Madam Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you this evening on the floor of the House of Representatives, and at the conclusion of what some considered to be a long week here in Congress. And I'd like to go back and…
Madam Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you this evening on the floor of the House of Representatives, and at the conclusion of what some considered to be a long week here in Congress. And I'd like to go back and reflect upon some of the events that took place this week and perhaps look into the future.
And always our deliberation here on the floor of the world's greatest deliberative body should be about perfecting legislation and moving America forward in the right direction.
Looking back upon some of the things that have taken place this week that are unprecedented, some would say that yesterday, and it was unprecedented, more votes on the floor of the House of Representatives than ever in the history of the United States of America. After all of these years, from 1789 until 2009, we had more votes on the floor, almost a third more votes on the floor than ever before. The previous record was 40 votes. I think yesterday, 54.
One would ask, why is that? And the answer to that is, because the majority
decided they were going to shut down the deliberation and the debate here in the House.
And I take all of us back to think about the continuum of events, the Constitution that underpins us, the directive in the Constitution that all spending has to start in the House of Representatives, not in the Senate, Madam Speaker, but in the House of Representatives.
In fact, if we shut this operation down here, no new spending could be initiated in the United States Government, at least constitutionally, because it all has to start in the House. That is our duty. It's one of our most important duties, not our only duty by any means.
And we've had a tradition of going through a number of appropriations bills, 13 in number, as I recall, and it gets changed a little bit from year to year as the configuration of the Appropriations Committee gets changed. But we've run through those appropriation bills in the years that I've been here under Republican leadership, starting, by my recollection, at least, every one out with an open rule that allowed every Member of Congress to introduce an unlimited number of amendments, and offer and debate those amendments on the floor of the House, ask for a recorded vote if they chose to do so, ask for a re- vote if they chose to do so. In fact, there could be a movement for reconsideration if we chose to do so.
If every Member offered amendments, of course this place would slow down dramatically and it would come actually to a halt. But for all of these years of the United States Congress, we got our work done under open rules because we found ways to come together and come to a conclusion so this government's business could be done in a legitimate fashion, with debate on both sides, with amendments that are offered that seek to perfect the legislation that's there, with fiscal responsibility on our part of the aisle, at least, and sometimes on the part of the Blue Dogs who used to come up and try to slow the growth of the government of their own party.
But that has not been the case this week, Madam Speaker, and that is the reason for the unprecedented number of votes that took place here on the floor. And that's because the majority party decided to shut down the process and disallow amendments and disallow debate in order to shield their spending, in order to protect them from, let me say, an alternative view. Some would call it criticism.
But addressing you tonight, Speaker pro tem, Speaker Pelosi received the gavel that you hold this evening in January of 2007. The first woman Speaker in the history of the United States. I've been here to witness the swearing in of that historic event, as well as the swearing in of the first African American President of the United States. Historical moments. And both of those moments were coupled with a degree of optimism that flowed on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, although I will stipulate that there had to have been more euphoria on the Democrat side of the aisle than there was on the Republican side of the aisle. But just the same, a level of euphoria on each side, a sense of optimism, a sense of we have reached some historical milestones.
But, Madam Speaker, when we reach that moment, that is no time to rest on our laurels. That's no time to come to a conclusion that the people who have been honored so in such a historically unprecedented fashion should be exempt from criticism or exempt from dissent, nor should they be handed all the power of the government of the United States, whether they're the President or the Speaker of the House. But it seems as though that's the attitude of significant numbers of Members here in the House of Representatives.
And so if I take you back to the 12 years that Republicans were in the majority here in the House, from 1994 until 2006, those were elections, sworn in '95 and until January of 2007 were actually the times that our span served, we offered appropriations bills under an open rule that allowed amendments, an unlimited number of amendments, to be filed. They didn't have to be filed into the Congressional Record. Nobody had to come here with their play book and open it up and say, here's the play I'm going to run, do you think you can play defense on that. We just said, offer your amendments into the Record, and we'll deal with them when they come up. And as long as we haven't passed that title of the bill in our deliberations, the amendment will be in order. And if you have amendments that you'd like to offer at the end of the bill, we're going to allow for an unlimited number of amendments to be filed at the end of the bill as well.
And so Democrats and Republicans were able to record their dissent from each of the appropriations bills by filing amendments, seek to perfect the legislation that was there, and either expand the spending or reduce the spending as their conscience and their constituents dictated. That went on through the 12 years of Republican leadership.
And I will also make a point that there were times when we had too many amendments and there were times when leadership came together and negotiated a unanimous consent agreement. And there were times when some people didn't all agree, but didn't really have much opportunity to object. And I have been one of those people that saw unanimous consent agreement reached and didn't have an opportunity to object.
But at least the leadership was talking about how to perfect legislation, how to bring the most important amendments to the floor for debate and for vote so we could bring the will of the American people and the wisdom of the American people together and move this country forward.
That's how it was here in this Congress from 1995 until the beginning of 2007, when Speaker Pelosi took the gavel, named a whole group of new committee Chairs, a new appropriations Chair, a new Ways and Means Chair, a new Financial Services Chair, the list goes on. And as the appropriations bills were brought to the floor, Republicans and Democrats offered amendments to those bills, and there were--and that debate, although it was extended more than it was this year, was shut down by unanimous consent agreement.
Okay. I can accept that. I don't like it, but I can accept it. That was the last time we had a legitimate process, Madam Speaker, because the 2007 appropriations cycle didn't even have an appropriations bill come to the floor, not 1 of 10, not 1 of 13--zero--because Democrats didn't want to take a vote on bills to spend money, and they didn't want to take a vote on the amendments that would be seeking to slow this massive growth in government, so they stacked it all up and put it into one continuing resolution that kicked the can down the road until after the last election when they brought up an omnibus spending bill that put everything into one bill. Then that bill appeared on the Internet. It was after 11 o'clock at night. The following morning, there were 3,600 pages, as I recall, and around $450 billion in spending all wrapped up and stacked into one bill. Actually, it may not have been 3,600, but it was a lot of pages of legislation. We had overnight to read it, and we are held accountable for everything that we vote for or against in this Congress. We have to have an opportunity to read the legislation no matter how good our staff is. We can't even delegate that we break the bill up into pieces and tell each one of our staff to read 100 pages. It's impossible.
Furthermore, there was no opportunity to tell what was in the bill. Even more difficult was to figure out what wasn't in the bill, and that all has to be evaluated if we are going to be operating and running the finest country that has ever had the privilege of being sovereign on the face of this Earth.
Yet our process is broken. Our process has been usurped. Because of the sense that power can dictate, then it has dictated. So, for 2 years, we haven't had a legitimate appropriations process here in the United States Congress, not until this week, not until the Justice Appropriations bill was offered. Even then, it wasn't a legitimate process. It was offered under a rule that I had never seen before, and I believe it was historically unprecedented, which was: print all of your amendments into the Record and then we'll make them all in order. Now, they can announce this in advance. They can
tell us what the Rules Committee is going to decide in advance. We filed all of our amendments into the Record, 127 of them or some number near that, and that allowed the majority to read our entire playbook. It allowed the majority to evaluate the political implications and the economic implications of every amendment, and it allowed the majority to plan their strategy. What was their strategy?
The strategy was: well, we dare not let them debate this because they're going to bring up things that are embarrassing. We dare not allow votes because the Members will be held accountable. Who will hold them accountable? The voters. So, in order to protect the vulnerable Members of the United States Congress, the constitutional duty and the deep traditions of this Congress have been suspended by the majority party, and they were suspended with the structured rule that allowed for these 127 amendments, of which I had some; but even that, Madam Speaker, wasn't good enough. Twenty-some minutes into the debate on the first amendment, the majority party moved to recess to the call of the gavel, and they decided to go up to the Rules Committee and change the rules again.
Now, it is a very bad deal when you change the rules from the Constitution and from the tradition of this body, from these 200-and- some years of this constitutional Republic that we are. That is a very serious thing, but those changed rules are the ones we started out with. Once we got 20 minutes into the debate on the first Republican amendment, they then decided to change the rules again, Madam Speaker, and went up to the Rules Committee, which, by the way, is the heart of the power of this Congress. The people who decide what debate will take place here on the floor are up there on the third floor--that way. It's a tiny, little room, and it doesn't have television cameras in it, and you can't tune into it on C-SPAN, and there is no live feed that goes out of there.
I brought an amendment up a couple of years ago to present it when the Chair of the Rules Committee said, Well, we're going to make sure that we report every vote out and that we put it into the Record. I simply brought an amendment up there that would require the Rules Committee to print every vote into the Record. The Chair became--let me just say to understate it--unreasonable and emotional in that I would seek to codify a promise that she had made. Didn't I trust her?
Well, the answer to that, I think, is obvious, because the rules got changed twice in the middle of the game. The second time, they decided they would only allow amendments to come to the floor of the House that they thought were good for them politically. So these 127 amendments got chopped down to 23 amendments. Of the 23 amendments, 20 of them were about spending.
You know, it surprises me, but the Democrats didn't mind voting for more spending and voting against reducing spending with the exception of this $100,000 on capital bicycles today. Trillions of dollars have been spent, but they did get mobilized, some of them, about the spending on the capital bicycles.
So the rules were changed from tradition. Then they were changed in the middle of the game. This Justice Appropriations bill came to the floor, and it was set up so that there wouldn't be embarrassing votes.
For example, the Speaker of the House has declared the CIA to be willfully lying to the Congress of the United States of America and to her, and this issue is unanswered and unspoken to, and the security of the United States of America is hinged upon our ability to have a working and trusting relationship to fund the CIA and the 14 other members of the intelligence community and our Department of Defense, I might add, and our domestic law enforcement, I might add. Well, now there is no relationship between the Speaker of the House and the intelligence community other than one of being directly at odds against each other, with the Speaker's declaring the CIA up here in the secure room in the Capitol to be lying to the person who is third in line for the Presidency--the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Yes, they lied to me. They did it all the time. They misled the Congress of the United States of America.
That's the statement--not retracted, not clarified, no evidence given. Just an allegation.
Now, when someone accuses someone else of lying outside of these doors and on the street, in the family, at the workplace or in private society, they had better have the evidence before they accuse somebody of being a liar. That is the standard in America. If you think somebody is not telling you the truth, you don't call him a liar unless you have the facts. We have worse than that here in the Congress because there is a statute that has been passed that directly prohibits anyone from lying to Congress, especially about domestic or international terrorism, and that's what these briefings were about. They were about enhanced interrogations that most of America, Madam Speaker, thinks took place down at Gitmo, waterboarding among them. The truth is that no waterboarding took place at Gitmo. None of it took place in this hemisphere, and I can't verify that there were any enhanced interrogation techniques that took place even in this hemisphere, let alone at Gitmo by United States forces.
So that's a long subject, and I won't go into that, Madam Speaker, except to say, to the extent when that declaration was made by the Speaker of the House, that declaration of the CIA's lying, it was an allegation of willfully committing repeated felonies against the Congress of the United States.
This is an untenable position. We cannot have a situation where the most powerful Member of the House of Representatives, the person third in line for the Presidency, can declare our intelligence community to be willful liars, to be lying to us here in this Congress and to be in violation of Federal statute. We cannot just simply decide, because the Speaker doesn't want to talk about it anymore, we aren't going to talk about it either.
I am bringing this up because this is the only arena that exists. This is the only forum that exists right now. We could not force a vote on it. We could not shut off funds. We could not direct the Speaker. We could not bring any language, because it was shut down in the Rules Committee. I will submit that the security clearance for the Speaker of the House of Representatives must be suspended until this matter is cleared up. It is her responsibility to clear it up, not mine. It is not the part of some outside working group or of some factfinding force. It is for the person who made the allegation.
Madam Speaker, I would ask you to reflect. When Jesus stood in front of the high priest, Caiaphas, Caiaphas asked him, Jesus, did you really say these things? Did you really preach in this fashion?
Christ said to Caiaphas, It's you who say I did. Ask them. They heard me. I was open.
The guard struck Jesus, and Jesus said again to Caiaphas, If I have spoken wrongly, then you must prove the wrong, but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?
That's the standard. When someone speaks rightly, you can't attack him. You can't strike him. You can't challenge him. You can't beat him. You can't call him a liar; but if he speaks wrongly, the one who makes the allegation of speaking wrongly must prove the wrong. That's the standard in the Book of John. That's the standard in this American culture. That needs to be the standard here in the United States Congress. We need to hold the Speaker accountable for this for the very sake of the integrity of this institution and for the very sake of the security of the United States of America, which, surely, is put at risk when you think about the majority party, the majority party that is all trying to work together, to get along and to follow the direction of the Speaker, all of the staffs of all of the committees--the committee Chairs, the subcommittee Chairs, the rank-and-file members, the Armed Services people, the Select Committee on Intelligence, which just had their markup in secret. That won't hit the press. You won't know what went on in there in the Select Committee on Intelligence. You won't know what kind of debates took place, because that's in secret. You won't understand how partisan the Select Committee on Intelligence is today because
the committee has been stacked with people who will support the Speaker.
Madam Speaker, the American people don't have any insight into what goes on within the intelligence zones here in this Congress nor do they have an opportunity to view it, because a lot of it is classified. I can tell you, when you have a partisan committee, partisan votes, partisan debates in secret in the Committee on Intelligence, and when you have all of the intelligence agencies that are now colored with the allegation from the Speaker of the House that they willfully lied to the Congress of the United States, let me ask:
Does that produce more funding for on-the-ground intel? for more devices? for more technology? Is America safer because of this tension, this conflict? Are we less safe? Are there more of our resources put to bear to gather this intelligence that we need so that we can direct our military to protect us from attacks from terrorists, both foreign and domestic, or is it less resources?
When you send a brother and a sister out to the kitchen to clean up the table after dinner at night and they're fighting, does the job get done better or worse? Does it get done quicker or sooner? When people are at odds with each other, that lack of cooperation ultimately leads to less efficiency and to a poorer product.
One of the problems that we had that left us vulnerable for September 11 were the silos of intelligence when we didn't have our members of the intelligence community sharing intelligence. They weren't communicating as well as they should have. That is the foundation for the reason of establishing the Director of National Intelligence and for putting it under at least one command. I have concerns about the results of that as well, but that was the reason, and now we have a silo of politics here under the Speaker of the House, who declares Intelligence to be lying to Congress. She continues to go up to the fourth floor to receive intelligence briefings from an intelligence community that is probably walking on egg shells.
The CIA, itself, directed by Leon Panetta, has laid out that they have the documents and that they have the proof, and their notes show that the Speaker was briefed in line with what had been taking place with the enhanced interrogation techniques of three individuals and that it had already taken place prior to the briefing that she received on September 4 of 2002.
This is an untenable position. It must be rectified, and it can't go on. This Congress has been shut down partly so we don't have a debate on this issue.
Another reason this Congress has been shut down--and I'm talking about the open amendment process to appropriations bills--is there is a partisan interest in protecting ACORN. It can't be anything else. Most everybody in America at this point has heard of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN was in the news constantly throughout the election cycle last fall. I've been watching ACORN for 4 to 5 years. ACORN has been involved from the beginning, and here is a series of things, and I'll just lay them out and then talk about them to the depth that I can at this point, Madam Speaker.
ACORN's involvement early on way back in the Community Reinvestment Act. This Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 and then refreshed it under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Community Reinvestment Act recognized something that was wrong, and that was that we had lenders who looked at neighborhoods and concluded that the real estate value in those neighborhoods was declining because of violence, because of activities going on in those neighborhoods.
And so they drew what they called--they did what they call redlining. They drew a red line around those neighborhoods and concluded they weren't going to loan money for homes for real estate in those neighborhoods because the value of the real estate was going down.
If you looked at the racial makeup of the residents of those redlined areas, often it was African Americans in those inner-city parts. Some of them contributed to the decline in the value of the real estate. Some of them were victims of the decline in value of the real estate. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed to encourage lenders to--let me just say in simplistic terms--make bad loans in bad neighborhoods, to loan into the redline neighborhoods so they could improve the percentage of home ownership, get more people into their own homes, and the theory is they will take care of them: They'll have a nest egg to work with, and they will be more stable with everything they do. The families will be more stable, too.
I don't disagree with the philosophy of the Community Reinvestment Act. I disagree with the result of what came about. And what came about was ACORN seizing on the Community Reinvestment Act and learning that they could go in and, essentially, intimidate lenders. If lenders wanted to expand or open up a branch office, they had to meet the standards of the Community Reinvestment Act. Vaguely written. But those standards were easier to prove if you had the approval of ACORN. If you had the disapproval, it was hard to get them approved because ACORN established political connections, and supported political candidates, and became a get-out-the-vote machine for Democrats.
Now, think in terms of Chicago politics. I think Chicago is a city in America that best illustrates the foundation that is ACORN.
And so ACORN intimidated lenders. They got groups together--some would say gangs; I'm calling them groups. And they went into lenders' offices and sometimes shoved the banker's desk over to the wall and surrounded him and hollered at him and screamed at him, intimidated the lender into making bad loans in bad neighborhoods. They intimidated lenders and banking institutions to write nice big checks to ACORN, and ACORN used that money to operate, and if they wrote a big enough check, ACORN wouldn't be in there demonstrating or jamming the entryways to the banks and shutting down their commerce. These were intimidation shakedown tactics. ACORN is just one of the entities that did that. We know of a few others, and I think the name Jesse Jackson comes to mind for most people when I raise this subject matter. There were other entities out there that did the same thing.
But ACORN was in the center of this. And not only that, but ACORN found themselves in a situation where they could go out and identify and broker the people who would qualify for these low-interest loans, subprime loans--a lot of subprime loans were promoted by ACORN. The lending institutions made those loans because then ACORN would be off of their back and allow their doors to stay open, and they kept this relationship going.
ACORN also found themselves in a position to be brokering these subprime loans through into the secondary market of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So I think already, Madam Speaker, you see the pattern here.
The Community Reinvestment Act was a foundation that allowed ACORN to go in and intimidate lenders and set themselves up where they became the broker for home mortgage loans that many times were subprime loans that were sold in the secondary market to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac And on up through the line to the investment banks, where these loans were sliced, diced, sorted, shuffled, cut, stacked, and tranched.
And all of that went on to the point where you couldn't trace where all of the loans had gone anymore, but the collateral still was attached to the mortgage loans. And this became part of the core of the financial meltdown that we've experienced in the last several months.
That's transgression number one for ACORN.
Transgression number two is ACORN's pledge to go out and register--I think their goal was 1.3 million new voters for the 2008 election cycle. So they put their minions out into the streets across the streets of America. Interesting. They've been active doing this before. There were investigations that came up in 2006. In the 2006 election in the State of Washington, ACORN turned in in one sample 1,800 voter registration forms, and the number of legitimate registration forms out of 1,800 was six. Only six were real. The rest were phony. I didn't do the
percentage on that, but I can tell you it's not very good.
And so they brought about a prosecution there and got some kind of settlement. But that was 2006. There were other incidents scattered across the country. The focus of these incidents seemed to show up in swing States, swing States like Ohio, States that they wanted to affect the result of the election. Of about five or six important swing States, ACORN was the most active in them.
Now, this is also an organization that has received, as a matter of fact, more than $53 million of our tax dollars to fund them. To do what? Well, in part, facilitate bad loans in bad neighborhoods sold up through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--which have since been nationalized, by the way, because of the insolvency in part created by some of those transactions--and a get-out-the-vote Democrat drive that took place in many of the cities, Chicago for example, and registered hundreds of thousands of fraudulent voter registrations. And in fact by ACORN's own admission, over 400,000 fraudulent registrations were filed by ACORN in that cycle leading up to the 2008 election.
And I asked for investigations. I asked for congressional inquiries. I asked for the Justice Department to look into ACORN. And I had no sympathy on this side of the aisle. I temporarily had some sympathy from the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Conyers, who for about 3 weeks was on record as believing there was evidence there that may warrant that we take it up and investigate ACORN. But 3 weeks after he expressed the sentiment, he concluded there wasn't enough evidence there.
There is a lawsuit against ACORN that has been won and a settlement that's been achieved. We have put hundreds of pages of data into the records here in this Congress, and still they conclude that there is not enough evidence there to bear looking into it. We've named hundreds of--I don't know if it's hundreds--we've named dozens of post offices this year. We debate these on the floor under suspension. We vote and name post offices. We've got time to name post offices, but we don't have time to look into ACORN, which is corrupting our election process and has undermined the financial integrity of the United States of America?
And furthermore, we have to suspect that there is a real lack of enthusiasm on the part of the administration, as well as the Democrats in the Congress and the House and in the Senate, because when we look back through the history of the President of the United States, we find a consistent association with ACORN on the part of Barack Obama. Barack Obama, who was a lawyer for ACORN and argued for them in a voter registration case, albeit pro bono, but still their employee, still representing ACORN in court.
And when someone does that pro bono, does that tell you they agree with them or disagree with the agenda of ACORN? I think we all can agree that if you're going to take a case for free and argue in court that surely you must agree with the principles and the people that you're working for. You're not going to see me go represent Planned Parenthood in court for free or for a check, for that matter, because I disagree with the agenda of Planned Parenthood.
Barack Obama clearly agreed with the agenda of ACORN. When he worked for them for free and represented them in court, that makes him their employee as their attorney.
Now, if that's not compelling enough, Madam Speaker, we'll take another component of this. Barack Obama headed up Project Vote. Project Vote is a subsidiary of ACORN. That's not disputed. They're the get- out-the-vote machine in Chicago. That's not disputed. The head of ACORN in Chicago hired President--well, at that time Barack Obama--to train the people that were going to work under Project Get-Out-the-Vote and also those that would go into the bankers' offices and encourage them to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods.
Part of this enterprise that has all of the trappings of a criminal enterprise headed up in Chicago by--I will check the name--- but I believe it's Margaret Talmage, who hired Barack Obama to head up Project Vote, and he got paid. The canceled checks exist. He worked for Project Vote as an employee, hired by the head of ACORN in Chicago to work for their subsidiary to get out the vote and to train people in community-organizing activities and postures himself as if community- organizing is a highly virtuous endeavor.
Well, hardly anybody knows what a community organizer does. And I suspect that it's different from community-to-community, county-to- county, State-to-State, and nation-to-nation.
But when it comes to community organizing in Chicago, clearly there are those who adhere to the mission of Saul Alinsky, the great community organizer, Rules for Radicals Saul Alinsky--whom also Hillary Clinton studied under, by the way directly, and whom Barack Obama seems to be a philosophical protege.
But the ``Rules for Radicals'' clearly applied to ACORN. They were activists. They did intimidate. It was part of their M.O. ACORN, Project Vote, and dozens and dozens of other subsidiaries of ACORN scattered across this country. And ACORN central headquarters is down in New Orleans. It's been moved from downtown New Orleans out to the outskirts of New Orleans at 2609 Canal Street. A $2.5 million building, roughly relatively new and modern, that houses many of the subsidiary corporations that one can connect.
And I've filed a list that is incomplete but is a list of 174 of the more than 250 corporations that are affiliated with ACORN. I filed them into the Congressional Record as part of the amendments that were to go on the justice appropriation's bill that was managed by Mr. Mollohan and concluded yesterday. But of course, those amendments were denied not quite in secret, but up here where you can't hardly get six reporters in the room if there are going to be a dozen Members of Congress, if they're pleading to be heard here on the floor.
So that's the record. That's the standard. 2609 Canal Street, ACORN's building. One should go on Google Earth and take a look at that and zero in on it and see what it looks like, Madam Speaker, and the corporations that are involved as subsidiaries, the inner-connecting spider web of corporations.
By the way, Louisiana is one of the easiest States in the union to incorporate in. I don't think it's a coincidence that ACORN is there with their central headquarters. But they have headquarters scattered across this country in 50 cities, at least that they announce--and I don't know how many States--and activities going on, and also they say over 100,000 members--that number actually is higher than that, around 175,000 families.
Annual dues for an individual, whether you're poverty stricken or aren't, I understand is around $120. So they raised some of that money from dues from people that may or may not be able to afford that. Fifty-three million dollars from our tax dollars, and now--actually, we don't know the whole picture because it takes a lot of work to unravel this spider web of corporations that exist that are affiliated and part and parcel of ACORN that have interconnecting boards of directors and sometimes copy-and-paste boards of directors where if the board of-- let's just say Project Vote or one of the other subsidiaries happened to meet and then walk into another room and you would sit down with ACORN and that board met, you might look around and not find any faces that are different. They might all be the same. Some of these interconnecting corporations, subsidiaries of ACORN, have identical boards of directors and identical addresses and identical corporate filings with the exception of the name and the date that they're filed.
This is a copy-and-paste reproductive method that allows them to go out and take all kinds of money in from every avenue, pour that through, commingle those fungible funds and spend them however they like, including getting out the vote for Democrats, registering hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes.
And when ACORN's asked about this, Madam Speaker--and that question came up in a little debate with the head of ACORN last night--they say, Well, ACORN's not under investigation or indictment. Not true. They clearly are. Absolutely in Nevada they are. But they are alleging that there were only investigations or indictments of their employees that were just a few,
not very well managed, maybe rogue employees that were out there registering.
Well, it turns out to be a fact that ACORN's policy in print was, in some of the States, to pay commissions for people to sign up voter registrations. Clearly against the law in a number of the States across the country and many of the States across the country, including Nevada. We will see more of these investigations and convictions unfold.
Now, why am I concerned about this, Madam Speaker? The answer is, first, it is essential that we maintain a legitimate, reliable and honorable election process in America. If first you corrupt the voter registration rolls, the next thing that happens is the votes themselves are corrupted. And ACORN's position is, well, maybe we gave you 400,000 or more fraudulent voter registration forms, but never fear, there were no fraudulent votes that came from that. In fact, the Attorney General of Nevada, who happens to be a Democrat and is involved in the prosecution of ACORN, and I applaud him for that, says that he's certain that there were no fraudulent votes that came from this. I don't know how anybody can be certain that there were no fraudulent votes that came from 400,000 or more fraudulent registrations. That defies my ability to imagine. 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations and no fraudulent votes? That is a leap of faith that I can't take.
It's logical to me that the more fraudulent registrations you have, the more fraudulent votes you have. It's not logical that every fraudulent registration would be a fraudulent vote, but it's clearly logical that with over 400,000 fraudulent registrations, you're going to get fraudulent votes. How many, is the question. Who were they? We don't know because a fraudulent vote is almost the perfect crime. If you can walk into a polling place and the poll worker says, Who are you, and you answer, my name is Joe Schmo and I live at--let's just use a previously used address, 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, and if there's someone registered under that name, they hand you a ballot and you go vote, no ID required, no picture ID required. In fact, in New Mexico--and this is part of the Congressional Record where the Secretary of State of New Mexico testified before the Judiciary Committee about 3 years ago--it comes down to this: if I am working as a poll worker in New Mexico registered to vote in New Mexico and someone walks into that polling place and says, I'm Steve King and I live at--names the address that I live at, even if they say they are me and I'm working the polls, by law in New Mexico I can't challenge that fraudulent voter. It's against the law to challenge voters in New Mexico and many other States because the liberals have so corrupted the process.
First, they passed Motor Voter, so that when people get a driver's license they ask them, Do you want to be registered to vote? Well, who says no? Also, there is a little spot on there that attests that you are a citizen of the United States. Well, who says no? What if you don't understand the language, are you really going to read that as a legal document and know that if you attest that you're a citizen of the United States, that you're guilty of perjury?
By the way, out of 306-or-so million Americans, does anybody know anybody that has been prosecuted for falsely attesting that they are a citizen on a voter registration form? No. That's an unprosecuted crime; a crime of perjury, which exists as a felony in every State that I know of, unprosecuted. So our voter registration rolls were corrupted by the low standard of Motor Voter.
And then we had the Florida fiasco in 2000. And there, if we looked across what was going on in Florida, there were allegations of voter fraud on both sides. I don't know that there wasn't some on both sides. But what I saw was indicators that there could have been significant votes shifted. And I think all the scrutiny that came into those counties in Florida helped. I think it was a good thing that a lot of people went down and watched the hanging chad count.
But I also have seen film of the director of the Miami-Dade County Election Board, Michael--last name starts with an L, and I actually can't remember it, it's been 9 years. In a previous election, there is videotape of the hanging chads that would come in. How did they deal with the hanging chads in Miami-Dade County? And I've seen this videotape; I don't think it could be reconstructed in any way. They had 70 volunteers from the League of Women Voters--now, they haven't been on my side very much, they really don't seem to be very bipartisan to me--long table, 70 volunteers from the League of Women Voters. They were set down at a table, and they would bring in these punch-card ballots and set them on one side of each of the ladies that were there working, issue them two or three nice sharp No. 2 lead pencils--like you take your Iowa basic skills with where I come from--and they would pick up these hanging chad ballots, these punch-card ballots, and clean them up. If any chad is hanging and it's still dangling there, they would punch the pencil through the hole, break it off, and stack these cleaned-up ballots over on this other side where, once they got done cleaning up the hanging chads, these 70 volunteers from the League of Women Voters, then the process ballots would go through the vote counting machine. Now, does that give you a lot of confidence if you put somebody there at a table to decide your vote for you by where they poke the pencil and which chad is hanging? Not me it doesn't. That process should have never happened.
The Collier brothers did investigative research on election fraud down in Florida. Neither one of these gentlemen are alive today--and I don't have any sign of foul play and I don't allege such a thing, I just haven't been able to track what brought about their demise.
But I read a fair amount of material. And they did a movie in investigative journalism where they went into the previous election board director of Miami-Dade County that took care of the voting machines, sitting in a warehouse out along the edge of the swamp. And they walked in and said, What do you do? Well, I fix these vote- counting machines and I keep them up in shape. Well, how do you make this all work? And they got to talking about how the elections got rigged. And he said, Here's how it is--and the video exists. He pulled some plastic gears out of a drawer and he showed, here it is, we grind one of these teeth off on this plastic gear, we put it in the vote- counting machine, and then where we put that gear makes a difference in which side gets an extra vote for every 10 that comes through. Openly in the videotape.
And they went up into the loft in the attic and filmed a bunch more of that before they got suspicious and they had to skedaddle out of there with their cameras. I saw those things while I was doing this research back then.
I bring this out, Madam Speaker, because, just because this wasn't a particularly close election in November of 2008 doesn't mean that we shouldn't be alarmed about the corruption of our election process; 537 votes made the difference in Florida, and Florida made the difference on who would be the next leader in the Free World, Madam Speaker.
And those 537 votes could easily be blended through the more than 400,000 fraudulent registration forms that ACORN has admitted to turning in that corrupted voter registration rolls and opened the door for the corruption of our election process.
Now, I have discussed the Community Reinvestment Act, and now I have discussed the voter registration fraud process. And these are the ``get out the vote'' people for Democrats, please don't forget. And if we do forget--I should put another fact out.
President Obama, as a candidate for President, then-Senator Obama, hired ACORN to get out the vote and wrote the check to one of their subsidiary corporations for over $800,000. There's three ways the President is tied--more than three ways the President is tied to ACORN. One is as their attorney, one is as an employee of Project Vote, heading up Project Vote in Chicago, receiving paychecks, ACORN through Project Vote into President Obama. The third one is hiring ACORN to get out the vote.
There are rumors that donor lists got circulated back and forth; I haven't been able to chase that down. The
fourth component is the White House has hired ACORN to participate in the census.
Now, over 400,000 fraudulent registrations turned in, admitted by ACORN--I suspect significantly more. I have never met someone who admitted to such wrongdoing and admitted to it in the full magnitude of their wrongdoing. They always try to minimize. So at least 400,000. And now the President, who has worked for ACORN in two capacities, hired ACORN in at least one capacity, now hires ACORN in another capacity as President of the United States to help with the census, to help count the people of the United States.
Now, if you want to direct what goes on in America, if you want the power of this country, there are two ways: through the ballot box and influence the elections so you get your people in these seats here and in the seats in the Senate and in the White House, where there is tremendous power. That's one component. Another component is through the United States Census.
What does it do? Well, the Constitution requires us to count the people every 10 years, count the people--not by formula, not by some magic formula, but actually count the people. It costs a lot of money, and it takes a lot of people out there to do it to actually count them.
But once the people are counted, it affects two big things: one is the redistricting process, where new lines get drawn on the maps of all the States of the Union. And those maps are drawn and approved by the State legislatures. And some of them it's very, very partisan, and they decide how they expand the number of Democrat or Republican seats, whoever happens to be in charge. In my State I am really fortunate because it's far less partisan than it is in any other State that I know of. But that determines, in a large way, who will be in the majorities in the State legislatures after the next elections. Some seats will be lost and some seats will be won because of the lines that are drawn that are the result of the census that is taking place in 2010.
Not only does it make a difference in who is in the majority in the State legislatures--and every State is bicameral, with the exception of Nebraska, which is unicameral--but also it makes a difference in the congressional districts, these 435 districts that are seated here in this Congress, Madam Speaker. And when those lines are changed, it makes a difference on sometimes who comes to this Congress. It makes a difference on whether a few more Republicans get elected or a few more Democrats get elected. And if you can stack the count in certain areas, you can expand the number of seats and make a difference on who holds the gavel here behind me, Madam Speaker.
If we just look at the count of illegals in America, there is a study done by a reputable organization, Dr. Steve Camerata, as I recall, that comes to a conclusion that there are between nine and 11 congressional seats in America. This is an election or two ago, so the analysis probably shifts down. But it was between nine and 11 seats in America that are shifted because we count illegals along with legals for purposes of apportionment. It takes, in my opinion, a constitutional amendment to fix that. But someone like Maxine Waters in California, it will require perhaps 50,000 votes to get reelected to Congress because I suspect she doesn't have as many legal Americans there and a lower percentage of citizens, and certainly a lower incidence of people voting. My particular seat, it will take about 120,000 votes to be elected or reelected to the Fifth District of Iowa because we have a high percentage of citizens and a low percentage of illegals.
The census makes a difference. And if the census is an accurate count, then we can draw better lines. If the census is an inaccurate count, then the lines will be drawn to favor the partisan interests of the people that produce the inaccurate count.
Now, if I were going to look across the entire United States of America and try to come up with entities that have the wherewithal to significantly provide the manpower for this census and who had the most ability to corrupt the process, number one on my list of alarm would be ACORN and all of their affiliates for all these reasons that I've said. Now, how can anyone expect to get a legitimate count on the census from the very people that have produced the illegitimate voter registration forms? And yet President Obama, his administration has contracted with ACORN to assist with the census.
Madam Speaker, the question came up--actually, it came up last night in national media--about do I have any proof of this because ACORN denies it. And Madam Speaker, I have in my hand the documents that do determine--these are documents that come from the U.S. Census Bureau, and they read that, let's see, they were looking for some entities that could help with the census. Their goal was to work with national organizations and corporations that could help us reach the hard-to- count populations. And as I look down through this information that includes an agreement with ACORN, it says, Our overall goal was to work with organizations that could reach the hard-to-count populations.
And here's what they did to identify who to partner with. They went to a list of national organizations, they added advisory committees, they have used a cluster segmentation approach. They looked at the economically disadvantaged, the unattached mobile singles--that's a term I had not seen before--in high-density areas with ethnic enclaves. Okay. These are legitimate places where we would have difficulty with the census, and I recognize and agree with that. But then they had criteria for not partnering with a group. One is if they didn't meet the criteria above that I mentioned. The second one is if they're hate groups. Now, I would like to see that list of hate groups that's filed under the United States Census Bureau.
It seems as though the Department of Homeland Security had identified conservatives as hate groups. It seems as though the FBI had the resources to send investigators out to mill through the crowds on TEA Bag Day, April 15, Tax Day. The FBI was looking at the people that came to the courthouse square to voice their objection to the oppressive taxes that have been imposed upon this country and the irresponsible spending, and they're identified as hate groups. Conservative groups, hate groups. I don't know of a liberal group that would be on that, but I hope that we are able to make that request and get a list in the Congressional Record of who are the hate groups. I suspect I'm probably alleged to be on some of them.
Then other groups that were not considered were law enforcement groups, anti-immigrant groups. I don't know what an anti-immigrant group is. I know there are some anti-illegal immigrant groups. I don't know of a single anti-immigrant group, but that gives you a sense of the biased ideology that lays this out. Also, any groups that might make people fearful of participating in the census. I don't know who that might be, but it gives them a way out. Or maybe any groups that did not serve the hard-to-count population.
So it looks to me like they have written some regs here that will qualify ACORN. I have in my hand a document from the U.S. Census Bureau, National Partnership, and it is a document that says the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN, their tasks check-marked and dated January 13, 2009, 3:02 p.m.: ``Dear sir or madam, I am writing to inform you that on behalf of the 2010 census partnership program, we would like to invite you to become a national partner with the Census Bureau for the 2010 census.''
ACORN is already in. It's not a matter of conjecture. ACORN is involved in the census. And if we don't suspend that here in this Congress, the result will be, I fear, a corruption of the census process that is nearly as serious as the corruption of the election process.
Why would you go to the people that have exactly the wrong track record and put them in control? Why did the President ask to move the Census within the White House and out of the Department of Commerce? Why is Rahm Emanuel involved in directing this, the man from Chicago, the Chicago politics visits and arrives at the White House with the President?
And, by the way, if one goes back also and even begins to think that President Obama wasn't involved with ACORN and this is just a random hiring process that took place because it
made sense, I would point out also that President Obama chaired for a time and sat on the board for a longer time of the Woods Foundation in Chicago, which distributed funds to community organizing groups and directed funds to ACORN. As chairing the Woods Foundation, he sent money to ACORN. He also sat on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. This is a liberal education initiative, the brainchild of the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers. William Ayers recruited President Obama, at that time State Senator Obama, to sit on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which what did they do? Raised money and distributed it to places including ACORN.
So I think I have given you enough threads, Madam Speaker, to understand that President Obama is tied in with ACORN, part and parcel. He's been their attorney. He's been an employee under the Project Vote. He's hired them and written them a check out of his campaign for over $800,000, sat on the board of the Woods Foundation and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Both of them sent other money to ACORN. William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist, was the founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. And by these documents here, Madam Speaker, ACORN is working on the census and at a minimum providing temporary employees to work on the census to count the people. And we know what's happened to our election process. It's been corrupted. And, by the way, there are news reports of fraudulent votes and prosecutions on fraudulent votes and people that voted multiple times that were enabled by the registrations of ACORN. Some of that, Madam Speaker, is in the news today.
So I revere this election process, and I would rather lose elections than I would lose the integrity of the election process. And I'm happy enough to accept the results of a legitimate census no matter what it is. If it draws a district out of Iowa, I will lament that. I want to have the most representation possible from Iowa. But we have got to have a real count and we have got to deal with integrity. And when we have corrupt organizations that have all the trappings of a criminal enterprise, this Congress should shut off funding to that criminal enterprise.
But, instead, we don't get a vote and we don't get a debate because the rules are unprecedentedly changed and corrupted up there on the third floor in the Rules Committee where nobody goes, and if many did, they couldn't get in. We need cameras there. We need the press there, and we need open rules here on the floor. And we need people that are willing to engage in this debate and take come whatever may. If you believe in yourself, stand up and say so. I will be happy to yield to you. But I see it never happens. You sit on your hands, and you accept this power that you happen to have right now.
But the American people are going to take it back, and they are going to give it to the people that they trust.