Floor Statements

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The gentleman from Iowa is pleased to be recognized to address you tonight in this 60-minute period of time.

Having recognized that the gentleman from Missouri was in the middle of a statement, and having recognized that there were gentlemen here on the floor, along with the gentlewoman from Wyoming, that are still full of information that America needs to hear, Mr. Speaker, I will just simply set the stage with a very short piece of this--and that is that I think we need to have the smoothest of transitions from Special Order to Special Order, and that would require that I yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) who was in the middle of a statement when his 60-minute clock ran out.

Thanking the gentleman from Missouri, and reclaiming my time, I would add to the statement he's made--and I'm quite impressed with the attention the gentleman must have paid at that presentation that morning--but to look at the situation in Spain, the highest unemployment in the industrialized world; 17\1/2\ percent, as the gentleman from Missouri has said. Over 100 percent increase in industries' electricity costs, and the idea that 20 percent of the electricity in Spain is generated by wind, which pushes up against the threshold of anybody in the country, anybody in the world that lays out these standards.

If you could produce 20 percent of your electricity by wind, that's way up against the threshold because we know that wind doesn't blow all the time. It lays down often at night, it doesn't always blow when you need the electricity. You have to have backup systems, you have to have gas-fired generators that can be fired up to take care of that demand when the wind is not blowing.

But, additionally, another statement that the gentleman from Missouri didn't make is how the Sicilian Mafia stepped in and was engaged in the brokering of licenses that determined who would be building the wind generation plants in Spain and the companies that would be building them and the inefficiencies that came from that, let alone the corruption that came from it.

Whenever you have government involved in brokering out licenses that has to do with who's going to be providing something that's not demanded by the market, I think exposes a great flaw in this. And the government of Spain about 7 or 8 years ago decided they wanted to be the world's leader in renewable energy. They set about going down that path.

Following that path to become the world's leader in renewable energy, they achieved it. But they also achieved the highest unemployment in the industrialized world--17\1/2\ half percent--a 100 percent increase in industries' electricity costs. They brought in the Mafia from Sicily, the Sicilian Mafia, that would be brokering the licensures along with some people in Spain, I'm convinced, and now they have a situation that so many people are bought into it that they can't step away and say that was a colossal mistake, and if we're going to save the economy of Spain, we have to pull the plug on this renewable energy idea.

This greenest of countries in the industrialized world, Spain, has the most stressed economy in the industrialized world and, in big part, because they have bought into this vast green concept of American energy.

So, as we flow with this, I see a posture of eagerness on the part of the gentlelady from Wyoming, Mrs. Lummis.

Will the gentlelady yield?

For snakes?

I thank the gentlelady from Wyoming.

It occurs to me that if this Congress is to have a nuclear carbon footprint--I remember the Speaker when she was, let me say, sworn into the third-highest constitutional office in the United States of America, third in line for the presidency, she concluded that this Capitol Complex was going to be carbon neutral, which means greenhouse gas neutral, which means CO2 gas neutral. And having a look at the generating equipment that produces the lights that illuminates us tonight, Mr. Speaker, it occurred to the gentlelady, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, that she would need to make a correction that would make it consistent with her left coast constituents. So it went on the Board of Trade and carbon credits were purchased at a cost to the American taxpayers of $89,000 to buy these credits that were designed to pay people to change their behavior that was contributing to the greenhouse gas, CO2, and the atmosphere over all of God's creation. That $89,000 was invested in two areas. I checked this out, and I went to visit some of the sites. One of them was no-till farmers in South Dakota. They were no-till farmers before they got the check. They were no-till farmers after they got the check. If they actually tilled the ground afterwards, the carbon escaped anyway. So if they sell the farm, somebody comes in, puts a disk or a plow to it, it will go back into the atmosphere. So the sequestration was nillo, shall we say. That was the no-till farmers in South Dakota. There was also a nice check that was written to an electrical generating plant in Chillicothe, Iowa, that was to pay them to burn switchgrass in place of coal in order to make the CO2 emissions carbon neutral as opposed to contributing to the CO2 in the atmosphere, which would come from the net consumption of coal. Well, I don't know. This is a pretty interesting thing. So I went to Chillicothe, Iowa, and I visited the generating plant. I went into these buildings that were full of the switchgrass hay they had purchased several years earlier, at the cost to the Federal taxpayer and a government grant, the equipment to run these big round bails, 1,500-pound switchgrass bails, through a hammermill to chew them up into little itty-bitty pieces, to spit them into the incinerator and blend them with the coal dust that would come from the grinding of the coal that would allow it to combust at the most efficient rate. This switchgrass that was going to be carbon neutral had been burned to generate electricity a couple years earlier, but--here is something I know--when I'm looking at a shed full of switchgrass brown bails, and it's covered with coon manure--not cow flatulence but coon manure--they probably haven't burned much of that hay in a long time.

So the conclusion that one can draw was actually, 2 years earlier was when they shut down the switchgrass burning technique, but yet they were paid to burn the switchgrass and to do this carbon-neutral approach. So we have 89,000 taxpayer dollars invested in purchasing carbon credits to provide carbon-neutral emissions for the Capitol Complex, to buy these carbon credits on the Board of Trade in Chicago, to encourage people to do more things that are more conducive to the environment and produce less CO2 than they would have otherwise. I couldn't verify that anybody changed their behavior whatsoever for $89,000. I can tell you, if somebody wrote me a check for $89,000, I would at least consume less energy, let alone produce that energy in a more environmentally friendly fashion.

So that's the result of cap-and-trade that is being proposed by the Energy and Commerce Committee today and probably tomorrow and hopefully the next day and the next day and the next day ad infinitum until they decide that the science doesn't support this and the economics doesn't support it. But that comes to mind for me. And, by the way, the electricity that we consume in Iowa, a lot of it comes out of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. I have been up there to look at that, where you could put a school bus in the bucket of the drag line. I'm still a little confused about square miles versus cubic miles of coal, but I know they have a lot of it in the Powder River Basin. I'm glad to have the power, and I appreciate the rail lines that come down. I really don't want captive shipping going on, but I appreciate the connection we have along with the renewable energy that comes out of the Missouri River and the seven dams that are on the Missouri River and the hydroelectric power that comes, which is carbon neutral, Madam Speaker. Our hydroelectric is carbon neutral but it does not get credit for being renewable energy because Bobby Kennedy Jr. and others think that however the rivers were is how they ought to be reverted back to and that we can't improve upon Mother Nature. I think God gave us these natural resources, and he's given us the ability to improve upon them. We've done so in many cases, and we should do so into the future.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas, the Secretary of our conference, Judge Carter, as much time as he may consume.

Reclaiming my time for a moment, I would point out that the carbon credits are the modern-day equivalent of the reason that Martin Luther came forward and nailed his positions up on the Diet of Worms which is, the church was selling indulgences. Carbon credits are indulgences that allow a company to pay for the carbon emissions that they're emitting into the atmosphere. I think that's what the judge is talking about.

For a price.

Sin tax.

Passing it on to the consumer is what this is about. We have seen the numbers that show that an MIT professor has done the calculation on the costs of the proposal on this cap-and-tax that's out before this Congress and put a macronumber on the cost to our economy. Then some ingenious people who just simply took the average number of persons in a household, which is calculated to be 2.54, and divided that into the overall cost to our economy, the increased cost of energy that has to do with cap-and-tax. They concluded that each household would see their energy costs go up annually by $3,128 a year. Then the professor at MIT said, Oh, wait a minute. I'm real sorry I released the number because I don't like the result of the conclusion that came about because of the division of the numbers of persons in a household and the cost per household that would be the increase in the cost of all of our energy, electrical, our heat, our gas bill, our gasoline bill and our fuel oil and all of those things that are required to keep each household going. That's what's going on here. This is almost to the point where it's a religion that believes in something that isn't based upon a science. Now I'm great with faith, but I'm not so good with faith that's based upon pseudo- science.

I would ask the Speaker, how much time do we have remaining?

I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Paul Broun, another one of my friends and colleagues.

Will the gentleman yield?

I would just ask: Have all of your ideas been blocked? How does this work? Can't you offer an amendment that would put up a recorded vote and tell America where you stand? What prevents you from at least telling America where you stand so that they can evaluate the votes of people on both sides of the aisle and make their decision in November of 2010? What is the obstruction there?

If the gentleman would yield, then why didn't I see that amendment on the floor of the House of Representatives and have an opportunity to send a message to my constituents about how I would like to see this economy managed? Is there a reason that blocked that from coming to the floor?

Reclaiming my time, the Rules Committee, which is up there on the third floor, meets without the benefit of television cameras and often without the benefit of the news media even reporting it. They can decide whether your idea can be heard on the floor of the House of Representatives. And often the Rules Committee decides that your idea will not be heard and it will not see the light of day. Is that correct?

Am I hearing that the Speaker of the House of the Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is the one who has the power and does decide what will be voted on on the floor of the House of Representatives, and the people of America have no access to being able to know what your position is or what the position is of Democrats and Republicans because it is being blocked by the Speaker and by the Rules Committee? That is how I understand that.

And I would yield to the gentleman from Texas to clarify that point.

Reclaiming my time, I would make also three additional points to this process.

Mr. Speaker, the American people don't care about process. But I'm about to address process again. It has been raised by the gentleman from Georgia and addressed by the gentleman from Texas. And I will say this, that not only do we have a Rules Committee that decides what the American people get to know about the opinions by recorded vote here on the floor of the House of Representatives, because no matter what kind of logical improvement that may come to perfect legislation from the minds and hearts of the American people, as brought through the minds and hearts of their elected representatives, if the Speaker's Rules Committee doesn't think it is a good idea for that debate to take place, let alone the vote to take place, it will not happen, Mr. Speaker. That is what happens here in the House of Representatives. It is a distorted process. And the rules regulate how much, what is going to be heard, what is going to be debated and what is going to be voted on here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And so I think that that is an educational process that needs to take place. And as I have gone before the Rules Committee, and I have found out that no matter how good my idea is, I actually have come down to the floor here and into the Record, it is a matter of record, I have said that we need to get television cameras up there so at least the American people can see the behavior of the Rules Committee carte blanche wiping out good idea after good idea.

Additionally, it isn't just the Rules Committee. It is the full committee process. And I can think of three occasions, Mr. Speaker, where the committee chair has either allowed his staff, or directed his staff, to change a bill after it passed out of committee to go to the floor. And I can think of the case of the stimulus package where there was a 12-hour markup in Energy and Commerce, the ranking member, former chairman, Joe Barton, was livid that they spent 12 hours marking up, writing, trying to amend and seeking to perfect legislation that was the stimulus package that was initiated at the request of the President, having seen that bill finally pass out of the Energy and Commerce Committee and come to the Rules Committee and come to this floor in a different form, the committee had no say in the end. It was a mock markup in Energy and Commerce.

Subsequent to that, the bankruptcy bill came out of the Judiciary Committee, where I sit and where Judge Carter and I used to sit arm to arm. I offered an amendment that would set up special provisions for people who went bankrupt because of their house mortgages. I offered an amendment that would have exempted those who have fraudulently misrepresented their income, their assets or the appraisal of the property. It would have exempted them from relief under the bankruptcy bill. That amendment was passed in the Judiciary Committee by a vote of 21-3. After the bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee, the language was changed before it came to the floor.

Then just a little over 1 week ago, on the Financial Services Committee, there was an amendment offered by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. I think she is Minnesota Number 5. And that amendment would have exempted any proceeds of the bill from going to ACORN, an organization that had been indicted and was under investigation by the Federal Government for election fraud. And that amendment passed unanimously out of the Financial Services Committee. It should have come to the floor as part of the bill. It was totally changed, I believe, at the direction of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee to limit it to only those companies that had been actually convicted of fraud, not those that had admitted to fraudulently filing over 400,000 voter registration forms.

This process is corrupted, Mr. Speaker, and it is because the process doesn't work. If it can change after it comes out of the committee, if it can change out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, if it can change out of the Judiciary Committee, if it can be changed at the direction of the chairman out of the Financial Services Committee, and if the Rules Committee can decide and the Speaker can direct them to decide what comes to this floor, then the American people don't even have the benefit of the debate, let alone the opportunity to improve and perfect legislation, which is a provision by our Founding Fathers.

And I would yield to the gentleman from Georgia to reiterate my point.

Reclaiming my time, the gentleman from Georgia, I thank you for your statement on this matter. And I would reiterate that each of us represents somewhere between 600 and 700,000 Americans. The franchise is this, Mr. Speaker, we owe all our constituents our best effort and our best judgment. And a lot of that best judgment comes from our constituents who are tuned into those issues who funnel those ideas to us. And we need to sort those ideas, and then we need to bring them back into the process in the hearing process in the subcommittee and in the full committee markup process and in the

Rules Committee and in debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. And the vision of the Founding Fathers is this, that the best ideas of America get synthesized, they get compressed and encapsulated here through this process that I have described finally being debated and voted upon on the floor of the House of Representatives. And there the vigor of the American people can be presented to the United States Senate for them to cool the coffee in the saucer as opposed to the hotter cup that comes from the House. That is the vision of our Founding Fathers. That is the vision that is being usurped by the policies of our regal Speaker who has undermined our national security.

And I would yield to the gentleman from Texas.

The President of the United States has said, why can't you learn from Spain?

Reclaiming my time.

This sparks a little bit of a number of some data that I produced about not quite a week ago. I have been asking the question, How do you put this global warming in context, Mr. Speaker? And so I begin to ask these basic questions that any environmentalist that was creating the idea of limiting the amount of greenhouse gasses that could be emitted into the atmosphere, when asked this broader question of, well, how big is this atmosphere--I mean, that is like question number one: How big is the atmosphere? And I don't think anybody here knows the answer to that question, Mr. Speaker. And I would ask you this question directly, but I don't want to put you on the spot. I just want you to listen carefully. That is that our atmosphere, the total weight--this is how we measure it in metric tons--the total weight of our atmosphere is 5.150 quadrillion metric tons. That's the pressure of all of this atmosphere that's pushing down on the Earth's gravity. If you could put a scale on all of the surface of the Earth, they would say, Oh, 5.150 quadrillion metric tons. That's all the atmosphere we have.

Now, that's the idea or the content of the volume of our atmosphere.

Then the next question you've got to ask is, well, if you're going to set the Earth's thermostat by controlling the emissions into the atmosphere from the industry of the United States of America, wouldn't you want to know what the net cumulative total of the U.S. industry since the dawn of industrial revolution would actually be?

Well, I asked the question of the energy information agency that we have--and it's their job--and of course they don't have the answer to that because they never asked the second most obvious question. The first one is how big is the atmosphere. The second one is what has the Earth done or what has America done to contribute to the greenhouse gasses, the CO2 within the atmosphere? The cumulative total contributed by the U.S. industrial giant since 1800 works out to be this: 178,792,900 metric tons of CO2.

Now, what's that mean to anybody that's paying attention? I'm sure there is somebody out there that's run the calculator and already come to this conclusion. This would be .00347 percent of the overall atmosphere.

Now, what does that mean in terms we can understand? This way, Mr. Speaker. If you would draw a circle that represented the entire volume of the Earth's atmosphere and do it at a 48-inch radius, 8-foot circle--so two 4-by-8 sheets of drywall side to side, circle drawn, full amount, more than my full wingspan here, that's the circle that you envision, Mr. Speaker. Now, how much of this overall volume of the U.S. atmosphere is the cumulative total of CO2 contributed by the U.S. industrial might since the dawn of the industrial revolution? That little circle in the middle of that 8-foot circle would be about like that, .56 inches. The diameter of about a buffalo bullet is about all it would be in the center of that 8-foot circle, and that's the cumulative total.

And we are going to reduce the overall U.S. emissions by 20 percent for a while and then 40 percent for a while and 83 percent for a while. And sooner or later, the arrogance and the vanity of America is going to adjust the thermostat of God's green Earth with a ratio of less than half an inch on an 8-foot diameter circle. How could we possibly imagine that could work? Where is Al Gore when I need him to explain this to me?

I will say this. Al Gore, you were wrong on the science. And those of you who are busily marking up in Energy and Commerce a cap-and-tax bill today, tomorrow, the next day, and for eternity, are utterly wrong on the economics. You would handicap America's economy on some myopic idea, some vanity idea that we could control the Earth's temperature, set the thermostat of America by reducing the size of this .56 circle in the middle of the 8-foot diameter. That's what we are dealing with. That's Midwestern common sense. And we're dealing with the utter arrogance of people who believe this rather than the God that created this Earth.

Or allow the miracle of photosynthesis to solve this problem of mothers kissing their children goodnight.

I will yield to the other judge from Texas, Mr. Gohmert.

Will the gentleman yield?

I would ask the gentleman from Texas, can you think of some program, a tax or any other program that would more effectively transfer jobs to China, India, and developing countries other than cap-and-tax here in the United States?

Reclaiming my time.

I want to pose this question, and this is the question I posed to the judge from Texas and I posed this to the other judge from Texas and the doctor from Georgia. I pose this to all of my Democrat friends over on this side of the aisle. Can you envision any program that would transfer more jobs from America to the developing countries than cap- and-tax? Is there anything out there that would be worse for our economy? If you have an idea, stand. I will yield to you. I will be very happy to yield this microphone to anybody on this side of the aisle that believes that Judge Gohmert would happen to be wrong or I happen to be wrong that there is any means that can more cripple America's industry or cost our economy more or transfer more jobs to foreign countries than cap-and-tax that's being debated right now in Energy and Commerce. I say none. You don't ask me to yield. That means you have no better idea.

I will yield to the gentleman from Georgia instead.

So the gentleman agrees with my conclusion.

Let me pose a question. What would be, in the history of the United States of America, today, including potentially a cap-and-tax bill that's before the Energy and Commerce Committee today, what would be the most colossal mistake ever made in the history of the United States Congress? In your opinion. And then I want to hear the opinion from the gentleman from Texas as well.

Reclaiming my time.

Is there a bigger mistake that has been made in the history of the United States Congress other than handicapping the U.S. economy by applying a cap-and-tax program? Can you think of anything, Judge Carter, that has happened in the last 200-and-some years?

Let me make this statement that Smoot-Hawley didn't put on our economy nearly as much burden as we would have with cap-and- tax. This taxation is the most inefficient taxation ever devised in the history of the United States of America. It applies about $5 worth of tax for every dollar that ends up in the Federal coffers, and otherwise it has no impact whatsoever. It is a tax. It is an 80 percent overburden for a 20 percent revenue stream. That's how bad cap-and-tax is. And I believe it's the most colossal mistake--if it's done--in the history of the United States Congress.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Reclaiming my time and presuming that we have a couple of minutes left.

I thank the Speaker for that acknowledgment.

We have watched this free enterprise system be subverted, and it's been subverted almost systematically and in a Machiavellian fashion and a fashion so much faster than I ever would have imagined it could have done. I've watched class envy be implemented as

a political tool that pit Americans against Americans and say to them, You don't have to worry about your car payment, your utility bill, or your rent or house payment because sooner or later, the Federal Government is going to cover that.

We're going to take from those who produce more, and we are going to give it to people who produce less. It's a matter of a political tool that says you are not really entitled to what you earn but you are entitled to what you claim you need.

And so this statement was made this morning by Star Parker, who is a wonderful, wonderful American citizen. She said the policy, as exists now in America, is that if somebody has something that you want, you go hire politicians to take it from them and give it to you. That's what's going on in America today, this America that was a meritocracy, an America that when my grandmother came here from Germany a little over 100 years ago, people stood on their own two feet, provided for themselves, and reached out and helped others. Where my father and his family were raised off of the coins in the cookie jar, today it's the coins of those who are working being passed over to those who don't, Mr. Speaker.

We cannot be the most successful Nation in the history of the world if we do not refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism. If we don't reestablish the merits of our free enterprise capitalistic system, if we don't refurbish the property rights that are there, if we fail to refurbish the rights that come from God, that are conferred through our Declaration and reiterated by our Founding Fathers, that these rights come from God and that they're natural rights and it falls under natural law, if we fail to refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism, we have seen the apex of our civilization.

The charge is on all of us. The charge is on Democrats to wake up to this fact, and the charge is on Republicans to wake America up to this fact. And I am committed to this cause, as are my colleagues here in the House of Representatives, including the judge from Texas and the doctor from Georgia.

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

One of the things that I am able to receive as I come down here and prepare for my hour here is an opportunity to listen to my colleagues and sometimes an opportunity to get an education. And if one listens carefully, Madam Speaker, there is a lot to be learned in this Congress. In fact, I believe that this is the most amazing educational experience that one could ask for.

We are the center of information here in many ways. Washington, DC, is a magnet for information. And as Members, we have staff and committee people that gather that information at our request and give it to us in a means by which we can understand it, process it, and utilize it.

In this information age that we have, this electronic era that we have, the Internet is full of information. The Library of Congress is full of information. There are all kinds of links out there; many of them are very credible, some of them are not very credible. So we sort through, and we are always looking at what is the original source. How do you document the credibility? Well, you figure out who the person was that wrote it and their measure of credibility.

So as I come to the floor and listen tonight, I am rather amazed at what I've learned. I saw this long list of successes of the Progressives. And I've lived through a fair amount of history by now, Madam Speaker, and I've studied a lot of history by now, and I had never equated the Revolutionary War to Progressives. That's a new thing to me. That's a revolution to me. It's a revelation to me that it was the Progressive group that decided that we should throw off the yolk of King George and grasp our freedom.

It seems to me that it was the Founding Fathers and those who shaped this Nation who put down in the document of the Declaration of Independence--that inspirational document--that our rights come from God and that those rights that flow from God into man are granted willingly to the people. That's a structure that--I guess you could call it progressive, but I haven't heard anybody on this side of the aisle that calls themselves Progressive stand up and say that their rights come from God or that there are natural rights and there is a natural order of things and it's ordered by the Master of the universe. That's what our Founding Fathers believed. That was the inspiration that shaped America. It was the inspiration that brought about the Declaration, and it was the inspiration that caused the perseverance that allowed the United States to prevail over the British in the Revolutionary War.

The Nation was forged on those fundamental values that haven't been openly rejected by the Progressives, but neither have they been embraced by the Progressive Caucus. But almost night after night I hear these things. The American Revolution, a success of the Progressives. That's a new one. I had not heard that one before.

The emancipation of the slaves. Well, that's an idea that is related to change. The institution of slavery had existed for thousands of years. But I didn't know that Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists were considered to be Progressives. I thought they were, Madam Speaker, Republicans. In fact, I'm sure they were Republicans. I have no doubt about it.

The history of my family and the history of my understanding of the Republican Party is it was forged in order to abolish slavery. That's why they came about. That's why they formed together and nominated Abraham Lincoln because he was the abolitionist

candidate, the first Republican candidate, the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, emancipated the slaves.

What would Abe Lincoln think if he were able to listen tonight and answer to the rhetoric that is here on the floor of the House of Representatives that claims that emancipation, the end of slavery at the loss of 600,000 free people who gave their lives in the clash to put an end to slavery and to establish the States' rights issue and to tie the Union back together, all those things tied together. All of that blood that was spilled by the sword that paid for the blood that was drawn by the lash was spilled because Republican abolitionists stepped forward and said we're going to put an end to the atrocity called slavery. They didn't think of themselves as Progressives. I don't think the word existed in politics in the fashion that we hear it today.

There are a group of Progressives in this Congress today. I don't know how they associate themselves with the success of the American Revolution, inspired by the rights that come from God, or the end of slavery that was paid for in blood and inspired and led by people who formed the Republican Party for, at least in part, the specific purpose to abolish slavery.

And then I go on and I see the National Park System, Teddy Roosevelt. I would call Teddy Roosevelt--not a Progressive. I would call him a populist, but not a Progressive. So he was responsible for establishing the National Park System. When I first looked at it, I thought, well, the Progressives are the ``national pork system.'' I would agree with that, Madam Speaker. But, no, the typo didn't exist. The chart said, ``National Park System.'' So let's give that to the prairie populous, or the populous, not the Progressives.

Civil rights for minorities and women was another piece on this poster board; civil rights for minorities and women, passed by Republicans, majority of Republicans--more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 than did Democrats. It gets distorted if you read the history off the poster. If you go back and look at the reality and the facts of it all, it's entirely different.

When I see rural electrification, it gets my attention. There have been a couple years of my life that I didn't use electricity that came from a rural electric cooperative. But almost every other year--most of the years of my life that has been our primary source of power. And I know where rural electrification came from. My families grew up on farms that didn't have electricity. They remember when the first wire got out there to the end of the line and they hung a light bulb in the barn so they could go out there and milk the cows in the dark; not by the lantern any longer, but by a 40-watt bulb that hung on a wire out of the ceiling of the barn. You pulled a little chain, turned the light on, then you could milk in the shadows of the light bulb instead of the shadows of the flickering lantern. That got there because of cooperatives.

And cooperatives, I believe at the very closest you could bring them towards progressivism would be taking them towards populism. It was the people out on the prairie and in the open range, the La Grange in the West, the populism that exists today within the politics of the people from where I live and points on west, that politics that decided we're going to settle this countryside and we're not going to live out here and live in darkness without water, sewer, water, lights or roads. We're not going to try to farm this countryside and take it back from the wilderness and turn it into a productive region unless--we can do it if we can bring electricity out, if we can bring services out, if we can bring telephone out.

And so they went to work and they set up cooperatives. They didn't view themselves as Progressives. They didn't even view themselves as populists. The people that established the RECs years ago, the rural electric cooperatives--and I have known many of them face to face, personally, as neighbors, most of them passed away by now. They shaped their cooperatives because it was the only way they could get electrical power out to the farms.

I happened to have followed that history from the time it was shaped together when they decided to build their first power plant. The network that comes to my part of the country that flows all the way up from what was South Crawford REC, now it's Western Area Power--or connected to Western Area Power, then on up through Basin Electric all the way up into the coal mines in Wyoming--which, by the way, Wyoming is one of the most punished States under the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax piece of legislation. But they shaped this so that they could have electricity go to the farms.

And they had to join together to do it. They had to have a little help because it cost a lot more money to string a wire from farm to farm a half a mile to a half a mile than it does to string it from house to house in the city or into an apartment complex or into an office complex within a city. So they shaped the cooperatives to do that.

I noticed on that board that took all this credit for Progressives-- the accomplishments of creative individuals that wanted to simply operate in a free enterprise economy--that it didn't have our grain cooperatives there, but we established those, too; the grain cooperatives so that the farmer-owned cooperatives could set up a grain elevator to store and dry their grain and ship it and market it, and also mix and grind feed and sell fertilizers and chemicals and make this all work.

It's the same kind of a function in the grain cooperatives as we had in our electric cooperatives. But in neither case was it Progressives that put this together, just like it wasn't the Progressives that fought and won the American Revolution or emancipated the slaves. In fact, of all these things that I've listed, it was a majority of Republicans--if you would identify their politics--that brought about these changes, most of which are good changes or they wouldn't have been listed on that poster board. But I think it's revisionist history, Madam Speaker, and I could not let that moment pass without raising that issue.

I will just stick with this subject for a moment, Madam Speaker, because I know what a Progressive is and I think America needs to know what a Progressive is. Now, it is not someone who has emancipated the slaves or fought and won the American Revolution or established a rural electric cooperative, not somebody that did those things.

It wasn't really somebody that--they may have played a part in, but they weren't a central part--that established the civil rights. It's people that believed in the intrinsic value of the individual, the rights that come from God regardless of what your race or ethnicity might be. That's not a Progressive thought. That's a thought of rights that come from God.

So here's what a Progressive is. And, Madam Speaker, anybody that's curious about this can just simply go to their Google page--that's the one thing that hasn't been nationalized at this point--and they can just Google in there dsausa.org--that's the Democratic Socialists of America, dsausa.org--and the screen will come up, and on it will say, ``What is Democratic Socialism?'' And when you read through this Web site--which I happen to have right here, Madam Speaker, and I will enter this into the Record--and this document that is the socialist Web site, peruse through it a little bit, dsausa.org.

What is Democratic Socialism?

Questions and Answers From the Democratic Socialists of America

Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and

society should be run democratically--to meet public needs,

not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just

society, many structures of our government and economy must

be radically transformed through greater economic and social

democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the

many decisions that affect our lives.

Democracy and socialism go hand in hand. All over the

world, wherever the idea of democracy has taken root, the

vision of socialism has taken root as well--everywhere but in

the United States. Because of this, many false ideas about

socialism have developed in the US. With this pamphlet, we

hope to answer some of your questions about socialism.

Q: Doesn't socialism mean that the government will own and

run everything?

Democratic socialists do not want to create an all-powerful

government bureaucracy. But we do not want big corporate

bureaucracies to control our society either. Rather, we

believe that social and economic decisions should be made by

those whom they most affect.

Today, corporate executives who answer only to themselves

and a few wealthy stockholders make basic economic decisions

affecting millions of people. Resources are used to make

money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We

believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by

economic institutions should own and control them.

Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-

owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by

workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists

favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large

concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and

steel pay necessitate some form of state ownership, many

consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.

Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that

the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we

believe that democratic planning can shape major social

investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market

mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many

consumer goods.

Q: Hasn't socialism been discredited by the collapse of

Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe?

Socialists have been among the harshest critics of

authoritarian Communist states. Just because their

bureaucratic elites called them ``socialist'' did not make it

so; they also called their regimes ``democratic.'' Democratic

socialists always opposed the ruling party-states of those

societies, just as we oppose the ruling classes of capitalist

societies. We applaud the democratic revolutions that have

transformed the former Communist bloc. However, the

improvement of people's lives requires real democracy without

ethnic rivalries and/or new forms of authoritarianism.

Democratic socialists will continue to play a key role in

that struggle throughout the world.

Moreover, the fall of Communism should not blind us to

injustices at home. We cannot allow all radicalism to be

dismissed as ``Communist.'' That suppression of dissent and

diversity undermines America's ability to live up to its

promise of equality of opportunity, not to mention the

freedoms of speech and assembly.

Q: Private corporations seem to be a permanent fixture in

the US, so why work towards socialism?

In the short term we can't eliminate private corporations,

but we can bring them under greater democratic control. The

government could use regulations and tax incentives to

encourage companies to act in the public interest and outlaw

destructive activities such as exporting jobs to low-wage

countries and polluting our environment. Public pressure can

also have a critical role to play in the struggle to hold

corporations accountable. Most of all, socialists look to

unions make private business more accountable.

Q: Won't socialism be impractical because people will lose

their incentive to work?

We don't agree with the capitalist assumption that

starvation or greed are the only reasons people work. People

enjoy their work if it is meaningful and enhances their

lives. They work out of a sense of responsibility to their

community and society. Although a long-term goal of socialism

is to eliminate all but the most enjoyable kinds of labor, we

recognize that unappealing jobs will long remain. These tasks

would be spread among as many people as possible rather than

distributed on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or

gender, as they are under capitalism. And this undesirable

work should be among the best, not the least, rewarded work

within the economy. For now, the burden should be placed on

the employer to make work desirable by raising wages,

offering benefits and improving the work environment. In

short, we believe that a combination of social, economic, and

moral incentives will motivate people to work.

Q: Why are there no models of democratic socialism?

Although no country has fully instituted democratic

socialism, the socialist parties and labor movements of other

countries have won many victories for their people. We can

learn from the comprehensive welfare state maintained by the

Swedes, from Canada's national health care system, France's

nationwide childcare program, and Nicaragua's literacy

programs. Lastly, we can learn from efforts initiated right

here in the US, such as the community health centers created

by the government in the 1960s. They provided high quality

family care, with community involvement in decision-making.

Q: But hasn't the European Social Democratic experiment

failed?

For over half a century, a number of nations in Western

Europe and Scandinavia have enjoyed both tremendous

prosperity and relative economic equality thanks to the

policies pursued by social democratic parties. These nations

used their relative wealth to insure a high standard of

living for their citizens--high wages, health care and

subsidized education. Most importantly, social democratic

parties supported strong labor movements that became central

players in economic decision-making. But with the

globalization of capitalism, the old social democratic model

becomes ever harder to maintain. Stiff competition from low-

wage labor markets in developing countries and the constant

fear that industry will move to avoid taxes and strong labor

regulations has diminished (but not eliminated) the ability

of nations to launch ambitious economic reform on their own.

Social democratic reform must now happen at the international

level. Multinational corporations must be brought under

democratic controls, and workers' organizing efforts must

reach across borders.

Now, more than ever, socialism is an international

movement. As socialists have always known, the welfare of

working people in Finland or California depends largely on

standards in Italy or Indonesia. As a result, we must work

towards reforms that can withstand the power of

multinationals and global banks, and we must fight for a

world order that is not controlled by bankers and bosses.

Q: Aren't you a party that's in competition with the

Democratic Party for votes and support?

No, we are not a separate party. Like our friends and

allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and

community organizing movements, many of us have been active

in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to

strengthen the party's left wing, represented by the

Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The process and structure of American elections seriously

hurts third party efforts. Winner-take-all elections instead

of proportional representation, rigorous party qualification

requirements that vary from state to state, a presidential

instead of a parliamentary system, and the two-party monopoly

on political power have doomed third party efforts. We hope

that at some point in the future, in coalition with our

allies, an alternative national party will be viable. For

now, we will continue to support progressives who have a real

chance at winning elections, which usually means left-wing

Democrats.

Q: If I am going to devote time to politics, why shouldn't

I focus on something more immediate?

Although capitalism will be with us for a long time,

reforms we win now--raising the minimum wage, securing a

national health plan, and demanding passage of right-to-

strike legislation--can bring us closer to socialism. Many

democratic socialists actively work in the single-issue

organizations that advocate for those reforms. We are visible

in the reproductive freedom movement, the fight for student

aid, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered organizations,

anti-racist groups, and the labor movement.

It is precisely our socialist vision that informs and

inspires our day-to-day activism for social justice. As

socialists we bring a sense of the interdependence of all

struggles for justice. No single-issue organization can truly

challenge the capitalist system or adequately secure its

particular demands. In fact, unless we are all collectively

working to win a world without oppression, each fight for

reforms will be disconnected, maybe even self-defeating.

Q: What can young people do to move the US towards

socialism?

Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, young people

have played a critical role in American politics. They have

been a tremendous force for both political and cultural

change in this country: in limiting the US's options in the

war in Vietnam, in forcing corporations to divest from the

racist South African regime, in reforming universities, and

in bringing issues of sexual orientation and gender

discrimination to public attention. Though none of these

struggles were fought by young people alone, they all

featured youth as leaders in multi-generational progressive

coalitions. Young people are needed in today's struggles as

well: for universal health care and stronger unions, against

welfare cuts and predatory multinational corporations.

Schools, colleges and universities are important to

American political culture. They are the places where ideas

are formulated and policy discussed and developed. Being an

active part of that discussion is a critical job for young

socialists. We have to work hard to change people's

misconceptions about socialism, to broaden political debate,

and to overcome many students' lack of interest in engaging

in political action. Off-campus, too, in our daily cultural

lives, young people can be turning the tide against racism,

sexism and homophobia, as well as the conservative myth of

the virtue of ``free'' markets.

Q: If so many people misunderstand socialism, why continue

to use the word?

First, we call ourselves socialists because we are proud of

what we are. Second, no matter what we call ourselves,

conservatives will use it against us. Anti-socialism has been

repeatedly used to attack reforms that shift power to working

class people and away from corporate capital. In 1993,

national health insurance was attacked as ``socialized

medicine'' and defeated. Liberals are routinely denounced as

socialists in order to discredit reform. Until we face, and

beat, the stigma attached to the ``S word,'' politics in

America will continue to be stifled and our options limited.

We also call ourselves socialists because we are proud of the

traditions upon which we are based, of the heritage of the

Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, and of

other struggles for change that have made America more

democratic and just. Finally, we call ourselves socialists to

remind everyone that we have a vision of a better world.

It really doesn't take a very heavy read to figure out what's going on. These are the Socialists. They say, ``We believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect.'' Huh. Sounds

like a little bit of what's been going on with the major corporations in America. Sounds a little like what's happened to the auto industry. It looks like they've been taken over and nationalized by the White House and handed over to the unions for control. That would fit. ``We believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect.''

Here's another one: ``We believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.'' Exactly what's happening to the automakers today, as they pulled the plug on a good number of Chrysler auto dealers, as they threatened to pull the plug on an even greater number of General Motors auto dealers, and as the stock shares get handed over to the unions at the expense of the investors who were owners of the hard collateral of the business of Chrysler Motors, and now it looks like General Motors as well, all right off the Web page of the socialists. ``We believe that the workers and consumers that are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.

``Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives''; not managed for profit, not managed for efficiency, but nationalized businesses run and managed by workers and consumer representatives.

I started a construction company in 1975. I borrowed money, invested a lot of capital, and the business is going on. It's a second- generation construction company. My older son owns it today. There were a good number of places along the way that it would have been easy to give up and just drop out of business, but I had to make it work. I was determined to make it work. And if I had handed over the management of the company to the employees at any one of those critical points, there's no way that King Construction would have survived.

This is quoting from the sheet again. ``While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership''--they're talking again about nationalizing--``many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.''

So they want to nationalize large businesses where there's concentrations of capital--energy, steel, a couple of examples. Automakers fall right in that. And on here it says, Well, we're not Communists. Here's the difference. Communists are harder lined than we are, and there's a few other distinctions. I'll ask you to read that, Madam Speaker, thoroughly. I think everybody in this Congress should know what the difference is between a Communist and a Socialist. I don't like either one.

I don't like either one. I like free markets. I like freedom. I like free enterprise. I like capitalism, and I like individual rights that come from God. Those are the pillars of American exceptionalism, not socialism, not Marxism, not communism.

Here is another pretty frequently asked question. Private corporations seem to be a permanent fixture in the U.S., so why work towards socialism? Here is the socialist answer: In the short term, we can't eliminate private corporations.

Now I think, Madam Speaker, that you've been convinced that the Democratic socialists of America want to nationalize the major corporations, and they want to run this free enterprise economy not as a free enterprise economy but as a collectivist state, operating businesses for the benefit of the workers and the customers without regard to profit or the investors. That is clear here.

Also what's clear in this document, which I will submit for the Record, is that the socialists are no longer hosting the Web site of the Progressive Caucus. Because in 1999 the issue was raised and the heat got a little too high so the socialists that were managing the Web site of the Progressive Caucus, they decided, and the progressives decided they'd run their own Web site.

So when you see Progressive Caucus come up on a blue board here on the floor, they're saying, go to our Web site, see what all we've got. Look at all the credit we're taking for the things we didn't do. And, by the way, they don't actually announce that they are the legislative arm of the socialists, which you will find in this document that I will introduce into the Record this evening, Madam Speaker.

They say here in this document off the Web site, the socialist Web site, that they are not a political party that nominates candidates under their banner. But their legislative arm is the Progressive Caucus, an absolute undeniable link right here on the Web site, socialists tied to progressives. That's what they are, Madam Speaker.

So I get a little disturbed when this Congress and the rest of the Nation tries to mess with the definitions that Noah Webster wrote into our dictionary and our understanding of the English language.

We know what socialism is. If you want to find out what communism is, the socialists define it. If you want find out what a progressive is, the socialists say progressives are them, their arm. And there is a list when you go on the Web site of 72 registered progressives in this Congress that are linked to the socialists directly as their legislative arm. They are the ones advocating for the nationalization of our energy industry, for the oil refinery industry, for the nationalization of our automakers, for example, and all the way up the line. Our financial institutions, large insurance companies, the nationalization that has taken place from President Obama with the full support of the Progressive Caucus and most of the Democrats in this Congress and in the House and in the Senate, Madam Speaker.

I don't think that we can hold the rose-colored glasses along any longer. We have got to understand that our freedoms are being taken from us, and it's happening right in front of our very eyes, under our very nose. And the American people don't understand it yet.

When they go to the Web site and they read through this document, What is Democratic Socialism? on the Web site of dsausa.org, and look to the connection of Progressive Caucus.

And then, by the way, go to the Progressive Caucus Web site. They put it up here. Just Google Progressive Caucus and up will come the Web site that takes the credit for a lot of these things that they didn't have anything to do with, they didn't have any existence then during that period of time. But also they won't take credit for the things that they advocate for that are the mirror image of what comes off the socialist Web site here. One and the same, Madam Speaker. And the American people need to know it, and they know it now.

So that's a little bit of what I didn't come here to talk about, Madam Speaker. But what I did come here to talk about is the nomination of one Dawn Johnsen to the Office of Legal Counsel. Dawn Johnsen is the President's nominee. And the Office of Legal Counsel, for the sake of those who are not all wrapped up in government, is the most important nomination that you've never heard of.

The Office of Legal Counsel is kind of a mini Supreme Court. They issue carefully worded opinions, and they're regarded as binding precedent, and they have the final say on what the President and all his agencies can and cannot legally do, Madam Speaker.

So this is the person that has the opportunity to whisper into the ear of the President on a daily basis, on a regular basis and make recommendations such as, Mr. President, you do or you don't have the authority to issue an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay. That would be one of those whispers into the ear of the President. It might well be a written document that would be formally handed to him as well. I use that as, I'll say, an image, not so much a technicality.

Dawn Johnsen is the person who has offended, I think, a greater number of Americans than any other nominee, even those that didn't pay their taxes. There is a long list of things that Dawn Johnsen has said and done. But I believe at this time it would be useful if I could have the opportunity to yield to the very vigorous and energetic gentlelady from Ohio (Mrs. Schmidt) for however much time as she may consume.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentlelady for coming to the floor and standing up for life and making this announcement on statement after statement, quote after quote, that has come from Dawn Johnsen, the former legal counsel for NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the one who has inflamed the profamily, prolife, pro-Constitution pro-individual rights of people in this country by making a whole series of outrageous statements. And many of them were mentioned by the gentlelady from Ohio.

I put this one up on abortion protesters, this is the KKK piece, that ``the `terrorist' behavior of petitioners is remarkably similar to the conspiracy of violence and intimidation carried out by the Ku Klux Klan against which Congress intended this statute to protect.''

People that are outside of the abortion clinics praying for the innocent human life that is being exterminated inside are being described as KKK-type of intimidators. This is the person that we would have whispering into the ear of the President, the Office of Legal Counsel, issuing opinions and decisions

that are de facto judgments on our Constitution and the legality. And that is one example. The gentlelady gave a number of other examples. And I would yield to the gentlelady from Ohio.

Reclaiming my time from the gentlelady who has been a champion for life for a long time, here is another piece that we have heard about, Dawn Johnsen on abortion, legal but not rare. This is where she even goes in conflict with such known liberals as Hillary Clinton, for example, where Dawn Johnsen said, ``The notion of legal restrictions as some kind of reasonable `compromise,' perhaps to help make abortion `safe, legal and rare,' thus proves nonsensical.'' That is her statement of January 25, 2006, not that long ago.

And here our Progressives show up again, as I spoke about earlier, Madam Speaker, ``Progressives must not portray all abortions tragedies. Absent unforeseen technological and medical changes, abortion is unlikely to become truly rare and certainly not nonexistent.''

This lady isn't happy about abortion becoming rare. She has chastised even Hillary Clinton about asking for abortion to be safe, legal and rare. This gives you an example of what Progressives are, also, Madam Speaker. Progressives fit this bill. Can you imagine a Progressive who was antislavery who believed in the value, the intrinsic value of human life, to the extent of laying down their life for their brethren who have lived in bondage, would people like that be advocating for more abortions and calling those who pray outside of abortion clinics equivalent to the KKK? I think we know what a Progressive is today. I don't think there were any Progressives that existed by any defined label that took place around the Revolutionary War time, Madam Speaker.

But Dawn Johnsen does fit. She is a Progressive. I will give her that. And her name should be withdrawn by the President of the United States.

In fact, the gentlelady from Ohio and I are on a letter together. We and 60 other Members of Congress issued a letter to President Obama dated March 24, 2009. It calls upon President Obama to withdraw the nomination of Dawn Johnsen as Office of Legal Counsel. And part of the language here in the second page of the letter to the President signed by 62 of us from the House says: ``Senator Hillary Clinton, in a 2005 speech commendable for setting forth a pro-choice, pro-prevention, pro- family agenda, took the aspiration a step in the wrong direction.'' This is Dawn Johnsen talking about Hillary Clinton. She said Hillary Clinton ``took the aspiration to rare abortions a step in the wrong direction when she called for policy changes so that abortion 'does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances.' '' That is a quote of Hillary Clinton.

Dawn Johnsen even calls Hillary Clinton out as not progressive enough, not being enough pro-abortion that she would think that abortions should be rare. That is an affront to Dawn Johnsen's values. And Dawn Johnsen would be in a position to whisper into the ear of the President on what is legal and what isn't, what is constitutional and what isn't. But not only that, she is not just flipping a toggle switch that is a legal opinion, Madam Speaker. She is shaping legal policy and making recommendations to the President that are policy changes.

Now imagine if she wasn't there. And she is formally not there because her nomination is held up by the Senate. It is held up by the Senate because they know many of the things that Mrs. Schmidt and I have talked about here tonight and we have talked about for some months now since her nomination emerged. But the Guantanamo Bay issue fits perfectly with the type of thing that I would bring to bear where an Office of Legal Counsel would be there with access to the President continually, generating an activist left-wing, yes, call it a Progressive agenda, because that is not going to be a very good word when we finish describing what it is, coming up with ideas like, Mr. President, you need to issue an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay and turn these prisoners loose.

Well, Madam Speaker, I didn't make that up. I'm not being flippant. I'm simply quoting Dawn Johnsen. It says here on a list of quotes from Dawn Johnsen with regard to Guantanamo Bay under Gitmo that Dawn Johnsen posits two alternatives to deal with the Gitmo detainees, the enemy combatants, the terrorists, the vile al Qaeda terrorists, the worst of the worst that are down there, 241 of them, according to the testimony before the Judiciary Committee today by Attorney General Holder.

She says we only have two choices with the Gitmo detainees: either release them or transfer them to facilities in the United States and consideration of civilian criminal prosecution in the Federal courts. An outrageous idea that seems to be under consideration by this White House at this time.

And I have been down to Gitmo maybe a little over a month ago. They are living pretty good down there, Madam Speaker. No nation has ever treated prisoners of a conflict as well. I didn't say any better. I said no nation has treated them as well as we have treated these enemies at Guantanamo Bay who have a vile oath to kill Americans. And they believe it is their path to salvation. They are attacking American guards an average of 20 times a day. Half the time they are throwing feces and trying to rub it into the face of our guards. That is their own feces. The other half of the time they are physically assaulting them and trying to hurt them with whatever they might have for cuffs and shackles. They are living in climate control. They set the thermostat in the air conditioned Caribbean island vacation resort. Their limitations are they have to live within the fences that keep them from getting away. But even when they are in there, they get a little soccer field. They can go out and play soccer. They have got foosball tables. They get to choose from nine items on the menu every day and they set the thermostat between 75 and 80 degrees because they say that is their cultural temperature. So we would give them air conditioning and give them their cultural temperature while our troops are sometimes out in the sun. They stop for prayer five times a day, 100 minutes a day. Our troops stop and respectfully wait. That is all right with me. Everybody gets a Koran. No one can have a Bible. Of the 800-and-some who were there altogether, there was one who requested a Bible. And it created such belligerence and violence among other detainees that they said, no, you can't have a Bible. They have since released the individual that wanted a Bible. Everybody else gets a Koran, one that is untouched by one of these infidel guards that are getting feces thrown in their face on a regular basis, Madam Speaker.

This is the kind of idea that comes from Dawn Johnsen. Let's turn these people loose or bring them to the United States. She argues that she should have habeas corpus rights. That is a radical Federal Court decision by the way. And it is radical. The Founding Fathers would have never approved such a thing. That is why they wrote the provisions in the Constitution of habeas corpus. She writes that it was there so that when we fight people around the world we can round them up and bring them back on a slow ship with a sail. They didn't have motors on their boats back then, let alone airplanes. Bring before an American court. Give them rights of habeas corpus. If they get turned loose on a technicality, turn them loose into the streets of America. I asked the Attorney General today, Can you assure us that you will not turn these Gitmo detainees loose into the United States? He could not assure of us of that.

Now, I can tell you if I were the Attorney General, I would be able to find out a way. I could tell you under these conditions this is what we are trying to do. I will assure you I would do everything I can. I would at least like not to have these detainees board domestic

American airliners and fly with my children or grandchildren. I would think that maybe we could put them on the no-fly list like Teddy Kennedy was. For some reason, we can't even do that.

And as a temporary diversion to this diatribe, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Indiana, who might be able to flesh that story out just a little bit, such time as he may consume.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman's coming to the floor and laying out this picture in this fashion, as much as I do the gentlewoman from Ohio doing the same.

As I listened to this, Dawn Johnsen's confirmation of her nomination is in trouble. Harry Reid announced that Tuesday of this week, that he had planned to bring it up for a vote. He was short a couple Democrat votes, and I think more than that.

So we need to ask, I think, Madam Speaker, that everybody weigh in on this from a conscience standpoint and understand that these statements made by Dawn Johnsen are just that, an advocacy for the National Abortion Rights Action League, which she was the chief legal counsel for them. She argued a number of cases before the court. The record is replete. It does not vary. It's consistent. It's liberal. It's activist. It is a danger to life. It's a danger to every unborn child. And she is a danger to fathers.

This is a quote from Dawn Johnsen: ``Our position is that there is no father and no child, just a fetus, and any move by the courts to force a woman to have a child amounts to involuntary servitude.''

But put into that context. Dangerous for babies, unborn babies, dangerous for mothers, who are disrespected. My mother a fetal container? That offends me. It should offend America. We're all children of mothers. They're not fetal containers; they're our mothers. They brought us into this world. They loved us. They nurtured us. There's no substitute for a mother, and I will never get to be one, and I'm a little jealous.

I yield to the gentlewoman.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentlewoman.

I'd add a piece that I want to reiterate here. Madam Speaker, if America is not moved enough at this pro-abortion activism and this legal distortion that has taken place as a matter of the professional actions and the public record of Dawn Johnsen, the President's nominee to head up the Office of Legal Counsel, they should be concerned about our national security. A national security that would say turn the Gitmo detainees loose or bring them here to the United States, put them under U.S. courts, and then, by the way, turn them loose and nurture them with our tax dollars so they can get on their feet again. All of that being part of this concept. But also Dawn Johnsen's objecting to surveillance of al Qaeda communications when it was a phone call that took place from a foreign country like, let's say, Afghanistan and ended up in Pakistan. If Osama bin Laden was calling Khalid Sheik Mohammed and if that nexus came back to the United States for the link but no one set foot in the United States, she would object to their not getting a warrant to listen in on that traffic on a telephone signal that would originate in Afghanistan and terminate in Pakistan.

Here is what she said. She attributed that type of surveillance to ``an extreme and implausible Commander in Chief theory.''

Now, this is an implausible and extreme theory, Madam Speaker, but the Commander in Chief is not a theory. It's constitutional. It's strictly defined in the Constitution. The Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces is the President of the United States. And the President of the United States has nominated Dawn Johnsen, who is a radical extremist. And her nomination is in trouble, and 62 of us wrote a letter and said please pull the nomination.

The President, if I were standing before him, I would make such a plea, and I would entreat the President of the United States that the juice is not worth the squeeze. There are plenty of activists that are traipsing through the White House these days. This is a lightning rod activist. Why don't you give us somebody that's not such a lightning rod, maybe somebody that's not going to be quite so radical. You're going to have to appoint somebody there to make these legal opinions, and I would like to have somebody that understands what's constitutional, at least recognize that the President of the United States is Commander in Chief, that constitutional position.

I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman and the gentlewoman.

It sparks my memory, as I listened to the gentleman from Indiana speak. A

mother is not transformed from a fetal container into a mother by the birth. A mother is a mother at conception and from that point on. And we use that language consistently.

But another piece comes to mind when I think about the President of the United States and this subject matter, and that is that I look back on the Saddleback Church debate that took place there, very well handled by Reverend Rick Warren, who offered the prayer just a few feet behind me here on the west portico of the Capitol Building at the inauguration of the President of the United States. But there they sat with John McCain and President Obama, and he asked the question of then-Senator Obama, When does life begin?

Senator Obama's answer was, ``That's above my pay scale.'' When life begins--when his life began--is above his own pay scale.

Now, there is significant evidence that President Obama got a raise put in since August of last year because he decided right away in January that it was in his pay scale. He decided that he would rescind the Mexico City policy which prohibited our taxpayer dollars from funding abortions in foreign lands. By executive order, he wiped that out, that very conscience decision that was debated on the floor of this House over and over and over again and defended by the pro-life effort in this Congress and across the United States. And he also by executive order decided that he wants to fund with Federal tax dollars the ending of human life in the form of experimenting on embryos, little frozen embryos, little snowflake babies, some of whom I've held in my arms that were frozen for 9 years. Loving, giggling, laughing little children wiped out by executive order that now seems to have found its legs and decided life must not begin or it must not be sacred yet if it's in the early stages, when it can't scream for its own mercy. So the Mexico City policy wiped out, the embryonic stem cell prohibition of using Federal dollars to experiment on them has already been moved. And now we see the appointment of Dawn Johnsen. And we have a President that's going to be soon speaking in South Bend, Indiana, at Notre Dame University, directly in conflict with the teachings of the church. It is a hard thing for us Catholics to watch. It's a hard thing for the pro-life people in this country to watch.

But I have seen hundreds of thousands of Americans come to this city to stand up for innocent unborn human life. They will come to this city in greater numbers if Dawn Johnsen is confirmed, and I think the President will keep that in mind, and I pray that he will pull her nomination.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I am honored to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this Nation's most deliberative body of debate, at least it used to be, and I hope it is once again, Mr. Speaker.

Having listened to my colleagues here and identified, I think, the centerpiece of this debate that's taking place in this country, I wanted to address, Mr. Speaker, this evening the idea of where we stand with the broad economic view that is what's taking place in the United States of America today, and then I'd like to take us back to where we are with the overall cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, greenhouse gas, global warming, climate change debate that's going on. The language seems to be drifting and moving a little bit, Mr. Speaker, on this. And I will go to the climate change component of this.

But first, Mr. Speaker, I want to address this situation on where we are from a broad economic perspective so that there is a backdrop in order to think about how we go forward with policy and what is the right policy for the United States of America within the context of the world and the globe.

We are the global economic leader. We are a large percentage of the world's economy. We have been leading this world's economy because we have, are, or were a free market economy. And the foundations for American exceptionalism should be clear to everyone on each side of the aisle.

Of course that foundation is rooted back in the philosophy that is the foundation for our Constitution, which is the Declaration of Independence. It's rooted in the natural law and the natural rights that come from God and that our founders all unanimously recognized. And as they took those principles and laid them out in the Declaration of Independence and then later on, about 13 years later, were able to get that language into the Constitution and get the Constitution ratified and give birth to a nation, what made us such a great nation? Why didn't we wallow back into the problems that so many other nations have had? What distinguishes the United States of America from the other countries in the world?

Now there have been powerful economies in the world. There have been powerful cultures and societies. The Founding Fathers studied a lot of those. They looked at the Greeks and the Romans, for example. They didn't have the opportunity to take a look at the former Soviet Union, but they would have taken a lesson from the former Soviet Union. It seems as though many Members in this Congress have missed that little history lesson, even though they lived it as contemporaries.

But these foundations of American exceptionalism, many of them in the Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of speech, religion, expression, assembly, a right to keep and bear arms, a right to property that was diminished, I think to some degree, by the Kelo decision in the Supreme Court about 3 years ago when they struck three

words from the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which says, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

The Supreme Court struck these three words ``for public use'' out of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That's the effect of their decision. And that, Mr. Speaker, isn't just me. That was my independent conclusion and analysis from reading the Supreme Court decision later on after I spoke on the floor on the issue, and as I prepared to rebut the now Chairman of the Financial Services Committee from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank). So I listened to him in preparation to--generally I would disagree with him on most everything that comes to this floor. This time he and I agreed verbatim. And I read later on Justice O'Connor's dissenting opinion, which also was right down the line with the position that Mr. Frank and myself and many others--the Supreme Court had undermined property rights by their Kelo decision.

But that is one of the major keys to American exceptionalism, that right to keep and own property, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

But in New London, Connecticut, they took private property and they transferred it over to another private entity, a development corporation, for the sake of what they considered to be a better public interest because they could collect more tax dollars from the developed property rather than the lesser-developed property.

It was a flawed fundamental constitutional principle that they made that decision upon, and now we're seeing an incremental encroachment upon other property rights in this country. But property rights being one of the pillars of American exceptionalism, I laid out those other points. Many of them are in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment.

But there are other reasons. One is that this Nation was founded by a robust people that skimmed the cream of the crop off of the donor nations as immigrants came to the United States with a dream. It was hard to get here, and yet there was so much to be gained and achieved when they arrived here. And they didn't all make it. Some of them failed. Some of them went back to their home country. Some of them didn't make the cut at Ellis Island. About 2 percent were turned around and put back on the boat and sent back to Europe back in those days, 100 or so years ago.

But those that stayed, many of them exceeded their own expectations. The success of the vitality of newly arriving immigrants in this country was another one of the foundations of American exceptionalism built upon these constitutional rights, including property rights, built upon free enterprise capitalism. That desire to succeed and that will to succeed along with a culture that celebrated success, those being some of the underpinnings of the pillars of American exceptionalism.

Well, as we look at how this has unfolded, these things happened, those pillars that came together at that time flowed from Western civilization, became the embodiment of Western civilization. And while that was going on, this robust people that had these new rights that came from God and this right to property and a right to return on their investment, these new rights that were there also matched up with a continent that was almost unlimited in natural resources and a continent that was being developed by a country that kept taxes low, regulations low, and in many cases nonexistent so that the reward was there for the entrepreneur. And that culture, that tradition, and those rights that are the foundations for the success of this great country are being eroded today at a pace faster than anytime in the history of the United States of America.

Now, we saw these lessons of these failed countries, and we saw Rome rot out from within and corruption that pulled it down. It couldn't hold itself together because of the corruption that was within Rome. We saw the nation states arise. They started out to be city states, and then to the limits of the languages also went the borders of the countries and the nation states of Europe over the last 250 years or so. And they fought wars that were clashes of cultures and economies to determine the boundaries and the borders of the nation states. But still over the last 200 or more years, the nation state remains as a very essential successful institution on this planet. The nation state that looked out for the interest of its citizens, the nation state that had clear borders, the borders that usually went out to the limits of the language itself because that's what defined the common interest of the common people, and to a lesser degree that does so today, but it's been a foundation of a nation state.

And this nation state of the United States of America, this unique experiment that brought people from all over the world and put them in here on this country with these nearly unlimited natural resources, with the low taxes and the low or no regulation, and a culture that was rooted in religious freedom that had at its foundation Christianity and the work ethic that comes from the Protestant work ethic and the Reformation, those things that flowed within that culture, this country became a giant petri dish that was teeming with success. That's American exceptionalism. It's who we are. That's why the rest of the world has had trouble keeping up with us. That's why the rest of the world doesn't match up with us in patents or trademarks or copyrights. That's why the rest of the world hasn't matched up in the growth of their economy, they haven't matched up militarily, they haven't matched culturally, because we have this robust freedom. And sometimes there's a price to be paid for that. But we lead the world. We are a nation that leads the world with freedom. And the rest of the world looks on full of awe and respect and sometimes some trepidation because they are really not sure what's coming out of the United States of America. And, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that I'm at the point now where I am not very sure either on how this has drifted.

But as I watched this economy that needed to take a correction because there was a housing bubble in this economy, Henry Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury, came to this Capitol on September 19, 2008, said, I have got to have $700 billion. I've got to have it right now, and I've got to pour it into the economy, and I'll pick up this toxic debt and we'll do what we can to stop this impending free-fall of this economy. Well, after more than a week of running around this Capitol and out to the White House and doing press conferences and pressing this Congress to appropriate the $700 billion, we sure saw the economy go into a tailspin in a hurry, and some of it accelerated by that kind of activity. And I would have preferred that that would have been back- channel discussions that could have been kept at a low key so that we didn't see this economy react the way it did. But it did. And when we saw the stock market spiral downward, a correction that at least in part needed to be made, and globally as the world lost its confidence in our financial institutions, we had the real risk of our financial institutions going under during that period of time, September, October, November, December, January of this year, and into February. As that instability hung in there, while that was going on, we were a nation that I think overreacted, Mr. Speaker.

Some of the things that happened as the economy spiraled downward were people on the floor of this Congress and in our committee and back in our meetings and talking to the press beginning to tell America, Well, I guess that tells you what capitalism does for us, arguing that capitalism had failed and that's why the economy was spiraling downward.

Mr. Speaker, no economy has ever matched this economy in the United States of America. We have overcome far greater burdens than this one we're under today. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a larger burden than the one we're under today, at least by any measure that we can do currently. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month. By this time next year, we'll look back and we ought to have a pretty good idea. But this free enterprise economy has recovered and bounced back in the face of difficulty after difficulty. It took us through the recessions of the 1800s. It took us through the Civil War. It brought us through the Spanish-

American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cold War.

In fact, Mr. Speaker, of all those things that we had been through, including the Great Depression, which I briefly mentioned, the Cold War itself is a perfect model of what this free market economy can do because Ronald Reagan looked across at the Russians, called them an ``evil empire,'' which they were and are increasingly becoming again, and he went to Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate and he said ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.''

We didn't know at the time how much was going on behind the scenes, how much was going on back channel. But we know, looking back in history and this being reported in the news, that in the nuclear defense negotiations that were to take place in Reykjavi, Iceland, Ronald Reagan walked out of those negotiations because he couldn't get a settlement with the Soviet Union. And the press excoriated President Reagan for being--I don't remember the exact language. Today they would say ``cowboy diplomacy,'' if they called it diplomacy at all. They believed that Ronald Reagan had put this world at risk by walking out of those negotiations. But Ronald Reagan wasn't about to give up our national security for the sake of getting along with people who had lined themselves up against us to be our opposition in the world, to challenge the United States for the title of this world superpower. And for a long time, we went along running in parallel with the Soviet Union competing against the United States for which nation would be the preeminent superpower.

Jean Kirkpatrick was Ambassador to the United Nations during the early part of the Reagan administration. And I believe after 2 or 3 years, she was preparing to step down from that role. And as she retired as Ambassador to the United Nations, she explained something to America that when I read that on Page 3 or 4 of the paper that day, a tiny little clip, actually, it settled in for me the picture that Jean Kirkpatrick had drawn, Ambassador Kirkpatrick had drawn, and it was this. Now, remember we are in the middle of the Cold War. We're perhaps at the height of the Cold War with the maximum amount of tension that's being brought to bear because Ronald Reagan is doing the thing that the leader of the free world would do, and that is playing some negotiating brinksmanship but knowing the card that he holds and having a pretty good idea of the cards that the Russians are holding. But Jean Kirkpatrick described this conflict of the Cold War this way: She said, What's going on 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 they checkmate the United States militarily? That was the question that she laid out as she stepped down as Ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr. Speaker, when you think about this and come to a realization that a country like the Soviet Union that was in an arms race, building missiles bigger, more of them, and building them faster than they ever had before, pouring a high percentage of their gross domestic product, which is an all-controlled economy in a socialist/communist economy-- I'll just call them a communist nation. Their communist economy was trying to produce enough wealth that they could match up against the United States and enter into an arms race and defeat us in an arms race so that we would be looking at so many nuclear-tipped, multiple nuclear-tipped warheads that we couldn't hope then to defend ourselves against the Soviet Union and we couldn't hope to mount enough missiles to provide a deterrent to them. Mutually assured destruction. The Soviet Union was determined that they were going to be in a position where they would assure our destruction and, with the power of that, they would then cause the United States to back down and recede diplomatically and that the Soviet Union would be able to advance themselves around the world and exert their influence into country after country and begin to dominate the world because of the military threat that they would be to the free world, particularly the United States, the military threat that they were in Europe itself, lined up, remember, with the Berlin Wall standing. It was another 5 years before the Berlin Wall came down.

All of this dynamic is going on, and the Cold War is being fought, some say without firing a shot. That's really not true, but without firing a lot of shots in relation to the billions and billions that were invested. The Cold War was not a shooting war. That's why we called it the Cold War. But it was a clash of civilizations. It was a clash of cultures. It was a clash of economies, Mr. Speaker. And as the economy of the United States competed with the communist economy of the Soviet Union, and it has still a vast amount of resources and should have had enough people to produce enough wealth to be able to match up against us in an economic/military contest, the United States economy dominated that of the rest of the world and produced enough wealth that we could grow our economy and at the same time take on and compete with the Russians in the development of our military capabilities globally. And at a point the weight and the burden of trying to compete against this United States economy brought about the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, which brought about the political collapse of the Soviet Union and their satellite states, which softened and prepped the landing zone, so to speak, or softened the area so that the Soviet Union could no longer hang on in their satellite states like Germany and Poland and Romania and the Baltics. And all the way across Eastern Europe, country after country, Czechoslovakia, became free. Most of that bloodlessly.

The Berlin Wall began to come down November 9, 1989, the date that the Russians stopped requiring the East Germans to defend the wall. And they started to take hammers and picks to chop that wall apart, and people climbed over the top, and they were on both sides and they were celebrating, and families were reunified. The liberal media in this country saw that as family reunification. What they didn't see, and it took them a very long time to understand it, was that the Berlin Wall represented the Iron Curtain. It was literally the Iron Curtain. It was a concrete wall that went around the people that lived in West Berlin and trapped them in, a cage, a fence around the people that lived in West Berlin. But it was literally the Iron Curtain. And when it started to come down, when the Berlin Wall crashed, so did the Iron Curtain crash. And as it came down, people realized the Soviet Union can't make East Germans shoot East Germans for crossing that line any longer. They can't enforce it themselves because they don't have the economic capability to do that. They couldn't sustain their military. Their military was rotting out from within as their economy had rotted out from within because you can't have a managed economy that can compete with a free market economy, Mr. Speaker.

That's the difference, and that's the essence of the victory that the United States, with some of the help of the rest of the world, brought down the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed. The satellite states claimed their own independence, and there was some blood in a place like Romania when Ceausescu was executed, if I remember, he and his wife executed by the mobs of Romanians who desired to have their freedom, finally.

But most of Eastern Europe was bloodless. It was essentially bloodless in Germany for the wall to come down and free people, to welcome people that had been in slavery, in the slavery of a Communist- controlled managed state for all those years, since the end of the 1940s, and until such time as you had the Berlin airlift.

And one of the things that happened on one of my trips over there into Berlin, we had a tour guide who I will call her a young lady, younger than me. She was a young lady when the wall came down in 1989, and she told us how when they were able to go over the wall and go into West Berlin and go into the shops and stores and see what they had, see the food that they had, the clothing that was there, the appliances, so many things that they didn't have as part of their lives in East Germany or part of their lives in West Germany.

And the contrast in the western part of Berlin versus the eastern part of Berlin was so stark, she told us that they went out and bought all of the wild colorful clothes that they could find, the reds, the oranges, the greens, the bright yellows, all of those bright colors, and they dressed themselves in the brightest colors possible. They didn't have access to those. They were wearing drab, bleary clothing.

But all this bright clothing was available. Anybody could dress in the West any way they wanted. They could have access. You would find in the stores whatever the free market would demand, because the free- enterprise economy produced the kind of clothing people wanted to wear. And the East Germans surely were so glad to have an opportunity to go into West Berlin as the wall went down on November 9, 1989, and buy up this bright clothing and proudly wear this bright clothing wherever they went.

Because it was a symbol that said, I have my freedom back, a freedom back they weren't born into. They had been born since they lost their freedom. They had their freedom back, and they gloried in the demonstration of that to be able to wear colorful clothes.

Wherever they went that sent the message, I'm free, and I can dress as I like. I can do as I like. I can speak as I like. I am free to succeed. I am free to achieve, free to be educated in the way I want to be educated.

You know, the people who have achieved their freedom most recently in that part of the world are the ones that love it the most. The Czechs went to the square in Prague and stood there by the tens of thousands and held their keys up and rattled their keys. Tens of thousands of them rattling their keys, Mr. Speaker.

And that noise, that persistent noise, Vaclav Havel and others brought about freedom in Czechoslovakia in a bloodless fashion. They achieved that freedom later on. They separated the country in the Velvet Revolution, a bloodless revolution.

And they are quite proud of being able to come to these conclusions by the voice of the people, emulating the freedom that we have had here since 1776, ratified in 1789, Mr. Speaker.

So I look at that part of the world, the part of the world that has been the part that has generated the utopian philosophers, those philosophers that shaped the ideas of socialism and communism and national socialism and fascism. These utopian philosophies emerged from that part of the world, thinkers that came from there.

But they believed that they could set up the perfect society and control it and manage it. And the part that's always been missing on the part of the utopianists, those managers, those elitists, they think that they know best for people and that they think that an average common person, they believe, doesn't have the capability of making decisions for their own job, their own business, their own health care, their own education.

So they want to take that all out of the hands of the individuals of this country and put it into the hands of the liberal bureaucrats who know best, the nanny state managers.

And the great lesson throughout history has been, even if you have smart people at the top, if you have smart people at central planning, and they come out with a 5-year plan--and in the collectivist state of the Soviet Union, they had collective farms. And so they just simply made a 5-year plan and they said, all right, here is what it's going to be, 5-year plan. This field will be wheat. This one will be barley. This one will be hay. This one lays fallow. I don't think they raise much corn over there, Mr. Speaker. I would bring that up.

And they managed it with as good of a skill as they could produce. But out of the government management comes some corruption, a tremendous amount of inefficiency. And if people are not rewarded for their labor--we learned this in the first settlements of the United States--then if they are not rewarded for their labor, they are not going to work the same way they do if they get to achieve the different fruits of their labor.

And so the Russians began to take their labor and let some of the crops rot in the field. Where I come from, on an October night that's clear and still, and if the humidity is right, you can drive across that flat countryside at night, 9, 10, 11, 12 o'clock, 1, 2 in the morning.

And if it's the right night, the humidity will make it so the soybeans aren't too tough and you can look from horizon to horizon. And you can see the yard lights of the farms that are there, and you can see the combines that are running in the fields, with the trucks that are out on the roads taking the grain off, and the tractors with the grain carts that are shuttling those soybeans over to the trucks, sometimes in the field, sometimes in the road.

But you can see they will run all night. They will run till the beans get too tough or the bin is full and their storage is full. They have got to stop and process and then go back again.

But the Russians did it a different way. They didn't let the people have the fruits of their labor. And so when their 8-hour shift was up, or whatever they worked, they would park the combine, park their tractor, park their truck, and they wait until the clock ticked again. And then they would start to work again, if they showed up. And a lot of them didn't.

But the inefficiencies that grow when you start guaranteeing a people a living and they are not tied into having a share of the profit are the kinds of things that we are starting to see in this country more and more and more; less accountability for production and more demands on the labor of somebody else.

But the human nature component of this, the component that realizes that if you don't work, you shouldn't eat, that was how we settled our--the Pilgrims settled it here. They would have starved to death if it hadn't been for that. So they let the people keep the proceeds of their own labor. And then those that were needy lived off of the alms of those that were good producers. And they were helped in proportion to their effort by the alms of the producers, and it made this a far more productive Nation.

And our job here, Mr. Speaker, needs to be, it needs to be to improve the annual average productivity of all of our citizens. If we do that, if we raise our average annual productivity of all of our citizens, we will raise the gross domestic product of the United States.

If our productivity goes up, if mine goes up, if my neighbor's goes up, then that wealth is accumulated into our economy, and it spills over and it blends into other businesses, and it lifts their profitability. And if they are working and producing, they will have more opportunity at success.

But if they are not, if they are hanging back, if they are not responsive, if they have a bad attitude about how they do their work, the customers will stay away from them. Their businesses will not thrive. The bosses who are able to hire good people because they want to pay good wages and good benefits to good people can go off and cherry-pick from those bosses that don't pay good wages and don't provide good benefits and don't respect their employees.

I have been in this business, in the construction business, for nearly three decades writing payroll checks and investing money in heavy equipment and going out and doing jobs, and we have always looked out across the available labor pool and tried to find the best people we could find.

And we wanted to pay them a good, going wage, and we wanted to give them the kinds of benefits and the package so they could have what they needed. They wanted a job that they can go to, that they can take pride in, that they can continue to develop their skills in, and they want to have the kind of environment where they can raise their family and take care of them and have some time to spend with them so that it's really worth the trouble.

This is what a free enterprise economy does. If you allow the businesses to succeed, they will then take advantage of that and succeed.

If this Government taxes them out of existence, that's exactly what will happen. Our businesses will diminish, and they will spiral downward out of existence.

If we regulate our businesses too much, then we will diminish their effectiveness and put a burden on the overhead that is a fixed cost that weighs down everything they do and makes it harder for them to compete against their domestic competitors

here in this country and harder for them to compete against foreign countries as well.

And if we weigh down existing businesses with taxes and regulation, the emerging entrepreneurs, the budding businessmen and women, the people that have the idea, the people that have the dream, the people that want to someday be the one that signed the front of the paycheck instead of the back of the paycheck, create as many jobs as possible, pay as many people as possible, that group of people takes a look at the regulation and the burden of government and too often they decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze, that going to work for the government is the better choice because, after all, the government check will always be there, the benefits will always be there. The stress load there is probably not going to be as great.

Probably you can't measure your achievements the same way you can measure them in the free market system, but if you want to raise your family and come back home and crack a beer and watch the news at night, maybe a government job is for you. We need good people in government, too. But when we raise the salaries and benefits package and we lower the responsibility level, and when we fail as a government to measure the productivity, the output of government employees, then we are creating a scenario by which people are not excelling to the level that they might if they were in a competitive environment.

But business has to produce in a competitive environment; government does not. Government has a monopoly.

Now, to thread an analogy in here, or I should say an anecdote, in a fairly recent trip down to Mexico City, and I sat with a number of government officials and business leaders there, at one point I was sitting at a diplomatic table. And as I looked around the room and each one introduced themselves, I realized that there were many representatives of the monopolies in Mexico sitting at the table.

And they all wanted to make sure that they were not a political target, but the richest man's name in the world is Slim, S-l-i-m. Doesn't sound like a Mexican name to me, but he is from Mexico. The reason he is the richest man in the world is because he has a monopoly on the telecommunications in Mexico. He gets paid for every phone call that gets made in that entire country.

And with the capital that he makes from that, he can invest in other telecommunications in other places around the world. So he's got a protected market that's a monopoly.

And some years ago the Mexicans understood that their state-run enterprises were a burden and that they were inefficient because they were monopolies. They were government monopolies. So I would look at a situation like that, and I would follow the Margaret Thatcher model.

I would take it further than she did. I think she took it as far as she could in that environment at that time. I would follow the Margaret Thatcher model, and I would start to privatize these government monopolies. Well, that first part of the equation worked for the Mexicans. They understood that.

They understood that they needed to privatize the government-run monopolies like telecommunications, let's say cement manufacturing, certain retail outlets, the list goes on, utilities. I think utilities of all kinds. They came to the conclusion they wanted to privatize because government itself was inefficient, how a government monopoly was utterly inefficient, that it begged for corruption--and they had plenty of corruption, still do--but they only went half as far as they needed to go.

When they privatized, they privatized the government-run monopolies into private-sector monopolies so that people like Mr. Slim could run the entire telecommunications industry in Mexico and take the capital and invest across the world.

Now, the shortfall of this is that a government-run monopoly is almost the most inefficient kind of a business model that you can produce if you want to provide services to people at a competitive price so that they can live a good lifestyle and they can have some disposable income to spend somewhere else.

The second to the last thing you would ever want would be a government-run monopoly, because they are inefficient, and there is not an incentive there to compete. But the Mexicans stopped short of where they needed to go, and they just transferred these government-run monopolies into private-sector monopolies, which is the only thing I can think of which is worse than a government-run monopoly.

If you hand someone a monopoly in a market that is not a regulated market and he has the entire market, he has cornered everyone, and he can set the price for a phone call, or they can set the price for a cubic yard of cement, or they can set the price for the electricity that's generated without any check or balance on it.

And so a privatized monopoly is worse even than a government-run monopoly because it incorporates so many of the--there are no restrictions there, and the desire for profit, actually the need for profit, gets added on to the government entity.

So we are here now with an economy that is being shifted dramatically by a majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives, a majority of Democrats down this hallway in the United States Senate, and a President who was elected, I think, with having been rewarded for the most masterful skills in the history of America, of the language of ambiguities.

As I listened to the President speak here in this Chamber, not that long ago, speaking before a joint session of Congress, and as I listened to him speak before our conference, I looked through the speech, and as I marked it up, sitting back here about 20 feet from where I stand right now, Mr. Speaker, I found seven or eight clear ambiguities in the President's speech--the kind of phrase that, if you believe we ought to produce energy in order to have an economy that can compete, you could hear in the President's words that's what he wants to do.

But if you believe you wanted to shut down the energy production in America in order to drive the prices up so that industry would use less, the consumers would use less, so that our economy would be constricted and chase the jobs overseas and all of this fallout that some of the people on that side of the aisle don't seem to understand but cannot hardly deny, but if you're one of those environmental extremists that wanted to shut down energy production, you could find that in the President's speech, the same phrase that I could find that we need to produce more energy.

Now that's just one example. There were seven or eight of those. The master of ambiguities is now the resident of the White House and the leader of the Free World and the Commander in Chief of our military and the mastermind behind the economic changes that are taking place here in the United States. The man who said that--well, he said that he wants to reach out--here's what he said, Mr. Speaker--one of the things that he said.

He said, ``Under my plan of cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass that money onto consumers.'' Necessarily skyrocket, Mr. Speaker, my plan of cap-and-trade. It's the President's plan of cap-and-trade. These are exactly the words that he used back when I don't think he expected to be elected President, in January of 2008, meeting with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Now I can imagine what that's like. You would be sitting in San Francisco, tempted to say things to the San Francisco Chronicle that you thought the people in San Francisco would agree with and probably that the Speaker of the House from San Francisco would agree with. And I'm convinced that our Speaker of the House would maybe not agree with this analysis but would agree with the plan of cap-and-trade system.

But here's what's predicted: Electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket, and that will cost money. And it will be put onto the backs of consumers.

Well, that wasn't an ambiguity. That was before the ambiguities had been completely mastered by the now-President of the United States.

This man is driving the reaction to the economic downward spiral. This man is driving the cap-and-trade argument. This man is pushing a hardcore leftist agenda.

Cap-and-trade; what is it and why do we have it, and can you find anyone on the street who can explain the science? I would like to see investigative reporters of all stripes--the San Francisco Examiner, Sean Hannity--you name them. Reporters from Chicago or L.A. or Dallas or Des Moines go out on the streets with an action cam and carry that camera around with a microphone and ask people to explain this idea of global warming. Explain the science.

If you remember, sometimes they will walk along and they will interview people--often on the streets of New York City--and they will say, Who's the Vice President of the United States? And they will give every name except Joe Biden, today. He is a little hard to find. I understand why they might not know. But after 8 years of Dick Cheney, you think they would have known. A lot of them didn't. They don't have the basics there.

But I'd like to go to Central Park and put the action cam out with a microphone, Mr. Speaker, and ask them, I don't understand the science around this global warming. Can you explain this to me? And I would like to know how many out of a thousand would even try, but I would be willing to lay a wager that none of them could succeed in making a scientific explanation as to why their emissions of greenhouse gases by man can be a significant contributing factor to the Earth's warming. Which, by the way, even the global warming people, even the Al Gores of the world, have changed the language now. They can't say global warming any more because the Earth's been actually cooling since 2002.

So when you find yourself out there on the end of a limb and you've been saying, Global warming, global warming, global warming, and you've been doing that for 15 or 20 years, and you find out, whoops, I have been making this argument long enough; that the Earth is actually cooling, and maybe the scientists who back in about 1970 predicted there was a coming ice age that couldn't be averted, maybe they were actually right.

I don't know if they were right or not, Mr. Speaker, but I know one of those expert scientists in 1970 that said an ice age is imminent is now an expert on global warming, and he is saying global warming is imminent, and it will happen. But they don't actually use the global warming argument any more. They use climate change.

That's a safe term. I bet they wish they would have started out with a climate change kind of a label rather than global warming, because one thing we know about climate, it's always going to change. It's been changing for thousands of years, millions of years, and it will change again and again and again, and it will change tomorrow.

But the climate change people that were former global warming people that are now climate change people are going to argue that the Earth is going to get warmer, and there's all kinds of calamities that come out of a warmer Earth. And the Earth can get--what's the most extreme--4.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer over the next 100 years. Maybe only .15 degrees or so. Depends on which model.

But they didn't make a model 10 years ago that can predict where it is 10 years today or they would have never used the term global warming in the first place. If they had a model 10 years ago, if they had a model in the middle of the Al Gore era.

Let me take us back to--Al Gore was competing for President in 1992. He didn't win that nomination. But when he debated as a Vice Presidential candidate, he matched up against--let me see, Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle said, You are asking for $100 billion a year to be spent on global warming, on environment, on this climate change piece. And Al Gore said, No, I didn't say that.

And I don't remember the page number anymore, but I'm going to guess, Mr. Speaker, because I remember former Vice President Dan Quayle saying, Yes, you did, Mr. Gore. It's right here in your book.

And he pulled the book out, ``Earth in the Balance.'' He gave a page number. I think that page number was 204. I don't remember for sure. But I went out and bought the book. And I went to the page number that was pointed out by Dan Quayle, and there was the exact language calling for $100 billion to be spent then back in that year, which I believe was 1992.

So the call for this reaction to global warming in 1929 must have been modeled on something. It must have been modeled on a computer model that had checked the temperatures around the globe and made the adjustments for atmospheric and the greenhouse gases that are there. It must have had some sound science behind it.

And so where is that computer model today? If that model predicted the Earth would get warmer, and we chugged along, and now we're 17 years later and the Earth has gotten cooler over the last 7 years. It was supposed to get warmer over the last 17. Got a little warmer for the first 10 or so, then it got cooler over the last 7 or 8.

How does this happen? Does anybody go back to the computer model that must have been the basis for the science that was driving Al Gore at the time? I don't know that anybody did. They keep telling me they have got better and better models and they're doing a better and better job of monitoring the temperatures on the globe.

I remember also another book that was published I believe that same year, and it was called ``Trashing the Planet'', written by former Governor of the State of Washington, Dixy Lee Ray. She starts her book out by saying, In the year 1900, the Earth was a very smelly and dangerous place. And she wrote about the disease and the pollution that was there, the garbage that got dumped out of the windows onto the streets, how the sewage ran in the streets, and how disease was rampant, and the water wasn't clean, the air wasn't clean, the soil wasn't clean.

But as that all took place, she compared 1900 with the late 1980s or so, as the book was put together and drafted and I think published around 1990. Dixy Lee Ray.

She made several statements, God rest her soul, she had a clear idea on this. And she said that technology always improves our quality of our life and our lifestyle. All the improvements that we have--we figured out how to drill for wells and purify water and put it in pipes--clean, sanitized pipes, and send it off into all of our houses. We didn't have water at the turn of the century, 109 years ago. We surely did the latter part of the 20th century.

And clean water was a big thing that ensured a lot more health because people weren't drinking bacteria and nitrates and catching a disease from their drinking water.

I remember going up to Fort Niagara up near Niagara Falls on one of the Great Lakes there. We were in a redoubt that had had several flags fly over it, including the British flag, and they told about how the men slept there in this redoubt, this little fort. The beds were so short.

I said, How come the beds are so short? Well, they were not actually as tall as we are today, but the shorter beds were because they didn't sleep laying down. They had respiratory diseases, respiratory illnesses, so they slept kind of sitting up, propped up.

Another thing they did, they had a chamber pot. And they sent the lowest-ranking troops down the hill to the lake with this chamber pot. So that was the one they used at night when they didn't want to go outside, and it was cold. So they carried the chamber pot down, dumped it out--I don't know where they dumped it out. I presume they washed it out. But they used the same pot and carried it back up and they used that for drinking water during the day.

The British, nor did anybody in the world, understand about diseases back in the mid to late 1700s. But that water cleanliness was a big part. Sanitary sewers were a big part. We got rid of the outhouses and flushed it down to the sewer treatment plant.

I want to thank Lady Bird Johnson. Kids my age grew up shooting rats at the dump. We don't do that any more because we have sanitary landfills and we cleaned this up. We cleaned up a lot of things. We are a lot safer and a lot more healthy because of technology, because the modern world has marched along.

But the technology of calculating global warming doesn't hold itself up.

There was a conclusion that was drawn by Al Gore and others--now he has a Pulitzer Prize--there was a conclusion that was drawn by him back in some year--some year perhaps in the Eighties, and I do not know, Mr. Speaker, what the catalyst was, but I do know environmental groups came quickly and strongly and financially behind Al Gore at a certain time in the late Eighties--almost overnight. And he drew a conclusion that has yet to be shaken by the temperature that's going down incrementally on this planet.

Now this is always mysterious to me, Mr. Speaker. How is it that a conclusion can be drawn that the Earth is getting warmer and we must do something, cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. We can't really explain the science to you because you're just a regular old citizen and you can't comprehend this. Instead, you just have to take the word of the environmental extremists that the Earth's going to get warmer unless we follow them. Follow them down this path of shutting down our production of energy in the United States, closing down the CO2 emissions, doing the cap-and-trade that is proposed here so that it would skyrocket our electrical costs.

Why is it that no amount of science has shaken them? Why is it that, of all the things that we have collected for data throughout this time, they haven't really stepped up and said, Well, here's the adjustments we have to make now because we know more than we did then. It's as if science didn't march on for the last 17 years, but the politics have marched together in a huge army of politicians and their environmentalist supporters that keep making the case we must do something.

It's as if this Earth is going to keep getting warmer even though it's been getting cooler--and the only thing we can do about it is reduce the amount of CO2 emissions in the United States. Now how does this work?

And so I have some new numbers that the world has never seen. They are just produced in a spreadsheet in my office indexed back to real facts. I know the doctor from Georgia is going to be very interested in these facts.

And it starts out this way, when there is something going on and somebody says this is the science of it, I usually go out and I ask, what are the big questions so you can lay out the parameters for me, Mr. Speaker?

The first question I would ask is, if we have global warming, and it is because the industry emissions are contributing to the atmosphere, the first question I would have is, okay, how big is our atmosphere? How do you measure all this volume of gases that have settled down to the gravitational pull, come out of outer space and settled down to the gravitational pull of Earth, all that God breathed on and those little molecules added to it, how much is that? Well they measure that in tons. So the weight, if you could put a scale on all the Earth's surface and weigh this atmosphere, you would find out--we are pretty close on this--5 quadrillion 150 trillion metric tons is the full weight of the atmosphere of the Earth, 5 quadrillion metric tons. That is all the air, the weight of all the air.

Now we are measuring greenhouse gases in tons, in metric tons. So I ask the question, what is the weight of all the greenhouse gas that is in this atmosphere that is 5.15 quadrillion tons? Well, let's take it to the CO2, because that is the only thing that Waxman- Markey addresses is CO2. So the weight of all the CO2 gases in the atmosphere is 3 trillion, try that, 3 trillion metric tons. Three compared to 5.15 quadrillion. So I will tell you this. If all the atmosphere is 100 percent by weight, then the CO2 in the atmosphere is .0591. That is the CO2. Now a lot of the CO2 is there naturally. We don't charge that against industry in the world.

So I take this thing down to what do we charge against this? What do we measure? So I will just take you to the net CO2 emissions in the United States. I'm sorry, I don't have the numbers from 1600 or 1700. But I do have the numbers from 1800 until 2005, two centuries plus 5 years. So that is pretty much the dawn of the industrial revolution contributed all the way up this way. The net CO2 from U.S. emissions over the last 205 years, that is hanging in the atmosphere, is 178 billion 792 million metric tons.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you are listening closely, we have an atmosphere of 5.15 quadrillion metric tons, we have a total CO2 of 3 trillion, and we have the CO2 contributed by the United States of 178 billion 792 million, is all that is, so the U.S., this is the net, because 45 percent of it goes into sinks, the net greenhouse gas that is contributed in the form of CO2 contributed by the United States to this overall atmosphere, the net that is hanging out in the atmosphere today is .00347 percent of the overall atmosphere.

Now here is the picture I want to draw and put in the minds of people just immediately before I intend to yield to the gentleman from Georgia, and that is this: if you lay this out in a picture form, in a poster form, and most everybody knows what a 4.8 sheet of plyboard looks like. For me, if I reach up, I reach about 7 feet, a little more, so 1 foot above my hand would be the height of a 4 x 8 sheet of drywall, let's put two of those side by side, 8 feet out this way, 8 feet this way, draw a circle the full diameter of 8 feet by 8 feet, that would be a 48-inch radius, whoop that circle around there, a great big circle would be the height of most walls in a person's living room. That would represent the full atmosphere of the Earth. It is volume measured in metric tons of all the atmosphere of the Earth.

Now what are we trying to control here with Waxman-Markey? How big is this piece of the atmosphere that we are trying to affect a part of by reducing its emissions? The total accumulation from the last 205 years, the industry of the United States comes down to a radius, I will just give you the diameter, the diameter would be .56 inches, that is how big the circle is, that is all the complete contribution of U.S. CO2 emissions in the last 205 years altogether that is hanging out there in the atmosphere. You have an 8-foot circle, imagine the size of the 8-foot circle, but the little circle in the middle is the part that we can control. If you shut it all down, the entire sum total of the accumulated total is the diameter of a lug on your tire. Not the nut. Take the nut off. It is the stud that goes inside the nut. Usually those are a half inch thread. That is what we have got. The size of my little finger is the size of the circle that would represent the complete volume of the accumulated CO2 admitted by the United States inside of that, inside a circle 8 feet in diameter. And we are going to try to control the Earth's temperature over 100 years by fooling around with that tiny little circle that is a half inch in diameter?

What utter arrogance. What utter vanity. I think we have gone into a new level of vanity here. I talked about the Utopian philosophers that emerged from Western Europe over the centuries that thought they could manage humanity. We have Utopian scientists here who believe they can control the Earth's temperature by fooling around with a tiny little circle that is just .56 inch in diameter. What does a 50-caliber bullet look like? Just about that. A little bit of expansion and you have got it. So we are dealing with, if you have an 8-foot circle, and you put a .45 caliber bullet into the center of that, you are going to be pretty close to the size of the hole that would represent the circle that would be all of the CO2 that the U.S. has put into the atmosphere that has accumulated in 205 years.

What utter vanity, Mr. Speaker. And I will expand on this thought much more until the American people understand that we cannot be handicapping our economy based upon a science that can't be substantiated. And we can't find anybody in this Chamber that can argue the science even with that single fact that I have laid out there. And so, Mr. Speaker, I make that point.

There is a whole other point to be made on the disaster that will be caused to our economy. But there is a significant point to be contributed by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun), Dr. Broun, Congressman Broun, whom I would be very happy to yield to and call my friend at the same time as much time as he might consume.

I thank the gentleman. And I regretfully yield back the balance of my nonexistent time.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 237, I was not able to reach the House floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been able to cast my vote, I would have voted ``nay.''

Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and joining my colleagues here on the floor of the House of Representatives and for an opportunity to address you and an opportunity to convey some thoughts that are going on in my mind that I think it is important for you and the American people to hear.

One of the pieces of subject matter that has been very little debated in this Congress, at least in this new 111th Congress, and was not debated in any kind of depth whatsoever in the Presidential race after the nominations came from both the Democrat and Republican Party is the issue of immigration.

As we move along here complacently, I am aware there are pieces being moved behind the scenes to arrange a situation so this Congress could potentially be taking up, I call it a comprehensive amnesty bill. And if anyone doubts where I stand, I am opposed to amnesty in all of its forms. I lived through the amnesty bill in 1986. I revered Ronald Reagan, and I still do. There were very few times I disagreed with him. But the day he signed the amnesty bill in 1986 was a day I disagreed.

At that time I was operating a business that I had founded over a decade earlier. I was compelled to comply with the Federal directive that came from the 1986 amnesty bill. It was the INS at the time, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the requirement was this. There were about a million people in the United States illegally that would be granted amnesty, and President Reagan was straight up honest with us. He called it amnesty, and it was. It was amnesty for about a million people. And the trade-off was this: the conclusion that the Congress had come to and President Reagan had come to was we really couldn't enforce the law effectively enough to clean up the problem of the people that were illegally in the United States, and so because we couldn't clean that mess up by enforcing the law, we would just solve the problem by legalizing those million people that were here illegally, grant them a permanent status here in the United States, grandfather them in, so to speak. But from that point forward, Madam Speaker, from the point forward from when Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty bill of 1986, there was to be a major commitment on the part of the Federal Government to enforce our immigration laws under the idea that in order to pass amnesty out of this Congress, there needed to be a commitment to, from that point forward, enforcing the rule of law.

The argument that came was this. It was that we can't make it work because we have a million people here, but from here on we're going to enforce the law, and we're going to enforce the law aggressively. So the amnesty of 1986 was to be the amnesty to end all amnesties.

President Reagan signed the bill with that in mind, that there would be enforcement. And his administration was responsible for the duration of his term in office, a couple of years, to do the enforcement. And I, sitting there as an employer in 1986, am thinking a promise to enforce the law does not equate into enforcing the law.

But I think INS will come in, and they will enforce it against me as an employer.

And so I complied with the law because, first, I believe in the rule of law. I think it is an obligation to adhere to the rule of law. If you don't like the law, it isn't something that Americans should be doing by ignoring it; we should comply with it. But if we don't like it, we should set about trying to change it. That is the process. That is the system, Madam Speaker.

And I did comply with it. In fact, I agreed with the component of it of the enforcement side. And so when we had job applicants come in my office, from that point on after the 1986 amnesty bill was signed, I took a copy of their drivers license, I took their other data. I brought out the I-9 file and had them fill out an I-9 form. And we took the copies of their identification material and we attached it to the I-9 form and put that in a file. And to this day--I'm not sure that I can, but I think I can go back and find some of those original records, however dusty they might be. I kept those records. I kept it right because I believed in the rule of law. I believed in the Federal law. I believed the government, when the Federal Government told Americans-- and that means those who are here legally and illegally and those who might come here--that they were going to enforce immigration law to the letter, I believed them. And I adhered to that immigration law to the letter.

But since that time, the immigration enforcement was, I will say, as high then, from a concentrated basis, as it has been since. And since 1986, the enforcement of American immigration law has diminished incrementally over that period of time. I think it was more effective under Ronald Reagan than it was under the first George Bush. I think it was more effective under the first George Bush than it was under Bill Clinton. And I think it was more effective under Bill Clinton than it was under George W. Bush as President, Madam Speaker. And I think George W. Bush's enforcement at this point has been more effective than it has been under this current administration of President Obama, under the direction of the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.

I think if you would graph on a chart the worksite raids, the actual interdiction of people that are unlawfully in the United States, the deportations, the prosecutions, the data that's there on a proportional basis, I think you would find what I have described. Immigration enforcement has declined over the last 20-something years, perhaps 23 years. And I don't know that it has reached a bottom at this point. I hope it has; I hope it turns around and goes the other way.

But we have learned a lesson from the 1986 Amnesty Act, the amnesty to end all amnesties. It would be the last

time we would ever do this. And now, from that point forward, we were going to enforce immigration law so that we controlled who comes into the United States and who stays out of the United States. Madam Speaker, you can't be a Nation without borders. You can't call them borders if you don't enforce borders. You can't have borders that you can claim are enforced unless you decide who comes in and who stays out, unless you decide what products and materials come in and which products stay out.

But we are, today, a Nation that has had such a flood of illegal immigration. And we have actually had at least six more amnesties since then, and smaller ones, than the large 1986 Amnesty Act. And they were generally designed to provide amnesty to the people that we missed or forgot in 1986. And by the way, the 1 million people in 1986 actually turned out to be over 3 million people from the Amnesty Act of '86 because, one is, we have always underestimated the numbers of illegals that we have in the United States. And the other is that, even though there was a direct line cutoff date--if you were in the United States before a particular date you would qualify, if you arrived here illegally after that date, you did not--well, there was a massive amount of fraud. There was an entire industry that was developed that came about in order to defraud the '86 Amnesty Act. So our 1 million-- which maybe was too low a number estimate in the first place--grew to 3 million because it was underestimated, and it certainly didn't consider how much fraud there would be.

Well, today, we have a large body of people in the United States, Madam Speaker, that are looking simply at this Nation from the standpoint of what affects their bottom line, what affects their life, what affects the safety and security of them and their own households, how does it affect their investments, their profitability, and their futures. And we have a large group of people here in this Congress that are doing a political calculation on what kind of political power does it give them if we would just grant amnesty to the 12 or 20 or more million that are here in the United States today--some of those that promised they would come to the streets to demonstrate last Sunday, and not very many of them showed up, and those that promise they will go to the streets next Sunday, and we will see how many of them will show up.

But once you grant amnesty and you say you will never do it again, Madam Speaker, you lose your virtue. When you lose your virtue, you can't get it back. You can't say in 1986, well, I don't know how to solve this problem of 1 million illegal people in the United States, so I am just going to legalize them and that solves the problem, I no longer have any illegals in America. But I am never doing it again. And I guess I'm thinking of some images of how virtue gets compromised and never reclaimed. It's like someone goes into a store and shoplifts a candy bar and they get caught. Do they say, well, I'll never do it again? What do you think the odds are that they will do it again? Once they've lost their virtue, if they tell a lie, how likely is it that someone who has told lies habitually all of a sudden will decide, no, I am going to be virtuous now? People do have epiphanies, but classes of people, nationalities and cultures don't have epiphanies. They react to real external stimuli. They react to enforcement at the border. They react to enforcement at a worksite. They react to a culture and a civilization that either adheres to the rule of law or it doesn't.

One of the great strengths of America has always been that we had great respect for the rule of law and that everyone was subject to equal justice under the law and that we enforce the law without regard to whether you were a prince or a pauper. In fact, we rejected princes and royalty here in this country. We want everyone to have an equal opportunity, but we have to decide who comes in and who doesn't come in.

We have the most generous immigration policy anywhere in the world. There is no country out there that can match their immigration policy up to the United States and argue that their borders are more open, that they are more accommodating. No one takes in more refugees. No one provides more asylum. No one allows in more raw numbers of legal immigrants and no one does so in a greater percentage of their population than we do here in the United States of America. That is just the legal side. No one is better than we are. The rest of the world criticizes us, but none of them can match up to the United States for being generous in providing legal access to this great Nation of liberty, the United States of America.

And while that is going on, legal immigration in the United States, it runs about 1.1 to 1.3 million a year--a huge number, 1.1 to 1.3 million a year legal immigration. And the argument that I hear is, well, the lines are too long. There are people that have been in line for 10 or 12 years wanting to come into the United States legally, and we have to do something to shorten these lines. Well, there are some solutions to that, I presume, Madam Speaker. If your idea was only to shorten the line so people didn't have to wait to come into the United States, you could just open up the door wider and in would come the people that are in the line. If you do that, more people will get in the line.

But let's just think of a line of, let's say, 1.2 million people lined up to come into the United States, all through, say, this door, Madam Speaker. And we process their paperwork, we do background checks on them, we evaluate whether they're the kind of people we want to come here or not--by formula, not so much by analysis--and they get to bring in people on the family reunification plan. And one person might bring in more than 250 in the family reunification plan, and that formula goes on and on and on ad infinitum.

But let's just imagine that there are 1.2 million people lined up outside this door, and once a year we open the door and let them all in and then we close the door when we get to 1.2 million. That is a lot of people to bring into the United States of America. And it is a huge endeavor to seek to assimilate and adapt our economy to that many people coming into this country. By the way, our birth rate is a little bit to the plus side. So every time we lose somebody, there is more than one baby born. And that's a good thing; I want to see our population grow on a natural basis.

So 1.2 million people coming into the United States legally, but there is another lineup out there that, every year we open the door, in come 1.2 million, but a few more people get into the line that's outside. And so there are, not in real numbers, but practically speaking, roughly a decade-supply of people out there lined up wanting to come into the United States legally.

While this is going on, we have approximately 11,000 illegal border- crossers sneaking into the United States on average on a given night, 11,000--roughly 4 million a year coming into the United States. That's 4 million, 11,000 a night, twice the size of Santa Anna's Army that invaded Texas, twice the size, every single night, coming into the United States. Some go back on their own; some stay. And so the raw net numbers is something that we have a little trouble agreeing on what that might be. But 4 million illegal border-crossers coming into the United States, 1.2 million legal entrants into the United States. That is the ratio that we are working with.

If we can shut off the bleeding at the border, shut off the bleeding into the United States that is coming in through all of the ports of entry that we have in the United States and seal that down, we have already created slots for other folks to assimilate into this society and assimilate into this culture. Four million people a year illegally coming into the United States, 1.2 million coming in legally, and the argument is, well, let's go ahead and legalize all of these people. So maybe there are 12--the other side will allow 12 million as an estimate, but they've been using 12 million illegals in America every year since I have been in this Congress and this is the seventh. Now, you do not have to be, I will call it a ``rocket surgeon'' to figure this out--and that's not a mistake--you don't have to be a rocket surgeon to figure out that if you have 4 million people coming into the United States illegally every year and you do that for 7 years in a row, the math on that turns out to be about 28 million--some go back home, some die, yes. But for 12 million

illegals to have been here in 2002 and only 12 million illegals to be here in 2009 and having 4 million of them coming in every single year defies anybody's logic to think that that 12 million is a static number. It has to have grown. Or if for some reason that I don't understand it's not growing, I would like to have somebody explain to me how we got to the 12 million in the first place. When did they come, at what ratio?

The reality is we know, Madam Speaker, the number is more than 12 million. It is very likely more than 20 million. It could be 30 million. But I am hearing people--on the other side of the aisle, in particular--argue, well, we can solve this illegal immigration problem, we will just grant them--don't call it amnesty, we'll redefine it, we'll call it something else.

That, Madam Speaker, was an intense debate that I had with Karl Rove. I advised him, you will not be able to redefine the term amnesty. It is amnesty if you reduce the penalty. It's amnesty if you don't apply the penalty that applies at the time they committed the crime. But his argument was, well, what if we require them to pay a fine and learn English? If they paid a $1,000 fine--I think we're up to a $1,500 fine--and if they learned English or if they took English classes--that we pay for with taxpayer dollars--wouldn't you then say it's not amnesty? Because, after all, some of them would actually even pay some of their back taxes by the legislation that they offered. They would be able to choose 3 out of the last 5 years that they pay their back taxes. What American citizen wouldn't want to have that opportunity to look back over the last 5 years and skip the best 2 years you had and decide not to pay your taxes in those 2 years and put the cash in the bank? Stick it into this giant ATM that they view America as and just select the 3 worst years out of the last 5 and pay the tax on that, have somebody pay for your classes to learn English. And then the tax savings that you get you could pay a $1,500 fine in order to get amnesty. So you wouldn't call it amnesty because there was a penalty involved.

Madam Speaker, this is a breathtaking concept for me. I can't get there. I can't get my logical mind around the idea either that we could solve this illegal problem and the crime and the drug smuggling that is associated with it if we would just legalize people. And they keep making this argument. And I have yet to find anybody that can sustain the argument past the opening statement of, well, we can solve this problem; at least if we legalize them, we will know who's coming and who's going, we'll know who's here. They can't get to the second phase of that analysis; how would you know who's here? How would you know they told you the truth in the first place when you granted them amnesty? If you said, all of you come through this turnstile and we will take your identification and give us your birth certificate from Mexico or El Salvador, or wherever it might be, Guatemala perhaps, and we will give you an identity here in the United States of America, how will we know that that's their real identity? Many don't have birth certificates in their home country, they don't maybe know where they were born, they can't prove it if they do know. And so we would grant an identification to 12 or 20 or 30 million people, give them a path to citizenship, and all they would need to do is attest that they were someone. Now, why would we imagine they would attest that they were only one of someone? Wouldn't they also walk through that turnstile two or three times to get multiple identities?

Many of them are doing it now. Many of them are taking on the identity of some American. The identity theft side of this thing--and by the way, when somebody steals your identity, you are never done. You never can come back to be the person you were again because you never know, when out there in society, your Social Security, your driver's license, those IDs that are breeder documents that are paths to the equivalency of citizenship aren't being used. You might catch the person that stole your identity, but you never know how many people picked up your identity and transferred it along the way; how many people might be working underneath your Social Security number.

But if we would grant this amnesty, and I have actually forgotten the term that they use because ``amnesty'' is the most descriptive term. If we would grant this, we would see 12, 20, maybe 30 million people line up and ask for their path to citizenship. Now, we don't know who they are but we've given them identification. We can't do a background check on them because we can't verify who they are in the first place. So now we have into our system, let's say, 20 million, 20 million people into our system who have been granted some kind of a legal status, and this legal status isn't indexed into anything they did in the past because, after all, nobody is going to come forward and say, ``Oh, yeah, I was a felon in Guadalajara.'' The criminals will not come forward and identify themselves. So we will have purified the ID of people that would come here and accessed the identification through this amnesty program. We'd given them legitimate identification that allows them to travel anywhere they want to anytime they want to. And the crooks are not going to line up and tell us that they are crooks. So the idea that we could keep track of them is a false and specious dream because the people we want to keep track of are not going to step up and volunteer to be tracked.

So what we have today are 4 million illegal border crossings a year pouring across the southern border, an accumulation of 20 to 30 million illegals in America. And in that huge human haystack are the needles that are the criminals, the drug dealers, the murderers that are hidden within that huge human haystack of humanity. And the idea on the part of this administration and the previous administration and, by the way, the idea on the part of the Republican nominee for President as well, was we're going to grant them amnesty and then when we legitimize all of this huge human haystack, then we will be able to sort the needles out of the haystack.

That, Madam Speaker, is an impossibility. Conceptually, it's an impossibility to take the idea that you're going to let people have a path to citizenship and you're going to give them documents that allow them to legally travel back and forth between the United States and any other country. The US-VISIT program is only half operational. We keep track of who comes into America, but we don't keep track of who goes out of America.

I tested this one evening down on a border crossing on the Mexican border and just simply was there observing what was going on. And I can recall people coming through there that our Border Patrol knew, our Customs and border protection people knew. So they would say, yes, and they'd take their card, swipe it through the US-VISIT computer, and it would register the identity that was on the card. That identity matched the face of the driver. The driver took off. I stood there a while longer, and maybe an hour or an hour and a half later, the same car came back, the same individual in it, drove right on south out back into Mexico. And so I said, ``You swiped her card coming in, checked her ID, showed me how that worked. You didn't swipe her card going out?''

``No, we don't keep track of that.''

In a few places I understand we do pilot programs, but we don't keep track of that. So we don't have a system. We can't get a system up to deal with the people that have proper documentation today to keep the computer database of who came into the United States, who left out of the United States, and then the balance in the middle, those that came in minus those that left will be the list of names of people that are here. We can't even get that done. So instead we would legitimize 20 or 30 million people, give them that path to citizenship, tell ourselves that somehow out of this haystack of humanity we'll be able to ferret out the criminals and the drug dealers and the violent people that are there. All the while in this stream of humanity comes 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America, Madam Speaker, 90 percent coming into the United States across our southern border and all the human carnage that goes with that, the damage to our families, the damage to our productivity, the loss in lives, the children that are abused, the wives and

sometimes less often the husbands that are violently assaulted by their spouse, their boyfriend, their significant other, whatever arrangement it might be, the children that are abused that come because of methamphetamines and because of marijuana and because of heroin and because of crack cocaine and because of cocaine itself. Those drugs, the marijuana, which often is a gateway drug to the drugs that incite a higher level of violence, this damage to America's society is high. It's high in terms of dollars and lost productivity. It's high in terms of human suffering. It's high in terms of human life.

And, Madam Speaker, I will be continuing to press our Drug Enforcement Agency and all of the relevant agencies to give me the numbers on what the cost is to this economy, what is the street value of the illegal drugs in the United States of America. They can give me a number that tells me about how much is profit that goes south, but they don't seem to want to be able to give me a number on how much is spent on illegal drugs in the United States of America.

I can tell you about how much money is wired out of the United States into the rest of this hemisphere, almost all of it south, and it works out to be this: $60 billion a year ago, $60 billion wired from the United States into points south. Half of it into Mexico, $30 billion into Mexico, $50 billion into Mexico over the last 2 years. That's billion with a ``b,'' not trillion with a ``t.'' Billion with a ``b.'' But $30 billion, and another $30 billion that went into the Caribbean and into South America. So $60 billion out of this economy. A lot of it came from wages that were earned, some by legal immigrants that are here, and they have a perfect right to wire their earned money wherever they want to wire their earned money, and I will defend that. But it's a drain out of this economy. And coupled with that are the billions of dollars that are wired out of the United States in wages that are earned illegally, and coupled with that are the billions of dollars that are laundered and wired out of the United States of America that are being paid for by illegal drugs that are the street value of illegal drugs in the United States of America. That's the number I don't have. That's the number I'm going to press until I get, Madam Speaker, because we can then start to make some decisions on the broader parameters of having a knowledge base of the big picture.

So the big picture, with blanks in it, is our economy loses $60 billion a year that's wired south, much of it from wages, and I think a significant portion legitimate, legal wages, people's choices, $60 billion going that way. There's a profit margin of around $25 billion on illegal drugs in the United States of America. About 90 percent of those illegal drugs come across the border with Mexico. Many of those drugs originate in countries south of Mexico and travel through Mexico. The magnet for those illegal drugs is the market here. The market here is allowed and created because we have drug abusers in America, and lots of them, and they spend a lot of money in a year. The Drug Enforcement people tell me they don't know that answer. I say they've got the data and they can figure it out. If they can't, I will.

But in any case, the loss to this economy is huge. And when the Mexican Members of Congress sit down in my office and they begin to talk to me about the violence in Mexico that's brought about by the drug trade, I have to concede to them the point that it is the demand for illegal drugs in the United States that brings about the violence because of the profit that's associated with smuggling drugs into the United States.

Now, we also know that the methamphetamine production in the United States has been reduced to a minimum because we have passed some legislation that could have been better, and some of the States have made it better, that shuts down the pseudoephedrines that are the feedstock to make methamphetamines. So, in Iowa, we have a good law that has taken a lot of that out of the local drug labs. It's not perfect yet. We make them jump through a lot of hoops. They still make some meth in Iowa, not as much as they used to. Now maybe that number is 95 percent of the methamphetamine in Iowa comes from Mexico, a higher number than 90 because we make it harder for them to make it in Iowa. They have made it harder to make it in some of the other States, including Oregon and, I believe, Oklahoma and other States.

But another piece of information that I gather is that Mexico, and they advised me down there that they have done this, that it's a matter of public policy, and I applaud them for it, and that is for the beginning of the year 2008, they outlawed the importation of pseudoephedrines in Mexico so that there would not be a feedstock coming into Mexico for them to manufacture methamphetamines with. They allowed people that had it in their possession to use it or market it, get rid of it by the end of 2008. And by the beginning of 2009, it's now illegal to possess pseudoephedrine in Mexico because it is a feedstock that they use to produce methamphetamines. That's a couple of big pieces of legislation and a strong commitment on the part of the Mexicans to reduce the production of methamphetamines in Mexico, much of which comes into the United States.

Now, the gap becomes orders that are ginned up in size, overblown in their volume. They come into the United States through various means, and I won't speak to those means. Then the pseudoephedrines that are illegal in Mexico that can't be imported into Mexico any longer get smuggled into Mexico from the United States, converted into methamphetamines there, and brought back into the United States to be distributed in my neighborhood, across all neighborhoods in America. These things are going on at a huge price in American lives, blood, and treasure altogether. And the price that we pay here in this country is high, but the price that they have paid in Mexico, at least as published in the news, is perhaps higher yet. And we do not have a full approach to what we need to do about illegal drugs in America.

We talk about comprehensive immigration reform. Madam Speaker, what about comprehensive illegal drug reform? When we look at this thing from a broader basis, first of all, I will suggest that as long as we have people coming across our border legally and illegally to the tune of 4 million illegals a year, and I don't know the legal crossing numbers, but 4 million illegal crossings a year, and of that number roughly 11,000 a night, drugs being smuggled in in that stream, and the stream itself, whether they are involved in other illegal activity other than the crime of coming into the United States, they become a shield, a habitat, a way of protecting the stream of illegal drug smugglers that are operating all over the United States. And when I ask the Drug Enforcement people what would happen if magically tomorrow morning everyone woke up in their own country, a place where they were legal, what if we had no illegals in America magically tomorrow morning, what would happen to the illegal drug distribution system in the United States? And their answer has consistently been that will suspend immediately illegal drug distribution in America because it's at least one link, and every distribution chain is a link that's forged by an illegal in the United States. Sometimes every link is an illegal link, but they're forging these links. At least one link in every illegal drug distribution chain is an illegal immigrant that's here transferring drugs.

And I won't argue this, so I will say this first hypothetically: If we had full enforcement of our immigration laws overnight, we would shut off illegal drug distribution overnight, Madam Speaker. Now, that's not to say that those distribution chains wouldn't be reconstructed, that there wouldn't be illegal drug distribution manufacturing entrepreneurs that would fill that demand, because the demand does exist. It exists here in the United States, but the profit is going to Mexico.

So we have about two choices on this, or I will say there are three choices: We can ramp up the interdiction to the point where it raises the transaction costs so high that bringing it into the United States would get so costly that it would cease. That's one thing that we can do.

And another thing that we could do would be to turn up the drug testing in the United States, thinking of it in these terms: If every employer had a

drug-free workplace, if every employer enforced a drug-free workplace policy, if the employers actually initiated drug testing within their workforce in four different categories, if they had preemployment testing--so let's just say at the H.R. department if one sits down for a job interview and the employer interviews them and they come to this conclusion that they'd like to hire them and they say, all right, I want you to come to work for me on Monday morning, but conditional to this I am going to have to run your numbers and your data through E- Verify to make sure that you're legal.

And the second thing that you will have to do is to comply with the drug test. So I will set you up. We have got this little clinic here that works with us, and we will run over there, you can do the test. You pass the test, you pass the E-Verify, you can come in Monday morning and punch the time clock. Congratulations.

That would be a good process. Some companies do this. In fact many companies in Iowa do this, with the exception of the E-Verify component, they have to actually hire them before they can use E- Verify. And that needs to change, Madam Speaker, but the preemployment drug test is an important tool, and employers can with that screen their employees so they are hiring drug-free employees at least at the moment that they hire them.

Three other categories of drug testing need to fall into this. Post- accident testing, if you have an employee, and he is involved in an accident of any kind, whether it's his fault or not. If there is a personal injury, if there is a property damage, then an employer needs to have a policy, a workplace drug-testing policy, that will test that employee on the basis that if there is an accident, there is a sign there that's an indicator.

So you would have preemployment testing, you would have post-accident testing, you would have to have reasonable suspicion testing, and that is when you have trained supervisory personnel that are qualified, that can watch the behavior patterns of the employees. And under that legitimate evaluation, send those employees off for a drug test that are showing the signs of drug abuse. That's the third way.

And the fourth way, and I think it's most effective, is random drug testing, where it's the same system we have for our certified, our certified driver's licenses, our CDLs, of which I carry one. And if you are going to drive an over the road truck today you have to have an up- to-date physical, and you have to have a logbook, and you also have to be in the random drug testing pool so that when they pull your number, when the random generator number kicks your number out, you go in and you give a sample, and you get tested.

So you have four ways of workplace drug testing, they have preemployment, post accident, reasonable suspicion and random drug testing; those four components are the tools that all employers should have and do need to guarantee a drug-free workplace. Now think of a world that instead of $25 billion in profit going to drug lords south of the border, wherever they might be south of the border, if all of this human carnage of the death and the violence that comes from the drug abuse itself, of the crime and the death and the violence that comes with the struggle, fighting over whose drug turf, whose profit, whose illegal border crossing is going to be controlled, instead of that, all that could go away.

All of that could go away if we restigmatize drug abuse in America, if we increase the testing in these categories that I have said, preemployment, post accident, reasonable suspicion, random drug testing, if we did all four of those, and if private sector employers chose to do so, to clean up their worksite and to lower their insurance premiums, and to improve the work area so that they hired a better class of employees. If that happened, if government tested in a random fashion so that we were subject, that would be a deterrent for many people who might otherwise be experimenting with drugs. So if we test employment, all employment, and I am not talking about a Federal mandate, I am talking about setting a scenario up where we provide the right incentives so this can actually happen, so workplace drug testing, welfare drug testing--why would we be granting people the benefit of someone else's labor through handing tax dollars out to welfare benefits, to people who are enabled to take the day off and do drugs all day because they are not working? And so we give them rent subsidy, heat subsidy, food stamps, the whole list of title 19. The list goes on, allows them to abuse drugs all day, and they don't have to work.

Why wouldn't we say, as a condition to our help that is to be a safety net for those that are in need, and, hopefully, a transition into the workforce is where we want them, we are going to require that you submit yourself to a random drug test. There would be a lot of people that would no longer be on welfare. For a couple of reasons. One of them is we wouldn't provide them that welfare if they were on drugs. We would pull the plug and send them off to rehab if they failed that. That's another equation.

Or many of them will just decide I can't live this illegal drug life any longer, I am going to have to get a job because they are going to test me eventually, and they will transition off of welfare and into work. So if we test in the workplace, we test in welfare, the other place to test is in educational institutions. Yes, that includes our colleges and universities, includes our schools to almost every degree, and it includes the employees that are there as well if we had a random drug testing system set up.

And we think of the three large universes of this society, the workforce, the welfare rolls, the educational institutions and the students and faculty there. We have covered everyone in America and given them a random risk, I am not talking about doing this as putting them all in the same pool, I am talking about on a voluntary basis for the employers to do that, especially in the private sector, move through this, build this institutionally, and at a point we then, we have cleaned up the workforce, we have cleaned up the welfare roles. We have cleaned up the educational institution, three huge universes of this society and civilization, and the result of it, who would be left? Who would be left to be on drugs?

And the answer is nobody except those who are dealing and those who are stealing. It's a lot easier for law enforcement to focus on the dealers and stealers if we provide the deterrent for everybody else in those huge spheres in this society, this culture, this economy. That would, this proposal that I have laid out here, would shut down dramatically the demand for illegal drugs in the United States.

If we did that, then we would see fewer illegal border crossings. We wouldn't see the death and the destruction in Mexico as they fight over who is going to sell drugs, because the market would be drying up here in the United States. We have got to dry this market up and if we can't dry the market up on illegal drugs in America, then we get to William F. Buckley's solution, which is capitulate and legalize.

I am not there yet, and I say yet because I think it's worth establishing the rule of law, it's worth reestablishing it. It's worth enforcing on the border. It's worth enforcing in our worksite. It's worth enforcing across the streets of America and the highways of America. We ought to have efforts that are effective, and we should reward the people that enforce the law.

But if we should fail to do that, and if we are unable to implement a policy that would be workplace drug testing, then at some point all the violence that comes with this, drugs that we have today, is a mirror of what happened back during the prohibition era of the Roaring Twenties, when this country came to a conclusion they couldn't enforce a prohibition on alcohol, and that the violent crime that was coming with it, and then the nonviolent crime, was so great that they would rather tolerate the alcohol than tolerate the violence.

I am not there. We have a tolerance level built into this civilization that's the United States of America that accepts the idea that if we don't see it in front of us every day, we are not going to score the carnage. But the carnage is high. The loss in lives is high. The loss of lives even at the hands of illegal aliens to Americans is very, very high.

We have had a number of witnesses come before the Immigration subcommittee that are surviving family

members who have lost a loved one at the hands of illegal, criminal aliens who had been interdicted by law enforcement. Law enforcement had encountered them, perhaps knew they were illegal or chose not to determine, and released them back on the streets.

A good number of these perpetrators that took the lives of Americans had been arrested a number of times before. That average is a high number that's part of a GAO study that was released in May of 2005. And, yet, we still have local law enforcement that's told on a continual basis that they really don't have the right to enforce illegal immigration or U.S. immigration law.

I, Madam Speaker, I reject that philosophy. It is a solid position for local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. We passed a 287g program that sets it up so that local law enforcement can receive training and work in direct cooperation of ICE; in fact, step into the shoes of ICE. That's a 287g program.

That needs to be expanded. It needs to be moved forward, as does the E-Verify program. And E-Verify needs to be expand, expanded so that an employer can use it to run his current employees through it to verify that the people that are working there for him now are lawfully there, not just on the new hires.

That will be helpful with this. But we need to do much, much more. We need to enforce our immigration laws, we need to stop the bleeding at the border. We need to beef up our ports of entry.

We need to use all technology down there at all locations and continually get better because they are playing a chess game against us. They are bringing contraband illegal drugs and other products into the United States, even through the legal ports of entry and through the illegal ports of entry.

And yet, yet, as I listen and read the news and have discussions with the administration at the Cabinet level, I see a shift in priority from the interdiction of illegal drugs and people coming into the United States across our southern border to a pivot, almost a full pivot. Instead of lining our folks up on the border and guarding against what's coming from the south, but a turn-around and look to the north, to be in a position to intercept legal, Second Amendment-defended American guns that are going south, that become illegal when they are struggled across the border into New Mexico.

Now, I have heard some high-profile individuals talk about this particular issue and one of those individuals would be General Wesley Clark, who used to command NATO and is a sometime presidential candidate.

So I listened to him talk. He argued that we were smuggling assault weapons, illegal assault weapons into Mexico and smuggling machine guns into Mexico.

Madam Speaker, neither one of those statements are true. There is no such thing as an assault weapon in the United States, at least by a legal definition. That was a legal definition that expired a few years ago, rightfully so, because you cannot define an assault weapon without defining what it looks like.

You can't define an assault weapon simply by defining its functionality. Because the functionality of the things that Wesley Clark and others, those who want to take away our Second Amendment rights, those weapons that they declare to be an assault weapon, when you define them by functionality, they become deer rifles.

In fact, the most popular gun to use, hunting the varmints in the United States, the coyotes, is an AR-16, M-16, M-16 model .223 in caliber. It's the most popular gun there is. It's a semiautomatic.

It functions just like anybody's deer rifle, although it's a little low in caliber to be effective as a deer rifle. It's just right for hunting coyote.

So that's the kind of weapon that Wesley Clark would declare to be an assault weapon, and it's the kind of weapon that was included in the list of guns that were described by this administration, including the Secretary of State herself, that 90 percent of the guns used to commit violence in Mexico are smuggled in from the United States, come from the United States.

That was never a truthful number. It was never an accurate number. The number is actually not 90 percent, but much closer to 17 percent, of the guns used in crimes in Mexico are smuggled into Mexico from the United States.

Most of these guns are legal in the United States. Mexico has different laws.

So, we can't hardly outlaw guns in America by following a Mexican law. We have got to defend the Constitution, the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.

The Heller decision, which I would have preferred would have been broader, gives an individual a right to personal protection, not to be denied in an effective fashion by a local jurisdiction.

But 17 percent, not 90 percent of the illegal guns, of the guns used in Mexico came from the United States. The 90 percent number came from an evaluation of running a database off of a small segment of guns that were gathered up and confiscated that had been involved, at least picked up with, some people that were committing crimes.

And because in the United States we put a serial number on guns, then you can track those guns.

But a lot of the guns that are in Mexico don't have serial numbers. They came from other countries and other continents from around the globe, can't be traced.

So if you take the universe of the guns that have been gathered up in this battle with the drug cartels and you take a look at them, of those that you could trace, a small unit--90 percent came from the United States--but of all the guns, about 17 percent did.

My point is, Madam Speaker, that American guns are not the major problem that Mexico has. The major problem Mexico has is the violent drug cartels' vicious attacks on their competitors and the law enforcement in Mexico and spilling over into the United States. And that violence is rooted in the extremely high profitability of selling drugs to the United States.

The source of that is the demand here in the United States. We're doing nothing about the demand for illegal drugs. We're doing something about the smuggling of illegal drugs into the United States, very little about the smuggling of illegal people into the United States.

And I will say today, Madam Speaker, that effectively this administration has suspended worksite enforcement and there has not been a high-profile illegal immigration rate on an employer in the United States since that one in the early part of the Obama administration that took place on the engine factory in Washington State.

When that happened, the Secretary of Homeland Security said she didn't know about it in advance. She ordered an investigation--an investigation of her own people--because she was concerned that they might be not following through with the right kind of investigation.

I actually have no idea. I just don't think she liked the idea of the raid going off and people being deported. And I'm told--and I think this information is accurate--that at least 28 of those illegal employees got work permits to go back to work in the same factory, and that work permit was directed or issued by the Department of Homeland Security.

So what was that raid worth? Perhaps we will get some prosecution of the employers. But I say this, Madam Speaker, to you for everyone in America to hear. You can not conduct raids on employers, prosecute employers, and do so effectively, punish them for knowingly and willfully hiring illegals, without identifying the people it is that are working illegally for the employer. That part of the raid is essential in building the case against the employers.

They're all part and parcel of the same problem. You have to start at the base of it. And let's just say that there are 1,000 people working in a factory and 350 of them are working there illegally. Can you go in and pick up the employers and allege that they have illegal employees without some information, without some proof, without some data?

You go in and you line up the employees and you run them through the check and you verify, You're illegal, you're illegal. Fine. We're going to let you go back to work. But those of you that we suspect or essentially confirm, we're not. We'll build a case against

you. If you want to voluntarily go back home, here's your ticket. Go back home and stay there. But don't come back here again because you'll be facing a 20-year penalty in a Federal penitentiary for having once been deported for coming into the United States illegally. But it happens every day because we're not enforcing the law effectively enough, Madam Speaker.

But of those that we would gather in to that kind of a roundup, those that are here illegally, working illegally, that are guilty of document fraud, also bring the case against them, and in the process of the case, you gather information, you get depositions, you get court testimony that tells you how an employer is complicit in hiring illegals.

And then, Madam Speaker, we need to pass the new IDEA Act. The new IDEA Act. This is actually the best part of the entire hour because it brings to bear a logical approach to a problem that has been befuddling Congress for a long time. Congress is only befuddled because we have conflicting interests--political power over here; more illegals that one day will be voters, but will be counted in the 2010 census anyway; and over on this side and on this side, those that have a vested interest in cheap labor that think they can lay the costs or the maintenance off that cheap labor off onto the taxpayers in the form of welfare that goes to those people that are here illegally. All of that goes on, Madam Speaker. But the real solution, the most important component, the real solution is the new IDEA Act.

The new IDEA does this. It reestablishes, it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not deductible for Federal income tax purposes. It denies that write-off as a business expense. It allows the IRS to come in and take the Social Security numbers that are there on the form that you file with your income tax, run those Social Security numbers through the E-Verify program. If they don't come back than that's the person who can lawfully work in the United States, then the IRS can deny the write-off of that business expense.

And so let's just say you're an employer and you're paying an illegal $10 an hour. And if they work 2,000 hours a year--and these are numbers I can do the math in my head, maybe, as we go.

So you have paid them $20,000 to do their work, written it off, and your payroll calculation--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, 0765 times 2, 15.3 percent added on that, so that's $306 on $1,000 would be--I should actually back this number up.

In any case, you pay Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. There may or not be withholding for State and Federal income tax. But that write-off that you would have for the business expense would be the $10 an hour, plus the 15.3 percent of that $10 an hour. So that's $1.53 an hour that goes on for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. You can write that all off as a business expense.

But when the IRS comes in, runs the numbers through the data base and the E-Verify kicks them out and says, ``Can't accept that,'' then they can look at your income tax report and say you can't write off this $10 an hour plus another $1.53 for Social Security.

So your $11.53 an hour goes from the expense side of your ledger, where it's a tax deduction, presumably over to the profit side of your ledger, where it is taxable income.

So, in simple terms, a $10 an hour employee denied as an expense by an IRS audit because they are illegal becomes a $16 an hour employee when the IRS attaches to that the interest and the penalty, and by the time you pay about a 34 percent corporate income tax on that fund.

So an employer would make a rational decision. They would look at: do I want to pay $10 an hour with an illegal employee that I'm confident is illegal, or I at least strongly suspect is, on the chance the IRS will come in and it's going to be a $16 an hour back charge for him and the rest of the illegals that are working for me, or do I want to transition my employees over to a legal workforce?

Most employers would decide they would like to pay somebody $12 or $13 or $14 an hour who is legal than they would someone $10 an hour who is illegal.

That's how new IDEA works. It uses the IRS to come in and enforce the illegal immigration laws that we have in the United States, and it requires the IRS to set up a cooperative exchange of information with the data that they gather in their audits with the Social Security Administration, who has a whole list of no-work Social Security numbers, no-match Social Security numbers, and require those two entities, IRS and Social Security, to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security, who also has a data base of those who come into the United States illegally, those who have stolen IDs and documents, et cetera.

So we would have not only--you always hear the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, but when we put new IDEA in place, it will be the right hand of the IRS making sure that the left hand of the Social Security Administration knows what the middle hand of the Department of Homeland Security is doing. That's a three-way; that's a three-fer.

And that brings together three huge American agencies that would be working in cooperation to give a financial incentive through denying tax deductibility, interest penalty, the risk of the penalties that come from the Department of Homeland Security once they have been notified of the IRS's information.

So the risk gets greater and greater and greater. And employers would purge themselves. They would clean up their workplace roles. We would do this almost administratively, and we could do this with positive cash flow.

Furthermore, Madam Speaker, if we do this, as we see people volunteer to self-deport because we've enforced our laws, we will have taken at least the 7 million working illegals and moved them on out and made room for 7 million who are legal to work in the United States.

There are over 11 million looking for jobs today. I think the number of working illegals is greater than 7 million. I think it's greater than 11 million. But a Nation that has 11.5 million people that are looking for work, a Nation that has 69 million Americans that are simply not in the workforce altogether, that are of working age, we can find a way to solve this problem.

We have to have the determination, we have to have the leadership, we have to have the clarity, and we have to have the political will. And the only way for the political will to come to this Congress is if the American people contact their Members of Congress; they turn up the heat. If they say, ``Pass the new IDEA Act, turn the IRS loose.'' They love enforcing their job. Let them help with the immigration part of this because they're in the process of collecting the tax liabilities that are due the United States government anyway, and just cooperate with the Social Security Administration, just cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security. You will solve a lot of this internally without having to do very many of the worksite raids.

And, while that's going on, we can turn the pivot back the other way at the border. Let's intercept the illegal drugs and people coming into the United States. Let's not have our number one focus be trying to intercept things that are being smuggled into Mexico that are legally in the United States--guns and cash. Let's intercept illegal drugs and illegal people.

If we do all of this, Madam Speaker, we can solve this drug problem in the United States. We can solve the illegal immigration problem in the United States. It is a comprehensive solution. I advocate for it.

I call upon this Congress to take action on it, or at least have a legitimate debate. If there's a flaw in my logic, I'm standing here waiting for that criticism. I don't hear it.

So I will yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 42 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until, Monday, May 11, 2009, at 2 p.m.

I thank the gentleman and judge from Texas for taking the lead and coming here to the floor to help convey this message across the country as he addresses you and as I address you, Madam Speaker. As I listen to this, the transition goes, the segue handoff goes to AIG. I happened to look at the AIG story that is there today. ``AIG nears sale of headquarters in Japan for $1 billion.'' We look at the AIG, the big Federal bailout that is there, the effort to block, after the fact, the bonus packages, the retention bonuses that were paid under the contract, the sanctity of the contract, as the judge said. And what happened was this process here in this Congress raced too far too fast. And there was a big TARP bill that passed last fall before the Presidential election. Half of it, $350 billion of that, was made available pretty close to right away. Another $350 billion had to go to the next Congress. Most of that money was going to be spent by a Secretary of the Treasury to be named later by a President to be elected later, Madam Speaker, and that is what happened.

So those $700 billion went forward, the $787 billion on the stimulus plan and the $410 billion on the omnibus spending bill, 1,222 pages stacked up that high. They arrived at 11 o'clock at night and were brought to the floor the following morning. We were asked to read 1,222 pages, or have staff read all that, and figure out what was in it, and then figure out what was not in it and draw a good judgment on all of this. This was pushed through, shoehorned in and rammed through quickly for political reasons, I believe, Madam Speaker.

The AIG loophole was actually written into the bill. We don't quite know yet whether it was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee or whether it was the White House that actually had the most influence in that. We know there was communications going back and forth between the White House and the Chair of the Finance Committee and the Senate, and they wrote language in there that was a loophole that allowed for major, major bonuses to be paid. First it was $165 million. Then it went up to $200 million. Then it got up to about $240 million that went into bonuses for people who had led a company into disastrous ruin.

So now we are watching some of the spin-offs. This is some of the effort, some of the nationalization that goes on. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized. They were organizations, companies, that should have been capitalized and regulated. We tried to do that on the floor of the House of Representatives, Madam Speaker, and we were blocked at every turn by some effort on the part of Republicans and a big effort on the part of Democrats. They argued, especially right now the chairman of the Financial Services Committee came to this floor and argued, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not in trouble. They don't need to be capitalized. They don't need to be regulated. I don't see any problem there. I'm going to oppose any efforts. The gentleman who is now the Chair undersells his persuasive ability. But many of us tried during that period of time.

This thing unfolded with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being nationalized, AIG effectively being nationalized and spinning off the headquarters in Japan for $1 billion or so. And then we heard the gentleman from Texas, the judge, talk about Chrysler, well, formerly Daimler Chrysler, now Chrysler, and this push merger that goes on with Chrysler and Fiat--I never owned a Fiat. I want to make that clear to the gentleman from Texas. But I probably would have enjoyed it if I had had one--and the de facto nationalization of General Motors Company.

Now, that should alarm Americans. It alarms me that there was a poll that went out about 1 month ago that found that only 53 percent of Americans said they believe in capitalism. Now I didn't see the exact text of the question. I

think they have to believe in free enterprise in a bigger number. They might think capitalism is something not quite as clean and pure as free enterprise, but we have got to believe in our market system.

This free enterprise capitalistic system that we have in the United States of America is the engine that defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War. For 45 years, we fought a Cold War, and we were playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the question was, will the Soviet Union checkmate the United States militarily with their ICBM missile endeavor before we bankrupt them economically? On that board, chess and Monopoly on the same board, this American free enterprise system defeated the Soviet Union and won the Cold War without technically firing a shot because our economy has been, and remains, the strongest in the world, the most robust in the world, the most resilient in the world and the most adaptable in the world because it rewards entrepreneurs better than any other in the world and because we have created a favorable tax arrangement and a favorable regulatory arrangement compared to, let's just say, European socialism.

But our President, Madam Speaker, has drawn a different message. He has drawn a different message from the New Deal in the 1930s. The message that he has drawn is that the failed New Deal actually would have succeeded if FDR had not lost his nerve and spent a lot more money. And this President has not lost his nerve. He has spent a lot more money. He has spent so much money that I look for the vibrations and reverberations down there. I would just think that FDR would be rolling over in his grave right now watching the trillions of dollars that have unfolded.

I have expressed this before that when we say ``trillions of dollars,'' these trillions are being discussed across America in the coffee shops as we used to talk about, well, let's just say millions, $1 million here, $1 million there, and pretty soon you have some real money. But trillions work out this way. I don't know how much corn they raise in Texas, but I can tell you how much we raise in Iowa. We will raise about 2\1/4\ billion bushels this year for 2009. And if it is worth a little better than 4 bucks, which it probably is not going to be in this economy, it is about $10 billion worth of corn. That is about what that crop is worth.

Now, if all of our producers took all of their input costs and put all their labor, all their land prices away and they swallowed all that and just gave that corn crop at market prices to help pay down the deficit, let's just say to help pay down $1 trillion, they could take the 2009 crop, the 2010 crop, the 2011 crop, all the corn we raise, give it to the government to pay down $1 trillion, and when they paid down the $1 trillion in real present value, the 2108 crop, 100 years would be how long it takes to accumulate $1 trillion with all the corn that Iowa can raise, an entire century of corn for $1 trillion. And now we can think in these terms: dollars, corn.

Put it in another term here, that is only $1 trillion. I said that into the Record, Madam Speaker. All the corn that Iowa can raise in 100 years is only $1 trillion, and it is only compared to a $9.3 trillion deficit approved by this budget that was just passed out of here the other day, 9.3 trillion. Now, how long does it take to pay off $9.3 trillion at present value? That would be--I have to round this a little bit so I can do the math in my head. That would be 1,000 years of all the corn that Iowa can raise with no expenses deducted from it, the gross value of that crop as it comes out of the field and will be delivered, 1,000 years of all the corn Iowa can raise just to offset the deficit created by the budget that was proposed by this White House and passed by this Congress.

And then if we thought we were going to pay off the national debt, that is another $11.5 trillion or $11.8 trillion, and you add that to the $9.3 trillion deficit, and these numbers I am looking at are $20.8 trillion to $23 trillion depending on who you ask for that number. But let us say $20 trillion, the downside, that would be all of the corn at present value and at present yields that we could raise in Iowa for the next 2,000 years. Or if you want to back up, take it back to the birth of Christ. That is what it would take to pay off the national debt and pay off Obama's deficit by his budget. President Obama, I should say.

On top of that, what we have, Madam Speaker, is the nationalization of great American companies. Great companies, companies that grew right out of the entrepreneurship of the can-do spirit of receiving a reward for value invested, invest some dollars and put some investors together, and put together some shareholders, crank out a company that is going to start making cars and sell to the market. And sometimes even go out and create the market, which Henry Ford did. Henry Ford actually created a market for him to sell to.

You have heard the numbers from Judge Carter.

Today, well, 50 percent of General Motors is owned by President Obama. And representing the United States of America, representing the disenfranchised taxpayers that will be paying off the debt and not receiving any return on this particular investment, 39 percent, you heard the number right, from the UAW, the union, own shares in the company. And what did they pay for those? Maybe they actually did, if the shares are down to a couple of cents, but I don't know those numbers. And the bondholders are reduced down to 10 percent, and the stockholders 1 percent.

This is a nationalized company. Isn't anybody alarmed about this? Didn't anybody see the image down in Central America when we saw the glad-handing and the extra hand up there on the arm of Hugo Chavez, the happiness that showed the big, grinning faces that came from President Obama and Hugo Chavez, sending an image to the world that they are good buddies.

I see two things when I see that image. One of them is Hugo Chavez, standing at the podium at the United Nations the day after President George W. Bush spoke to the United Nations and calling our President in Spanish the devil, El Diablo, and saying there is a stench that still lingered at the podium, to snickers of laughter from the people sitting in the United Nations funded by Americans.

And what is the message that the world gets, glad-handing, big grins, President Obama, President Hugo Chavez? They get the message that there is no penalty for insulting the United States or declaring the United States to be your enemy. There is a reward for it. There is a happy image to send around the world.

The second thing, the second message is the one that I get, and that is two leaders of their representative countries, one of them, the leader of the free world, standing side by side grinning at the cameras, each of them had nationalized at least one important company in their country within a 30-day period of time. And in President Obama's case, he way out did Hugo Chavez when it comes to the socialization of major corporations. He nationalized General Motors and he nationalized Chrysler all in the same day; and he stepped up and took credit for it.

This free enterprise country, this country that forged freedom and settled a continent because we had entrepreneurs that could go out and struggle and receive on their investment for their labor and brains and for their intuitiveness, that is how we settled this country. And now we are to the point where we have the radical nationalization of major American companies, General Motors, Chrysler, on the same day. And you would think if a President thought that he needed to do that in order to save a company, that he would have at least been wise enough to keep his fingerprints off it, but he took credit for it. He took credit for it. He did the press conference. He did the nod. He did the smile.

I am sitting there appalled that there could be such a thing taking place in this country, and with a disregard for what made this a great nation. And one of the central pillars of American exceptionalism is free enterprise capitalism, and you cannot deny that from a historical perspective. But he did that. And he said, I will work to protect your benefits, to the unions.

And Nancy Pelosi, the formal Speaker of this House, said she is not going to give the automakers bargaining leverage over the unions. When

you see the unions are stepping in in ownership, I have to take you back to a Web site that everybody in America should visit, and it is the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA.org. And on that Web site, you can read some things.

One says, ``We are not communists.'' Okay. Well, I need to understand that distinction. So I read that carefully. It says we are not communists because communists believe in the nationalization of everything. They think that they should own all of the properties and all of the companies and tell everybody what to do and what to make and what they are going to make. And socialists are not really like that. They recognize there is merit to have little mom-and-pop shops running around making donuts, probably not selling gas anymore, but running the barber shop and the flower boutique. So they say, we don't want to nationalize everything; we just think that the major corporations should be run for, get this, ``the benefit of the people affected by them.''

What does that tell you? Running major corporations for the benefit of, which is it, the unions or the customers? It sure in the world is not the shareholders and the bondholders. But it is for the unions, the labor unions, the employees, one might say, or the customers.

And so we have now national socialism in America. The nationalization, socialization of these major companies, 50 percent of General Motors to the Federal Government, deemed by the President, 39 percent to the UAW, 10 percent to the bondholders, 1 percent to the stockholders. And watching this happen is a sad, sad tragedy that is not bringing the alarm in this country that I think it ought to bring.

I am greatly disturbed by what I see, and these are not speculations; these are the facts. These are after-the-fact facts that are there. History can't write it any other way unless somehow they wake up tomorrow morning and decide they are going to start selling shares off to some private interest so that the stockholders can start to run the company again, and maybe they can decide whether they want to fire the CEO rather than the President of the United States. And the President of the United States has also decided what people can collect for a salary and what they can't.

And they have put money into the banks, and some of the banks are resisting it. They want to give the money back. The President doesn't want to take the money back. He doesn't want to denationalize the nationalized banks.

That sounds like I might be impugning his motives. And I tell you, I look at the facts. Here is how I draw this conclusion, Madam Speaker. This is the 12 of 14 rule. With the mortgage-backed securities, the toxic mortgage debt that is out there, the proposal that came out about 3 or so weeks ago, it was on a Monday, we get these proposals on a Monday. Work on them all weekend long, Monday morning you get a new idea, and another new idea, and it comes at you over and over again like a cannon going off every Monday morning, sending shock waves through our economy.

But this rule, 12 of 14 rule works out to be like this: If an investor will partner with the President in picking up this toxic debt on these mortgage-backed securities, a regular investor, like Judge Carter, for example, could lay $1 down on the table and then the Federal Government will match it with one of your tax dollars. So there are $2 on the table. And then there are loan guarantees that are guaranteed for the balance. And this is a $14 package, $12 worth of loan guarantees, guaranteed by President Obama, your tax dollars. So there is $12 worth of skin on the table from the taxpayers that are loan guarantees. There is another dollar on the table from the taxpayer that is matching the $1 that Judge Carter introduced for his investment. The individual has a 7 percent investment, and the taxpayers will have a 93 percent investment. And so how do you think you might split some kind of an investment like that?

I would think, okay, I will give you 7 percent of the profits for your 7 percent of the investment. But President Obama says no, no, no. I want you to have half of the profit, Judge. You can take half the profit for your 7 percent investment, and the Federal Government, the taxpayers, will take 93 percent of the risk and even that wasn't good enough. Then the President says, why would we want to tax the people who are our partners? So now they don't want to tax 50 percent of the profit that you get for 7 percent of your investment, they want to waive the tax on that.

Now, if we were in desperate condition and we needed to figure out something to do with these toxic debts and mortgage-backed securities, maybe that would be an act of desperation where you put together a package like that, and you can say, I am partnering with the private sector. This really isn't the nationalization of the mortgage industry; I really didn't follow along on what we did to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No, this is a free enterprise endeavor.

Well, it doesn't work out this way. Some of us, and I introduced legislation to do this, would suspend the capital gains tax on those investments that pick up the toxic debt. But we couldn't suspend those. That idea was off the table in a heartbeat. The chairman of the Financial Services Committee swept those things off the table immediately. So we couldn't give a tax break to willing investors, but we would give a tax break if you partner with the Federal Government. We can't suspend income tax on the profits made by most who pick up mortgage-backed securities because that would be, what, free enterprise capitalism that had a favorable tax situation that could come in and rescue this situation with willing investors.

That confirms for me that this President is determined to nationalize, nationalize, nationalize until we become nationally socialized big business in America, exactly verbatim within the model plan that is on the Democratic Socialists of America Web site, dsa.org, where it says we just want to nationalize the big companies and run them for the benefit of the unions and the benefit of perhaps the customers, but not for the benefit of the shareholders.

That is the scenario today. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and appreciate him leading this Special Order.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

It just brings to me a number that was reported in the aggregate, the union contributions, political contributions for the last election cycle, 45 billion dollars. And now we see a President and a Speaker of the House, and others, who have decided that they are going to make sure that there are shares in the hands of the workers without a transfer of wealth? But just simply--apparently they are good workers, all right. They think they are good campaign workers, that's what I hear.

This question now troubles me, as I listened to the gentleman discuss this, with the teachers' salary, Teachers Union salary, and perhaps as invested in General Motors and Chrysler. And a big part of that portfolio perhaps is spiraling downward--has spiraled downward. Now, if you take the position that the President has, ``I will protect your benefits,'' and the position that the Speaker is taking, ``I am not going to let the automakers get bargaining leverage over the unions,'' and if that turns it into, Here are some stock shares, and the union can have controlling interest in the company--or at least to break even, half the interest--and broker it, if they can get together with the stockholders that have 51 percent, if that can be the case, this is a Federal Government bailout of a situation where they are setting up jobs for people, not jobs for production for profit. But if that happens--and it has happened--and the taxpayers are there, what happens if the retirement funds for the Teachers Union meet the same end as the value of the stock shares for General Motors and Chrysler? How do you go in and nationalize a retirement fund for a union? I think you don't, except to put the capital in there and just say we are going to guarantee it, just like we will with Social Security or any other entitlement.

By great, huge gulps, this government is swallowing up the private interests, large corporations swallowing up one after another after another and nationalizing them and taking on obligations in the process that are implicit, that go on down the line. If you remember Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they didn't have a guarantee from the Federal Government. They just had the implicit full faith and credit of the Federal Government. And we came through, $100 billion here, $100 billion there, $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities. This can happen with these retirement funds, too. And when they get nationalized, pretty soon everything is government except the barber and the shopkeeper and the little ones. And it is right off the Web page, dsa.org.

We would have national socialism.

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

As often happens, if I come down to this floor for the purposes of addressing you in this Special Order hour, I find myself following the gentleman from Minnesota, who was here with his posters up, advocating the Web site of the Progressive Caucus and advocating for things that I just simply disagree with. I went over and looked at the charts because I was trying to understand what kind of insight was being conveyed, Madam Speaker. I know he was addressing you, but you couldn't see the charts, so I'll describe to you what I saw.

I saw the chart that showed the subprime loans that started in about 1995. It grew. Then the numbers of subprime loans diminished in about the year 2000, at about the time that George W. Bush was elected President. Then they increased again substantially throughout that period of time until such time as there was an abrupt end to the chart, which was the beginning of the Obama administration. So I guess we don't know the trend since President Obama has been elected, but here is what I also hear:

I hear criticism of the past administration, criticism of the past majority, in other words, criticism of Republicans because subprime loans went up during that period of time. I hear defense of the Community Reinvestment Act because the Community Reinvestment Act apparently, one could conclude, was properly crafted legislation that brought about a good result. There might have been an even better result, if I'm hearing the gentleman from Minnesota correctly, if it hadn't been for Republicans in the way of administering this in a fashion that would have been different and that would have been done if we would have had, say, President Gore rather than President Bush and now, of course, President Obama.

The Community Reinvestment Act was something that was put in place so that there could be more loans that went to minorities, especially in the inner city, and it recognized that there were lenders that would draw a red line around some of those districts in the inner cities because they saw that crime rates were going up and that property values were going down, which was in inverse proportion to the crime rates. As the inner cities began to devolve, the lenders understood that it wasn't a good place to put their money, so the Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1978 to provide an incentive for lenders to loan into those inner cities because they wanted to get away from the redlining that was being done.

I think it was done with the right motivation, but what you saw were the results of the Community Reinvestment Act--those results on the chart, Madam Speaker.

In fact, what you didn't see was the result on the chart that showed an increased number of subprime loans, and the subprime loans that were increasing were in response, in significant part, to the Community Reinvestment Act, which compelled lenders to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. So they devised this method of subprime loans that they could get so they could get more bad loans into these bad neighborhoods in order to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act so that they could take some of the profits from other places and invest and expand their operations. They couldn't expand. They couldn't meet the regulation requirements of the Federal Government unless they complied with the Community Reinvestment Act, and so they made bad loans in bad neighborhoods, and they created the subprime loan market, at least in part, to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act.

The President, President Bush, came to this floor, Madam Speaker, where you're sitting--in fact, in front of where you're seated right now. President Bush addressed this Nation in his State of the Union Address. This would have been January 28, 2003. He said that we had the highest percentage of homeownership in history, that we had 68 percent homeownership in the United States of America. Democrats cheered, stood and cheered. Republicans stood and cheered, because we wanted people to own their own homes. Everybody wanted that to happen. It was being led by Republicans, but it was in reaction to a Democrat law called the Community Reinvestment Act, which put bad loans into bad neighborhoods so lenders could expand in other neighborhoods and could expand their operations.

The Community Reinvestment Act was inspired, I think appropriately, but it was bad law because it didn't hold collateral underneath the loans that were being made. It encouraged bad loans.

We heard a Member of Congress on the floor last night say that she was part of ACORN when they went into bankers' offices to intimidate the lenders so that they would make more bad loans in more bad neighborhoods, driving up the subprime chart you saw from the gentleman of Minnesota, and building a rotten foundation underneath our financial structure in America. When it began to crumble and collapse, we saw the downward spiral in all of our markets, not just in America but in the world, because we didn't have our finances built on a sound foundation.

You can't make bad loans in bad neighborhoods with little or no down and with collateral that is diminishing in value and, by the way, without a fixed interest rate, with a floating interest rate that is going to go up over time.

We know that Alan Greenspan saw the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and he decided he would try to shore up that hole created by the bursting of the dot-com bubble by creating a housing boom, a housing market that would lift this economy. He did that with unnaturally low interest rates. That was built into the Community Reinvestment Act. Then there was the intimidation that was going on by ACORN that was, in significant part, funded by the American people's tax dollars. They would go into a bank or into a loan banker's office--let's just say the south side of Chicago. I don't know why I think of that, but I do. They would march in there with a group of people from the neighborhood, shove the banker's desk out of the way and begin getting in the face of the banker and intimidating him into making loans to people who don't have the means to pay them back. Then they have the audacity to come here to the floor of the House of Representatives and blame this all on Republicans. The Community Reinvestment Act was a Democrat bill.

It was sought to be adhered to, not just to the letter of the law but the intent of the law, by the lenders who made some bad loans. And yes, there was greed involved and there was some mindset that existed there which was

the lenders would just keep doing what everyone else did, understanding that if they did that, everybody would be making or nobody would be making money. So if they're making money, then each participant would be making money. Also understanding that if things fall apart and blow up, these big lenders would be bailed out along with the other big lenders, that mindset existed.

This was a perfect storm, a perfect calamity, a chain reaction of the disasters that took place, rooted in 1978 in the Community Reinvestment Act. It was built within the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were undercapitalized and underregulated and the chairman of the Financial Services Committee resisting every effort to try to regulate and capitalize Fannie and Freddie.

And while that's going on, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the shoring up of a housing boom with low interest rates, subprime loan mortgages, bankers that saw an opportunity to use those mortgages to increase their portfolios with the subprime loans that were bad loans into bad neighborhoods to satisfy the Community Reinvestment Act. And all of this going up to the point where we had bundled mortgage-backed securities that were guaranteed by AIG, which set premium rates on it with no one able to look over their shoulder. They had such a large market share, there wasn't competition, and they set the risk without oversight.

This built into mark-to-market accounting, and add to that, the credit default swaps which were part of all of this, and bundles of mortgage-backed securities that start out with a loan in your local bank or your local savings and loan that would then be sold off into the secondary market, perhaps picked up by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, who would then bundle it up into a bundle of like secondary-market mortgages and sell that into the marketplace on up to the investment brokers or investment bankers on Wall Street, who would take that thing and slice and dice it and tranche it, they say, and bundle them up in different packages.

What was going on with these mortgage-backed securities was the equivalent of if you have ever been to a farm sale or a yard sale, a house sale where they put the hayrack out there and the auctioneer begins to sell these things off that people don't really want very much. So he will put a washtub out there on the hayrack, and nobody will bid on it, and then he will throw in a hammer and crowbar and some old pictures and some nuts and bolts, and pretty soon somebody will bid on it because there is one thing in there that they want and then he'll sell that to them. And then that washtub goes back to the garage of the buyer. He sorts that out, and he's already bought several others at other sales, and then he will sort out and he will take all of the hammers and take them and sell them at a sale where it brings a better price for hammers. And then he'll sell the crowbars at that kind of sale and the garden rakes at a different sale, maybe.

But in the end, slice, dice, tranche, shuffle, cut, deal these mortgage-backed securities up through the financial chain--so many times that nobody knows not necessarily where they originated but how they actually got all the way to the other end of this chain--evaluated not on the value of the real estate, which is the underlying collateral, but evaluated by the premium that you had to pay to AIG to ensure that these loans would perform. All of this into a financial market system that was the underpinnings of what should have been the actual asset value of the mortgage-backed securities, not the performance of them, in my view.

So, we have a lot of things we need to fix in this Congress. But this Congress is so busy shifting blame that we cannot get to the solutions that we need to have at hand. We need to repeal the Community Reinvestment Act. We need to capitalize and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac equivalent with other lending institutions, and we need to privatize them eventually. We need to end mark-to-market accounting. That's the kind of accounting where if you have an asset value on your balance sheet today and you're required to post that value, you have to go out to determine what is the actual bid for that today.

And so a bundle of mortgage-backed securities, for example, would have a rating, a rating to them, say AAA, and there would be a certain bid. So you would have to adjust your balance sheet to what those bids are. And now if there happened to be no bids, you might go from $60 million down to zero, effectively, overnight.

I would compare it to--let's just say if you had your grain bins full of corn and corn was worth $4 a bushel, you would multiply 10,000 bushels, for example, by $4 a bushel, and you end up with $40,000 worth of corn. You put that on your balance sheet. Now, that's fine. It's legitimate, and I would nod my head in agreement. But what if a big flood comes along, washes out all of the bridges and there are no trucks running, no rail lines running, nobody is transferring, shifting any grain? All of a sudden, this grain that's in the bin that has value, you have to evaluate it at zero.

That next day along came the flood, your $40,000 worth of corn goes to zero. You know, you put that in your balance sheet and you go to your banker and say, I want to borrow $30,000 to put my crop in. Sorry. There are no bids on corn. You don't have any asset value here. So if you don't have any other assets, we aren't going to loan you any money. That's how that works.

So the bankers come into the lending institutions, and they will say, Give me a look at the collateral that's there. And if this collateral is mortgage-backed securities, commercial paper, or there are no bids on it or the bids are dramatically down because the instability takes away the marketplace, then it gets marked down and the bank has to go out and recapitalize, get their capital level up. That means they have to call some loans. That means they have to quit giving some loans that they might be giving to some really effective entrepreneurs that have a real opportunity, and our economy begins to shrink.

All of these things flowed out of this not because George Bush was President, not because Republicans had the majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate for a time. It flowed because we had, from a long time back in our history, back to 1978, had a series of mistakes, one stacked on top of another that set up this scenario for this perfect storm. And we're not able to even identify that or hold a legitimate hearing in this Congress that can shine some light on what has happened so that we can start to fix the problem.

No, we're into growing government. We're into a lurch to the left that every time we have a financial problem with an institution, what happened? The President of the United States steps in and takes a step to nationalize the private sector businesses which are the mother's milk of our economy.

Private sector is the goose that lays the golden egg, and when government competes with it, it starves that goose and she can't lay those eggs like she did before and, eventually, she will stop laying eggs altogether.

But the nationalization of General Motors and the nationalization of Chrysler--it was Daimler Chrysler. They got out of it. They dropped a few billion dollars and stepped away. And now we have the President of the United States who came out on a specific day, I think--I don't clearly remember that exact day, late March--March 26th would be my guess, and he took credit for nationalizing General Motors, firing the CEO, hiring a new CEO. That means the White House is managing General Motors. And he took credit for directing that Chrysler merge with Fiat, the Italian company, and that they would now be compelled to make automobiles, at the direction of the President, that got a certain mileage and they were energy-efficient vehicles, whether anybody wants them or not.

Now, Madam Speaker, I can go back and look at the parking lot at my church, and I happened to take a little note. It was Palm Sunday, I noticed. It was hard to find a car in that church that would meet the satisfaction of Speaker Pelosi or President Obama--I am not sure what Harry Reid thinks--because we couldn't have gotten to church on a two- wheel drive vehicle that day. I would have to have--mass transit means something different

where I come from. You'd have to come home and set up some transit to get me to mass if I didn't have a four-wheel vehicle to get me through the snow on Palm Sunday. That's the place I live. That's the way my neighbors are.

But this idea that the President of the United States can nationalize major corporations--what is a more American business than General Motors, Chrysler Motors? I guess Ford is more American today because they said, Don't give me the money. I don't want to have strings attached. We think we can run this business without government intervention, without the government bailing us out.

And what we saw happen was a President Obama that went down to the Central American conference--and I was looking for him to join up with President Uribe of Colombia. We have an important free trade agreement that we've negotiated in good faith with Colombia that not only is it important for our trade to be able to export to Colombia and cash their checks and bring the money back here to help our balance of trade and allow them to trade back to us, yes, but it's important from a national security perspective. It's important for the security of the Western Hemisphere.

The FARC rebels down in Colombia, the Marxist rebels that are in Colombia, President Uribe has been fighting them, and he's been defeating them; and he's been fighting the drug smugglers and the drug cartels, and he's been defeating them. We need a President of the United States that would go down there and do a big glad-handed grin with President Uribe and say, We've negotiated this bipartisan--it actually is bipartisan--bilateral free trade agreement with you, and I want it brought to the floor of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate for a vote in accordance with keeping our word of honor in the best interest of the United States, Colombia, and the Western Hemisphere.

I saw no photo-op of any meeting that took place with President Uribe. I just saw the video and the photos that took place with the glad-handed gripping handshake--somebody said a fist bump. I didn't actually see that, but the two grinning leaders side by side. And the image that I saw was this:

Chavez went to the United States a year ago and called our President of the United States El Diablo, the devil, and he said there is a stench of sulfur here that lingers from his speech yesterday. The most vile insult I can ever remember on an international stage. And what do we see within the first 100 days of President Obama's administration is a big, glad-handed, grinning handshake with an extra hand up on the arm to really reestablish this--apparently a happy get-together that I don't know if it was planned by staff or it was spontaneous.

But it says two things very loudly to me, Madam Speaker. One of them is there is no penalty for challenging the United States and insulting the biggest funder of the United Nations. We pay way more into the United Nations than anybody else to support the Security Council, to support the United Nations, and what do we get out of the United Nations? Just insulting resolutions that attack the United States and/ or Israel. That's what we get out of the United Nations. We host them here. And instead, it's a constant drumbeat of insults against the free people in the world, the leader of the free people in the world, capped off by Hugo Chavez's vile insult against the United States of America and our Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world. And our new President goes down to do a glad-handed handshake so all of the world can see there is no penalty for that kind of a vile insult against the United States of America. That's the first message that comes out.

The second one is this other message, these two leaders of their own sovereign countries, within less than 30 days of each other and just last month, nationalized major businesses within their own countries. President Obama nationalized General Motors and Chrysler and Hugo Chavez nationalized a rice processing plant that belonged to an important Minnesota company, Cargill, Cargill Company. The gentleman from Minnesota who just spoke doesn't seem to have an ounce of heartburn about the nationalization about a proud and important Minnesota company, Cargill. Chavez just went in and said, I own this now. This is my ground. I will run it the way I see fit because I am not happy with the way you run your operation. If you try anything else that's out of line, I'll take care of any other property you may have in Venezuela.

Well, I have got an answer for Hugo Chavez, Madam Speaker, and it's this: We produce enough ethanol from corn in America today to completely replace any of the energy that's coming from Venezuela.

We can replace it all just with the ethanol we produce from corn.

So we don't need Hugo Chavez. And I don't need his gas stations in this country, and I don't need his leering grin coming out of my television. He is a self-evolved Marxist, a hater of the United States, and someone who is building relations--not just diplomatic or political, but military activities and operations with the Russian Navy and our own Caribbean designed to send a message to the rest of the hemisphere; Hugo Chavez is a troublemaker.

And what does our President say about that? He says, well, the national military budget of Venezuela is only one-six hundredth of what ours is, so it really isn't a threat. Is that what you measure? Do you measure the money that they are spending today on military, or do you measure what this means when it sends inspiration to FARC, the Marxist revolutionaries--the Marxist rebels is what they are--in Colombia that undermines Uribe, who believes in freedom and free enterprise and a rule of law, our sound partner--that we can't even get a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives to ratify a free trade agreement that was negotiated in good faith by our U.S. Trade Representative, under the direction of President Bush, with a legal obligation to have that vote within 90 days of it being presented to this Congress. No, even the rule of law, even that commitment was defied by order of the Speaker with a convoluted rules vote that undermined the very law that was in the books, the good-faith provisions.

So, Madam Speaker, we have a whole series of different concepts here that I think need to be debated, and I brought out some of them. But when the gentleman from Minnesota talked about his reverence for ACORN, his reverence for La Raza, that also comes with the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, a whole list of separatist groups here that exclude Members from their list. There are a whole lot of Members of Congress that can't walk into either one of those caucuses I mentioned; they wouldn't be accepted in there. They can't be members because they don't have the right race. And they get a pass. And I just say, let's treat everybody equally. Let's just recognize we're all God's children, we're created in His image. And He has seen fit to bless us with characteristics so we can tell each other apart. Why do we fight that? Why don't we just accept that and recognize it and be grateful that he has a wisdom that maybe we don't see as well as we should.

But, instead, we have a legislative effort that is determined to divide Americans and pit Americans against Americans. Why, majority party, why does the President of the United States, Madam Speaker, why are they determined to divide us? I would like to know the answer to that question. Don't divide us; unite us. Unite us by eliminating these classifications of race, sexual orientation, gender, skin color. Let's look at everybody as an individual intrinsic in their sacred value as a human being. And if we do that, we can continue to move down the path of the things that actually do unite us, like establishing English as the official language of the United States, a common form of communications currency that would bind us together.

The things that bind our culture together are important components. What is it about being an American that makes us unique? What is it that makes it common for us to be Americans? What do we have in common? What are these characters, Madam Speaker? And I will submit this: we, for the most part, do speak a common language. You can pick up a newspaper most anywhere in America, open it up and read it and be able to understand it. You can walk into a city council meeting most anywhere in America

and conduct that business in English so that you understand what's going on there. You can travel across the breadth of this land and find Americans that get that feeling in their stomach and in their heart and a tear in their eye when they see the Flag come down the street in a parade on Memorial Day or at the cemetery or in the parade on the 4th of July. Americans bound together by a common history, common experience, having pulled together. Americans that were pulled together when we saw the attack on this country on September 11 in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon. Those attacks bound us together.

I know about the divisions in America; I hear them here every day, the debates we have against each other, the parochial differences that come up--urban versus rural, North versus South, right versus left. All of the divisions that are economic interests--manufacturing States versus the intellectual property States versus the ag States, cotton versus corn in the Ag Committee. These things go on constantly. And yet, when this country was attacked on September 11, I remember seeing the devastation. I remember watching the buildings tumble down, the flaming buildings go down and the dust go up. And as I watched that, a sick thing came through my heart. And I watched Americans in the Midwest transfixed in front of the television at the Clay County Fair, to have 70 and 90 people standing in front of the television at one of the displays, it went on all day long, just a constant rotating dirge. It was like being at a wake, the sadness and the mourning and the prayers that went up for the victims and their families all across this country.

In our schools, prayer came to the public schools September 11, 2001. And no one objected on that day. Many of our public schools gathered together, filled their auditoriums, brought their pastors in, stood all of the students and the parents that came together and they joined hands and they prayed together and they read Bible verses together in an ecumenical expression of faith and unity and hope and prayer for the victims and for this country. All that was fine when we were under the stress load of being at war and of the attack that came our way.

I remember, also, a picture of a young black man who was standing on a street and the smoke was rolling down the street. And as he stood there, his face was covered with dust, but one tear washed his cheek from gray to black, and that tear said more about the unity of this country than any image that I have seen in association with September 11. It sticks in my mind what kind of a Nation we are.

But I also knew, as the discussion about how many people had lost their lives, in those Twin Towers in particular, the numbers went up, estimations from 10,000 to 15,000 to 20,000--20,000 was the highest number I heard. And I can remember as the estimate went down, and as each time the estimate went down from 20,000 it was with a sense of relief that it wasn't as bad as it might have been, it wasn't quite as bad as we thought it could have been. And as those numbers went down and they approached that 3,000 number--which is the one we use today that I think is pretty close to the numbers of people we lost that day--I remember the relief that I was feeling as the numbers went down, while at the same time I knew that the lower the numbers were, the sooner we would forget about this attack on Americans on our soil, and it would be in inverse proportion.

If that number had gone down to zero, if it had just destroyed the buildings and no one had been killed, I would submit, Madam Speaker, that we wouldn't have had these wars that we're in. This would have been a law enforcement practice a long time ago instead of a war against these radical jihadists. But we lost more people on September 11 than we did in Pearl Harbor. And the attack was on the continental United States in a domestic facility rather than--at that time not yet a State--the great State of Hawaii and the attack mostly on a military base in Pearl Harbor.

And so immediately afterwards I heard from Members of Congress and leaders, thought leaders, it was, what did we do that caused them to hate us so much that they would attack us? And part of this Nation went into this introspective mode of trying to figure out what we might have done wrong because, after all, part of the guilty Americans--which usually come from this side of the aisle--are always looking for a way that it's the fault of the people on this side of the aisle, like subprime loans are President Bush's fault somehow, or Republicans' fault, and somehow we should not have done the things that caused them to hate us enough that they attacked us on September 11.

I went off to those weekend seances with bipartisan Members of Congress--I point out that I call them weekend seances facetiously, Madam Speaker. But I sat for 3 days on end in rooms with other Members of Congress that constantly asked the question, What did we do wrong? What did we do wrong? How are we ever going to get ourselves to where they don't hate us anymore so they quit attacking us? And what are we going to do if people are willing to die when they attack us?

Well, in the first place, it's not our responsibility to know what causes a person to be so deranged that they would fly planes into buildings just to kill people because of the success that we have. They hate our freedom. They hate the success of our free enterprise capitalism. They must have burned some subprime mortgages on that day-- maybe that's a measure of happiness for the people who think they are naturally bad. But it is not our responsibility.

We had a series of Middle Eastern experts in the room, and they had been talking for several days. And I finally posed this question, and it was this: Of that culture--and I hesitate to call it a civilization--of that culture, what has been their contribution in the area of math, science, medicine, or chemistry in the last 700 years? Can you give me a single contribution that that civilization has made in the last 700 years? And of all the experts we had there, not one could come up with an answer because the improvements in civilization have come from outside that type of a culture.

We have a culture here that is grounded in the things that grow us and make us good. We are rooted in the rights that are in the Bill of Rights and natural law and free enterprise capitalism and property rights and the entrepreneurial spirit and the vigor that comes from the donor civilizations that have sent immigrants to America from the first day. We have had that vigor of the people that had a dream, and they were willing to take a risk and go across an ocean to come here to build a dream on this continent. That is unique about America. They hate that. They haven't seen that level of success. And so they just simply say, we want to kill you unless you will kneel before us and accept our God and reject your own.

It is not my job to know what is going on in their heads. We can try to understand it so we understand our enemy better, but we are not going to accommodate to that kind of thinking, Madam Speaker. We need to challenge it, we need to defeat it wherever it exists, and in fact we've done so in Iraq.

In Iraq, we have reached a definable victory in Iraq, and I have introduced a resolution that says so. And it has its purpose. But the reason that I will say that we reached a definable victory, the list of reasons come along this way: that ethnosectarian deaths, from our high, have dropped 98 percent, civilian deaths have dropped 90 percent in Iraq. We had three successful elections, one constitution that has been ratified in Iraq. The distribution of the oil revenue has been, in a fairly reasonable process, has distributed that revenue from Baghdad out to the other cities.

The mayor of Fallujah has declared it to be a city of peace. The mayor of Ramadi sounds like the mayor of Peoria: ``I need more money for sewer water, lights and streets.'' The mayor of Fallujah said it is a city of peace. They are going to repair every sign of war in Fallujah and plant a lot of flowers instead so that one day soon when we go to Fallujah there will be no sign of war.

All of those things are good signs that this war has gone to the point where we have achieved a definable victory. But the most important statistic is, from June 30 of last year until the last report that I received some days

ago, the loss of American lives in Iraq has been equal to or less for those Americans lost in accidents than we have to the enemy. That tells you when a war is going the right direction.

Those statistics tell us the right things. They don't give comfort to the families who lost a son or a daughter there. They deserve our constant prayers and respect and appreciation for their noble service and their noble sacrifice. But George Bush ordered the surge. Had he not done that, we would be looking at having already pulled our troops out of Iraq and chaos would have ensued, and there would be a defeat in Iraq. And you cannot retreat and declare it victory; you must own the land you fought for before you can declare victory.

And so the ideas that came from some of the people, like the gentleman from Pennsylvania that said it is a war that can't be won, it's a civil war, we have got to get out of there, we've got to retreat to the horizon--we find out the horizon was Okinawa, which takes me back to the courage that this Nation needs to have to face the enemies that we have, and the fear that we had because four planes were crashed into the United States and we didn't know how to fight these people that were willing to die to kill us. Well, Okinawa tells us how.

I went to a National Convention of Survivors of Okinawa a few years ago. They faced 4,600 Kamikaze attacks on the fleet, on their land forces around and on Okinawa. It was a massive suicidal effort to try to wipe out our American forces and a last ditch stand to stop the efforts of the American invasion of Okinawa; 4,600 Kamikaze attacks, and we are worried about four.

We think we don't have the steel within us, the mettle within us, the conviction within us to face off against people like we have today, when you think of what happened in World War II, two-front war, global, 16 million men and women in uniform and in arms and an industrial base that supplied the world because the Second World War destroyed the rest of it.

We are a Nation that became the world power and one of the two competing superpowers until the end of the Cold War, which resulted in one lone superpower, the unchallenged greatest nation in the world economically, militarily, socially, cultural, the beacon for freedom, the inspiration for the free people of the United Kingdom from which originated the English language, which binds us together, and the inspiration for freedom that goes with that language wherever it goes around the globe.

When I read Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, I finally closed that book and I thought of all the places the English language has gone, it's been accompanied by freedom. Freedom has followed. It's gone with the English language. There is an inspiration that's built into the culture that makes us the vanguards, the defenders, the beacons for freedom. We have that responsibility, Madam Speaker, and it's a responsibility to stand up to the tyrants of the world, whether they be Osama bin Laden, Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad. Anybody that undermines freedom is our enemy. And anybody that adheres to and loves and works for and sacrifices for freedom, we adhere to them. The free people of the world need to stand together.

I had a lunch with the Japanese, some members of their Parliament, today. And I said to them that the peace and the security of Asia will depend significantly upon our ability to be friends together today, but peace is not achievable unless we have freedom, and we must defend our freedom.

And then bringing us back to the issues that have been before us here in this Congress this week and last week, there has been an effort to undermine the freedoms of the American people. We're losing track of those underpinnings, those pillars of American exceptionalism. The majority that's here that seems to want to spend their time criticizing the past President, criticizing the past majority in the House of Representatives, and criticizing the past majority in the United States Senate, the people that just can't let go of their rooted criticism for Republicans, the people that can't move on, that must be drilling down and blame shifting back onto our side of this aisle, have lost touch with the fundamental values of human beings. They've lost touch with the criminal law, the criminal law that flows from English common law, the traditions that were there. Criminal law rooted in, if it's the king's deer and you kill the deer, you've committed a crime against the Crown. And if anyone ever is a victim of a crime and they go to court to support as a witness or to observe the proceedings that take place in a criminal prosecution, they will hear the clerk or the bailiff announce this is the case of the State versus John Doe, the alleged perpetrator. They don't say anything about the victim. They don't say that Mary Jones, the victim of this crime, is involved in it. They say that this case is the State versus John Doe, alleged perpetrator. That's because the crime is presumed to be committed against the State, not against an individual victim, rooted back from if you take the king's deer, you've committed a crime against the Crown. If you kill one of the subjects of the king, you've killed one of his assets that he would be deprived of the labor of the subject; so when the king gets his version of justice, the actual victim of the crime is not in the equation anymore. It's the State versus rather than the king versus the perpetrator of the crime.

Now, that's one of the fundamentals, but it always was punishment for the criminal based upon the overt act of the criminal, the action itself. Not the thought, not what went on, not the motivation, but the very act. If you assault someone, we punish you for assault, assault and battery. If you attempt to murder someone, we punish you for the attempted murder. If you murder someone, we punish you for the murder itself, not for the murderous thought that might have preceded the murder. And if you rape someone, we punish you for the rape, not for the motivation or the thought. Now, it might come into a sentencing hearing, but it's not part of the crime, until this House of Representatives, in a breathtaking leap away from hundreds and hundreds of years of criminal law, leaps into this arena to declare that there actually are thought crimes that should be punished separate from the act itself. Now, they call it ``hate crimes'' and they call it Matthew Shepard's law and they call it a lot of other things, but it's thought crimes, Madam Speaker.

Someplace in here I have the text of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. Orwell wrote this book in 1949, and he made a prediction that there would be thought crime control taking place in the world by 1984. Now, we are here in 2009; so he was a little bit ahead of himself in the thought crimes prediction arena. But he said, and I'm going to just paraphrase, Madam Speaker, that we don't care about any overt act; we care about the thought. It's the thought that counts, because if you can control the thought, you can control the act.

Now I do find it here, Madam Speaker, and here it is verbatim from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is the new totalitarians speaking to Winston: ``The party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. We are not content with negative obediency nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world however secret and powerless it may be.''

Madam Speaker, that's what this hate crimes/thought crimes legislation does. It controls, it punishes the thought. And now it sets up a special class of protected people and it subverts our language in a way that's not defined, and I had indexed it from the bill. It subverts our language this way: It replaces the word ``sex'' with the word ``gender.'' And here's why, and I have some history in litigating this. Here's the definition of ``sex'' from Black's Law. ``Sex: The sum of the peculiarities of structure and function that distinguish a male from a female organism.'' The physiology of male versus the physiology of female. That would be your sex. But the word ``sex'' has been constantly replaced in this society willfully in a premeditated way by, let me call them, homosexual activists who see the law of this and they

began to push this in this way: They replace the word ``sex'' with ``gender.'' And ``gender'' is used in this hate crimes/thought crimes legislation. And here's the reason: Gender is ambiguous; sex is specific. Anybody can identify a male from a female. Any plumber or electrician can do that easily. They see the sense in my argument. Some others do not. But sex is specific to the physiology, the physical characteristics. Gender is not so. The definition of ``gender,'' and I'm in the American Heritage Dictionary now, it might be the condition of being female or male.

It's odd that they're so politically correct that they actually willfully switched the male-female to be female first. That's okay with me, but I just noticed that in our literature these days, too.

``The condition of being female or male sex.'' Gender might be that. But right below that it says that ``gender is your sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.'' So if you have a gender that is a sexual identity, doesn't that include a cross-dresser, someone that goes out on the streets as the identity of a female that may have the physiology of the male? That definition doesn't fall under ``sex.'' You don't have any cross-dressers under ``sex.'' They are whatever anyone can determine they are by the physiology of being male or female, but now this legislation plugs the word ``gender'' in.

I tried to replace them, Madam Speaker, but the amendment was voted down exactly by party lines. Now they're a special protected class of people. You can't discriminate against anyone because of gender. You may not be able to determine what it is. That's in the head of the alleged victim.

Then you have gender identity. The definition of ``gender identity'' gets a little bit broader and a little harder to nail down. But gender identity, the definitions that come along with this become definitions that are either a mental definition or a physical definition or, in some of these cases of the paraphilias, of which there are about 547, it can be the act as well.

But we don't know from reading this legislation or talking to the people that wrote it what these words really mean. So if you have sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender identity can be a person's own sense of actual or perceived gender-related characteristics. That sounds a lot like gender to me under that broad, loose definition that's there. What would be the physical definition of gender identity? Could anybody take a look at someone who said that they are of a specific gender identity and determine if they were that gender identity? No. We can determine their sex independently, but the individual has to characterize their gender identity because that's a self-perception, and then it may or may not include a particular act.

But when we get to sexual orientation, sexual orientation includes paraphilias that are listed here by the American Psychological Association. And paraphilias are ``a powerful and persistent sexual interest other than typical sexual interest.'' There is list of 547 specific paraphilias. I call them proclivities. Many of them are perversions, Madam Speaker. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings) read a whole list of them on the floor in the debate yesterday: asphyxiophilia, apotemnophilia, autogynephilia, kleptophilia, klismaphilia, necrophilia, pedophilia, and we know what that one is-- that's, of course, the sexual activity with children--urophilia. There are some philias. And the gentleman from Florida said, I think we have to have special protected status from all philias whatsoever, all proclivities whatsoever. These that are perversions are specifically, at least within some of the idea of the definition of this legislation, protected.

It's outrageous to think that the amendments to protect the unborn child, the amendments to protect the pregnant mother, the amendments to protect the senior citizens, the amendments to protect our uniformed soldiers from this kind of hate crime against them motivated by what's in the head of the perpetrator were all voted down in the Judiciary Committee and denied to be debated on the floor of the House of Representatives because we had this draconian closed rule that would not put these Members up and require them to make a decision on whether they were going to protect these proclivities, these paraphilias, these perversions, while we had one Member say, yes, they're protected in this law. We had one of the strong advocates of this bill say, no, it's only homosexuals or heterosexuals.

Presumably it's not bisexuals. Well, I don't know what happens when you cross the line between heterosexual to homosexual. There must be somebody in the middle that's a bisexual that she would want to include. But this lack of specificity gets us in trouble, Madam Speaker.

Another thing that gets us in trouble is the statements that are made in the debate in this bill that are just flat erroneous, such as, well, it requires a crime of violence before it will kick in the Federal extra penalty against someone because they've committed this hate crime/thought crime. It requires a crime of violence.

Well, it doesn't, Madam Speaker. It doesn't require a crime of violence. It does under the imposition of the Federal law but not when we are sending the Department of Justice down to any political subdivision, city, county, or State, municipality, parish, tribal area, to help out with prosecution there. Then we honor whatever they might have written into their local ordinance for hate crimes.

We use Federal forces to enforce it, and these crimes can be committed against property, specifically in the bill that can be crimes against property, not just crimes of violence against people. And here is where it comes from. They reference the section in the code.

So I go to this section, and it's a definition of crime of violence. And it says: ``The term `crime of violence' means an offense that has as an element the use, attempted use or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another as an element.''

Even the threat of physical force against only the property of another, if they presume that it's motivated in part by a built-in bias against someone's proclivity that cannot be divined by the perpetrator but has to be self-identified by the victim.

Sounds a little like the sexual harassment that we debated here in this Congress about the time, well, it was exactly at the time of the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas. It sounds a lot like you can sexually harass someone and not know it, because the rationale is it's in the mind of the victim.

And so if someone comes in and tells an off-color joke at work, if no one is offended, it's not sexual harassment. But if someone is offended, then it's sexual harassment.

And if someone paints some graffiti on a garage, and that garage happens to belong to someone who says I have one of these philias, one of these proclivities, one of these paraphilias, then they can bring Federal hate crime charges against the person with a can of spray paint. Or, Madam Speaker, here is a case in point. It could be, brings me back to Ellie Nessler.

Ellie Nessler is well-known in California. Her son was a victim of a sex crime. And when they brought the perpetrator into court, the alleged perpetrator, because he hadn't been convicted at that point, and the trial stopped right after Ellie's act, he smirked at the mother of the victim, who was there to protect her son who needed to be there for the case of this trial.

And after he smirked at her, she went out and got her pistol and shot the perpetrator in the courtroom. The justice that was brought to Ellie Nessler was manslaughter, and I believe that she served 6 months in the California penitentiary, and then she was paroled on good behavior.

This sets the scenario up where Californians were satisfied with the justice that Ellie Nessler received. But if there had been some that were connected at the national level, under this kind of legislation, then the Department of Justice could send in Federal prosecutors to prosecute Ellie Nessler for a hate crime that she committed against the perpetrator who was a pedophile. And that pedophile would have that special protected status.

And even in his death, the punishment could have been multiplied up to and including life in a Federal penitentiary because he had committed a politically--he committed an act--and

she had committed a politically incorrect act, for an extra penalty. Now I don't make excuses for Ellie Nessler's act, but I point out that Federal involvement in local crimes is unnecessary, and it's interventionary.

And it's unjust for us to believe that we can set penalties here on the floor of this Congress and lock people up for as long as life in prison for what we think was going on in their head, about what they might have thought was going on in the head of the victim.

And we are going to for the first time match up the psychoanalysis of the victim, the psychoanalysis of the perpetrator, put them together and come down with a decision not on the overt act, Madam Speaker, but on the very thought that might go on in the mind of the perpetrator.

It's wrong to take justice down this path. It's unjust to do so. It's unprecedented to do so. It pits Americans against Americans. It sets up sacred cows, people that can walk through this society, and they will be dealt with differently because there will be the threat that Federal law will come in and give them a special protected status, a shield that doesn't exist for people that don't fit within this list of special protected status.

I urge the Senate to oppose this legislation, to defeat it with every effort that they can; to filibuster this hate crimes, thought crimes, legislation; to amend it to the high heavens; to take us back to the rule of law where we punish the overt act, not the thought. Thought crimes legislation should not be part of American law, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 5 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, May 4, 2009, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding the time.

Mr. Speaker, this issue was debated for 2 days before the Judiciary Committee. There were many, many amendments that were offered before the committee. Every one of them was rejected and shot down out of, I think, a desire to preserve the bill to be whatever it was that was presented to the committee.

And now here we are with a rule that results in a closed rule, Mr. Speaker, a closed rule because, as the gentlelady from North Carolina said, there is a fear that there could be amendments that would succeed that would be offered here.

One of those that I happened to have offered before the Judiciary Committee was to exempt pedophiles as a special protected status that is under this bill. Now, the rational thought on the other side I couldn't follow, Mr. Speaker, but I think it would be rational for this full body as a House of Representatives to make a decision on this. And I think that there was a fear on the part of the Rules Committee that that would also be a decision that would be made.

Well, I have before me a list from the American Psychological Association of the paraphilias, paraphilias being, I will call them proclivities in my vernacular, Mr. Speaker, and among them are pedophiles and a whole list of other kinds of activities. There are 547 of them altogether. We can't even exempt pedophiles, let alone the other proclivities that are there, from special protected status.

We can't define the language that's in the bill, the language in the bill that says ``gender'' versus ``sex.'' Gender isn't the same thing as using the word ``sex.'' Sex is what an individual can determine someone else to be. Gender is what a person thinks they are in their head. So the blurry language of gender replaces the clear language of sex that has been in our law for a long time in history.

Sexual orientation is another one of these. There are three different categories. We are figuring out what's in people's heads, the perpetrator and the victim. So under sexual orientation you have a mental definition, the head of, perhaps, the victim what's going on there. You have the plumbing of the victim, that's a different kind of a definition. And then you have the act that might be carried out by someone of a specific sexual orientation. No definition exists in law.

Gender identity is another broad category that can be whatever any individual wants it to be. So how does someone discriminate against someone else? How do they determine what these particular proclivities are, Mr. Speaker?

These are the broad, mushy areas of law that lead us down a path that ends up with any combination of liberal activist judges who will turn this into a mass of special protected status people, sacred cows walking through our society, self-alleged.

The gentleman from Florida mentioned the immutable characteristics. No, that's not in the bill. We tried to put it in the bill, but that amendment was shot down. I wish we could protect immutable characteristics. I think they should be. And those characteristics are those characteristics that are independently verified and can't be willfully changed.

That's the subject matter, 1984, George Orwell. I brought this up the last time we debated this. And I think it's important that we look at the book that was written in 1949 and predicted by George Orwell that by 1984 we would be where we are today in 2009.

He was writing about the new totalitarians who learned from the Nazis and the Russian Communists. And they said, ``The Party is not interested in any overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world.'' This is George Orwell, 1984, anticipating we would be having this debate in 1984, and today it's 2009, Mr. Speaker.

We should punish all perpetrators. There should be no special victims, and all perpetrators should be punished the same. And I think 25 years for assault on anyone is enough. But to the gentleman from Colorado that called for a life sentence for assault, what does he do to a murderer?

I oppose the rule and the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding.

I want to take it back to this question. We have these vague terms in this legislation that's before us, these vague terms that the Judiciary Committee majority refused to define and refused to allow a definition, and so I've looked up some definitions of this language, and here is one of them. Sexual orientation. We'll go to the Merriam Webster's Dictionary, under medical, and it says, sexual orientation: One's attraction to and preference in sexual partners. One definition.

Here's another definition that comes from the American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary. It says sexual orientation is sexual activity with people of the opposite sex, the same sex or both.

So one is an attraction definition, and the other one is an activity definition.

And now I go to the American Psychological Association, those people that have identified 547 different paraphilias, and they say sexual orientation is different from sexual behavior because it refers to feelings and self-concept. Individuals may or may not express that in their behaviors.

So, here we have, again, these broad definitions in the so-called hate crimes legislation that truly are thought crimes, because without the thought, you're not going to have the hate, and it can only be defined by trying to look into the skull of the victim and the perpetrator. And there's never been legislation that's presented that's been this broad or that imagines that it can define something that is in the head of a victim and in the head of the perpetrator at the same time, let alone what might be in the head of the judge, Mr. Speaker. So I oppose this legislation.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for his leadership in opposition to this issue and for yielding.

The gentleman, the previous speaker, just said this bill only punishes violent crimes. I take you to the language from the bill. Here's the definition of a crime of violence. It means an offense that has, as an element, the threatened use of force against the property of another. If one threatens to use force against the property of another--this is verbatim from the section that is referenced in the existing code--property crimes are included in this, threats against property crimes are included in this. Hate crimes, the definition of hate crimes in the Federal statutes means a crime when the perpetrator selects property because of the property owner's actual or perceived sexual orientation.

This isn't just violent crimes. It is in some of the Federal segment of it but not in the assistance that goes to local governments. And in local governments it also states in the bill that any local jurisdiction's hate crimes ordinance or legislation can be supported by supporting the prosecution of the local hate crimes legislation that's there.

And so whatever local jurisdiction may determine is a hate crime is covered under this bill. It might be a city, a county, a municipality; it might be a parish, it might be a State. It might be San Francisco's ordinance that says, Thou shalt not discriminate against the short, the fat, the tall, or the skinny. That is hate crimes ordinances that could be prosecuted with Federal assistance under this bill. The short, the fat, the tall, the skinny. That will cover some regular people, I think.

And so I would ask this: Why are you dividing us? Why are you pitting Americans against Americans? That's a rhetorical question, Mr. Speaker. This divides us and pits Americans against Americans. And the definitions in this bill are broad, ambiguous and undefined anywhere with any consensus, even among the professionals that deal with this on a daily basis.

In the committee, I asked specifically the question, ``What is the definition for sexual orientation?'' The answer that I got back from the gentlelady from Wisconsin was, ``This bill only covers homosexuality and heterosexuality.'' Now it presumably excludes bisexuality, but in the rule debate, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings) said, ``No, no. Here's what we have,'' and he read through a whole list of philias, he called it.

There are 547 specific paraphilias that are listed by the American Psychological Association. About 30 of them have been read into this Record. I've got a list of these 30 philias. Among them pedophilia--the obsession with children--which specifically was excluded from the bill when I offered the amendment by the Judiciary Committee.

So, Mr. Speaker, we're going down the path here of no one really knows. Am I going to buy into the statement made by the very senior member of the Rules Committee who says I want to protect all philias whatsoever no matter what the proclivity? And many of them are perversions, Mr. Speaker. We're going to grant that protected status to people who are actually breaking the law if they act on their particular sexual orientation, or are we going to limit it to--as the gentlelady from Wisconsin says--homosexuality and heterosexuality, not bisexuality.

I tried to explain this to the press as they asked me questions. And finally my answer became, ``If this sounds confusing and gibberish, it is.'' And it leaves it open to any judge, any lawyer, anyone for anything that is in their head or might be their plumbing or might be in the perception of the perpetrator as well as, and/or, the perception of the alleged victim.

There is no precedent for this in law, this broad, broad idea that we're going to punish what is in the head of the perpetrator by dividing what may or may not have been in the head of the victim. That's where this legislation takes us.

Why are they dividing us, Mr. Speaker?

I oppose this legislation.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

In listening to the dialogue that has taken place here in the previous hour, I think it's time for a little bit of information to unfold, and, that is, it's time to move on. It's time to let go. It's time to take responsibility. It is not any longer time to come to this floor and spend your time beating up on George W. Bush. He's not the President today. Or beating up on Dick Cheney. He's no longer the President of the United States Senate today. And neither is Denny Hastert the Speaker of the House. And neither is Mitch McConnell the majority leader of the United States Senate. All of those things have changed, and they have changed recently, Mr. Speaker.

So to listen to this dialogue that's here tonight--and, by the way, fairly devoid of humility--with the exception of seeking to impose that on others--but 60 minutes of defense of, whose name came up more often than George Bush's and Dick Cheney's? Barney Frank. Members of the committee here on the floor spending 60 minutes describing how it is that Barney Frank's leadership was the correct path to follow throughout all of this time and explaining that we can't afford the status quo, that Republicans wanted the status quo.

I would just take you back, Mr. Speaker, to think about this. They talked about 2005. I remember the debate here in 2005, and I remember the exact date. It was October 26. And it was an effort to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a piece of the subject matter from all of these highly informed people from the Financial Services Committee. They seem to forget that Republicans weren't satisfied with the status quo; it was Barney Frank that was satisfied with the status quo. The one who said over and over again into the record, on committee, here on the floor in debate, specifically on that date that I mentioned, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were just fine, they don't need any more regulation. He would resist, and he aggressively resisted the effort to try to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman. I had engaged in this and I was hoping you would come back.

And I don't either.

Reclaiming my time, I would easily agree to that and that's the point I am seeking to make--that now today you do. That time has passed. Now you have President Obama and you have Speaker Pelosi and you have Majority Leader Harry Reid. And so that whole scenario that you were using to describe this in past Congresses, today it's a new world. It's time to move on.

That's my point.

I thank the gentleman for coming back and engaging. I always enjoy it.

Continuing on, Mr. Speaker, that debate here on this floor, October 26, 2005, was about seeking to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

There was an amendment that I recall that was brought by the gentleman, Mr. Leach, who believed strongly that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were underregulated, undercapitalized and I agreed with him, and a good number of the rest of us agreed with him.

But the defense was of Fannie and Freddie coming from the current chairman of the Financial Services Committee who has not only been all over the airwaves playing self-defense in this economic calamity that we're in the middle of but who, on the eve of our departure to go home for Easter vacation, came to this floor for a 60-minute Special Order to explain how it was that he was right and the rest of us were wrong.

And now I hear a committee that comes down and deploy themselves across the floor, and it's essentially the same thing. And they dig back into the Community Reinvestment Act and they argue that in that reinvestment act, there wasn't a requirement that there be bad loans made into bad neighborhoods.

That's true, Mr. Speaker. There wasn't a specific requirement that required lending institutions to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. It was simply this: You will not expand your operations if you don't make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. And we know that there were people that came and sought to intimidate the lenders and pushed their desks around. And sometimes it was Members of Congress. I may have actually heard a confession here on the floor tonight, Mr. Speaker, to intimidate lenders into making these bad loans. And lenders put people on their payroll in order to fill out portfolios and be able to hand to the regulators their case that they had been complying not just with the letter of the Community Reinvestment Act but what they perceived to be the intent of Congress, the changing intent of Congress, in the Community Reinvestment Act. That act was part of the foundation for the financial problem we have today. Not the only reason. It wasn't the only reason at all. But it laid a rotten foundation for the other things that were built on top of it.

And when the gentlewoman from Wisconsin makes a statement that many, many loans were made to African Americans and Hispanics, I long for the day that there is no box to check in a loan application. I think we all should be treated equally. I think that we should be color blind. I think someone who qualifies for a loan should have that loan granted to them without regard to race, creed, religion, ethnicity, national origin, or any other characteristic. I don't want to see people that are God's children categorized by skin color or national origin or sexual orientation, for that matter, or any other component that we are obsessing with here in this Congress.

This is about dividing people. This is what's going on. It's pitting Americans against Americans. You can hear it in the tone in the previous hour, where there's some more virtue in one ethnicity than there is in another. I don't believe that, Mr. Speaker. In fact, I heard the statement made that they

were bragging about ``we loan to black people,'' closed quote, from the previous hour. I wouldn't know I was doing that. I would think I'm lending to God's children without regard to race, ethnicity, color, national origin, or any other characteristic, mutable or immutable.

And it was said in the previous hour that race was the single factor in the past 30 years in determining who would not get a loan. Maybe it was in some cases, and I think that when that was the case, the motivation was right for the Community Reinvestment Act. It's just the policy that was wrong. There were lenders that were drawing a red line around different neighborhoods in the cities, especially in the inner cities, and they had concluded that the asset value of that real estate was going down, not up. And they had decided it wasn't a prudent business investment to make loans into those neighborhoods that were red lined.

Now, if they drew a line around a neighborhood because it was African American and probably wasn't Hispanic back in those days, if they did that for race reasons, that was wrong, Mr. Speaker. If they did it for economic reasons, it was perhaps a prudent economic calculation, a prudent business model, but not because of race.

So the Community Reinvestment Act was formed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began picking up loans in the secondary market that were being issued in order to build a lender's portfolio so they could expand into these neighborhoods and beyond. And the bookkeeping that was done to make this case to the regulators was set up more and more from, I'll say, a perverse incentive to make enough loans that they could characterize them as, well, race was the single factor in the past 30 years in determining who would not get a loan. It may well have been the single factor over that same period of time in determining who would get a loan under the Community Reinvestment Act.

I would just make a point, Mr. Speaker, and I, again, believe that we should not categorize people by race or ethnicity or national origin or any of these other characteristics that I've mentioned, but this data that I see shows that 96 percent of African Americans voted for our first black President. That's the largest percentage of any ethnic group ever known to vote for a single presidential candidate in the history of the United States of America, the most pluralistic nation in the world, and we probably always will be. And I would just submit, Mr. Speaker, that this President would not be President today if any of the other races were so racially motivated in the ballots that they cast when they went to the polls.

So I think if there's going to be a color painted on anyone, a bias that's painted in there, an implication that comes out of this dialogue, I think the folks that were making those statements ought to look home to themselves first rather than outward to try to place some blame. And I'm happy to acknowledge every legitimate vote, and I think they should be counted. But I think we need to recognize that these things do swing both ways and it swung dramatically the other way.

I would just reiterate, Mr. Speaker, it's time to let go. It's time to move on. It's time to govern with the people that were elected in the majority today and not point fingers backwards and place blame where there is no blame due in particular. And I think when you hear a hue and cry come up, and when you see a relentless effort to advocate in favor of an individual in this Congress, and when I see him do it himself here on the floor as chairman of the Financial Services Committee, when I see these Members here tonight spend an hour essentially doing the same thing, that tells me there must be something there that caused them to want to be defensive. And I'm going to submit that the opposition to the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac looms as another significant component in what went wrong in our finances.

So to run through this thing from the Community Reinvestment Act to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and to recognize that the secondary loan market was underregulated, undercapitalized, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who were purchasing these loans and selling them back, and they were the secondary market and they were bundling them up and moving those on through the financial sector, they had an unnatural advantage. Less capital, less regulation. And behind them they had, technically speaking, and the gentleman from Massachusetts would raise an objection and disagree with me on this, but I'll submit this: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had the full faith and credit of the United States Government behind them. That made their capital more effective than the capital of a private lending institution that had to compete with them. And I will concede the point they would like to make if they were here, that technically they didn't have the full faith and credit. But they had the implication of the full faith and credit of the United States Government that was there, which allowed them to take more risks and take those risks with less capital than if they had been another lending institution.

And what happened, Mr. Speaker? Clearly we know what happened. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got in trouble, in big trouble. And they were looking at $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities if their investments fell apart. They had to be capitalized. They had to be managed. So what happened? Roughly $200 billion from the U.S. taxpayer went into capitalizing Fannie and Freddie, and they became nationalized, wholly owned subsidiaries of the Federal Government, no longer quasi government entities but wholly owned subsidiaries, nationalized. The guarantee of the full faith and credit of the United States Government did come to pass, and the taxpayers did fork over $200 billion. And today these are nationalized government entities that were quasi private that had been wholly private.

And I introduced legislation to capitalize and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and privatize them last September or perhaps October. It needs to be done yet, Mr. Speaker, although we have enough things going on in our finances today that I choose not to advocate aggressively on that path because we'll get bogged down and not be able to do the things we need to do.

So that's just the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And if we move on and we look at some of the other things that went wrong, we had the bursting of the dot-com bubble that just started to happen in the last year or two of the Clinton administration. It was initiated by the lawsuit against Microsoft, and that was what pierced the dot-com bubble. I think it would have burst anyway. The bubble was created because we had technologically figured out how to store and transfer information more effectively than ever before, cheaper than ever before. And yet the speculators were investing in these dot-com companies, anticipating there would be a lot of money made in the industry. And there was. But the calculation that was the burst of the dot-com bubble was when the bubble had to collapse and let the air out of it that was there because there also had to be an increase in production and efficiency that came with all of that information. If it didn't create that, it didn't have an economic value. So we speculated on what that value might be. The bubble burst when it was pierced by the Microsoft lawsuit. And as the economy began to decline, George Bush was elected President. And we had this bubble going on.

Alan Greenspan saw this happening and concluded that he needed to create an economy that would fill the dot-com bubble. So he began to rachet interest rates down and to do so especially on our long-term loans, and we ended up with subprime loans, to create an economy that would fill the hole that was created by the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Alan Greenspan was busily ratcheting those interest rates down to unnatural levels, creating a housing bubble to fill the dot-com bubble hole, while September 11th rolled around and the United States was attacked by our enemies. The financial centers of the United States attacked by our enemies.

We saw this all happen. And while it was going on, we needed to make some adjustments to bring this economy around because we were wobbly when the attack came on September 11 of 2001. This Congress passed the first round of Bush tax cuts. It filled a

minor hole. It was May 28, 2003, when the real Bush tax cuts took place, and they were the ones that had long-lasting value that brought this economy throughout the entire Bush term, even though we were in the middle of fighting a war, even though our financial center had been hammered. And while all this was going on, the housing bubble was being created yet, even though as the interest rates went higher, the subprime loans and the variable interest rates were being adjusted and putting people in trouble with homes that would have been in trouble probably anyway, many of them. Not all of them by any means.

So this was almost a perfect storm. And I haven't even gotten to the mark-to-market accounting side of this thing and credit default swaps and AIG Insurance that had nobody looking over their shoulder that were setting their own premium rates and had such a market share that there wasn't a way that anyone could look in on them and second guess the rates they were providing to guarantee the return on the bundles of mortgage-backed securities.

So this perfect storm unfolded until the day Henry Paulson came to this Congress and called for $700 billion. And he said, I've been watching this problem for 13 months.

And we said, Why didn't you do something?

He said, Well, if I had said anything, it would have accelerated a downward spiral in our economy.

Well, so what was he doing here in Congress asking for $700 billion and doing press conferences and interviews every step along the way around this Capitol but scaring the living daylights out of everyone and demanding $700 billion? So could he have just done that 13 months earlier, maybe we could have had a way to digest all of this and the crisis wouldn't have been as bad. But it got bad.

I will say, though, that where we are today, the United States economy hasn't taken the hit as hard as the rest of the industrialized world has and that President Obama picked up the plan that was proposed by Henry Paulson and endorsed by President Bush. He picked this up. And, by the way, he came back to vote for the $700 billion TARP, and yet as elected President, he was fond of saying, I inherited a trillion dollar deficit; so don't blame me for all the things that have gone wrong in the past.

Well, part of that trillion-dollar deficit he voted for. Maybe not all of that because he didn't spend a lot of time in the United States Senate, but he voted for a lot of the deficit that President Obama claims to have and for a significant portion of it did inherit.

But it's his economy. He voted for it. He supported it. President Bush initiated it. Who knows how far he would have gone. Would President Bush have allowed General Motors and Chrysler to move into Chapter 11, or would President Bush have simply decided enough was enough? We actually will never know what President Bush would have done. But we do know what President Obama has done and what he has said. And what he has said is the New Deal actually did work, that FDR got part of it right, but he ran out of nerve and he got worried about spending too much money; so he backed off in the second half of the decade of the 1930s, and that brought about a recession within a depression.

This is the President talking, not me. I don't believe that this is what happened. I've studied it and I draw a different message from it.

But the message that our President drew was that FDR should have spent a lot more money. If he had done that we would have recovered from the Great Depression before World War II had to come along to be the largest stimulus plan ever and get us out of this depression. Not that anybody is concluding that we would not have had World War II if we had had a stronger economy. I don't think that's actually a valid exercise in the study of history.

But I will make this other point. Whenever you borrow billions of dollars from the future of our children, and you inject it into the economy and make-work projects that do not have economic value, you put this Nation in a debt that is harder and harder for it to climb back from. That's what this policy has done, that's what this stimulus plan does, and that's what many of the proposals that have unfolded here from this Federal Government have done.

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had gotten it right, we would have seen a positive recovery from the Great Depression take place in the thirties. But instead we saw unemployment rates going into World War II that were very similar to the unemployment rates in the middle of the decade. I will say that FDR inherited some very high unemployment rates.

The numbers that I recall are about 25 percent. That would be the peak. But at 15 percent, it's really serious. And we are seeing unemployment rates now that show at least 11.5 million people in America that are out there actively looking for jobs.

Now this 25 percent unemployment rate that we had in the early thirties carried through at 15 percent, in that range or a little more, on throughout that entire decade, and then World War II came along and put people to work. When I hear people tell me that 4.6 percent is a historically low unemployment rate--and we had that rate 3 or 4 years ago--I would disagree, Mr. Speaker. When I look through the rates, my recollection is, and I am very confident I am right on this, at the close of World War II, 1945, the United States of America had a 1.2 percent unemployment rate.

That's about as close to a full employment economy as you can actually devise out of a society, because there's always going to be some people in between jobs. That was the scenario of a full employment society.

And had we done the free-market thing back in the thirties, had we just simply pulled government back out of the way, lowered some taxes and given the entrepreneurs an opportunity, instead of competing directly with them for capital, for employees, and, actually, for jobs, had we let the private sector flourish in the thirties, I believe we would have seen a lower unemployment rate and real economic growth going on into towards World War II. The war would have happened, anyway, but we would have been on the footing of not carrying the debt we did into the Second World War which put a tremendous amount of debt on our economy.

We need to remember, Mr. Speaker, that from the time that FDR was inaugurated as President of the United States and initiated the New Deal program--let me back up a little more. I will back up to October 1929 when the stock market crashed.

The stock market on the day that it crashed, that point as a benchmark, we went through to 1930, the beginning of the decade of the thirties, all the way through the thirties, not reaching the point where the stock market had been when it crashed in October of '29, all the New Deal, we exhausted every dollar invested in New Deal, spent it all, make-work projects of all kinds, borrowed money hand over fist, hired people to work directly for the Federal Government to do make- work projects, to dig holes and fill them back up, all the way through the thirties, and still the stock market hadn't recovered in a substantial way.

We went into World War II and industrialized all of America and we were the surviving industrial nation at the close of World War II, and still the stock market hadn't caught back up with where it was in October of '29.

So we had the post-World War II era when our troops came back home and the economy got a shot in the arm because we had good, well-trained employees that were starting families, and there were real investments going on. And throughout that period of time, from 1945 until the early fifties, still the stock market didn't catch up with where it was in October of '29.

And then the Korean War began, and we went over there and fought that war and lost those soldiers over there and negotiated to a draw in Korea. And still the stock market didn't catch up with where it was in October of '29. Not until 1954, Mr. Speaker, not until Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years did the stock market recover from where it was on the day that it crashed in October of 1929.

That's not data that tells me the New Deal worked. But our President has adopted the idea that the New Deal actually did work, to use his terms, except FDR lost his nerve.

And I can say this, Mr. Speaker, this President will not lose his nerve when

it comes to spending money. If there is one thing that he has courage to do, that's to spend our money. And he has spent trillions of our money, and I predicted when he made the pitch for the stimulus plan that his economic recovery model was about an $8 trillion project. And I got ridiculed for being such a radical reactionary.

But he has surpassed $8 trillion some time back. His very budget that he presents to this Congress creates a $9.3 trillion deficit.

Mr. Speaker, I can't help but seek to inform you and the balance of the body of what a trillion dollars is. You know I come from Iowa, and we happen to be, and we are pretty proud of it--and I don't raise any of it so I don't get the credit--we are the number one corn producing State in the Union. We raise a lot of it, and we are pretty good at it. We have the right weather and the right soil and the right people to do it. We have been increasing yields 3 to 4 percent a year for some time, and we will do that for sometime into the future.

But we will raise about 2\1/4\ billion bushels of corn in this 2009 crop that's being planted, well, as we speak, if it's not raining at home. Two and a quarter billion bushels. Let's just say for the sake of simplicity and math, it's worth $4.40 a bushel. It's not today. It's worth less than that, less than $4 today. We have had some markets that went well above that. This works out so that I can memorize these numbers. I can't do the math this fast in my head.

That makes Iowa's corn crop this year worth about $10 billion. So we have a good yield, the markets are down a little, or if we have not such a good yield, the markets are up a little, we will raise enough corn to cash sale that for $10 billion.

Now, how much is a trillion? Well, let's see. If we could take all the corn we could raise in Iowa this year and next year and next year and the year after, and we handed every kernel of corn over that we could raise in Iowa for the next 100 years, we would have generated a trillion dollars. A hundred years of Iowa's corn crop just to pick up the trillion dollars that is not even enough to pay for the first proposal on the stimulus plan, let alone the Obama budget deficit, which comes to $9.3 trillion. A century of all of our corn accumulated comes to a trillion dollars.

But this is not a trillion dollar deficit. It's a $9.3 trillion deficit created. And if you would just bear with me, and we will presume that we are going to round this up to 10 trillion for simplicity, and because government always spends more money than they promise you they will--we know that to be a fact. It's a historical truth.

So a $10 trillion deficit created by Obama's budget, now, how much corn is that? It's all the corn that Iowa can raise, and not one century or two centuries or three centuries, Mr. Speaker, the deficit created by the Obama budget is the equivalent to all of the corn, the value of all the corn that Iowa can raise in a thousand years, an entire millennium of our corn crop, a thousand years, way longer than anybody has been farming this ground. It will take a thousand years of all of our corn just to pay the deficit created by this budget.

And now, if you wanted to add to that the value of the existing deficit, which is around $11.3 trillion, now it's easy. It's easy to get to $20 trillion.

In fact, the numbers will come to between $20.8 trillion and $23 trillion. But let's just use 20. This is a conservative number.

How much is $20 trillion? That's if we take the present value of the production of corn in Iowa from the time of the birth of Christ and multiply that every year for more than 2,000 years, you would finally, at the end of two millennia, accumulate enough money in present value to pay off the Obama budget and the national debt. $20 trillion. That's how big this is, Mr. Speaker. This is a huge deficit put upon our children and our grandchildren.

And I happen to think that the economic problems that this country has aren't the worst problems that we have. They sound insurmountable. Perhaps on another night I will approach this with a solution, and I have in the past.

But I think what happened here on the floor of the House of Representatives today tells us something about the other problems that are great, that are huge, that undermine the core of our civilization, the character of our nation. That is, Mr. Speaker, the hate crimes legislation that passed the floor of the House of Representatives today.

This is legislation that sets up a special protected status for sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, I think they have also disability in there, which I am not particularly concerned about. We did a 2-day markup in the Judiciary Committee on this legislation, Mr. Speaker.

What it does is it defines special classes of people that will have special protection from, let's say assault, and special classes of people whom if someone does assault them, the perpetrator, if convicted, will get an enhanced penalty, an enhanced crime. It sets up sacred cows in our society. This civilization that we are so blessed to be part of has always punished the overt act, not the thought, not the hate that's underneath many of the crimes that we have, but we have punished the act, not the thought.

Because throughout history, we have understood that. We can't know what goes on in someone's head, but we can prove definitively, many times, the extent of the crime that was committed and who committed it. It's the crime that's wrong, not the thought associated with it that's wrong. This is a free country that we have, after all.

And so this legislation reflects for me George Orwell's book, 1984, written in 1949, studied by many of us as we went through the educational system, and I would present for your consideration, Mr. Speaker, some phrases from George Orwell's book, 1984. He was writing about the force of the new totalitarians. That's my term, not his. Well, actually it is his.

He didn't call them the new totalitarians, but he called them the totalitarians. And they were the successors of the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. And he argued that the totalitarians wanted total control, not just total control of the economy and the military and the society. They wanted to control everyone's minds, Mr. Speaker.

So here is what goes on. This hate crimes legislation seeks to punish, to punish not the overt act but the thought that is associated with the overt act. There wouldn't be any reason to have hate crimes legislation if we were just going to punish people for committing the crimes, because we have laws against them.

But this legislation puts up a special penalty for the perception that is in the head of the perpetrator, which is identified by the perception that's in the head of the victim.

And for the first time, there would be legislation, passed this House today, that evaluates the skull contents of the perpetrator and of the victim, and what goes on in that gray matter and what motivated them, rather than the crime itself. Now, George Orwell wrote, and I quote, ``The party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.'' That's out of George Orwell's 1984, Mr. Speaker.

The party then, the new totalitarians, were not interested in the overt act. But they were interested in the thought. Because they knew that if you control the thought, you control the act.

Now, that was written to stretch our minds and, I think, predict for us what could happen when government got to be the be-all, end-all, super intrusive conscience for everyone. And I think we have heard that here tonight.

As I look at this legislation, Mr. Speaker, I find all kinds of gaps in it.

When I take it apart piece by piece and go through it word-for-word, line-by-line and subsection by subsection, I find that this legislation doesn't hold together, that it has references in it that references other sections of code that are inconsistent with the language in the bill itself.

So as I look through these definitions that are here, I recall the gentlelady

from Wisconsin in committee saying that sexual orientation only meant homosexuality or heterosexuality. Apparently it didn't mean bisexuality, and obviously according to that definition doesn't include all of the proclivities listed in the American Psychology Diagnostic List.

So if that is the case, I am still concerned. But I offered an amendment to eliminate pedophiles as a special protected class of people. And, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to put a shield of statutory protection around someone for their proclivity, couldn't we at least exempt it for the pedophiles? But on a party line vote, the Democrats in the Judiciary Committee voted no on the exemption of pedophiles from special protected status. And that is just one of those groups, Mr. Speaker. It is just one of the groups.

Here is a list. This is a list that is a list of the paraphilias. Paraphilias, things that I call proclivities, they are the powerful and persistent sexual interest other than typical interest and behavior. That is paraphilia. There are, according to one of the well-respected definitions, how about from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, here is a list of some of the paraphilias. There are 547 of them altogether, Mr. Speaker.

Among them there is a high list of 30 that we will recognize some of. Let me see which ones could I actually mention into this Record without embarrassing myself.

One is Asphyxophlia, and that is a sexual gratification derived from oxygen deprivation. I didn't know that was out there. But that is a special paraphilia, a proclivity, that would be protected under the hate crimes legislation. So one dare not assault one of those folks or discriminate against them in any way, because you could be subjected to a Federal hate crimes legislation.

I will argue that everybody ought to have protection without regard to any of these things. But these are special protected classes of people created by this law. And even that side, even though they won't discuss it and they won't answer the questions, doesn't agree with each other. I get a different message from the gentlelady from Wisconsin, Ms. Baldwin, and a different message from her from the gentleman from the Rules Committee, Mr. Hastings.

Mr. Hastings read from a list of paraphilias, and I don't remember just which ones he read into the Record, there are so many. But, let's see, as he read through these philias, he said he thinks they are all protected under the legislation under the definition of sexual orientation. So Autogynephilia, Coprophilia, what other philias do we have here, there are a number of others, Kleptophilia, sexual excitement from stealing. I didn't know that existed. Klismaphilia, I won't give you the definition of all of them. Necrophilia, that is fixation with a corpse. Pedophilia, I mentioned that to you. I think all these philias should be in the bill and are covered by sexual orientation. But his own party member and main proponent of the bill says no, it is only heterosexual and homosexual, but not apparently bisexual.

This is a major discrepancy in this approach, but what it does is it allows the courts to decide what is and isn't covered under ``sexual orientation,'' a very, very broad definition of the term.

Then, Mr. Speaker, as I reach to pull this bill out, here is a definition of gender identity. Gender identity, when I make the point that there is no definition of gender identity, I get this response. Yes, there is. It is defined in the bill. Just look in the bill.

So, I looked in the bill, and I read here that I guess you could argue it is defined, although I wouldn't want to make this argument. Gender identity, from the bill: ``For the purposes of this chapter the term gender identity means actual or perceived gender-related characteristics.''

Okay, so if you are coming in off the farm, what in the world does that mean? I say I don't know what gender identity is, can you help me out here, because we are going to be setting the destiny of America. So define it for me. I would like to know.

Well, gender identity means actual or perceived gender-related characteristics.

All right. Let me see, how would you define clothing? Well, clothing could be actual or perceived clothing-related characteristics. Well, would that be like a heavy Russian winter coat, or would it be a itsy- bitsy bikini, or a pair of blue jeans? What would you describe it as? It is not very specific. Could you identify that all as clothing without a definition of clothing as having clothing-related characteristics? Can't we do better in law?

I argued that fence posts come in a lot of different versions too. We have creosote-treated pine fence posts. That would be wood. We have hedge posts. We have cedar posts, split cedar posts. We have steel post, T-posts, electric fence posts. What if I defined it as fence posts mean actual or perceived fence post-related characteristics? Now what have we?

I am just telling you this, Mr. Speaker, because these are inanimate objects that I am describing here, and even still the silliness of this I think emerges in my argument. But when you start talking about not inanimate objects, but animate objects that are being described by what goes on in their mind and using terms such as ``gender'' instead of the word ``sex'' and ``gender identity'' and ``sexual orientation'' and recognizing that there are three different categories for some of these definitions, Mr. Speaker.

One of them is gender, okay, for example, as opposed to sex. Sex is a physical characteristic. Gender can be a physical characteristic, or it can be what you think you are, a mental characteristic. All right. So there is two different categories of gender, two different definitions of gender.

You have sexual orientation. Gender identity. Let me go to gender identity. Gender identity can be whatever you think you are, I don't know about the physical component of this, and sexual orientation can be what you think you are, what you act upon, or let's just say the composite of those two. And the thought, the act and the physiology are the three categories we are trying to define here and blending and blurring them all together.

So it is no wonder that when I try to explain this law, it sounds like gibberish, Mr. Speaker, because it is gibberish. It is a piece of gibberish legislation that seeks to set up sacred cows, those people that would walk the face of the United States of America, could lay down in the center of traffic like a cow in India, they could walk through the bakery shop and do whatever they wanted to do, and everybody would have to walk around them for fear that the Federal regulators would come in and bring hate crimes charges against them.

Or I described this scenario last night, Mr. Speaker. Let's just say we had a baseball game going on in Chicago and it was an inter-league game between the Cubs and the White Sox. And let's just submit that there were 15 Cub fans in the sports bar and they were of mixed ethnicity, mixed race, mixed sex/gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. These are the Cubs fans over here. While the game is going on hot and heavy, here are the White Sox fans over here mixed up the same way, every imaginable race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity, and even whatever sex they might be.

Now, as the game goes on and the barbs fly back and forth and the insults go from the Cubs fans to the White Sox fans and back and forth, let me presume here there will be some racial slurs that will come out, there will be some gender-oriented slurs, there will be some slurs that have to do with these paraphilias that I talked about. Then a fight would break out, White Sox fans versus the Cubs fans. And they would line up along those lines, because they would know who was a Cubs fan and who was a White Sox fan. They might forget who fired which insult at which particular special protected sacred cow class that has been created by this Federal legislation if the Senate should pass this to the President.

Now we have the Feds coming in to sort out a bar fight in Chicago and bringing Federal charges against people whose primary motivation might not have been anything to do with any of the insults that they hurled back and forth. It might just have been a more effective way to insult a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan.

When you get into the path of punishing people for what goes on in their

head, this law cannot figure it out. They can't even figure out how to define the terms that are in it, let alone psychoanalyze anybody that falls under the purview of this hate crimes legislation.

While we are on that subject, Mr. Speaker, let me just surmise this, that most of us would agree that preventive medicine is a good idea. So if we go to the doctor regularly and get our checkup and get our physical, he will run the blood samples on us and let us know what kind of shape we are in. And if he will do that and we submit ourselves to an exercise regimen and watch our diet, take the medication that we need to, that preventive medicine will save a lot of money and a lot of lives over time, and our lives will be more productive. It is a good and healthy thing to do to have preventive medicine.

Mr. Speaker, if we can divine what is in the head of the perpetrator of these crimes, if we can go in and psychoanalyze the perpetrator without bothering to psychoanalyze the victim and taking their word for whatever their paraphilia might be, but if we could do that, why don't we just pick up the Orwellian approach to this, psychoanalyze people and figure out they are likely perpetrators before they commit the crime, rather than let us have a victim lead us to that perpetrator, and then we could have the preventive medicine of hate crimes.

Wouldn't that be great, if we could just punish people when they have the thought, before they actually acted upon it? I would suggest that if we can actually psychoanalyze people after the fact, we can psychoanalyze them before the fact, and then we could do crime prevention. But truthfully you all know, and I know you know, Mr. Speaker, I don't believe that can happen. I don't believe we can know what is in their head.

Let me take up another definition of sexual orientation. Even though we had a couple of different definitions along the way, sexual orientation as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, medical dictionary, we have sexual orientation by Merriam-Webster as one's attraction to and preference in sex partners.

Here is another definition from the American Heritage Stedman's medical dictionary. Sexual orientation would be sexual activity with people of the opposite sex, the same-sex or both.

So one says it is the attraction, it is in the head. The other one says it is the activity. It is the overt act, or maybe a covert act, Mr. Speaker. That is two polar opposite definitions of sexual orientation, which is in the bill.

And we have two polar opposite definitions coming from the Democrats, neither of which is in the bill. One definition says homosexual, heterosexual, nothing else, not even bisexual. The other says every kind of proclivity, paraphilia, all philias whatsoever, Mr. Hastings from Florida.

I go to the American Psychological Association for their definition of sexual orientation, and this is it: ``Sexual orientation is different from sexual behavior because it refers to feelings and self- concept. Individuals may or may not express their sexual orientation in their behaviors.''

So, you can give no sign that you have some particular paraphilia sexual orientation and be a special sacred cow protected class, that if someone commits a crime against you they are facing a punishment far more severe than they would be facing if it was just someone that wasn't carved out in this legislation as a special protected sacred cow class. And herein lies some of the flaw and some of the fault in this legislation.

Some other is this. It isn't just violent crimes against people, Mr. Speaker, because there is a reference in the legislation that takes us back to an existing section of the code that defines a crime of violence. Crime of violence in this bill means what it says in this section of the code, and I will read from that.

The term crime of violence means an offense that has as an element the use, attempted use or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another or any other offense that is a felony that by its nature involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.

So, the crime of violence means a physical act against a person or the attempted use or threatened use of that force, but also against property, Mr. Speaker, also against property. And it says an offense that has an element.

Now, if there is an offense, let's just say someone maybe perceives a thought that goes on in somebody else's head and decides they want to send him a message, and so they go and paint some graffiti on a garage door, there is a crime against property, not an individual. Well, that would be the crime of violence definition. It would meet it because it would have an element in it that the use of and/or the threatened use of physical force against property has taken place.

Physical force is another broad term. Is physical force leaning against the garage door? Is it pushing the spray button on some spray paint? Yes, it could well be. But the element that is part of that takes us back also to the thought crimes part of this, and it tells the pastors of the world, be careful if you preach from Leviticus, be careful if you preach from Romans, because if you do, there might be someone who could intimidate someone else based upon their new Biblical beliefs that you have just informed them of last Sunday, and now you have become an element in a hate crime that maybe was not any crime against an individual, but maybe even a crime against property. And this is set up so that we would send Federal forces in to assist in prosecution to political subdivisions, Mr. Speaker.

Political subdivisions being cities, counties, States, parishes, any subdivision smaller than that in the United States. And not only would we help them in the prosecution of hate crimes, but we'd also, according to this legislation, Mr. Speaker, we would be in there helping to enforce any of those political subdivisions' existing hate crimes laws, whether or not it fit the definition here in this bill. It doesn't have to conform with the Federal standard; it just has to be whatever they decide it's going to be.

And so, I happen to recall that the Speaker of the House's home city, San Francisco, has an ordinance in San Francisco that says essentially this: Thou shalt not disparage the short, the fat, the tall or the skinny. Now, that's an antidiscrimination. One might characterize it as a hate crime if you disparage somebody that's short, fat, tall or skinny. I think all of us think we're one of those categories, sometimes two or three of them at the same time, but that would be a case where if we could actually have Federal prosecutors go in to San Francisco and decide they're going to support an ordinance like that.

Now, think how intimidating it is when you have Federal prosecutors coming in to enforce hate crimes legislation that's created by a city council that might be so utterly biased in their approach that they could reflect the judgment of the people on the other side of the aisle on the Judiciary Committee that brought this legislation to this floor under a closed rule, denying all amendments, and a very short period of time to debate, Mr. Speaker. It's no way to run the House of Representatives.

And so--and by the way, the pedophilia that was apparently approved for special protected status in two ways, voting down my amendment to exempt pedophiles from this special protected sacred cow status, and also, I think, if we listen to Mr. Hastings, and if he's right, if all philias whatsoever should be protected under this legislation, then a pedophile is this. It's an adult sexual disorder consisting in the desire for sexual gratification by molesting children, especially young children. That's the pedophile.

Here's another definition of sexual orientation. They're all over the place, Mr. Speaker. Refers to feelings and self-concept, not behavior. Maybe. But we know that another definition in the dictionary that I referenced says that it actually is the act, not the thought, not the attraction.

So, as we go through this piece by piece, Big Brother is reaching out and telling us that they're going to control our thoughts by passing hate crimes. And they're going to give us definitions like gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and not even engage in a debate on what those words might mean, but leave it wide open for trial lawyers and defense lawyers and judges

to decide what it is we might possibly mean. And how are they going to decide if we don't have clarity even from the proponents of the bill?

It'll be decided in a slipshod fashion, Mr. Speaker, and it will not be a happy result.

And I will submit also that we will see soon on the floor of this House the chairman of the Financial Services Committee's legislation called the ENDA Act, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which really means discriminate against employers and impose your values on them, tell the churches they have to hire people that are the antithesis of their teachings, for example.

And in the end, there also was another amendment. There were many of them that were rejected. One of them was the immutable characteristics amendment. I just simply want to protect people who have immutable characteristics. It was mentioned in the opening remarks in the rules today erroneously. Immutable characteristics are not protected in this bill. It was specifically rejected when I offered it by amendment. Immutable characteristics are often poorly defined or wrongly defined.

And, Mr. Speaker, immutable characteristics are those characteristics of people which can be independently verified and cannot be willfully changed. Those characteristics we can protect when we cross the line and we start protecting especially behaviors. Those are not immutable characteristics. They are mutable. Behaviors are those kind of characteristics that one can just simply self-allege.

And so as the question was raised back in those years when I was in the Iowa Senate, constantly lobbied by the students, often they came from the University of Iowa, and they asked a State senator there, we need special protection because--and he said, why? What, protection from what? Well, discrimination. Well, how are you discriminated against, and how do you people discriminate against you? Because of your sexual orientation. And they said, well, they won't rent us apartments and we can't do this and that and the other thing. We don't have certain opportunities that might exist for others. We think we're discriminated against and we need special protected status.

So this State senator said, let me ask you a question. What am I? What, am I a heterosexual or am I a homosexual? And they looked him up and down and they finally said, well, we don't know. We don't know.

And his answer was, exactly my point. Now, if you don't know, how could you discriminate against me? Or if I don't know, how could I or anyone discriminate against you? If you keep those things private, there can be no discrimination. And that's what I submit is the right thing to do when it comes to sexuality, Mr. Speaker.

Except, I believe that the laws should be respected. And I don't believe that we should be establishing a special protected status for people who carry such proclivities that many of them are punished with prison time for the very sake of carrying them out.

I think this bill restricts religious freedom, and I think it restricts our First Amendment rights. I think it intimidates pastors. I think it takes us to a place where we are seeking, by law, to define what is in the head of the perpetrator and what is in the head of the victim. And sometimes it's the plumbing of the victim and sometimes it's the mental attraction that exists for it within the victim and the perpetrator. And we can't agree. Even the authors of the bill don't agree on where the perception actually exists, whether it's in the head of the perpetrator or the head of the victim. I'll submit that it has to eventually be analyzed in both, and that cannot be done, not with today's science or technology.

And with today's understanding, I'm very concerned because, Mr. Speaker, this society has, to a large extent lost its ability to reason. We're racing from emotion to emotion, from feeling to feeling. We are not racing from scientific data to empirical analysis and logical conclusion arrived at by deductive or inductive reasoning. That seems to be lost in this civilization.

I look back on the Age of Reason of the Greeks 3,000 years ago, and I think of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. I think of them sitting around under the shade trees in their togas analyzing, thinking, testing each others' brains, writing the classical works that they did, and shaping the foundation for Western civilization, the theorem, the hypotheses, the basis for our science, for our math, the basis for our reason. If it hadn't been for the Greeks, Western civilization maybe would have never found this modern era.

But the Age of Reason that came from the Greeks primarily, that flowed through and was the foundation for the Age of Enlightenment, centered in France, and at the dawn of the industrial revolution, that all came to the United States and found itself in an environment of almost unlimited natural resources, very low taxes, in many cases, no regulation, with a moral people that came over here for their religious freedom, with Judeo-Christianity the inspiration for freedom and the core of this culture. It found the perfect petri dish to thrive, and the vigor that we have in the United States enhanced by legal immigration that skimmed the donors from every other civilization on the planet, the best vigor, the best vitality, from each of those donor civilizations. And our Founding Fathers had the wisdom to sit down and place into the Declaration and into the Constitution the foundations for our freedom, the rights that come from God, that are vested in the people and the sovereignty of the people that loan that power, those rights, to their Congressional Representatives, their elected Representatives in this Constitution Republic that we have. The greatness of this Nation is diminished by the mushy thinking of hate crimes acts, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I very much appreciate the honor of addressing you here tonight on the floor of the House of Representatives.

There is an issue that comes to mind for me immediately. It is the reason that I have asked for some time tonight here in this Special Order in this hour of privilege that we have. It is a disturbing factor that I have experienced, along with a number of others, through a markup in the Judiciary Committee last week, and that is this dramatic departure from the rule of law, the dramatic departure from the Constitution, the dramatic departure from the understanding that criminal law in America would be focused on overt acts, not on the thoughts that we might divine would be within the heads of the perpetrators.

I'm speaking specifically, Mr. Speaker, about the hate crimes legislation that has been pushed through the Judiciary Committee and that will arrive here on the floor of the House of Representatives tomorrow.

By the rule, the rules process that has taken place, there were a whole series of amendments that were offered in the Judiciary Committee. Those who watched the committee will know that the Judiciary Committee in the United States House of Representatives is the most polarized committee on the Hill. It's the committee that goes out and recruits, I'll say, the most hardcore, left-wing people in this Congress to advocate for the most hardcore, left-wing--and I'll say-- sometimes unconstitutional, often illogical proposals that might come before this Congress to be rammed through the Judiciary Committee but not without a legitimate markup. I will concede that point to the chairman, Mr. Conyers.

Many of us offered amendments, but there was a determination to vote down, to shoot down and to defeat every constructive amendment that was offered before the Judiciary Committee on this so-called ``hate crimes legislation,'' Mr. Speaker.

On Thursday, after a full day Wednesday and a most-of-the-day Thursday markup and after that legislation on the so-called ``hate crimes'' passed the House Judiciary Committee, it went to the Rules Committee, which met today, Mr. Speaker. The Rules Committee's job is to also enhance something that is the responsibility of every chairman on this Hill, that is the responsibility of you, Mr. Speaker, and that is the responsibility of all of those who have gavels in their hands. I've spent some time with a gavel in my hand, Mr. Speaker. The job of the chairman is to bring out the will of the group. It's not to impose the Chair's will on the group. To bring out the will of the group is the constitutional act of justice that should come from the hand that holds the gavel.

What happened instead--and perhaps, just perhaps, the hate crimes legislation flowed out of the Judiciary Committee reflecting the will of the Judiciary Committee, but when it is filtered through the Rules Committee--the Rules Committee that sits in judgment upon whether there will be amendments that are allowed to be offered here on the floor of the House of Representatives or whether there will not and which of those amendments might be offered--the Rules Committee has a profound responsibility to weigh the proposals and to make a determination that this House can work in an expeditious fashion but can still reflect the will of the United States House of Representatives.

That will has been frustrated, Mr. Speaker, because the Rules Committee, I'm told, has ruled there will be no amendments on this hate crimes legislation, that it will come to the floor under a closed rule with no amendments allowed, only the amendments that were offered in the Judiciary Committee and by no other Member of Congress. All of those who do not sit on the Judiciary Committee will have an opportunity to try to perfect this legislation that they call the hate crimes legislation but that I call, Mr. Speaker, the thought crimes legislation.

That's at the core of our discussion here this evening, and I'll submit that the will of this group, that the will of the United States House of Representatives, is directly frustrated by the actions that, I believe, are directed from the Speaker's office, by the actions of the Chair of the Rules Committee and by the actions of the majority members on the Rules Committee who have decided to shut down the amendments process and ram through a piece of legislation tomorrow with only 30 minutes allowed for all of the Members of the United States House of Representatives to voice their objections here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

There will be no amendments allowed, just a voice where there will be more than 30 people lined up who will have less than a minute to add their words to this, and where there will be no chance to sway the opinion of this body, the opinion of this body that is locked in on an idea that we're going to have hate crimes legislation in America that punishes the thoughts of people who may or may not be perpetrating crimes against folks because of their particular, special protected status that would be created under this hate crimes legislation.

I, Mr. Speaker, oppose, and I defy the logic of the people who would advocate for such legislation and the very idea that we could divine what goes on in

the heads of people when they commit crimes.

I will argue that the history of criminal law in Western civilization has always been about the overt act, not about the covert act; about the overt act, not about the thought, not about what goes on in the head of the perpetrator and certainly not what goes on in the head of the victim. We recognize and have for millennia that the value of the victim is intrinsic in that each human life has a unique value, a unique value that is priceless and sacred. Whether it's a baby who was just conceived a moment ago or whether it's someone in the last days or hours of his life, we all measure that life equally.

In fact, former Governor of Pennsylvania Robert Casey said human life cannot be measured. It is the measure, itself, against which all other things are weighed.

Yet this hate crimes legislation would weigh it differently. It would weigh the life or the health or the physical well-being of an individual who fit within this special protected status--the status that might be wrapped up in their sexual orientation, their gender identity or their gender, itself--of having a special status if it happens to fit the list of proclivities that they believe should be protected status.

Now, when you start valuing one person's well-being, one person's life differently than that of another, we have deviated dramatically from the essence of criminal law and have started ourselves down a path by which we're evaluating not as the proponents of the bill--and I will say there is the gentlelady from Madison, Wisconsin, whom I specifically asked:

Is this a crime committed, and is it evaluated by what's in the head of the perpetrator or by what's in the head of the victim? I think I might have misunderstood her, but they corrected me clearly, and they said: Well, it's what's in the head of the perpetrator.

All right. So, if we're going to presume that a crime could be committed and if we're going to enhance the penalty, maybe, 10 years or maybe as much as life in prison for kidnapping, for example, because we're going to judge what goes on in the mind of the perpetrator at the time he committed the crime and what provided him the incentive for committing that crime, then we're evaluating here by law what goes on in the head of the perpetrator.

But, Mr. Speaker, there's another component of this. This is what goes on in the head of the victim as well, because the special protected status rests upon not physical characteristics, not immutable characteristics--those characteristics that can be independently verified and that cannot be willfully changed. No, Mr. Speaker. These characteristics are those mutable characteristics, those that reflect not just the physicality of the victim but the attitude and what goes on in the head of the victim.

So, for the first time, if this legislation should become law, the Federal Government will be punishing and will be acting upon legislation that presumes to be able to know what's in the mind of the perpetrator and what's in the mind of the victim. It will match those two things together and will determine if a crime were committed and, if so, how to enhance the penalty. This is a bizarre thing, Mr. Speaker.

This takes me back to the book ``1984'' by George Orwell, written in 1949, where George Orwell wrote--and I will summarize this because I don't exactly have the quote in front of me:

We don't care about the overt act. We don't care about any overt act. What we care about is the thought, because, if you can control the thought, you can control the overt act.

So why would we care about the act, itself, when we could control the thought? By the way, we're not going to be satisfied if you just simply agree with us. You must do so willingly. We must bring your mind around to the point where you're eager to agree with us. When that point comes, there will be no more overt acts that we disagree with, and therefore, we will have controlled the mind, and by controlling the mind, we've controlled the actions, themselves.

This is a bald-faced effort to enforce public affirmation for behaviors that have been considered to be historically aberrant behaviors by the American Psychological Association, Mr. Speaker. There is a long list of them. The list that I have is 547 of them long. As near as I can determine, they're all specially protected activities or thought processes that are protected under this hate crimes legislation, Mr. Speaker.

We tried mightily to amend the bill and to try to bring some sense to this idea that whatever the proclivity, it was going to be protected by a Federal hate crimes law. We can't cross that line, Mr. Speaker. We've got to maintain criminal penalties for the overt act, not for the thought, because we can't know what goes on in the mind of the perpetrator, and we can't know what goes on in the mind of the victim.

Mr. Speaker, that opens this subject matter up, and I recognize that there are some very effective Members of the House of Representatives that would like to address this subject matter. And no matter how focused they may be on preparing themselves, I would be so happy to recognize the gentleman from Texas who is my good friend, Mr. Gohmert, for as much time as he may consume.

Reclaiming my time, and I very much thank the gentleman from east Texas for his clarity with his understanding of this legislation.

I would like to point out, Mr. Speaker, that I have sat with our committee staff, sat with my own staff. I have gone through this language. I have looked for a way that there is a consistent index between the definition that is in this legislation and understanding what it does. It doesn't exist. It is ambiguous. It is ambiguous, and it runs, actually, in contradiction to the existing statute that it references that the gentleman from Texas spoke to; one of them is a crime of violence definition, and the other one is a hate crime definition.

But also, the definition that is in the bill for gender identity, when I asked the question what is gender identity, and the answer that I received back in committee from the gentlelady from Madison, Wisconsin, was ``it is defined in the bill.'' Don't you know? Well, it is defined in the bill. Gender identity means ``actual or perceived gender-related characteristics.''

I am this Midwestern guy. We have a number of different kinds of fence posts; some of them are hedge posts, some are cedar posts, some are pine, creosote, pressure-treated. Some are steel, T-posts, round posts. You name them, we've got them. We've got electric fence posts as well. We have a whole different bunch of varieties.

Now, if I would define a fence post as ``actual or perceived characteristics of a fence post,'' you get the idea what the definition of gender identity is when it is the actual or perceived gender-related characteristics. It is no definition at all. And this definition will be defined by lawyers and judges, some activists, some that want to adhere to the law. None, if this legislation is passed, would be able to go back and track the definitions in this legislation and determine the intent of Congress, except to offer ambiguities that can be used at any extent.

And what a couple of the other ambiguities are; crime of violence means the threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another. But the bill doesn't say property, it says the person. But the definition in the bill says person or property.

A hate crime means a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property is the object of the crime, but the bill doesn't say property, it says a person that possesses these special protected characteristics--which makes them sacred cows in this society. And, Mr. Speaker, I, perhaps, will expand that thought of sacred cows, but I am much more interested in hearing from the gentlelady from Minnesota, who has arrived on the floor tonight to fill us in on her view of the hate crimes legislation.

I would be so happy to yield as much time as may be consumed by the gentlelady from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann).

I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota very much for coming here to the floor and, Mr. Speaker, for inspiring the families across America to understand what's going on here in the United States Congress.

This is a powerful thing that is happening, and it undermines the principles of law that have held together for thousands of years in this modern era of special protected status for people based upon their self-alleged behavior and what goes on in their minds. This is a breathtaking thing that may take place here tomorrow, and I clearly oppose it, Mr. Speaker.

But in the interest of time, I'd be very happy to yield to the favorite daughter of Oklahoma, the gentlewoman (Ms. Fallin).

I so much thank the gentlewoman from Oklahoma for coming to the floor to raise the issue that is so important as this House prepares tomorrow to attempt to cross this great divide. This great divide from punishing the acts of a crime, the overt acts of a crime, to divining what was in the mind of the perpetrator and using a definition of what's in the mind presumably of the alleged victim in order to come to some conclusion as to how much prison time a person deserves for an overt act that can be defined but not the thoughts, Mr. Speaker.

At this point I'd be very happy to yield to the gentleman from South

Carolina. Since we had a favorite daughter from Oklahoma, I would like to introduce a favorite son of South Carolina. The wonderful hospitality of South Carolina which I have experienced in every trip I have made down there, the Representative of which is Mr. Gresham Barrett.

I thank the gentleman from South Carolina for coming to the floor tonight and for addressing this subject matter.

Mr. Speaker, this so-called Hate Crimes legislation that proposes to understand and punish what's in the minds of people who may be committing crimes against victims or property, victims or property, Mr. Speaker. I don't know how somebody hates somebody else's property enough that if they would paint some graffiti on their garage door that what goes on in the mind of the person that has committed this act of vandalism can be punished with 10 years in the penitentiary but the act itself might be, well, let's say, a minimal fine for a misdemeanor of vandalism.

Mr. Speaker, I will lay out some scenarios here so that you and everyone else that is listening in can understand, I think, more clearly what's ahead of us. I have asked that we put together some definitions and these definitions that aren't in the bill, the definition that I described a little bit earlier of gender identity, when I asked the authors of the bill what is gender identity, they tell me, well, it's defined in the bill, don't you know. Defined in the bill, don't you know. And it's on page 14, line 24 and 25. Gender identity is the ``actual or perceived gender-related characteristics.'' And I described it, Mr. Speaker, as describing that, well, what is the definition of a fence post? Well, that's an item that has the characteristics of a fence post. What's the definition of gender identity? Well, that's ``actual or perceived gender-related characteristics.''

This is a lawyer's dream. This is a judge's dream. This is a full- blown open license to do whatever one will when you get into a criminal court of law and argue whatever one will. This is almost intentional ambiguity written into legislation, legislation that we tried mightily to refine and perfect with definitions and clarity in the Judiciary Committee. Each effort was rebutted without a logical, and I repeat that, Mr. Speaker, without a logical rebuttal. Just simply: This is our bill, it's going to come out of committee the way it came in because we have determined that's what it's going to be. And we have exposed so many vulnerabilities, so many weaknesses, so many built-in biases, so many unjust scenarios in the debate in the committee that lasted 2 days that the Speaker of the House and the Chair of the Judiciary Committee and whoever else who has something to say about this decided we dare not allow one single amendment on the floor of the House of Representatives because if we do, it will expose these ambiguities, it will expose the bias, it will expose the departure from the hundreds of years old tradition and knowledge of what law is.

Natural rights that come from God, Mr. Speaker. They are reflected also in English common law, and they flow through our Declaration, and they show up in our Constitution. And they are billed here in this Congress for more than 200 years. And we've punished always the overt act, not the thought, Mr. Speaker. And this is thought crimes; it's not hate crimes. We can't know if someone hates. Someone could commit a crime and not know what someone else's gender identity is, for example.

I will ask again how does one know? Could I go on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, and go identify someone that fits this category of sexual orientation and discriminate against them? How do I know, Mr. Speaker?

And here are some of the protected qualifications that exist within the language of this bill. Never mind the verbal response was, well, no, sexual orientation only includes heterosexuality or homosexuality. Nothing else? No, nothing else. The expert from Madison, Wisconsin, where they should have some experts, I would think. Heterosexuality or homosexuality. It doesn't include bisexuality.

So anybody on the continuum between extreme heterosexuality and extreme homosexuality, anybody that might fit exactly in the middle or anyone in the continuum, they would not be part of this definition of ``sexual orientation'' that is one of the subjects and one of the special protected classes of this bill.

So I look around, and we come up with some definitions for sexual orientation. Here is one. This is from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and it is sexual orientation. ``One's attraction to and preference in sexual partners.''

That is mental. It is up here. You can't know that. You can't see that. You can't tell that. It can't be independently verified. It is not an immutable characteristic. It may or may not be willfully changed by the person that has a particular sexual orientation, Mr. Speaker. That is a mental definition.

Here is the other physical definition of sexual orientation, and this is from the American Heritage Stedman's Medical--medical--Dictionary. It says this: ``Sexual activity with people of the opposite sex, the same sex or both.'' That is sexual orientation. So it might be the thought, it might be the act. It is not a physical characteristic. But gender may be a physical characteristic.

Now, I could go through this and confuse everyone more, and in the short period of time I have I will say this: We don't agree on what sexual orientation is, whether we are going to be defining it from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary or from the American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary. They are two different things.

But if you look at the paraphilias that are produced by the American Psychology Association, here is what they have. And ``paraphilia'' is a powerful and persistent sexual interest other than typical sexual behavior. They have 547 specific sexual orientation proclivities, all of which are specially protected in this legislation, Mr. Speaker.

Here is another definition for sexual orientation. ``Refers to feelings and self-concept, not behavior.'' But it might be behavior, because we know that the American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary says it is a behavior.

But here is a list of the particular paraphilias, you might call them proclivities, you might call them some other things, that are specially protected in this bill under the broad definition of sexual orientation. Some of these I just simply can't say here on this floor.

Asphyxophlia. That would be a fixation with, a proclivity for strangulation, starvation for oxygen.

Autogynephilia. That is someone who sees themselves as someone of the opposite sex, a man seeing himself as a woman or vice versa.

Bisexuality, which was defined in the committee as not part of it, is part of sexual orientation.

It goes on. I have a more concise list over here, Mr. Speaker, and that goes down the line of exhibitionism; incest; partialism, which is an obsession with a specific body part; masochism; sadism; scatalogia, that is obscene phone calls; toucherism, which is, you can imagine, someone who gropes; voyeurism; bestiality. The list of these things go on and on and on.

I offered the amendment, Mr. Speaker, that would have at least eliminated and given us a start, eliminated pedophilia. But pedophiles are specifically protected under this hate crimes legislation. Everything you can imagine is under there, every proclivity, every paraphilia is specially protected under this hate crimes legislation.

It makes a Federal crime out of something that has been a local crime, and they reach across the lines of logic in an unconstitutional fashion to define acts against these proclivities as Federal crimes.

So imagine this. Let's just say you were in Chicago, the President's hometown, and there are folks all in there at a sports bar watching a White Sox game versus the Cubs, or an inter-league game perhaps, Mr. Speaker. And let's just understand that there is some friction involved between White Sox fans and Cubs fans, and they start to hurl some expletives and start to call each other some names and start to make some presumptions about the other side, the other fans, about what their particular proclivities might be. And someone throws a beer or an ashtray and pretty soon they get in a fight, and you have got 15 people on one side that are Cubs fans, 15 people on the other side who are White Sox fans, all of whom have been called some kind of name about their particular paraphilias or proclivities, and we have now a Federal hate crimes brawl on our hands that can enhance the penalties beyond that imagined by the aldermen of Chicago, the local jurisdiction that might be there.

It brings the Feds in to deal with this, to sort this all out, because we are going to imagine what is in the minds of these people that are Cubs fans and White Sox fans, and I for one can't imagine what would be in the mind of a White Sox fan.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, April 29, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

(Mr. KING of Iowa asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 1139, the COPS Improvements Act of 2009, increases the authorization for the COPS ON THE BEAT Federal grant program by a whopping 72 percent. Why is the question I ask. Are crime rates up 72 percent? According to the FBI, they are not. Overall crime rates are down nationwide.

In the first 6 months of 2008, violent crime decreased by 3\1/2\ percent and property crime decreased by 2\1/2\ percent. From 1997 to 2006, the violent and property crime rates fell by 22 percent. Clearly, the crime rate is not a justification for dramatically increasing the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. If crime hasn't increased, why are we increasing spending on a law enforcement program that has mixed results?

Both the Justice Department's Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office found that thousands of hires funded by the COPS program never occurred because law enforcement agencies used COPS funding to cover their budget shortfalls, backfilling the holes in their budgets rather than putting cops on the street in some cases.

A 2005 GAO report concluded that factors other than COPS funds accounted for the majority of the decline in crime from 1994 until 2001. The crime rate did drop during this time period. It dropped by 26 percent, Mr. Speaker, and the COPS program did contribute to this decline. It contributed only 1.3 percent of the 26 percent decline. That 1.3 percent decline only cost the American taxpayers, and I emphasize the word ``only'' satirically, $7 billion. If you do the math on that, it works out to be this: The COPS funding, even though we've had a significant decrease in crime, was only accountable for 5 percent of the reduction in crime, according to the GAO report. That's one-half of the solution, and here we have a 72 percent increase. And if you do the math on the 72 percent increase, the 5 percent solution becomes an 8.6 percent solution presuming all other factors remain the same.

This is not a good return on investment. Perhaps the increase in COPS

spending is designed to generate jobs instead. The majority of cities' budget shortfalls and officer layoffs in police departments around the country are the justification, I think, for spending yet more money that we don't have. The fact is that roughly there is a 2- to 3-year lapse from the time Congress appropriates money to when a police officer actually reaches the street; so money appropriated under this new authorization will not even reach the streets until 2012 or 2013.

Congress just appropriated $1 billion for the COPS program in the economic stimulus bill, and we gave this money to the States with no strings attached, Mr. Speaker. We removed the 25 percent State matching requirement and the cap on grant awards. So this $1 billion will fund fewer than 6,000 police hires. You heard right. According to the Justice Department, we spent $1 billion of taxpayer money to hire fewer than 6,000 police officers. That works out to be $167,000 per officer. We send them a check, and they convert $167,000 into one officer when we take the strings off.

If my colleagues in the majority were truly interested in helping police departments maximize the number of officers they can hire, they would have kept the matching requirement and cap in place; then the $1 billion would have hired approximately 13,000 officers but not fewer than 6,000.

The COPS program is currently authorized at $1.04 billion, Mr. Speaker. Last Congress the sponsor of the bill, Mr. Weiner of New York, proposed increasing the authorization by only 10 percent to $1.15 billion. I say only 10 percent because in today's context, it's 72 percent. But even that more modest increase was too much for our colleagues in the Senate, who rejected such an idea. I would have supported this bill on the floor this year if it reauthorized the COPS program with the same 10 percent that was offered by the gentleman from New York last year. And I supported an amendment in committee offered by my colleague from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) to fund the program at that level. But in the last Congress $1.15 billion was good enough; this year it's not, for some reason. This year it must be $1.8 billion, although the Judiciary Committee had held no hearing, received no evidence or testimony for this dramatic increase, which is a proposal under suspension before this Congress, Mr. Speaker.

The bill before us today increases Federal spending without any demonstrated need. It's like giving huge bonuses to AIG executives. There is no justification rather than an insatiable desire to spend taxpayers' money and funnel resources off the backs of the taxpayers in America, the workers in America, into the inner cities where these jobs would be created at the cost of $167,000 a job by record, and the efficiency level that would be increased, taking us from a 5 percent of our 26 percent reduction in crime, 5 percent of that coming direct by the COPS program now might take it to 8.6 percent at this huge, huge cost.

It's interesting to me to hear the gentleman from New York State that they need help at the local level, and I believe I heard him saying enforcing local laws but also enforcing immigration laws. So I would be also more amenable to this legislation if it were directed to 287(g) programs. At least then we'd have a Federal interest and something that I think would be helpful to all citizens in this country. But it is encouraging to me to hear from the gentleman from New York that we need to use Federal money to enforce immigration laws at the local level through local officers.

I oppose this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

First, in response to the gentleman from Puerto Rico, who I believe comes here very sincerely and brings himself to this floor for this discussion, I hear him say the most important human right is the right to personal security. And I would ask if the gentleman from Puerto Rico could address the situation as where do human rights come from, if they exist at all? Where's the list of human rights that exist?

I would submit that we don't have any human rights in law. I would submit that we have natural rights that come from God that flow through the Declaration of Independence and are clearly defined in the Constitution itself, but that the idea of human rights just simply doesn't exist in law. They exist in the imagination of judges. So the gentleman's response from Puerto Rico, although I see he's leaving the floor, it may be for a particular reason.

The other gentleman's comments about the COPS program that today it's clear that there has been a 2\1/2\ percent reduction in crime from 1993 until the year 2000, Mr. Speaker, I have a report here. This is a GAO report and I will give you the date in a minute, but it's a current GAO report, and I presume it's the same report the gentleman is referring to. It says this:

``While we find the COPS expenditures led to increases in sworn police officers above levels that would have been expected without these expenditures and though the increases in sworn officers led to declines in crime, we conclude that the COPS grants were not the major cause of the decline in crime from 1994 through 2001.''

I think this report doesn't support the gentleman's position. The data that I laid out in my opening statement does.

I will yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I will concede the gentleman's point, to a degree. And the point is this, that there has been a minimal decline in crime. But this report, by the way, for the record is October 2005, and I don't think it contradicts the statement that I made in my opening statement. But 5 percent of the decline in crime is attributable to COPS, and that is a study I have identified.

If we appropriate an additional 72 percent, one could calculate you could have of that decline in crime, 8.6 percent of that might be attributable to COPS.

I would then at this point, Mr. Speaker, reserve the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

Would the gentleman yield?

I would be happy to write that to your chiefs of police. This is a nationwide piece of legislation.

Mr. Speaker, at this time I would yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I will go back to this October 2005 study since I think there has been some confusing verbiage that has emerged here with a regard to a number of different studies. I don't think I have heard anyone actually directly rebut the study that I have referenced, but I want to just go back to the concise language.

It says, it concludes, ``COPS grants were not the major cause of the decline in crime from 1994 through 2001.'' I find nothing in this report or any report that says that COPS grants are the major cause of the decline in even violent crime, although they were a contributing factor, and I stipulated those contributing factors.

Another point is I didn't equate any AIG executives as criminals. In fact, I voted against that bill that sought to reach back. It was a mistake made by Congress and people were looking for cover. That is what that was about. I opposed both components of that. I will continue to do so. In fact, I defended that they be able to keep those bonuses, because Congress made a huge mistake and we shouldn't interfere with the relationship between employers and employees.

Mr. Speaker, what I am having trouble getting my mind around is the image of data analysis that has emerged as I listened to the gentleman from New York, Mr. Weiner. He has argued all this data as to why we need to increase the COPS grant by 72 percent.

It surely couldn't be because police departments want more Federal funding. It surely couldn't be because they want to build empires. It surely couldn't be because crime has gone up. No one has said crime has gone up. In fact, it has gone down. Violent crime, nonviolent crime, has all gone down.

So what is this? Is this Mr. Weiner sitting in a loft somewhere analyzing data, divining away, maybe from the emanation from numbers, maybe it was something heretofore unimaginable, but calculating that we need to take another $1 billion into COPS, which we did, this Congress did, and now reach for an additional 72 percent, Mr. Speaker?

I cannot quite get that image fixed in my mind, that Mr. Weiner independently reached a conclusion off of data that would support this great big growth in COPS funding. There has to be something else. I don't think it has been clear. But I think the gentleman from Texas does understand this, and I hope he can illuminate us.

I would be happy to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time remains for each side.

Mr. Speaker, I would reserve.

Mr. Speaker, I will yield myself the balance of the time.

Mr. Speaker, it's curious to me now that I find the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen), I guess it's a matter of public record, is a cosponsor of the legislation. I have two gentlemen here on the floor of the House of Representatives that, theoretically, at least, shaped this legislation and this policy that weren't satisfied with an additional $1 billion in previous legislation, but had to bring forward an expansion of the 72 percent increase, this 72 percent increase.

And again, the image of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner) or the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen) calculating out the data to conclude, and I'd ask the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen), before he leaves the floor, I'd be real happy to hear from him and yield to the gentleman from Tennessee, if he could tell me how many police officers are enough, per capita, for 100,000, say, citizens. What is the average in the Nation? What is enough? How does a person arrive at this requested 72 percent increase of $1 billion tossed into this, $167,000 a job, 100 percent federally funded, no copayment, completely grants, and presuming the gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner) is right, and some, if not all these jobs will actually be in uniform on the streets within a year. But what is an appropriate number of police officers? What's your goal? Is there such a thing as too many police officers? That's really my question.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Tennessee.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I didn't ask the gentleman for some opinion of wanting more police officers. I recognize that if one's in uniform defending the streets in this country, that you're always going to want more help. I can't imagine a Police Department saying I don't need another officer, and I can't imagine a local jurisdiction, the taxation at a local jurisdiction saying no, we'd rather tax at home than we would at the Federal Government. I don't have a police chief saying to me that they want to reject the Federal funding and they want to tax their local citizens. And I've never known anyone that didn't need more help in what they were doing.

My question to the gentleman was, out of 100,000 people, how many police officers should we have? What is optimum? How many are too many? And if the gentleman can answer that specifically, then I'd like to hear it. And if not, I hope you wouldn't ask me to yield.

But do you have a specific answer?

I would yield to the gentleman from Tennessee.

Reclaiming my time, I oppose this legislation for the reasons that I have said. It's an outrageous growth in Federal spending. It is a transfer out of the pockets of the taxpayers into the inner cities, the jurisdictions that would be the biggest beneficiaries of this. And everyone in government is going to have the instinct to try to grow their empire, Mr. Speaker. And we don't have data that says what is the optimum number. We don't have even the admission that there's such a thing as too many government employees in any category. And I would not either submit that too many police officers would be the first category that I'd want to reduce in government. It is not.

We need to be prudent. We need to be responsible. I'm looking at a national debt and a national deficit and a budget that has grown to be a $9.3 trillion deficit out of this President's budget, $9.3 trillion. That's all the corn we can raise in Iowa for the next thousand years, just to deal with President Obama's deficit. And if we are going to retire the debt, it's everything since the time of Christ, Mr. Speaker.

I oppose this legislation.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I just want to ask if it was his intention to infer erroneously that I had said that there are too many cops.

Will the gentleman yield for a brief point?

I thank the gentleman.

I appreciate the opportunity to make the point that asking a question, which is what I asked, which was ``how many are too many?'' does not infer a position by any form of logic that I know of.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.