased and proud that they have done what they've done.

And that's not all, Mr. Speaker. If we continue on with ACORN, I would say here's another major concern of ACORN's involvement, and that is the practice of shaking down lenders, especially within the inner cities. Back in the seventies--it was either '77 or '78--Congress passed an act called the Community Reinvestment Act. It was an act that recognized a practice that I reject. It was the practice of red lining, as they called it--taking an ink pen and drawing a red line around a neighborhood in a city or several neighborhoods in the city. Banks that were loaning money for real estate, home mortgages, and commercial property identified that property that had its value going down, and they defined it. And it happened to also be inner city property.

Often one could index race with that declining value of property and the red lining. If it turned out it was a racial conclusion, it was utterly wrong. If it was a business conclusion purely, then it could be justified. But Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act that set the stage so that banks were then given an incentive to make loans into those communities where they had previously not been making loans. That was a direction of Congress to try to fix an ill that I believe at least was, in significant part, a wrong that needed to be corrected.

But ACORN exploited this. They were founded in 1977 or '78, as I said, and they began seeing the opportunities with the Community Reinvestment Act. And I don't know their involvement in getting the legislation passed. I suspect they were there at the table when it happened, but I don't know that. But I do know that they went in and shook down lenders and demonstrated outside the banks and intimidated the banks into giving money to ACORN. Not just in the first round of this. This wasn't, Give loans to the people in the inner city, it was, Write a check to ACORN, and we'll go away. Sometimes they would go into the lender's office, push his desk over to the wall, surround that lender and intimidate him, yell at him, shout at him and make demands, and eventually the intimidation tactics worked because banks wanted them to go away. So sometimes they wrote the check and sometimes they went away. Oftentimes they came back after a passage of time and began the process all over again.

Now, one demand was the shakedown that compelled--well, gave a strong incentive for--lenders to write the check to ACORN. That helped fund ACORN. You've also heard of this taking place from other organizations--Rainbow/PUSH comes to mind. They wrote the check to get ACORN off their back and then ACORN went away. And then they came back. And they did that over and over again. At a certain point, ACORN then demanded that the banks loan money into the neighborhoods that ACORN specified. They did their own red lining. They drew their red line around and said, You loan money into these neighborhoods or we'll come back and we'll protest so your customers can't get through the door. And so banks began loaning money into those neighborhoods and showing their records to the ACORN representatives, and now they're influencing a business practice. That's stage two.

Stage three is the lenders. In order to get ACORN off their back after they came back over and over again and escalated this, demanded money, demanded that loans be made into ACORN's red line district, then the next one was to grant ACORN a block of funds to be brokered into the communities of their choice, giving them more and more power.

This kind of shakedown undermines the free enterprise system, and it gives power to people through intimidation rather than market principles or moral principles. In fact, it is utterly corrupting in a society, and I can't draw a moral distinction between an ACORN shakedown, a Mafia shakedown, or a shakedown that might come from Hugo Chavez or some strongman in some other country. ``You will pay the protection or you will not be in business.''

I wonder if Cargill refused to pay protection in Venezuela and that was why Hugo Chavez nationalized the rice company down there, the rice plant in Venezuela earlier this spring, in about April.

So this is some of the pattern of ACORN's activity, Mr. Speaker, and it isn't, by any means, all of it. In fact, Wade Rathke, who was the founder of ACORN and was their CEO up until about a year ago, has a brother named Dale Rathke. Dale Rathke embezzled $948,000 and change from ACORN. It is a matter of public record. They found out about it within ACORN and covered it up for 8 years. They covered up a crime, a felony, for 8 years. And in order to solve the bookkeeping problem, they took money from donors and money from pension plans and backfilled the hole in the accounting which was created by the embezzlement of the brother of the CEO who helped cover up this crime. Then it erupted and finally blew up to the point where Wade Rathke was pushed out of ACORN--or I should say, off to the side of ACORN. They're still players today. He and his brother are both engaged in, let me say, community organizing. Activist community organizers, people who read the book by Saul Alinsky, people who read Cloward-Piven and now people who are writing their own book, the Rathke brothers.

Mr. Speaker, we need to clean up this mess that is ACORN. This Congress has a responsibility. We know it now. I offered an amendment to unfund ACORN back in 2007. It did not have a lot of support at the time. Today we have seen this Congress vote to unfund ACORN, and we've seen 75 Members--every one a Democrat--vote against unfunding ACORN. We know what our duty is. Our duty is oversight. It's our constitutional responsibility, Mr. Speaker. And we need to use all of the tools in this Congress to drill into ACORN, to get to the bottom of it, to bring the truth and the facts out. That will require, with all of these resources we have, in the House alone--and I call upon the Senate as well to engage in this. But in the House alone, we must have a full committee investigation and hearings by the Judiciary Committee, taking a look at the voter registration fraud that we know exists and look at it on a national scale. And from this, we need to drill into ACORN and pull out all of the rotten apples that are in there and shut down everything that is questionable. If there is anything left that has any integrity, I don't know what to do in that situation because I don't know how there would be any entity within ACORN that is not stained by this. But the Judiciary Committee has an obligation to investigate where there are violations of the law and where there are violations of voter registration and election fraud. That's our responsibility in the Judiciary Committee.

Government Reform--and this has been headed up very well in Government Reform by Congressman Issa of California--needs to look into this from the standpoint of: how is government tied into this; what does it do to corrupt our government; what about all the tentacles of ACORN that would reach into government; how many places are they working in cooperation with government? And let's sever all of those relationships. That's the Government Reform component of this. To the extent that we can overlap and cooperate, we should do so committee by committee.

We need to go into the Financial Services Committee. Chairman Frank needs to come all the way around to

cleaning up ACORN. He was not here for the vote that would have unfunded ACORN. He had a couple of different announcements. But the most recent announcement of his intentions was that he would have voted to shut off funding to ACORN. Well, we can speculate if we like. But, Mr. Speaker, to verify the position of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, we'll have to see what he does with ACORN. Will Chairman Frank investigate? Will he use the powers of the gavel and the staff that he has in Financial Services? Will he work with the ranking member of the Republicans to drill into ACORN and go back and pull out those pieces that he put in himself over the years in this Congress that set up the scenario by which ACORN still today--let me say it this way: still today, ACORN is looking at categories of as many as $8.5 billion that they could tap into of Federal tax dollars. Our tax dollars, Mr. Speaker. Altogether, $8.5 billion in categories. That is money that's within the Community Development Block Grant, a low-income housing grant, and the stimulus package. Those three add up to $8.5 billion. ACORN, as far as anything that has been signed into law today, would still qualify to go into those funds.

The chairman of Financial Services, Mr. Frank, has been involved in setting up the language, setting the stage. And it's not a practice of just this year. It's a practice of each year that I have been aware since I have been in this United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. So let's see if the chairman of the Financial Services Committee uses his gavel to investigate and provide proper oversight, with all the resources that he has at his disposal, working in full cooperation with Republicans on our side of the aisle and staffs working together. Let's see if that happens.

The Judiciary Committee needs to do a full investigation and hearings. Financial Services needs to do a full investigation of ACORN and hearings. By the way, when I say ACORN, that's a general term for ACORN and all of their affiliates, 361 of which have been identified by the Government Reform Committee in the report that was put out July 23 by the Government Reform Committee and Ranking Member Darrell Issa. The Judiciary Committee and the Government Reform Committee need to investigate ACORN and all of their 361 affiliates.

We also need to ask the Ways and Means Committee and Chairman Rangel--who I recognize has his own problems in this Congress, but this is an opportunity for Mr. Rangel to redeem himself as chairman. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee needs to commence a full, all- out, full-court investigation of ACORN and all of their affiliates and use the tools at his disposal, the power of the gavel and the subpoena ability that that committee has to bring in ACORN and examine their taxes and also to turn the pressure up and direct the IRS to do a complete audit of ACORN and all of their affiliates. The only way to get a clean bill of health is to put them all through, let me say, the fiscal physical, that is, a complete analysis of all of the funds that come into ACORN and all of their affiliates. Chairman Rangel can bring that about, and certainly he needs to work in cooperation with the ranking member on the Ways and Means Committee. I'm pushing very hard that we get this done.

I have named three committees. We have Judiciary, Ways and Means, Government Reform, all of them need to commence their investigations. We need the House Admin, who works in cooperation with the voter election laws. They're the ones that brought about the HAVA act, the Help America Vote Act. They need to be involved in this working in cooperation with the Judiciary Committee. We need to bring the Appropriations Committee into this. We need to examine every dollar that's been appropriated that may have gone into the coffers of ACORN and their affiliates. How did that money get used? Was it matching funds? And how does it go down into the States?

All of this needs to happen out of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and we need the IRS doing a complete forensic audit of ACORN and all of their affiliates. And we need the Department of Justice doing more than just an Inspector General's investigation to determine if Justice has written checks to ACORN or their affiliates and whether there's justice in Justice paying ACORN and their affiliates. If the limit of Justice's scope of justice is, did they actually pay somebody that was violating the not-for-profit laws, and did they use it for partisan purposes, that's pretty narrow.

ACORN wants to examine themselves and audit themselves. That's laughable that we should accept the idea that ACORN has appointed someone to audit themselves. It's a joke. But we do have the Justice Department who has said, We want to audit ourselves too with respect to what money we might have sent to ACORN, so that they find it before someone else finds it. Then they can make their press release and say they've cleaned it up and sworn off and washed their hands of ACORN-- like the Census Bureau finally did? For the second time, by the way. They put out a press release 3 months ago. After we turned up the pressure, they said, Well, we won't be hiring ACORN to do our Census. We turned up some more pressure, and when they saw the prostitution film, they put out another release that said, We have now finally--for the second and perhaps final time--severed our relationship with ACORN. Well, if you have to do something twice, who would believe you did it the first time? And then if you do something once, who is going to believe that that actually got done the first time? They will do it over and over again. Justice wants to look at it and wash their hands of ACORN, but I don't see them moving towards a complete investigation at the Department of Justice, which we must have, Mr. Speaker. The scrubbing that's taking place on the Census and now the U.S. Treasury. The Treasury has said that they no longer want to work with ACORN. ACORN was helping out with tax forms. So maybe they're going to rely on TurboTax instead. But they no longer want to have the relationship with ACORN because they're too hot a political potato.

These aren't things that these departments didn't know before. I have known this for months and, much of it, years. Yet we couldn't penetrate the minds of the Census Bureau until we beat on them through the media. We couldn't penetrate into the Department of the U.S. Treasury until the prostitution films came out. And the Department of Justice only wants to examine far enough to determine if they have written checks to ACORN and then what those checks were for, if they were legitimate or not.

It doesn't look to me, Mr. Speaker, like this administration is determined to do this forensic analysis. In fact, if you would draw a line down through the middle of the piece of paper--you could draw it figuratively right down this aisle, Democrats on this side, Republicans on this side--Democrats, as a party, beneficiaries of ACORN; Republicans on this side, a lot of them who are not here, are victims of ACORN's partisan activities. They've already lost their elections. They aren't here now, and many of them are not coming back. But that same line can be this: who has consistently called for the cleanup of the corrupt ACORN, the criminal enterprise ACORN and all of their affiliates? It's been people on the Republican side of the aisle who have done that, the survivors. Who has finally made some little mouse noises about cleanup of ACORN? Well, it's been Democrats. And it's been people who have redirected--it would be Chairmen Frank and Conyers who have called for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to take a look at ACORN and write a report. Well, CRS doesn't have the authority to go in and actually do a criminal investigation or a tax audit. They don't have the authority that these chairmen have themselves. If they want to get to the bottom of it, they don't have to ask anybody. They call for hearings and an investigation, and they levy their subpoena power, and they do that. But instead, they would like to redirect the American people into believing that calling for a CRS report is somehow a substitute of a congressional investigation. It's not. The Justice Department should be doing a complete, thorough criminal investigation, working hand in glove with the IRS. Instead, it simply announces that they're going to take a look to see if they've written checks to ACORN and then react accordingly. The U.S. Treasury finally

takes a position that they don't want to have ACORN cooperating with them in helping out with taxes.

These are all of the weak things on this side. These are redirections. These are straw men. They are red herrings. They don't have substance to accomplish what we need to get accomplished, which is clean up ACORN. On this side, we've called for substance for a long time, and we haven't cracked through because the people on this side hold the gavel, and they were determined to protect and defend ACORN until the political heat got so hot that all but 75 of them voted to stop Federal funds from coming into ACORN.

That's what's taken place, Mr. Speaker. Those are the facts. They cannot be denied. By the way, we need to ask some questions about why the chief organizer of America has not had a statement to say about ACORN, except for his statement on the Sunday talk show circuit; when asked about this, he said, Well, it's really not on my radar screen. It's not the most important thing before America. So I'm not really paying attention to ACORN.

Really, Mr. President? This is the star of ACORN. He is the lead chief organizer. He is the person who told the people at ACORN, I will invite you in, and we will be setting the agenda for America, even before he is inaugurated as President of the United States. This is the man who worked for ACORN. He is the man who was an attorney for ACORN. He is the man who trained ACORN's workers. Remember what he said before the election to his people: ``Get in their face. Get out, and get in their face.'' Does that sound like what was happening around the lenders' desks when they were capitulating to ACORN's intimidation of the shakedown? ACORN's activists got in the lenders' faces. The President said, Get in their face.

He worked for ACORN, trained ACORN's workers, headed up Project Vote. And Project Vote is integral to ACORN. You can't separate the two, and there are people who are labeled Project Vote and ACORN who concur with that.

Then on top of that, the President of the United States, as a candidate, hired ACORN to get out the vote. And then the evidence exists that his donor list was transferred over to ACORN. Once it was maxed out and they couldn't write another check in the Presidential campaign, the list went over so ACORN could raise money on that.

This man's not interested in ACORN? He's ambivalent about it? That's what he told us just last Sunday. Curious. He could inject himself into police operations of a professor of Harvard, Officer Crowley and Professor Gates. He can inject himself into that and have a beer summit, but he can't pay attention to what's going on when things are melting down around him?

This man stands at the top of ACORN. He's the man that directed that the Census be pulled out of the Department of Commerce and put into the White House. This is a man that hired ACORN to help hire individuals to work for the Census. And he's not paying attention? Do we think Rahm Emanuel is running this country or President Obama, or is it just Chicago politics? I think it's all of those things, actually, Mr. Speaker. But the President cannot deny knowledge of what's going on.

The United States Senate voted 83-7 to shut off funding to ACORN housing, Senator Johanns from Nebraska's amendment. That sent a resounding message. It shook through all the media. I'll bet you even Charlie Gibson knows about that one. And shortly after that, the House acted; and we had a motion to recommit that, if it functions the way we'd like to have it function, would shut off funding to ACORN. 345 Members of the House of Representatives voted to shut off funding to ACORN; 75 voted to defend ACORN, but there were a couple of them that wanted to change their intentions after the fact.

Chairman Frank wanted to change it. He wasn't here. He had a good excuse. He got to redefine his vote after he saw the politics of it. No allegations. Those are just the facts. Chairman Conyers said even though, let's see, whatever side he was on when he voted, he meant to vote the other way. I don't remember very many Members having to explain any votes in that fashion. I don't get to use that excuse. Maybe once in a career, not multiple times on a single issue by multiple Members of Congress.

But this man, Mr. Speaker, has a deep abiding involvement in ACORN. His history goes back to it. At the genesis of President Obama's political life, there he stands with ACORN, and he walks with them all the way through. It isn't my supposition; it's his own assertion, that ACORN was with him from the beginning. He's been with ACORN all of the way through, and one of the affiliates that he headed up was Project Vote.

There still are 360 other affiliates out there. We need to audit Project Vote. We need to audit the other 360 affiliates. We need all of the tools of the IRS and the Department of Justice. We don't need a lame little announcement that Justice is going to go look and see if they maybe wrote a check to some bad people and they'll correct that. We need to have them drilling into everything. And we also need every committee that has jurisdiction in the House of Representatives doing the examination of ACORN.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Minnesota.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota. And I'm looking forward to some future comments with regard to this as well.

The waste that's there is a significant part of all of this. But another one is just the lack of conscience and using Federal funds to do something of a partisan nature and do so with impunity in a completely cynical approach that we've known for years were designed to produce this result.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. I will introduce the DSAUSA documents into the Record.

The Organization

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest

socialist organization in the United States, and the

principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.

DSA's members are building progressive movements for social

change while establishing an openly socialist presence in

American communities and politics.

At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to

democracy, as means and end. We are activists committed not

only to

extending political democracy but to demanding democratic

empowerment in the economy, in gender relations, and in

culture. Democracy is not simply one of our political values

but our means of restructuring society. Our vision is of a

society in which people have a real voice in the choices and

relationships that affect the entirety of our lives. We call

this vision democratic socialism--a vision of a more free,

democratic and humane society.

In this web site you can find out about DSA, its politics,

structure and program. DSA's political perspective is called

Where We Stand. It says, in part:

We are socialists because we reject an international

economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor,

race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction,

and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.

We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane

international social order based both on democratic planning

and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of

resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment,

sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-

oppressive relationships.

DSA has a youth section, Young Democratic Socialists (YDS).

Made up of students from colleges and high schools and young

people in the work force, the Youth Section works on economic

justice and democracy and prison justice projects. It is a

member of the International Union of Socialist Youth, an

affiliate of the Socialist International. The Youth Section

meets several times during the year. More information is

available from YDS staff.

This web site also includes an extensive set of resources,

including bibliographies, pamphlets and links to information

on socialism and U.S. politics in general.

Please join DSA as we work to help build a better and more

just world for all.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota and the gentleman from Georgia.

Dr. Gingrey, I wanted to just step in and reinforce your statement in looking at your poster. As ranking member of the Immigration Subcommittee, I want to reinforce the analysis that you've laid out, especially on that first point. The President said, The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

H.R. 3200, not only has it been the vote in your committee, a vote of 29-28 that voted down the Deal amendment, which would have required proof of citizenship, which has been a consistent standard in Federal law under Medicaid, that pattern is played out here. Democrats want to fund illegals in this program and many others.

There is also a vote in the Ways and Means Committee that is consistent. That was a straight party-line vote on a very similar amendment that would have required proof of citizenship.

And the third piece of proof that you were right and your critics are wrong and my critics are wrong would be the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the cost of funding illegals in this. Their estimate leaves as many as 5.6 million that would qualify under the language of H.R. 3200--5.6 million illegals.

The fourth reinforcement of your statement would be Congressional Research Services, who reached a similar conclusion, although from a different approach and a little bit different language.

So there's four ways that says that this bill will fund illegals. The President has denied that, and now he wants to simply legalize the illegals in order to be able to maintain his statement that he's not proposing anything that will fund illegals. That's a pretty deft maneuver, if you can get by with it. But this is a modern world, and we see it happening.

Then I drop down to the statement that the President said, which is, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.

All I need to say about that is the President said he will not sign a bill that has earmarks. We know he has signed bills that had thousands of earmarks in them, so I don't make that statement at face value. And I don't make allegations about labels of the President.

No Federal tax dollars will be used to fund abortions. We know historically if there is not a specific prohibition, Federal funds will be used to fund abortions, 300,000 of them in the first couple years alone after Roe v. Wade.

Nothing in the plan requires you to change what you have. No, probably not specifically requiring you to change what you have, but there are certainly many threats as to the viability of the health insurance companies and the existence of the policies after the new health choices administration czar gets done writing new rules.

So this is ambiguous language designed to cause people to believe what they want to hear. But upon analysis, I rise to support your analysis, Dr. Gingrey.

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

I rise in opposition to H.R. 324, the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area.

This 3,300 miles shares already overlapping jurisdictions between the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, the Department of Defense, and then there are some residents of the tribes, the Pascua and the Tohono people, as well.

This area is a very high traffic volume for contraband, that being illegal drugs and illegal people, coming up through this corridor. I have traveled that corridor and visited as recently as last July, a little over a month and a half ago. We know that in some cases there have been national park lands marked off limits to the people of the United States because the illegal drug traffic and the litter has gotten so bad. It is too dangerous. They wouldn't take me there.

We need to enforce the laws on our border and not complicate the overlapping jurisdictions that are there. We know that the Border Patrol has enough trouble trying to get to an operational control of the border without having to deal with an additional area that would be a national heritage area added on top of it.

I am not sure about the State of Tennessee, but I would wonder if the TVA didn't come in there about the time Tennessee was declared a national heritage area, and it seems to me that the private sector was nudged out with that move, if my recollection of history is accurate.

But the bill still lacks sufficient protections that would allow the free flow of our U.S. border security personnel for drug interdiction and illegal immigration enforcement.

I would add also on the Coronado National Forest, that is in the center of this location and that is a direct conduit of illegal traffic coming through. So we need the jurisdiction to be such that it is free- flowing, and we need to enforce our immigration laws. We need to provide operational control of the border.

I would also point out that some of the difficulties we have in enforcing our immigration laws are also rooted in our inability to enforce even under current circumstances. And in this designation, I will be able to roll out my map and point to you, Mr. Speaker, the spot or locations, mountaintop after mountaintop, that are surveillance locations for the U.S. law enforcement that is trying to enforce illegal immigration and illegal drugs and the interdiction of same coming up through this corridor.

This serves no real purpose to accomplish anything other than to draw down Federal moneys. And as I look through this bill, and I didn't get them all marked, but I see the word ``fund'' or ``funds'' or ``resources'' being used over and over again.

The attention I would draw to page 5 of the bill, line 12, specify existing and potential sources of funding or economic development strategies to interpret, fund, manage.

And the same page of the bill, line 25, recommend fund, manage. And it goes on and on. As I go through the bill, it looks to me like it is a method to figure out how to drawn down Federal funds.

Page 9 of the bill, line 5, enhance, interpret, fund, manage.

Federal funds implementation, on page 10.

I thank the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. Speaker, I would continue. On page 10, it references implementation. The local coordinating entity. It references use of Federal funds.

On page 13, the amounts leveraged with Federal funds is referenced again.

On page 14, lines 19, 20 and 21, ``heritage planning; obtain funds from any source, including Federal programs,'' Mr. Speaker.

Page 15, line 4, ``The local coordinating entity may not use Federal funds authorized under this act.'' So there is a prohibition there in reference to funds.

Then with regard to the property rights component of this, we have seen this language before. ``Nothing abridges the rights of any property owner.'' That is kind of like the bill that came to the floor that said there are no earmarks in this bill, but there were thousands of them. To define it away doesn't mean it goes away.

I rise in opposition to this, and I would urge a ``no'' vote on H.R. 324.

All those compliments some might argue are a stunning departure from rational thinking, Mr. Akin, and I am glad I came over here just to hear that exchange between you and Cynthia Lummis tonight.

I am sitting here thinking this: That there is a great, huge philosophical divide going on in this Congress, and the people on the left side of the philosophical spectrum and the left side of the aisle seem to believe somehow they can generate all of this government, all of this government oversight, and take on a huge operation of the job that is being done now, a lot by the private sector, punish the health insurance companies, replace them with a Federal health insurance company, and somehow the incentive that is there today that has allowed some profit for doctors to get back their huge investment in their education and their training and their internships and nursing and all of the expenses it takes to have a front-loaded education, somehow there is going to be an incentive there to have more doctors and more nurses, when we know it is going to be less.

They cut the funding to Medicare by half a trillion dollars and argue that it is waste, fraud and abuse, and somehow the President makes the argument that, let's see, he can find this savings

that is there because of waste, fraud and abuse, but the quid pro quo is we don't get to save the wasted money unless we take on the socialized medicine part of his package.

If the gentleman will yield, and I thank the gentleman from Missouri.

There have been two flawed premises that have been under the foundation of this health care debate from the beginning. One is that we spend too much money on health care. That has not been adjusted for a number of reasons. The other is we have too many that are uninsured. The number that's the most consistent is 47 million uninsured. But when you break the number down, you start subtracting from that 47 million, those that are here illegally--which the President has decided now, he's changed his mind and now he doesn't want to fund those--those that are here legally are under the 5-year bar; those that make over $75,000 a year and presumably could pay their own premiums; those that qualify for an employer plan; and those that qualify for a government plan, like Medicaid, but don't bother to sign up. Once you take 47 million and you subtract from that universe, that list that I have given, you end up with 12.1 million who are Americans without affordable options.

To deal with less than 4 percent, which is 12.1 million.

I appreciate the gentleman yielding. A number of things jump out in my mind, and that is, yes, this subject matter gets me all animated. I don't know quite how to pick that up with Midwestern vernacular. I wanted to point out the President's vernacular. We have to be very careful and listen very closely to this President because he is a master of casting ambiguities that couch things in terms where he is not confined by the definition of the language.

For example, right there, ``Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage of the doctor you have.'' Remember for months he said, ``If you like your plan, you get to keep it.'' And John Shadegg said, ``If you like your plan, get ready to lose it. That's the reality of it.''

Now the President, in his address before Congress--which I will point out was I believe September 9, 2009--the President changed the language to read what's down there, ``Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,'' except you may not be able to access coverage or the doctor you had because the plan might bring about a change in premiums, it might disqualify the policies, it might disqualify the very health insurance company. And so nothing in the plan might require you to change, but you may not have the option to keep the one you have because they have eliminated the existing policies.

Again, listen carefully to the words the President says. Here is a little bit of a different subject.

After the blowup on that night of September 8, which was the joint session of Congress, regarding the issue about funding illegals through this, the President then came back, and he said, ``I want to be clear: If someone is here illegally, they won't be covered under this plan.''

In other words, he is going to oppose any language that's ambiguous that might allow for illegals to be covered under H.R. 3200 or under another health care plan.

However, just a few days later, the President went before an open borders organization, which I recall to be La Raza, and he said, Well, we need to move forward on legalizing the people who are here illegally.

So we have this language that says, if someone is here illegally, he won't be covered under this plan; but if you legalize everybody who is here, this language here becomes moot. So listen carefully to the ambiguities that the President threads into his language, and you might find out well after the fact that it's a little late to raise the issue.

Would the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman.

I think we are talking about a different amendment. The amendment with the general language that says nothing in this bill, I believe was written into the bill, may have been an amendment that was adopted. But the amendment that Mr. Gingrey referred to was the Deal amendment, which would have required proof of citizenship. It failed by a vote of 29-28, not exactly a party-line vote.