Floor Statements

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

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

After thorough study and deliberation, the United States Judicial Conference developed draft language that slightly alters time deadlines in 28 statutory provisions that affect court proceedings. This text is incorporated in H.R. 1626, the Statutory Time-Periods Technical Amendments Act of 2009.

These statutory provisions are limited to those that have short time periods, that use a rules method for calculating time periods, that are frequently applied or are otherwise important, and that do not prescribe a method to calculate time.

These legislative changes are necessary to account for the effect of amendments to the time computation rules in the Federal Rules of Practice and Procedure that are due to take effect on December 1, 2009, unless Congress acts to modify or reject them.

The rules amendments simplify the provisions for calculating deadlines and make those rules consistent in each set of the Federal rules. They respond to years of complaints by practitioners that the present rules are confusing and can lead to missing deadlines and to losing important rights.

To simplify calculating deadlines, the amended rules count intermediate weekends and holidays for all time periods rather than excluding them for some short time periods and including them for longer time periods. This simple ``days are days'' approach can have the effect of shortening a time period.

A large number of statutory time periods could theoretically be affected by the proposed shift in the Federal rules' time-computation approach. However, the number of statutory provisions to which case law has applied the rules' time-computation method is much smaller. An even smaller number of statutes is either frequently used or has time periods that could hopefully be adjusted to avoid inconsistency and confusion when the rules' time-computation method changes.

The proposed legislation provides short extensions of short time deadlines in a small number of statutes to offset the effective shortening caused by the new rules approach.

Mr. Speaker, the proposed statutory amendments are noncontroversial. They were the subject of extensive study and public comment during the Rules Enabling Act process. They have been vetted by numerous legal and bar organizations, including the Department of Justice. The Judicial Conference, led by District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, Chair of the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, provided bipartisan staff briefings on the need for the legislation.

H.R. 1626 addresses obscure but important subject matter that will allow our Federal courts to operate more smoothly. I urge the Members to support the bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I have no more speakers.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I will just recognize that the gentleman from New York, in spite of the fury of our previous debate, has significant confidence that I won't close with anything except an endorsement of the passage of the bill. I appreciate that.

Mr. Speaker, I urge the adoption of this legislation.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

Will the gentleman yield?

It's misstated facts.

I hope the people will stick around, and I will yield to the gentleman when I have the time.

I thank the gentleman for reaching his conclusion and allowing a yield. I sat and listened to this. One thing I think the chairman would agree to as just a minor correction to one of the posters that references Mr. Paulson as Frank Paulson rather than Henry Paulson. Small little correction. It wasn't the reason I asked to yield.

That's what the poster said. Frank Paulson.

I know that the gentleman is very interested in making sure the Record is correct. Having been corrected myself by the chairman, I would also offer that correction.

But my point was this, if the gentleman would yield to a question, and that is I'm listening to this this evening and I'm thinking of an evening that my recollection tells me was a debate on this floor on October 26, 2005, and it had to do with regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was an amendment offered by the former chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Leach of Iowa, that, in essence--and I can't quote it to the gentleman from memory--but, in essence, it would have regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the same categories--very similar to the same categories of that of other lending institutions.

I think there were around 35 to 38 votes.

If the gentleman would further yield, a recollection from the Congressional Record would have been that the gentleman, who is now chairman of the Financial Services Committee, had made the statement in that debate that he wasn't concerned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's viability, and that it wasn't necessary to increase the regulation or the capitalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And, that if anyone was investing in Fannie's and Freddie's shares, they shouldn't be confident that the gentleman from Massachusetts would support a bailout of Fannie and Freddie.

And today, we have the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie.

Would the gentleman yield?

And I appreciate the chairman yielding. But is it also true that you opposed those amendments that would have regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

The policy underlying--regardless of how the Republican votes came out, did the gentleman oppose those regulatory amendments that came to the floor?

I want to just thank the gentleman for yielding.

I am happy to thank the gentleman, and compliment him on his diminishment of his own persuasive powers, and be happy to yield back.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And I want to say, at the departure of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, I appreciate his yielding to each of us who have differing opinions on his presentation this evening. And that is something that I'm prepared to do should the gentleman raise an issue with statements I make. I know that Mr. Frank is competitive and very willing to engage in debate. And I know that he had a lot of things he wanted to get off his chest tonight. I was here to listen to it all. And I heard every word.

I thank the gentleman, and I will say into the Record tonight, that is a request that I would be happy to meet with, and I will be looking forward to the time when we come back on the other side of Easter. I appreciate it.

Again, Mr. Speaker, I listened to the statements made on the part of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee tonight. And it occurs to me that a man who has the full attention of the entire committee on any day he decides to choose to hold a hearing or a markup, a man who has full attention of the floor when he decides to speak here, it seems to me that since we have been through 2 days of budget debate, Mr. Speaker, that there must have been a lot of things that the chairman of the Financial Services needed to get off of his chest. And I heard a lot of them tonight. It occurs to me, though, that there is a high degree of sensitivity. And where I come from, when you throw a rock into the pigpen, the one that squeals is the one that you hit.

So I think what I heard is a rejection of the concept that the gentleman from Massachusetts and many of the Democrats that followed him in his leadership on these financial services issues, a rejection that he resisted the idea of regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, resisted the idea that the Community Reinvestment Act was a component of the financial meltdown that we had. And I heard the gentleman say to us that there were three Republican amendments on the legislation that would have and could have regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I raised the issue of one. And I do remember the day. It was October 26, 2005. It was an amendment that was offered by Mr. Leach of Iowa that would have regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac down the same lines as the regular lending institutions who are providing mortgage loans and real estate. I think that would have been a good thing to do. And I recall that debate. And it was a compelling argument made on the part of Mr. Leach that Fannie and Freddie were underregulated and undercapitalized, and they needed to be capitalized more and regulated more. Now I have just heard the gentleman from Massachusetts say that Republicans are afraid of regulation. In fact, it is the ``fear of regulation,'' he has said, that drives Republicans to reject changes in the control of the financial institutions in this country.

I would submit that we are for regulation. We are for the kind of smart, responsible regulation that ensures that we have viable lending institutions. In fact, we came to this floor and supported amendments that would have capitalized and regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I have introduced legislation that would repeal the Community Reinvestment Act. And I have introduced legislation that would capitalize Fannie and Freddie Mac like the other lending institutions and move them towards privatization. I recall the debate that evening on October 26, 2005, when the gentleman who is now the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and I don't disagree with his characterization here, it is a matter of emphasis, it is not a matter of accuracy, at least the disagreement on the accuracy, but I recall that. And it was that he would not support a bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because he didn't believe that they were undercapitalized, underregulated or in trouble.

Well, it turns out that was October of 2005, and easily, by the late fall of 2008, we can all see that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in trouble. In fact, they have been nationalized. And the risk and the liability that comes to the American taxpayers was calculated at the time to be about $5.5 trillion. Now the taxpayers own Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And regardless of whether there was a majority of Republicans that supported or opposed the amendment that would have regulated and capitalized Fannie and Freddie, it is true that the chairman of the Financial Services Committee opposed those amendments. And I think he underestimates has own persuasive powers. In fact, he must have gotten here for some reason. I think persuasive powers are part of it. I compliment him on that. I think he is an engaging fellow who has a very nimble ability to engage in this debate. And I look forward to those kind of debates, and I know I will be tested. But it remains a fact that some of us wanted to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Some of us wanted to move them towards privatization. Some of us wanted to capitalize them more. Some of us wanted to regulate them more. I am among those people. The voting record and the Congressional Record indicates something else on the part of the current chair of the Financial Services Committee. I don't think the Republicans have been opposed at all to regulations of our financial institutions. We have been in favor of smart regulations of our financial institutions, to essentially fix this problem ourselves.

So there is not a fear of the right wing that regulation is coming. There is a fear that we had an underregulation, and that is why we brought those amendments and brought that legislation. That is why the gentleman from New Jersey brings up the issue of Mr. Baker from Louisiana.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

I thank the gentleman. Reclaiming my time, as I listen to that, and you lived in the middle of the Financial Services Committee for these years into the seventh year, and that is background and experience that hardly anybody in America has shared with you, Mr. Garrett, and so I just ask you if you could, in the middle of this, throughout those, beginning into the seventh year at least, characterize the general philosophy that you gathered with regard to the thrust now of the committee and the majority within the committee as to whether before this financial meltdown, this economic crisis that we have, did you sense that there was any initiative on the part of the Democrats in the Financial Services Committee to regulate Fannie and Freddie, to capitalize Fannie and Freddie and move them towards any kind of privatization, or would it have been more or less business as usual with Fannie and Freddie? Which way was that line going from the Democrat side on the Financial Services Committee? And I yield.

Reclaiming, from the gentleman, if he would further examine this question, I understand their response that the Bush administration was very much focused on increasing the percentage of homeownership. And I recall a State of the Union address made by President Bush here in this Chamber one of those Januarys that made the statement that we had the highest homeownership of a free country in the world, or at least the United States, that 68 percent of the people in America lived in a home that was owned by themselves or one of the people that lived in the home with them. It does sound like it is a laudable goal. And it is certainly a goal that would be reached for, that was reached for by the Bush administration. It would be something that would be reached for I think by all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike.

But from the restraint side of this, from those who were lending a voice of caution, that were saying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the secondary market for mortgages, are getting out of control, they are undercapitalized. They are underregulated, and we need to rein them in before we have a problem that is far bigger than the one that is apparent today. If you had to give credit or blame to Republicans or Democrats in the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Garrett, where was the predominant voice for caution? Where was the predominant voice for capitalization? Where was the predominant voice for regulation? Where was the predominant voice for privatization of Fannie and Freddie during those years before the crisis was evident to all of us?

And reclaiming my time from the gentleman from New Jersey, and I thank him for his historical rendition of what's taken place within the committee. And I would take this a little further and ask this question, and that would be, did the subject of reform of the Community Reinvestment Act or the repeal of the Community Reinvestment Act come up in the Financial Services Committee in the years prior to the financial crisis that emerged here in this Congress, I

am going to pick a date, September 19 of last year? Was there discussion dialogue in the committee, and did it take place in a way that would have illuminated the circumstances we have today, and does the gentleman from New Jersey accept the premise that was delivered by the Chair of the Financial Services Committee that only 1 out of 25 lenders were affected by restraints in Community Reinvestment Act? Does that seem to be a balanced delivery, or would there be a particularly different viewpoint that the gentleman would like to discuss?

I thank the gentleman. Reclaiming, I think this might be a good time for me to lay out how I think the sequence of events took place with the economic crisis that we are in. And I'd ask the gentleman's indulgence and analysis of whether he would agree with this particular analysis.

But I would take us back, Mr. Speaker, to 1978, to the inception of the Community Reinvestment Act. The Community Reinvestment Act, I think, was passed for the right motivations, and the idea was that we had lenders that were redlining districts. They were drawing a red line around districts in particular cities and refusing to loan for real estate in those districts because the value of that real estate was not being sustained, and it was declining. That was maybe the right kind of motive to do that. But as we moved on from 1978 until the nineties, when the Community Reinvestment Act was refreshed under the Clinton administration, and it got a little tighter, it essentially said this, that if you're going to be a lending institution that will--that is inclined to want to expand, you're going to have to make loans into these neighborhoods that were heretofore redlined. And we're going to need you to have a certain percentage of the loan portfolios go into these communities that were red-lined around them and provide those loans to lower-income people. So the bottom line was, the Community Reinvestment Act was a regulation that put an incentive in place to give loans to people that didn't have a record of being able to pay it back and provided a merit for the lenders to do that if they were going to expand. So it was a perverse incentive. It essentially was an incentive that said to lending institutions, if you want to grow, you're going to have to make bad loans. That was the Community Reinvestment Act. Fresh, new 1978, refreshed in the early nineties, about 1993 or 1994 under Bill Clinton. And that became a foundational piece of legislation that didn't seem to be a very big problem except for a couple of things. One of them was, during the last years of the Clinton administration, Mr. Speaker, the technology that we've developed, the ability to store and transfer information more efficiently than ever before created the dot-com bubble. That existed because investors understood this ability to store and transfer information more effectively and more efficiently than ever before. And they invested in that ability. And they didn't make the corrections for the necessity that that ability to store and transfer information needed to translate into more efficiency in our economy, the ability to produce goods and services or deliver them more effectively. That was, Mr. Speaker, the dot-com bubble. So the dot-com bubble came about because of technological success, and let me call it an irrational exuberant optimism about the benefits that would come from that ability to store and transfer information more effectively than ever before. So we had a dot com bubble through the second half the Clinton administration. Part of the reason there was a balanced budget in this Congress was because, 1, the Republican majority here was determined to slow down and shut down spending and the growth in Federal Government, and they did that effectively. The new revolutionaries that arrived here, elected in 1994 and sworn in in January of 1995, were determined to produce a balanced budget, and they did. Part of it was out of fiscal conservatism, and part of it was out of resistance to the Clinton administration. But whatever those proportions were, we had a budget surplus for a number of those years. And we had a dot com bubble in the market that was not adjusted to rationality. And when the lawsuit was brought against Microsoft, that was the needle that penetrated the dot-com bubble until it burst. And when it did, we had a declining economy. A declining economy because of the aftermath of the collapse of the dot-com bubble, translated into the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, the first administration of his, when he was elected in 2000. And Mr. Speaker, when that took place, we needed to do some adjustments to recover this economy and we had Alan Greenspan look at this and concluded, I believe, and by reports that I've read, not characterizing his inner thoughts necessarily, that we needed to stimulate the economy. That brought about decisions made that resulted in unnaturally low interest rates, especially on mortgage lending, which created an unnaturally exuberant housing economy. This unnaturally exuberant housing economy that came about from unusually low interest rates was something that helped bring us out of the decline in our economy that resulted in the burst of the dot-com bubble, Mr. Speaker. And as that was finding its place in this economy, we were attacked on September 11, 2001. Our financial centers literally collapsed. We lost 3,000 American lives all in the matter of a few hours. And we needed to do something to stimulate the economy.

And so the President of the United States, George Bush, this Congress came together and decided to quickly enact some tax cuts and a stimulus policy. That was 2001. That bridged a small gap, and they weren't all that particularly effective.

But on May 28 of 2003, the real Bush tax cuts were enacted, and they were the reduction in capital gains, the reduction in interest and dividend income, and that resulted in a real economic growth. But as this economic growth came from the Bush tax cuts, we also had economic growth that came from the unnaturally low interest rates and this housing market that was created by those low interest rates, and we found our way through to this point now where the foundation of our economic difficulty, rooted in the Community Reinvestment Act, flowing through from, as I didn't mention, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a refusal of this Congress to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even though we had legislation that was brought before the Financial Services Committee, as Mr. Garrett has described, even though there were amendments brought to this floor, which I actively worked for and supported, that would have capitalized Fannie and Freddie, and regulated Fannie and Freddie, those things were resisted by the current leadership, the people that say it wasn't their fault, it was somebody's else fault, seems to be always Republicans fault. But this is a historical document. It can all be read. It all flows through.

In the end, we got to this point where not only was there a dot-com bubble

that burst that I think stimulated the unnaturally low interest rates that put us in the place where we had the housing bubble that burst, but the housing bubble was created not just because of unnaturally low interest rates, but because lending institutions were given an incentive under the Community Reinvestment Act to give bad loans in bad neighborhoods, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were undercapitalized and under-regulated, and there was a perverse incentive for them to pick up these secondary market loans and tranche those and roll them on up the chain.

And while that was going on, we had mark to market accounting, which is a good process when you have a market that's going up, and if you have a market that's going down, it accelerates the decline. It was a brutal and horrible self-inflicted wound, the mark to market accounting component of this.

While this was going on, additionally, we had a Congress that again refused to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and you had AIG that was insuring these mortgage-backed securities and these bundles of securities, and they had such a large market share there was nobody in the country that could look over their shoulder and pass judgment upon their evaluation of the risk.

And so we had a market that was under-regulated, a market that wasn't indexed back to the real estate value that underlined the bundles of toxic debt that we call it today, the mortgage-backed securities. That's how we got here.

There were many people that made mistakes along the way. And there was a failure to be clairvoyant on the part of all of us. But the voices that I have heard, there's been many voices that said, from my side of the aisle, capitalize Fannie and Freddie, regulate Fannie and Freddie. The Community Reinvestment Act is a perverse incentive, and mark to market accounting was a self-inflicted wound, a hideous self- inflicted wound on this country.

All of those things, put together, none of us are without fault in this. But there is no one that laid out the clarity of this in the beginning that can look back to the record and say, I got it all right; you just wouldn't listen to me. Some did. Some got parts of it right and we've talked to some them of them tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas, my friend, Mr. Gohmert, East Texas I might say, and an ``Aggie.''

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas for that measured response to, I think, the very long response that was delivered by the chairman of the Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I sat here for an hour and took notes on that because I thought it was important that I listen carefully to that presentation, as unusual as it is to have the Chair of the Financial Services Committee come and ask for a late hour after the adjournment, after the break for Easter recess, when most of the Members have gone and have caught flights for home. To have the chairman of the Financial Services Committee come to the floor and ask for an hour to be able to make his case to the American people after a budget is passed, after we've had this intensive 2 days of debate on the finances of this country, I think, is relatively unusual.

In my pages of notes that I took during that 55- or 60-minute period of time, as I scanned those notes after the fact. There seems, to me, to be a lot of things in these notes that are somewhat repetitive, and there are not a lot of significant points that can be raised out to be rebutted. The subject boils down to this, Mr. Speaker, and that is:

Who was in favor of the regulation of our financial industry and who was not? Who is on record as opposing the capitalization and regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Who is on record of supporting the Community Reinvestment Act? Who is on record as advocating the irresponsible financial activities here in this country? Who seems to be, I think, unusually defensive about his position and consistently making the charge that Republicans have a fear of regulation?

Here is another one: ``the fear of the right wing that regulation is coming.'' Another statement would be: ``It was a lack of regulation that did it.''

There is an emphasis on fear of regulation when we have Members who have consistently supported wise and smart fundamental regulation. In fact, we want to see businesses that are able to operate, function, profit, and thrive within the tax and regulatory environment that we give them.

By the same token, Mr. Speaker, we're opposed to the idea that we should leave holes there that will be perverse incentives that would allow Fannie and Freddie to collapse and to put that entire liability on the backs of the American taxpayers--yes, maybe $100 billion for each of those entities, Fannie and Freddie, but $5.5 trillion of potential liability wrapped up in those two. Now it's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Federal Government. Fannie and Freddie are nationalized, and that's a fact, Mr. Speaker, and they're nationalized because we didn't have the right kind of regulations which I supported and voted for on this floor and that others, who seemed to be very defensive, opposed directly. It's a matter of the Congressional Record. It's a matter of the quotes that have been delivered by Mr. Gohmert of Texas and those that I've pulled out of my memory in the dialogue with the chairman. That's just Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

If you go down through the rest of the list of these flaws that we have in our financial structure, where were these clairvoyant gurus in 2007 when mark-to-market accounting slid through without objection? It's something that didn't show up on very many radar screens. It's something that remains a foundation to the hideously self-inflicted wound that we have in our economy.

That's the regulation of mark-to-market accounting. Additionally, the

AIG, which I spoke of, AIG sitting there as a large insurance company, essentially a bonding company that laid out the premiums to guarantee bundles of mortgage-backed securities in their performance not based upon the value of the real estate that was the collateral that underlined those bundles of mortgages but based upon what their judgment was of the performance, the anticipated performance of these bundles of mortgage-backed securities. Based upon speculation but not oversight over the shoulder of AIG.

Another perverse incentive which was that AIG executives, the people who were actually the executives and the front-line people who were marketing these insurance policies that ensured the bundles of mortgage-backed securities were getting their commission out up front, Mr. Speaker. And so once they cashed their check, they didn't have any responsibility any longer or they didn't have any accountability to what would be the result of whether those loans were performed on or whether they were not.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas.

I very much thank the gentleman from Texas.

I am starting my seventh year here, and I have watched some sea changes politically. I have watched some things shift. I have watched the majority change. I have watched the Presidency change, and I have watched the majority change in the United States Senate. I don't think that I have worked within every possible configuration out of those three entities but a number of different ones.

And one of the things that I have observed is that the voice that I heard from the Democrats consistently over those first 4 years that I was here, and then to some degree over the next two, was especially, especially from the Blue Dogs, Mr. Speaker, that came to this floor and said, We've got to have PAYGO, pay-as-you-go accounting. We've got to have a balanced budget every year. We have to have a fiscally responsible government. And I would make the argument that they would want to tighten down the spending, that we were spending too much money. They always wanted to spend a little more money than we wanted to spend, but they thought we were spending too much in relation to the tax revenue that was coming in.

So their idea was hold down the Democrat spending idea and increase the taxes a little bit and get this thing to a pay-as-you-go equation. That's the mantra of the Blue Dogs. And we've gone through a long debate on this budget, Mr. Speaker, and it has been two intense days that this comes down to, but this debate has gone on several weeks now.

What I have noticed is the absence of the Blue Dogs. Where are they? Where is that voice of ``we must balance the budget''? Where is PAYGO? What has happened to the people that were the strongest advocates for fiscal responsibility among the Democrats? I heard the debate. I was impugned by your debate over these last 6 years. But where are you now?

Puts me in mind of Punxsutawney Phil. When he comes out of the hole up there in Pennsylvania, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and the groundhog sees his shadow, he gets scared and goes back in the hole again for 6 more weeks of winter. I don't know that that's necessarily the case, but I think the Blue Dogs have become the groundhogs of politics. They have gone down in the hole, and they are going to stay in there until there is a little bit more favorable climate that comes out, maybe not quite so much bright light shining, not quite so much shadows that are cast by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, this troika that drives this irresponsible spending bill. But they feel compelled to support the President. But he's our President, too.

But I don't support an irresponsible budget, Mr. Speaker, and I would have been really regretful to come to this floor to see a President of the United States of my party that had offered the kind of spending that would double our debt in 5 years and triple it in 10 years. The kind of spending that grows this irresponsible socialization of America--we rejected for a long time the European socialization--the socialized economy of the Europeans, and now we have--the President's over in Europe and is being lobbied by the Germans and the French. They are saying, Get a grip, Mr. President. Don't be spending money so irresponsibly. The Germans are saying, Get a handle on this thing. We don't agree with you in this Keynesian, almost intoxicated Keynesian approach to spending. This is Keynesian.

And the President said to us on a day in early February that--well, he said to

America that spending is stimulus. And then he said that FDR's New Deal actually would have worked except FDR essentially lost his nerve and was concerned about spending too much money. And so what you had was, according to the President, was a recession within a depression. And if you look at the records, there was a little dip in the economy in the late 1930s, but he argued that along came the biggest stimulus plan ever, which was World War II, which brought us out of the Great Depression.

Mr. Speaker, I will argue that the New Deal wasn't a good deal. No amount of more government spending, more profligate spending was going to get us out of the Great Depression. If you look at the data, there is no Keynesian approach in free market history that you can demonstrate that prevailed or produced a positive result.

In fact, if you look at the New Deal in the 1930s, that Keynesian spending, which I think intoxicated FDR for the first half of that decade, doesn't show that the economy grew. It shows that it was flat and then it declined.

And if you look at the wild Keynesian spending that took place in Japan when they had their economic recession in the 1990s, the more money they spent, the deeper they went into debt and the less they had to show for it. That's odd. That's what Henry Morgenthau said back in the 1930s as well, Mr. Speaker.

So when you look at that data--and if the people on this side of the aisle and the people that are running this show out of the White House can't point to an economic time in history that their model, which is the New Deal, they can't point to a time in history when it works, the data is not there. It does not exist, Mr. Speaker. And yet the President was only critical of FDR to the extent that he lost his nerve and he should have spent more money in the 1930s.

Well, I can tell you this President has not lost his nerve. He is spending money hand-over-fist in a fashion that is unparalleled in American history and maybe unconceived by any world leader in American history. And the price that we are paying for this--we've said over and over again--goes into the next generations. And the best you can hope for with a New Deal, a new New Deal--because we had an old New Deal that was a failed New Deal--the best you can hope for with an uber new New Deal of President Obama's is it may diminish the depths to which we might otherwise decline.

But the price for it's a very, very long delayed recovery, Mr. Speaker. That's what we're faced with today.

This budget that's crossed the path of the floor of this House is an irresponsible budget. It's a budget that spends way beyond our means. It's a budget that doubles our deficit in 5 years and triples it in 10. It's a budget that's irresponsible. It's one that doesn't even meet the needs of the United States of America, and it's one that I don't want to see my children saddled with.

And I can tell you, it's one that my children--or now men--call me and send me e-mails on an almost daily basis and are saying, What are you letting happen to me? What is happening to me? And they are going to be paying the price. My grandchildren will be paying the price. And I fear, Mr. Speaker, that my great grandchildren, should I be blessed with any, will be paying the price.

The gentleman from Texas has a point to make before we adjourn. I will be happy to yield.

I will let that be the concluding word this evening.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 2 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, April 6, 2009, at 10 a.m., unless it sooner has received a message from the Senate transmitting its adoption of House Concurrent Resolution 93, in which case the House shall stand adjourned pursuant to that concurrent resolution.

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.)

This resolution is about the on-premise sign industry. They say that a business without a sign is a sign of no business. This commonsense truism is proof that a well-designed, on- premise sign can help small businesses succeed.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, on-premise signs are the ``most effective, yet least expensive form of advertising for small businesses.''

Small businesses need all the help they can get during these difficult economic times that we are currently experiencing, which would allow them with the signage help, to use effective advertising as a good start.

I say this as someone who brings over 35 years of small business experience to the table, which would include 8 years on the House Small Business Committee, from which this resolution comes.

Just to touch some of the high spots on the on-premise sign industry, we have small businesses in particular that are at a competitive disadvantage with the large industries in the country today. One of the things that helps them compete is the effectiveness of being able to place signs in proper locations.

When I think about driving down the road and often we're looking for the signage that directs us on where we turn off--the right turn for gas, food, or clothing, or whatever it might be--it wouldn't be America if it weren't for the on-premise signs. It helps direct customers to the small business sites.

I want to also add, Mr. Speaker, that the Small Business Act empowers the Small Business Administration to take actions to relieve the competitive disadvantage that small businesses face. The Small Business Administration has recognized the value of on-premise signage, as we recognize in this resolution tonight.

I will say that it's a sign of the entrepreneurs in this country. It's a sign of their success. And lack of a sign is an indication of a potential business failure. We simply cannot find these businesses to do business with them if it were not for signage, Mr. Speaker. That's what brings this resolution here.

I'd also address that small business feels this pressure of this downward economic spiral as much as or more than any other sector of this economy. They are pressured by their customers' lack of revenue, they're pressured by budgets being squeezed, by large corporations, the pressure by the demands of an economy that has shrunk dramatically and that continues to stagnate in the bottom of the trough. They're pressured by taxation and regulation more so than large businesses are.

The businesses that need these signs up in front of them are also the ones that are under the scrutiny of the IRS. They're under the scrutiny of the Federal regulators. There is some information that I have accumulated that shows that the businesses in this country are subjected to over 680 Federal regulating agencies. Six hundred-eighty. And the burden that small business has is they don't have multiple floors in their high-rise office buildings that are full of lawyers and counselors that are in the business of keeping these businesses in compliance with all the Federal regulations.

They need to have their property rights preserved. They need to have low taxation and low regulation. Big business will often come to this Congress and advocate for more regulations because they know it puts them at a competitive advantage over the small businesses that are at a distinct disadvantage, Mr. Speaker.

These businesses need every advantage we can give them because they are the incubators for the businesses that will grow into the large employers into the future. They happen to also be the businesses that employ a significant majority--70 to 80 percent--of the employees in this country.

They can't make it without signs. They can't make it without being able to exercise those property rights. The Small Business Administration recognizes that. We recognize that, also, in this resolution tonight, as we recognize the burden of this economy, the burden of this budget, and the extravagant expenses and spending that's taking place that's rolling out from the top reaches of the government in this country.

Somehow, there has been this tsunami of a current that has swallowed us up--a Keynesian current--the idea that we can spend and borrow our way into prosperity, even though a family can't do that, a small business knows they can't do that, the on-premise sign industry knows that you can't do that.

You've got to have effective utilization of the resources in order to find a profit so that you can hire people. That's what creates jobs, is profit. Productivity marketed well, with good advertising, creates the profit that's necessary in order to hire employees and it creates the good jobs.

I want to provide the provision so that in this country our small businesses can succeed with signage, with low taxes, low regulation, and not putting the burden off onto future generations.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I would reserve the balance of my time.

I would yield myself the balance of my time.

To reiterate these points that I've made, it may not serve a purpose here, but I would take us back to where we stand with the Federal spending that exists today.

This Federal spending that doubles our deficit in 5 years and triples it in 10 years, this spending, this profligate spending that's rooted in the Keynesian philosophy--John Maynard Keynes--who said, ``I can solve all the unemployment in America.'' This is during the economic crisis called the Great Depression of the thirties.

How did he propose to solve all the unemployment problem in America? He said, If I can just go out to an abandoned coal mine and drill a lot of holes into the bottom of that abandoned coal mine and put U.S. dollars in those holes, fill them back up again and fill the coal mine full of garbage''--and that was the word he used, was garbage, which I thought was interesting--then he would turn the entrepreneurs in America loose and they could go about digging through that garbage and that would put everybody to work and it would solve the unemployment.

This is the mindset that prevails in this psychology that comes from those who are spending trillions and trillions of our grandchildren's dollars.

It's interesting. I don't know that John Maynard Keynes when he talked about digging holes and burying money and filling the coal mine up with garbage, he didn't talk about the signage necessary to be able to direct the entrepreneurs to the landfill or the coal mine so they could begin to dig through that garbage and come up with this money.

In fact, Keynes said: The more foolish the spending, the better, because at least when you spend it in a foolish way, it's not competing directly with the private sector that has, by virtue of it being able to compete, demonstrated that it is a more prudent expenditure than government can possibly make.

So I don't submit that we bury money in the coal mine or fill the coal mine up with garbage. I think that the EPA would probably raise an objection with that, Mr. Speaker. But I do submit that we get our wits about us, get a handle on what we're doing with our expenditures, get control of this profligate spending that's taking place and take responsibility in our time, in our generation, this year, now, here, in the House of Representatives, instead of delaying it off onto future generations.

Let's tighten our belt now like a family would tighten their belt now. Let's make sure that the entrepreneurs in America have the tools they need to help us recover from this downward spiral in our economy.

Let's keep the taxes low, let's keep our spending low, let's keep our borrowing low. Let's keep our regulations low and let's put our signs up high so everybody can see where to turn off to the small business and do business there.

I yield back the balance of my time.

announcement by the speaker pro tempore

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his leadership on this issue.

This is one of those issues that has a lot of support across the country because there are a lot of reporters across the country that are interested in making sure they have the last full measure of protection they can possibly have for their particular profession. And all of us, in whatever profession we are, see ourselves as the consummate professionals without regard to competing professions.

I would ask the question, what are we trying to fix here? What is the problem that this legislation seeks to address? And one of those is the lack of conformity between the States; I recognize that. But we only have, in the last 25 years, 17 incidents of reporters that have been incarcerated for their refusal to divulge their sources. The most public of those would be the case of Judith Miller in the Scooter Libby investigations that were conducted by the Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, Madam Speaker. And I asked myself during that entire investigation, why didn't they just ask Robert Novak? That would have answered the question.

And if I ask the question today, what was truth and what was fiction in all that? That may be a matter of record, but it is not a matter of public knowledge, even among us here. So it turned out it was Richard Armitage and not Scooter Libby. Scooter Libby was still prosecuted and convicted. I think that Judith Miller's 85 days in jail, if she had that to do over again, she still testified and she still had her agreement with her source.

This goes on and on, 200-plus years, and now we have journalists that have to have special protection without having at least a breadth of statistical data that would support this advocacy that is part of this bill.

And I will tell you, as one who has been in the public eye for some time today, Madam Speaker, that I don't think I am treated objectively by all of the media. I don't think I need to bring a law to this Congress and ask that, for example, to give a Member of Congress a cause of action to bring litigation against a journalist if they happen to be unethical or inaccurate or untruthful. We just go ahead and take that, because that is part of being in the public eye.

The protections are there. There is already sufficient judicial restraint on moving to bring to cause these journalists who speak. Their sources are protected substantially by the tradition and the effects of the court.

And I will submit also another argument, Madam Speaker, and that is that special professional protection is preserved by the States for certain professions. Priests and pastors, for example. They are considered to have a certain privilege with the people that they counsel and minister to, and we try not to crack into that source. And there will be other examples.

For example, a medical doctor or any type of a doctor who has patients. The

patient and the doctor relationship is protected in confidentiality. And we have attorney-client relations, too, that we are very well familiar with in this Congress. All of those are professional relationships. All of those are relationships with people who are skilled.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Madam Speaker, all of those professions that I mentioned are professions where we have people that are trained, that are essentially certified, whether it is by their denomination, by their education, or by their licensing, and those privileges are preserved for clear reasons. This is a privilege that is preserved for the sake of protecting the journalist only, and without an abuse of that confidentiality at this point, without a judicial abuse.

Seventeen cases in 25 years, I would make the argument that this is a solution in search of a problem. It is something that I think sends a message out to the journalistic world. And maybe those of us who will stand up against it will be subject to a certain amount of public criticism. I can face that. I have faced a lot of it. It is part of the price of being in the public eye. Part of the price of being a journalist then is to on a rare occasion, out of the thousands of journalists, 17 in a quarter of a century have been brought forward and said it is in the interests of the court that you go ahead and divulge your source, or at least divulge the information.

And I know that there has been an effort made to tighten this legislation up a little bit, and I appreciate the gentleman's work and due diligence on this. One of the words that was added to the definition of a covered person is the word a person who regularly, the word ``regularly'' gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information.

This definition of a covered person is tightened up because they have to be regular rather than irregular in their behavior; but I think this covers about anybody that is a journalist, unless they are listed in the exemptions rather than the definition of the bill, Madam Speaker.

So I will submit that the level of professionalism that has been demonstrated, although there are many high-quality professionals in the journalistic business, has not risen to the level where I am willing to give that kind of professional special protection, especially because we have had national secrets that have been divulged into the national and international media arena, done so out of this posturing of it is a public service to divulge national secrets. And I will submit, Madam Speaker, that that is not in our national interest, and I oppose this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here tonight. Before my colleagues leave the floor, I hope they can hear a little bit of an alternative viewpoint, that being that this news flash, for especially my colleague from Iowa, corporations don't pay taxes, Mr. Speaker. Corporations collect those taxes from end users, consumers, retail people, and then they aggregate the taxes from the consumers and they pass them on to the Federal Government or State government or whatever the tax collecting body might be.

For that reason, no matter what the circumstances are, we are not going to be able to chase these corporations. We're not going to be able to chase these corporations around the world and collect that taxes from them because they will always find another way to pay taxes or, of course, the obligation they have it to pass it onto the consumer.

This is a fundamental principle when it comes to holding this economy together and how we're going to build the

economy in this country and how we're going to compete with the rest the world. If we get that wrong, if we get it wrong and we think that we can somehow squeeze this capital out of these corporations that have lost about 40 percent of their asset value over the last year or so if you just simply look at the Dow, you'll find out that you can drive this free-market economy into oblivion and the free world will not make progress.

So we need to get that fundamental principle correct. We can't simply get corporations to pay taxes without them passing it on to consumers. And that is the bottom line, Mr. Speaker.

I didn't come to talk about that, but as I listened to my colleagues from the Populist Caucus--I discovered a new caucus here in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker--I raise another issue, the very vague and undefinable position of being for fair trade.

If someone stands up and says they're for fair trade, that means they're not for free trade. They can be for free trade and for smart trade, but you can't be for fair trade and also be for free trade.

Now that might seem like a little bit of alliteration gobbledegook, Mr. Speaker, but the truth is that there is no such thing as fair. Anyone who has raised more than one child--two or more children, I might further define--understands there's no such thing as fair. A three-year old can figure out that their four-year old brother or sister got an extra benefit along the way. They'll argue: That's not fair. As soon as they argue that, of course its subjective.

There's no such thing as fair when it comes to raising children, there's no such thing as fair when it comes to trade, because another country will have a different view on what is fair trade compared to what we will here in the United States.

Those are the fundamental principles. If we go down this path of this nice feeling rhetoric of fair trade as opposed to having justice and equity and balance and free marketing, if we go down this path of seeking to tax corporations and punish them, then we will continually be frustrated by trying to shape a policy that will never be achieved.

And that would be my comments to the gentleman who I think gave a heartfelt presentation here over the last hour, Mr. Speaker.

I didn't come, as I said, to talk about that. I came here to the floor of the House of Representatives tonight to talk about an issue that has to do with innocent unborn human life and these timeless values of the sacredness of the unborn child and the sacredness of all human life.

I have often made this case, especially to our high school and our middle school students, but also across this country, that we have these rights that come from God, and they are delineated in the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Speaker.

What our Founders drafted in the Declaration of Independence are the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That was not a random stream from the quill of Thomas Jefferson, Mr. Speaker. That was very specific, very carefully thought out, very prosaic designed phrase--the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Prioritized rights, Mr. Speaker. That right to life--the right to life is paramount to anyone's liberty. And the right to liberty is paramount to pursuit of happiness.

So let me say that in my pursuit of happiness, if I should encroach upon someone's liberty, my pursuit of happiness loses its right out of deference to a higher priority right of liberty trumps pursuit of happiness. In pursuit of liberty, if I were to choose a pursuit of liberty that would violate someone's right to life, the right to life trumps anyone's pursuit of liberty.

So our Founders understood these are prioritized rights. There's a right to life. That human life is sacred in all of its forms and we have to choose a time, we have to choose an instant when life begins because we simply cannot err. So I choose that instant at conception. Today, it's conception/fertilization. When that happens, we have the biological beginning of life.

I believe that's the moment that God puts the soul in that little child. From that instant on, they're a unique individual. There will never be another one identical to that unique individual. And they are all the solutions to the problems in the world, aside from those that come from above, come from those little children that are coming into this world.

They have a right to life. We need to guarantee that right to life. That right to life trumps anyone's right to liberty, as much as the right to liberty trumps anyone else's pursuit of happiness.

I can continue to give these examples, Mr. Speaker, but I think where we are at this point is, having laid the foundation, I recognize I have the gentleman here from New Jersey, who has, I think, put together a very strong and compelling case here in this Congress; someone who I can count on every time to be with us every day as we stand up for the innocent unborn human life. He's someone who brings a passion to the scholarship, the conviction, the faith, the core principles to this cause, an individual I get to count as a friend and a colleague and someone who it's an honor for me to be serve with.

I'd yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. And I appreciate the privilege to stand here and hear those words, the nonviolent, life-affirming philosophy that we are here and that we join together in, and the question that was presented, that is this question: Did Hillary Clinton understand? Did the Secretary of State understand the cruel, racist, elitist philosophy of Margaret Sanger in whose name she accepted the award? Did she understand the implications that come with such an award?

And I don't know the answer to that, Mr. Speaker. But I have to believe that someone who has been engaged in public policy all of her life, even as an undergraduate at Yale, this is not something that has not crossed her mind. I cannot believe that the Secretary of State would be ignorant of the philosophy of Margaret Sanger. I cannot believe that. If that were the case, then I would suspect that she is ignorant of many other things, and I don't buy that. I think this is a well-educated, very astute lady, a smart lady.

And as I listened to the gentleman from New Jersey's presentation, I think about something that takes us even to another level here, and this is a statement where we have an individual that has been nominated into this administration in a confirmation, a Senate confirmation position, Office of Legal Counsel, who actually is even more of an advocate of abortion and someone who even takes the position of Margaret Sanger to another level, and that is Dawn Johnsen, Office of Legal Counsel. And I have a quote.

Now, Dawn Johnsen has been appointed, Mr. Speaker, to head up the Office of Legal Counsel. This is the most influential, most powerful position that you have never heard of if you are an average, regular person in America.

The Office of Legal Counsel provides opinions on the constitutionality of the activities of the entire administration, and gives advice to the President of the United States.

The Office of Legal Counsel, the person who heads that up, this would be Dawn Johnsen, should she be confirmed by the United States Senate, has the opportunity to whisper into the President's ear over and over again Constitutional recommendations, which are actually considered to be binding precedent unless it happens to be overturned by the courts, so very seriously taken, and the opportunity to advocate for policy.

This is Dawn Johnsen, who says that: Abortion should not be rare. And actually went so far as to take issue with Hillary Clinton whom, in the presidential campaign, who said abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. At least rare is the right direction to go, and legal is another question. But here is Dawn Johnsen's statement:

The notion of legal restrictions as some kind of reasonable compromise, perhaps to help make abortion safe, legal, and rare, thus proves nonsensical.

In other words, she even took issue with Hillary Clinton's position that abortion should at least be rare. I will give Hillary Clinton that, Mr. Speaker, that she has at least made the statement, whether she has followed through on it or not. And she has accepted the Margaret Sanger award, which would actually contradict this statement about abortion being rare.

Margaret Sanger's philosophy was very elitist, very racist, very much focused on the idea of eugenics, and that we could perfect the species of Homo sapiens by selective breeding processes and by selective abortions. And data shows that in the African American community, as much as 50 percent of the African American babies conceived in the United States of America meet their death by abortion. Half of the population that would be here, that could laugh, live, love, play, contribute to this society, be part of this whole America, could enjoy a right to life and the right to fulfillment of that life lose that right to life in the abortion clinics.

And if I listened right to the gentleman from New Jersey, 300,000 altogether meet their end annually here in the United States of America at the hands of Planned Parenthood and their abortion clinics, 300,000 out of perhaps a number that is around 4,000 a day, multiplied across every day here in the United States. And this is just the United States of America.

Then we have the Advocacy for International Abortion, which comes continually here. Every year we deal with that debate.

Mr. Speaker, I remember this debate that we had on the floor here where we stand. It was the first debate on the Mexico City policy that took place in the 110th Congress, the first debate on Mexico City policy that fell underneath the gavel of Speaker Pelosi.

And I remember those of us who stand up for innocent, unborn human life lost that debate and lost that vote

here. And I will never forget looking across over on this side, Mr. Speaker, where I saw the advocates that thought that they wanted to compel American taxpayers to fund abortions in foreign lands clapping, cheering, jumping up and down, hugging each other, maybe even in tears of joy, for compelling Americans to fund abortions in foreign lands, something that is abhorrent to I believe a majority of Americans. And yet, the cheer came up over here, Mr. Speaker. Nearly impossible to understand.

I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. And I would hope that he can stand by. I have a couple of questions I would like to present that way and first make a statement. And that is, Mr. Speaker, with regard to partial-birth abortion, it has occurred to me that if an abortionist can go in and turn that child around so the baby is born breech, that being feet first, and bring that baby to delivery for everything but the head and in fact, part of the head, and then, hold the baby there so that the baby isn't fully born and then take a scalpel and insert that into the back of the skull and put some scissors in there and open up the hole and suck the brains out of that child while that child struggles for life and struggles for mercy, it occurs to me as I picked up the film, ``Silent Scream'' years ago when our children were about 10 or 12 years old and showed that to them one time, and one time was enough, that silent scream, the word of that movie that showed the violence of abortion, it occurs to me that this society can't abide the screams of the innocent. And so they had to devise a means of abortion that would stop the life of that innocent child an inch before that child could fill its lungs full of free air and scream for its own mercy. That, I think, is the psychology behind this. Even the abortionists couldn't stand the sound of the scream of the child screaming for its own mercy. And I think that is how partial- birth abortion was devised.

I would pose this question to the gentleman from New Jersey, and having been the individual that offered the amendment to preserve the Mexico City policy and having lost that debate and lost that vote on this floor, and having seen the display of glee and joy and hugging and clapping and cheering and perhaps even tears of joy on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, the joy that they were going to compel the American taxpayers to fund abortions in foreign lands, what kind of a person, the sons and daughters, the grandsons and granddaughters of Margaret Sanger, the mother of abortion, the mother of ``family planning'' in quotes, the eugenic idea of producing a more perfect race, Hitlerian idea, what could cause a person to be so full of joy about compelling you or me or the people who agree with us to fund abortions in foreign lands? I can't understand that, Mr. Smith. And I would be very interested in your analysis.

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. And as I listened to that description of the audience breaking into applause at a video of a baby who has been a victim of partial birth abortion, had its brain sucked out and stopped struggling, it became apparent that the baby was dead, that they would cheer, break into applause, that indexes to the cheer and the applause and the hugging that went on here when the Mexico City Policy was defeated on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker.

And I understood it differently. And I think it was because of a gap in the knowledge and experience that's been filled in by Mr. Smith from New Jersey. I explained that emotion over here as not being a rational, logical emotion, but an emotion that simply divorced itself from the sacred nature of human life, and was simply cheering because they had scored a victory over our side.

And how could anyone go through life and think they had accomplished something by compelling others to fund abortions in foreign lands? That's a psychology that I cannot connect with, Mr. Speaker. And so I could only rationalize it on the part that they know we hold innocent life dear. We hold all human life dear. And we believe that it's sacred in all of its forms, from the instant at conception and fertilization to natural death.

And Mr. Smith, among others, have been one of the stalwarts in leading and defending innocent human life, especially in this Congress. And I thought that that cheer was for having scored points against the value system, the core value system of those of us on this side.

Mr. Speaker, I'm not sure of that, because the people sitting inside that room who were watching that film of that partial birth abortion, the struggling child who ceased to struggle when it's obvious that the baby was dead, that broke into a cheer, they didn't do that because they scored points on the other side. That doesn't relate over here to a political contest which should always transcend our fundamental, timeless values. However I might try to rationalize their emotions, when you tie the two of them together, it's almost unexplainable. I can't explain an emotion or thought process that would want to end innocent human life and consider it to be a right, a fundamental right.

So I ask this question, and I ask this question continually in our public schools and our parochial schools across the land when I have the chance. And I say, especially to young people, you'll be called upon to make a profound moral decision in this society and this civilization; if you're 14, 15, 16, 18 years old, 19, 20 years old, you will, or you will be among those who will have to make that profound decision, the moral decision.

And you ask only two questions. It's very simple, and it's this simple. The first question is, do you believe in the sanctity of human life? Is human life sacred in all of its forms? Is your life sacred? Is the person next to you, is their life sacred, people on either side, are their lives sacred? And it becomes almost a universal yes. I've actually never had a student say, no, I don't think so. I don't think my life is sacred and I shouldn't be treated in a sacred fashion. I've never had that happen. They nod their heads. It's universal that we believe that life, human life is sacred in all of its forms.

So once we establish the answer, yes, to the first question, is human life sacred, the only question to follow that up with is, then at what instant does life begin? You have to choose an instant. And I describe it this way. You can't guess at it. What if somebody came by the gymnasium or the auditorium and stuck a gun in the door and turned their head the other way and pulled the trigger and ran down the hallway without looking back. If they were captured outside the building, you could ask them, did you kill somebody or didn't you? And their answer might be, I don't know. But we know that if the gymnasium emptied and there's someone in there who's dead, with a bullet hole in them, yes, the answer is, he did kill somebody.

And if it results in a dead baby, someone was killed. And you cannot guess when it comes to life. You can't err when it comes to life. You must choose that instant that life begins. It can't be a first trimester, a second trimester, a third trimester; it can't be viability outside the womb. We know it goes up beyond 24 weeks or below 24 weeks for viability today. There's no baby that's born, now, 9 months, full- term that really is viable without being nurtured by its mother and by its parents. And they've got to be nurtured. And so whether it's the instant before they're born or the instant after, when does life begin?

I remember asking that question when this first little miracle, that firstborn of our family, was put into my hands. And I looked at that child and I was struck by the awe of the miracle. And I don't remember that I thought this through on that day, but I remember going to work the next day and I was sitting there thinking this through. And I still believe there's a certain aura about that firstborn child.

And I asked myself, here's this miracle that's been in my arms within the last hours. This little child, this miracle, could someone take his life today? And of course the answer is no. Could they have taken his life yesterday, the day he was born? No. Could they do so the minute after he was born? No. The minute before he was born? No. What about 10 minutes before or 2 hours before or a day or a week or a month before he was born? The answer is no, no and no, Mr. Speaker. And so if you can't do that, if it's abhorrent to us to think about the idea of ending the life of our unborn child a day, a week or a month before they're born, just as we couldn't think of that a day a week or a month after they're born, then we've got to take this back to an instant, an instant that their life begins. And it's that simple.

And this has become a political argument that's destroyed the lives of 50 million babies, to the point where we argue that this civilization has a hole in it, in the generation.

I remember standing down on the Mall, this would be, I believe, a year ago, January 22, on the March for Life. And if you looked out across that Mall, there were over 100,000 there that day. This year there was a far bigger number in the March for Life, many, many young people.

And I made the point that if you are under 30 years old, and you're standing next to somebody that's under 30 years old, look at each other. And the ghost of one-third of your generation stands between you. That's the aborted generation, the generation that didn't have that opportunity for life, the generation that are the victims of Margaret Sanger, the victims of a political agenda, the victims of a lack of belief in the sanctity of human life, the people that would argue that babies are inconvenient, that an abortion should never be rare, the people like Dawn Johnsen who would argue that mothers are fetal containers. My mother a fetal container? Chris Smith's mother a fetal container? That the only emotion you feel--this is Dawn Johnsen again--the only emotion you feel when you have an abortion is relief, not trauma; that it never comes back to you; that it's simply off one's conscience.

We know that that has motivated--that women deserve better--the organization that Chris Smith talked about.

Dawn Johnsen spoke that women who get pregnant are simply the losers in the contraceptive lottery, and that they no more consent to pregnancy than pedestrians consent to being struck by drunk drivers.

And yet, I'm standing in my kitchen on Sunday, talking with my daughter-in-law, who's the mother of our third grandchild. And I told her that I'm jealous because I'll never get to be a mom. And yet, no matter what she wants to do with her career, some of that career is going to be slowed down because she's busy being a mom.

And she looked at me and she said, I know you're jealous. You've told me that before. You'll never be a mom.

And I think being a mom is worth the tradeoff of slowing down my career because I think it's great being a mom.

And that's the love that flows. That lady is not a fetal container. She's a mother, a mother that's brought love to each of the children that God's gifted this family with, just like the millions and millions of mothers across the planet who have done so, done so out of love, out of faith, out of conviction.

And I can't understand the people that would cheer and celebrate the tax dollars of American people going to any place that provides abortion services and counseling.

That is what happens, Mr. Speaker. And I know the gentleman from New Jersey has a few more words.

And I very much thank the gentleman from New Jersey. And it brings to mind an image that many of us have seen of an in-utero surgery where that--not only does that little unborn child feel the pain, but that little child reached up out of the incision and grasped the finger of the surgeon. I'll never forget that image. And it was something that floated around the Internet for a long time, and I think it would be worth bringing to this floor. Very, very human.

And as I listened to Mr. Smith, the gentleman from New Jersey, I have to reflect back on our dear departed friend and colleague, Henry Hyde, who was a stalwart on the life issue. And I wrote this down from the back of the program at his funeral in Chicago that day. His last day on this Earth was November 29, 2007. And I think it's a good place, Mr. Speaker, to close this special order with a quote from Henry Hyde. And he said this:

``When the time comes, as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I've often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it's a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates. You are there alone, standing before God. And a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there will be a chorus of voices that are not heard in this world that will be heard in the next, beautifully and clearly. And they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement, they will say to God, spare him because he loved us, and God will look at you and say not did you succeed, but did you try.''

Mr. Speaker, I will yield back.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, this Nation's great deliberative body that we are.

I listened with interest to the gentlemen who have made their presentation in the previous hour, and I think back as we start this discussion, this 60-minute Special Order about what has taken place in the country. And many of us watched the President do his press conference. I wouldn't be very surprised if President Obama has at this point reached the threshold for press conferences in his career that would match that of Ronald Reagan's. Ronald Reagan didn't believe in coming before the American people a lot of times in a row. That is clearly not the case with President Obama, Madam Speaker.

We are here dealing with a full-court press across this Nation that seeks to, as the President seeks to, sell his budget to the American people. We have watched the Congressional Budget Office come out with their estimates on what this budget is going to cost. I have watched the target move. I have watched the irresponsibility of the spending grow. And if you add up the cumulative total of the money that has been spent, taxpayers' money borrowed and spent, I don't really know anybody that has that full total. We need to put it down here on the floor and ring it up every day, just like you put the little thermometer up when you have got a fund-raising drive for a new library. The only thing will be that there won't be any new libraries for our children and grandchildren if we continue on this path.

I recall, Madam Speaker, the President making a statement that, in order to repair this economy, we need to construct this multi-legged stool, and the stimulus plan is only one leg of a multi-legged stool. That is by his words.

So I made the remark then that one leg of a multi-legged stool that wasn't a milking stool, that would be one leg. It wasn't a two-legged stool, I have never seen one of those. There would be no practical reason to have a two-legged stool, it would fall over. And so a three- legged stool, he would have said so. But we know it is multi-legged. So that is at least four, maybe more, with the legs of this stool that he would like to construct to solved our economic crisis at a price tag per leg of $1 trillion to $2 trillion each. And when I said that a month or so ago, there was a significant amount of criticism, that I was exaggerating the President's budget.

Madam Speaker, I submit that, no, now the Congressional Budget Office has exceeded my exaggerated estimate in their objective conservative estimate of what this budget is going to cost this country in debt, and cost the American people.

As I listened to the press conference today, I have been familiar with the term that was trotted at nearly every press conference, of which there have been many, and there are two things we can't get a total on: How much money is being spent, and how many press conferences we have had that set policy for this economy. But I have gotten used to the term that the President had inherited a $1 trillion debt from his predecessor.

Madam Speaker, I point out that no President inherits a debt from his predecessor President. A President can't spend any money. A President can't initiate any spending. In fact, a Senator can't initiate spending. It has got to be initiated, by Constitution, right here in the United States House of Representatives.

That budget, that spending, that deficit for the 110th Congress and the deficit coming into the 111th Congress, that is the Pelosi debt, the Pelosi deficit. That is the money that was appropriated by this Congress that established much of the debt that was inherited by the 111th Congress that would be administered by the Executive Branch, which would be the President of the United States. His job is to carry out the policies we set and take care to enforce the laws with due diligence. But his statement has been he inherited a $1 trillion debt. Today we have another milestone I hadn't heard before, Madam Speaker; and that is, now he has inherited a $1.3 trillion debt.

So the inheritance is growing for the President, but it is shrinking for our grandchildren, unless we consider that they are inheriting debt, as well, and the burden of supporting this government and taking it out of duly-earned profits in future, future years, without a prospect of being able to pay for this, without a plan to come out of it.

And the argument that if we just do something to establish socialized medicine, that will solve our economic problems? I cannot connect the dots on that kind of a statement, Madam Speaker, and it concerns me a great deal.

So the inherited debt, which is not inherited from his predecessor the President, President Bush, but it is debt that is inherited from the 110th Congress and previous Congresses, has grown to $1.3 trillion. But the debt the American people inherit out of this is over $8 trillion, perhaps over $10 trillion. And we are still configuring and constructing more legs of this multi-legged stool that is supposed to bring us out of this economic crisis.

I listened as that language unfolded, and you have to listen very carefully to understand the meaning of the President's words. It is usually an artful job of crafting this ambiguity of language, this ambiguity of language that allows me to pull out of it the meaning that I want to know and hear, and allows someone, my ideological opposite, to draw an opposite meaning from the same words and the same phrase. There are a lot of different ways to describe it. I am going to be generous and call it a classical ambiguity style. And I find myself sometimes turning down the volume and waiting for the newspaper the next day, because you really have to parse all this language and analyze it, and it is hard for me to find time for that. But some of this language is more clear than others.

I intend to take up the issue in a moment of the President's appointment to the Office of Legal Counsel, but prior to doing so I think it would be appropriate to transition into the economic circumstances, and recognize the gentlelady from Minnesota for so much time as she may consume to talk about whatever it be on her mind.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota for the eloquent presentation on the economic side of this thing and the very smooth transition into the life side. And this is an important issue that sits before this Congress.

Before I go to that issue, I would comment that in looking at the chart of the debt and the cumulative effect of the debt of President Obama's debt compared to the sum total of all the previous administrations, Congress has started, the President signed the appropriations bills, there is another statistic that I saw that was a calculation from the Congressional Budget Office that took this debt in the budget that has been proposed by President Obama and lays it out into the future. The greatest share of our gross domestic product that we have had as debt in a budget was 1945, right at the end of World War II. And this Obama budget projects to be not 100 percent of gross domestic product, but twice as high, 200 percent of gross domestic product is

the calculation that comes from numbers produced by the Congressional Budget Office.

Madam Speaker, I point out another component of this, that yesterday there was a plan that was rolled out that was played off of former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, who argued that he should have $700 billion to pick up toxic assets from the lending institutions, and that proposal was rolled out yesterday. And here is how this calculates, and that is that the Federal Government--and I want to make this point, Madam Speaker, before we move on, because I think it is so essentially important that we all understand what is taking place in this country with the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, reaching into the auto makers with the partial nationalization that is going on there, the nationalization of AIG. The taxpayers own 80 percent of the shares of AIG. They are not worth a lot, but taxpayers own 80 percent of them. We have a big investment in Citigroup. And as the Federal Government swallows up financial institution after financial institution, now this administration reaches in to the mortgages themselves, into institutional investors and individual investors, perhaps, to deal with these toxic mortgages.

Now I have argued, and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and I have signed on to a piece of legislation last fall and argued that we should use private capital to solve this problem with the toxic debt that exists, the toxic mortgages that are out there, those mortgages that aren't performing and that are going in the tank. It is always preferable in a free-enterprise kind of an economy to have private- sector capital come in and rescue.

The rescue fund, the rescue act was a piece of legislation that I introduced that we are original cosponsors of, and one of the things that it does to put private capital into this very thing, these kind of mortgages. It would suspend capital gains taxes on rescue capital that would come in to pick up the toxic debt. Each time that we have pushed out into the middle of the table the argument that we should be either suspending or eliminating capital gains taxes so that investors could come in and pick up these toxic mortgages, and then if they yield a profit, let them keep the profit tax-free, they will reinvest those dollars and pay taxes on their capital at a later date, Madam Speaker, but we can't get that simple idea of suspending taxes on capital gains to stay on the negotiating table any longer than it takes Chairman Frank's back of the hand to sweep it off.

Why? Why would the most logical proposal that can be devised, and the simplest one at that, that brings free-market solutions and private- sector investor capital that is looking for a place to go, why would it not be part of the plan to resolve this economic downward spiral that we are in? I will submit it is because the people that are in charge of devising the plan don't really believe in the free markets. If they did, they would want investors to come in.

So the White House has proposed a plan that would partner up the Federal Government, the White House and the taxpayers with private sector investment. Now I'm saying that we could get trillions of dollars of private investment to come in and pick up this toxic debt. You don't want to buy it at any more than the market price is. There is no reason to overpay for it. But you want to take it off the books of the banks and the lenders and let them move on and heal up. So here is the proposal, and it works out to be like this. If an investor wants to put $1 down on the table to invest in these toxic debts that we are not supposed to call ``toxic'' anymore, these mortgage-backed securities, that investor can lay $1 down, and the Federal Government will lay $1 down, and then the Federal Government will guarantee another $12 worth of debt. So, if I'm an individual investor, and I can come up with $1, that means the Federal Government puts another $1 in cash up to match it, and then they guarantee the loan on the balance of that, another $12, so we have got a $14 investment here. Thirteen of the $14 are guaranteed by the Federal Government. The risk for the investor is $1 out of $14, 7 percent of the whole. The Federal Government's risk is 93 percent of the whole, and if this thing goes down, if it washes out, we are, as taxpayers, holding the bag for 93 percent of the loss. And the result--oh, wait a minute. What happens to the profit, Madam Speaker? Well, the profits are shared 50/50 between the Federal Government, the taxpayers and the investor.

So if I can come out and put $1 down and somebody else will guarantee or put down $13, and out of that whole $14 worth of investment I'm going to get half of the return off of my 7 percent investment, and the Federal Government gets half of the return off of their 93 percent of their investment, I think you know what has happened here. They have rejected the idea that we should just not tax the profits, and instead, in the lust for sharing in the profits themselves and expanding the role of the Federal Government, they have rejected a free-market solution and come up with a Big Government solution that buys the Federal Government in in a big way with no way back out again and not even a respectable platitude that would give us a way to define it out of the ambiguity of the language that that is what is going to happen.

If the gentlelady will yield for a question.

It just occurs to me as you speak of this, let's presume that you had $1 million to invest. And you had been looking at a bundle of these mortgage-backed securities with the idea that you could go in and buy up this bundle with $1 million in investment and then manage them in such a way that you could get your money back out and make a profit. It would be a good thing for our economy. It would be a good thing for the investment in that capital.

Now, if you're ready to invest that $1 million in buying up a bundle of mortgage-backed securities, how would you be able to compete with someone who also had $1 million and who had $12 million from the Federal Government, between them then $13 million, to match up against your $1 million? What happens to the free market in this? And how does someone who doesn't want to participate and make an investment like that in direct competition with the Federal Government, how do they possibly find a profit? How can they compete?

And reclaiming my time, the gentlelady mentions the institutional investors. And we have also watched the institutions on Wall Street such as Goldman Sachs, AIG, Citigroup and let me see, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. The list goes on and on. It occurs to me that some of the same names and faces are inside the room when these decisions are made over and over again.

I think back to AIG, and the situation that flowed across this floor that would go back and back tax those retention bonuses that were paid to the executives. Who makes that decision? Who had the opportunity to say ``no''? Some of the same people that are configuring this program now. It looks like it is designed for the institutional investors.

We know that there won't be any opportunity for the American taxpayers to be made whole.

And I'm asking for the taxpayers to wake up. Take on this personal responsibility. Get out the tea bags. The American people can come together and say, enough is more than enough. This is too much. And it is time to put the brakes on this.

As I reflect on your discussion about this attitude about the Federal Government deciding what executives should be paid, what businesses are viable and which ones should be nationalized, I recall there is a fine and stellar company that is domiciled in Minnesota that had one of their pieces of their investment that was nationalized. It was a rice processing plant in Venezuela. A Hugo Chavez move, that took over a rice plant in Cargill in Venezuela. And this is a pattern. I think if you would read the story about that and then bring it back and just change the names, the places and the dates, put some American companies in there, I don't think you could discern the difference between the specter of what is hanging out for the American businesses that is coming out of the White House and what has actually happened to Cargill in Venezuela.

I thank the gentlelady. And it occurs to me that at some point, that the NBA, the professional baseball leagues, the NFL, hockey players all are going to eventually come under this scrutiny, and maybe even the Hollywood actors and actresses. If there is something that you can dictate what it is, the wages and benefits of executives in private business, then there is no line by which you wouldn't cross to tell anybody in America what they could or couldn't make.

And the point that is being made, the undercurrent of this point that is being made is what the gentlelady from Minnesota made at the beginning of this hour, and that is, getting to the foundational principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, these rights that come from God that are clearly articulated in the Declaration of Independence and flow through the Constitution that are part and parcel of our law and our culture and rooted in biblical values. These are the things that have made this a great Nation, along with property rights and free market capitalism, the rule of law, which is God's law transferred into this country. And so today it brings us to this point, this point of the subject of the law itself and how it is interpreted, how the Constitution is interpreted, the profound constitutional questions and how the laws that are written within the parameters of the Constitution are interpreted, and how the President himself is advised by the Office of Legal Counsel. And I will submit that the President's appointment to the Office of Legal Counsel is one of the most important appointments that is ever made. And it is an appointment that, according to the Newsweek magazine, the Office of Legal Counsel is the most important government office you have never heard of. This is the job that advises the President and other branches of government on all constitutional questions, evaluates executive orders as to their constitutionality and anything that might come before the President for a signature, a piece of legislation that would come out of here, for example, Madam Speaker, that is also something that would come under the purview of the Office of Legal Counsel.

The President issued, he rescinded the Mexico City Policy on January 23rd of this year, and that Mexico City Policy is a policy that prohibited Federal dollars, our tax dollars, yours and mine and everybody across this country, from being used to fund abortions overseas. That is the Mexico City Policy. I think the President wanted to issue his

Executive order on January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, but out of respect for the hundreds of thousands of Americans that poured into this city to make their case about the protection of innocent unborn human life, I think out of the fear of backlash, plus he was a little busy signing his Executive order that closes Gitmo a year to the day, it will be on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade on 2010. But on January 23, the next day, he issued the Executive order that rescinded the Mexico City Policy, opened up the door to compel American taxpayers to fund abortions in foreign countries, under the guise of what shall we call it, population control, reproductive rights.

And then, on top of that, we have the appointment of Dawn Johnson to the Office of Legal Counsel to advise the President on executive orders, constitutional questions, and someone who comes to this job with a real track record, a track record of a built-in bias as an assistant to the Office of Legal Counsel, under President Clinton, and someone who has made a whole series of outrageous statements, mostly that have come in conjunction with her doing her job as a legal counsel herself. So these are not, this is not talk that is coming along in the coffee shop. This is language that flows out of legal briefs that she has written.

Reclaiming my time. I thank the gentlelady for that further clarification of the Office of Legal Counsel, the most important government office that most have never heard of, Madam Speaker. And so, as we saw this appointment be made, and looked through some of the documentation of Dawn Johnson, we put together a letter to the President. And this letter is dated March 24 of this year. And there are 62 cosigners on here, both of us, Michele Bachmann and myself included. And it addresses a letter to the President and it says, essentially, Mr. President you stated when you rescinded the Mexico City policy, that no matter what our views, we are united in our determination--and this is a continuing quote--to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families and the choices they make. I will just close that quote there.

If it is your intent, Mr. President, that we really reach for those kind of goals, and another component of that statement, we must work to find common ground. Close quote.

I hope the President picks up on this. There is no way to find common ground with an individual who holds such utterly biased views. And this is, in my judgment, one of them.

And this is a quote from Dawn Johnson, and the notion of legal restrictions as some kind of a reasonable compromise, perhaps to help make abortions safe, legal and rare, which is a statement that has come out of a many leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. This proves to be nonsensical in her view. And I think it is the rare part that she objects so much too. And she goes on to quote in a different location, progressives must not portray all abortions as tragedies. Absent unforeseen technological and medical changes, abortion is unlikely to become truly rare, and certainly not nonexistent.

In other words, this is a rejection of the position, the most, I will say the most friendly position that I get from people that do not support the protection of innocent unborn human life. At least they will concede that there is a moral abhorrence to it, and it should be minimized if they aren't willing to eliminate. And that was something that Hillary Clinton said. But this statement by Dawn Johnson, I think, makes it clear, Madam Speaker, that she says that abortion will never be rare and safe, legal and rare, as a matter of fact. It will not be. And that just opens up the door to further dialog on this particular issue. There are many issues that I would object to. But I focus this on the abortion side.

And another one of these statements that we carry to the President is this: And this, Madam Speaker, is among the most offensive statements that the American people are asked to accept as part and parcel of the package that you get when the President appoints someone to be, to head of the Office of Legal Counsel who carries this kind of a bias against the people who stand up for innocent human life. And this is her statement on abortion regulation. The State has conscripted her body for its own ends because the State has an interest in babies being born. If a State is not interested in that, you will see a civilization ultimately die. So she goes, recognizing a compelling State interest in protecting the fetus would provide States with an open-ended invitation to force pregnant women to act in whatever ways the State determined were optimal for the fetus, thereby, and I pay attention to this, thereby reducing pregnant women to no more than fetal containers. That is a remark of contempt towards mothers, toward the cherished role that they have in bringing these young children to birth and nurturing them with all the love they possibly can. It is offensive to me to think that someone has called my mother a fetal container.

And reclaiming my time from the gentlelady from Minnesota who has lived her life in demonstration to that commitment to life, your own children and the numbers of foster children that you have nurtured, you are the woman that lives in Minnesota and had so many children but always knew what to do. And I have not quite figured out how to put that into the proper alliteration, but that is the concept.

It definitely helps to have a good husband. I remind my wife of that, and I appreciate that comment.

Going back to this, as you mentioned, it was the Office of Legal Counsel is a perfect position to whisper

things into the ears of the President, to get the President's attention, to be on his agenda, to make legal arguments, to make arguments that are going to help him rationalize and set the policy, a policy like the Mexico City.

Written statements with binding precedent, and the ability to write that into statements or whisper into the President's ear fetal containers, Mr. President.

And it would limit the ability of each of the agencies to react to the very policy that this Congress has established, this Congress might establish. And this kind of pejorative language has no place in law. And it has no place in the dialog of America. It has no place in families and humanity, has no place in nurturing little children, and it has no place in taking care of the mothers, the brothers and the sisters with the idea that a fetal container, that reduces the unborn child, that innocent little baby, to being a term that hardly makes it as a medical term.

These aren't the only comments that have been made by Dawn Johnson. I just picked them up as they come along. There is quite a stack here. And I don't know if I will get through them all, Madam Speaker, but here is one that is also indicative of a similar kind of language in the previous quote where Dawn Johnson, again, the President's appointee to head up the Office of Legal Counsel, the argument says the argument that women who become pregnant have in some sense consented to the pregnancy belies reality. I would like to think that most women who are mothers have consented to the pregnancy. Not all, but most. The large number of women who never receive proper information about contraception and others who are the inevitable losers in the contraception lottery, no more consent to pregnancy than pedestrians consent to being struck by drunk drivers. Pregnant mothers equivalent to being struck by drunk drivers when they become pregnant? That reduces this thing down into an act of almost negligent violence, if not willful violence. I think it is an act of love.

Reclaiming my time, even when they make that decision themselves.

I as a new grandfather myself 3 weeks ago today, I think of those children who are loved and wanted and planned and of those families who are not able to have children and who are lined up to adopt children who might become available. There are many more families in this country who are waiting for a child to come along who they can adopt and nurture into the bosom of their family and raise as one of their own than there are unwanted children in this country.

By God.

Reclaiming my time, raising up on the point made by the gentlelady from Minnesota, it is true that every child is both wanted as is wanted, but also, every child is planned and wanted by God. It is his will, and we need to acknowledge that will and nurture and love these children with all of our ability and with all of our will.

It takes me to another quote by Dawn Johnson. This one fits right in with the category. Perhaps it is more egregious. This is the infamous KKK quote where she says, ``The terrorists' behavior of petitioners,'' meaning those people who are praying for life outside the abortion clinic, ``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.''

Madam Speaker, I am watching my constituents by the hundreds on these 40 days of Lent, praying outside Planned Parenthood in Sioux City, Iowa throughout these 40 days, and they have been labeled now to be similar to the KKK by the prospective head of the Office of Legal Counsel who would be whispering these terms into the President's ear and writing legal opinions and bringing influence on the enforcement effort of the Federal Government, bringing that up against people who are exercising their first amendment rights of freedom of assembly and religion to protect innocent life.

Reclaiming my time, the gentlelady has articulated this, I think, very well.

We'll add these expressions up together: pregnant mothers are the equivalent of being hit by drunk drivers; that abortion will never be rare; the equivalent of the KKK are people who are demonstrating and protesting that we should protect and support innocent human life.

I'll put another one up here and add another quote to that. This is another quote from Dawn Johnson.

She says, ``The experience of an abortion is no longer traumatic. The response of most women to the experience is relief.''

I don't have any experience with that, but that is not the message that I get from the people I talk to who come to this city. The strongest leaders in the pro-life movement and always among them will be women who have had abortions and who have suffered the trauma, the psychological trauma of abortion. They don't feel relief. They feel compelled to pray and march and demonstrate until Roe v. Wade is overturned, and we can protect innocent life in this country as God intended.

Reclaiming my time, the trauma that has been visited upon many, many thousands of women in this country has brought about the beginnings of an entire organization, of a movement that has significant inertia and membership, and that is called Women Deserve Better. They come to this city continually and make the case that women deserve better. They deserve proper psychological and medical counsel. They deserve to be treated with respect. They deserve to understand what is going on, and they do not deserve to be told that they are going to feel relief or that it used to be but is no longer a traumatic experience.

But they may reflect the majority of the input that is going into the ears of the President as these decisions are being made, and they would reflect the position of the Office of Legal Counsel if Dawn Johnson is confirmed by the United States Senate.

Now, we can expect that these ideas--this philosophy, this pejorative approach--is not balanced and that they do not bring a sense of legality or legal scholarship or constitutional analysis. They bring a bias into this discussion. These kinds of biased positions would be reflected throughout the President's positions because he is the one who has chosen her. It does reflect his positions to some degree.

And he argued in favor of it.

The foundational principle that he argued for, Madam Speaker, was: A woman who sought to have an abortion had a right to a dead baby even if they botched the abortion and the baby survived.

That is not a moral principle. That is not a legal principle. It is a myopic principle that is pulled up within the political lobbying that comes out of Planned Parenthood. It cannot be based on anything moral; it cannot be based in law. The philosophy of the President was also reflected during the campaign trail when he was speaking as if his daughters got pregnant--out of wedlock, I presume is what he was referring to.

He said, ``I don't want my daughters punished with a baby.'' I listened to that tape tonight to be sure I heard it right. Those are the words of the President of the United States. He actually said, referring to his daughters, ``I don't want them punished with a baby.''

I don't believe a baby is punishment. I believe a baby is a gift and that the people whom I know who love their children as we do ours and our grandchildren as we do ours see them all as gifts, all as gifts from God.

I thank the gentlelady.

I have one more shocking statement made by Dawn Johnson. Now, remember, this is the person who would be doing the constitutional analysis, making that decision and making the same thing as a legal opinion, a binding legal opinion to the entire executive branch to one degree or another. She would have the ear of the President. I think Dawn Johnson has a major flaw in her jurisprudence even though she is probably very well trained. This is what she says about the difference between the Bush administration and the Clinton administration on balance.

She calls the Bush administration's claims to executive power ``extreme, extraordinary, implausible, illegitimate, appalling, and abusive.'' By comparison, as to the Clinton administration, ``I do not have any specific criticisms of the Clinton administration in these regards.'' Well, I think that tells us about the lack of partisanship that is there.

Let's see. I was looking for a quote. I have it in front of me. I will take it back to the slavery issue where Dawn Johnson said, ``Statutes that can curtail a woman's abortion choice are disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the 13th amendment, in that forced pregnancy requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the State's asserted interest.''

Slavery? I could read through that Constitution dozens of times over. I could pour through this case law over and over again. I invite the law school creative people. I don't know who would come up with the idea that the opportunity to be a mother was equivalent to slavery.

For a couple of minutes, I will yield to the gentlelady.

I thank the gentlelady.

And I would just remind the gentlelady, the Speaker, that we have, by letter, called upon the President to withdraw the name of Don Johnson to head up his Office of Legal Council for these reasons that we have argued here tonight, for a multitude of reasons that we didn't get to in the time that we had, for moral reasons, constitutional reasons, statutory reasons, reasons of logic, common sense, and understanding the nature of humanity; for reasons that we want to see this Nation continue to ascend in all of the levels of morality, and economics, and national defense, and culture, and vision so that this country can be moved to the next level of its destiny that's positive, one that we can be proud of, one that will carry us forward and make our children proud, one day that our children can come to the floor of the House of Representatives, somebody's children, the next generation, and say, We stand on the shoulders of our forefathers, our predecessors, the people who stood up for life, the people who stood up for what is right, the people who stood up for the Constitution and the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that are embodied in the Declaration of Independence; and the argument that these rights come from God, and they are not to be torn asunder by someone who is a liberal activist who would lay out this list of offenses against life and family itself, the very core and foundation of American life.

That is what we have going on here. No good can come of it. This is the reminder that we have. This is the letter with 62 signatures that we sent to the President to withdraw the name of Don Johnson, appoint someone with a Constitutional understanding and a commitment to those principles and not an activist. We don't need an activist to head up this Office of Legal Council. We need someone who will understand the Constitution and the law and respect life.

And with that, Madam Speaker, I would thank the gentlelady from Minnesota.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 18 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, again, it is a privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and also to have the chance to lay out here before you and our colleagues and ultimately the American people a point on the cause that we are involved in.

We have dealt with crisis after crisis here on the floor of Congress, and I look back at many of the things that have taken place historically here, and I could list them long. But I will say that I think the most colossal mistake that this Congress ever made was passing the President's Stimulus Act.

I think we have a budget hanging out today that may be a more colossal error. In fact, this budget that lays in front of us, President Obama's budget, spends too much, taxes too much, borrows too much. And what it turns into is their party, that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, has become the Party of Owe, the party of debt, the party of borrow. Not the party of ``no,'' the party of ``owe.'' They can't say ``no'' to anything; they just want to owe everything and everybody, even to the extent where this budget projects out by CBO to go to 200 percent deficit of GDP. Unheard of. The highest we have ever had in history was 1945, the end of World War II. Now, the President's budget takes this to that place.

This takes us to, in the middle of this economic crisis where we have seen the equity and the stock market drop by a huge percentage, by one- third or 40 percent or, in many cases, even more. It takes us to this point where the President said to us that he believes that FDR's New Deal actually would have worked, it actually was working, and that he just simply lost his nerve and didn't spend enough money. Can you imagine?

When he said that to us back in, I think, early February, I didn't think he was completely serious about having more commitment to spending a massively larger amount of money than FDR did in the New Deal.

But history hasn't served us very well in the way they reported the New Deal, because a lot of young people for two generations have been taught that the New Deal was a good deal and it got us out of the Depression.

Mr. Speaker, by the time the stock market got back to where it was in October of 1929, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years; we had fought two wars, World War II and Korea, and finally in 1954 the markets got to where they were in 1929.

There is no way that a logical objective historian can say that the Keynesian idea of borrowing and spending was a good deal when it was the New Deal. Nor is there any model in history that says that the new New Deal, the Obama Uber New New Deal, would be as good a deal as the bad old deal or a better deal than the old New Deal. This is the new New Deal, it is a bad deal, and Keynesian economics have failed wherever they have been tried.

We need to turn ourselves around to real solutions, Mr. Speaker, real solutions for the American people, real solutions that will take America to the next level of its destiny, not the level down, not in the direction where we put our children and grandchildren and our great grandchildren in debt, not to where little babies born today are looking at thousands of dollars in debt, for every child that is born in America that they are going to have to work off. And we can either print a lot of money and devalue our currency, or we can suppress our economy for generations to come by all of this debt that is on us. And what can transform us as a country? What will ever grow our economy out of this anchor that we are now dragging? They are going to be pitching more anchors off the side of this great economic ship, of the greatest economic machinery that has ever been built in the United States of America, and our free market system.

But in the bailout bill last fall, we pitched an anchor over the side, and we have been dragging that anchor. And then we have the stimulus plan that is another anchor we pitched over the side that we are dragging along bottom. And we have got the President's budget as another anchor that we are going to have to drag. And, now, they are talking about another stimulus plan. And burden after burden heaped on top of the American people, the free market system cannot sustain this kind of a load. We need to do something transformative.

The transformative component that I am advocating here tonight is the one that Mr. Stearns of Florida advocated a little bit earlier, Mr. Speaker. And I'll take you this way on the fair tax, and that is this:

I was audited one too many years in a row early on when I first started my construction business. The IRS showed up every year for a while, and they decided they were going to justify their existence by milking the little bit of blood that there was out of this fledging turnip of a company that King Construction was back in those years. And after they audited me one too many years in a row and I shut the doors on my business for 4 days so that I could be there and personally hand them the documents and justify the expenses, so that I could minimize the loss that was going to come to me from the IRS, because I had experience with that, and it cost me money, and I had to make a calculation on whether I was going to--I believe I did everything right. And I had to make a calculation on whether I was going to stand on principle and go and fight the IRS, in which case it was almost inevitable that I would lose my business in the process, because I couldn't afford to be away from my business and still keep it going. Or, borrow the money to pay the IRS a bill that I still don't believe that I owed in order to be able to keep operating.

Well, that was one of the times when I didn't commit suicide on principle for the business, but I borrowed the money, paid the IRS. And then I went out and climbed in the seat of one of my bulldozers, and the smoke went up out of the exhaust stack, and it went out of my ears. And I began to think, what is the IRS doing in my office? Why are they impeding my production? Why are they making Monday morning quarterback decisions on me and my life when I am doing the best I can to comply with the laws that are passed by Congress? Well, I didn't know then that it was impossible for the new head of the IRS to figure out the Tax Code.

So, Mr. Speaker, when Timothy Geithner can't figure it out even with Turbo Tax, and if Tom Daschle can't

figure it out, I guess I shouldn't have felt so angry. But I am glad today that I was angry, because I did a little fast-forward in my mind and it was, I want rid of the IRS. I want to be rid of that intrusive organization that can come in and take away the sweat of my brow and diminish the creativity and the energy and the entrepreneurial spirit that it takes for any business to get started, especially a small business, and especially a highly capital-intensive business like mine was. I understand how this works. So I just leaped to this conclusion. The next day I decided, I want rid of the IRS, and I want to repeal the entire Federal Income Tax Code.

Now, I didn't think about how you get that done. I am working on how you get that done today. But what I thought about was, how do you replace the revenue? Because the government has to have some money to run on, and the only way you replace the revenue is if you go to a national sales tax, and it starts with about three principles to know:

Businesses transfer the cost of those taxes on to their customers. Yes, I wrote a check for those taxes, but I had to pass those costs on to my customers if I was going to stay in business. Corporations don't really pay taxes, businesses don't pay taxes. They are tax collectors for Uncle Sam.

But here is the transformative principle No. 1: Ronald Reagan, quoted by Mr. Stearns of Florida, and I will give you a different quote from Ronald Reagan. He said, ``what you tax, you get less of. A tax is a punishment.'' But Uncle Sam, the Federal Government, has the first lien on all productivity in America.

If you have earnings, savings or investments, Uncle Sam is there with his hand out. When you walk in and punch the time clock at 8 o'clock on Monday morning, Uncle Sam is right there figuratively with his hand out, and you work until he gets what he wants. Then he puts that in his pocket and figuratively goes away, and then you can start working for the rest of the interest.

If it is earnings, savings or investment, if it is productivity, the Federal Government has the first lien on all productivity in America. So a taxation is a punishment. It is a disincentive. We have less production than we would have otherwise because we tax it first. We tax all earnings, savings and investment. If you go to a national sales tax, ``the Fair Tax,'' and tax the last stop on the retail for personal consumption of sales and service, that way you're actually levying the tax against the people that are the consumers that are using it. So we lift the tax off of all production in America, off of all earnings, savings and investments in America, then we cut those anchor chains that we are dragging. The cost of tax compliance is a cost to this economy, because we have lawyers that are tied up and business decision makers who have to, in every single business decision, do a tax calculation. We eliminate all of that and take that burden off and cut those anchor chains that we are dragging, and we turn those brains of H&R Block and tax lawyers, tax accountants and people that are strategizing business off of the advice that they get from their tax lawyers, and there are those people that have to make those decisions without the benefit of counsel, all of that mental energy, all of that time goes from, I'm going to just say this in a nice, gentle way since it is St. Patrick's Day, it goes from the parasitic sector of the economy to the productive sector of the economy. And the productive sector is the free market sector that produces goods and services that has value to people. That is the first transformative thing about the Fair Tax, of taking that burden off of the production, the taxation that is on production, and cuts all of those anchor chains, and it puts the taxation over on consumption where we can use a little bit of an incentive for savings and investment. And it lets people decide when to pay their taxes by when they make their purchases.

I watched a little YouTube clip of the majority leader in the United States Senate, Harry Reid. It was just not quite a year ago. He said, ``we have a voluntary tax system.'' Well, it is hard to make that argument stick. No. We have a confiscatory tax system. It is not voluntary. You don't today get to pay taxes when you want to. If you fail to pay your taxes, the IRS will show up, and they will charge you interest and penalty for failure to pay your taxes. If you still don't pay your taxes, they will garnish your wages. They can come in and put a title on your vehicle, assign themselves a new title to the vehicle, sell that vehicle and credit your account. But the interest and the penalty probably is going on faster than you can sell a car to get that back out of there. There is nothing that the IRS can't touch if they are going to collect your taxes. And when they are done, if they think you have avoided taxes, they will encourage prosecution. We have people in federal penitentiaries today for tax avoidance. So it is a confiscatory, mandatory taxation today.

I want to go to what Harry Reid calls a ``voluntary tax system.'' That is the Fair Tax. People volunteer to pay the tax when they make their purchases. There are other components to this, but I want to make one more point before I yield, and that is the other transformative point. The first transformative point is that what you tax, you get less of. The Fair Tax takes the tax off of all production in America. All earnings, savings and investment is not punished. You get to keep it.

The other transformative component is this, and a lot of people have been credited with this statement. I will give the general one, Mr. Speaker, and then we will perhaps give credit all where it is due before this discussion is over. But there have been many of our Founders and statesmen that have referenced what happens to a country that claims to be a democracy, and I will call us a constitutional Republic, when more than half of the people figure out they can vote themselves benefits out of the public Treasury, on that day our democracy ceases to exist. The future of the Republic ceases to exist. Many of us think we have crossed that line already. And if we listen to the promises that were made in the last campaign that came from our now President, Mr. Speaker, about how everybody was going to get a tax cut, even those that weren't paying taxes were getting tax cuts, those are refundable tax credits. It is a transfer of wealth from the wealthy to the unwealthy, a transfer of wealth internally. When that happens, when the American people become dependent upon someone else for their livelihood, when they lose their sense of self-responsibility, that sense of self-sustainability, when they stop teaching their children, Mr. Speaker, that they cannot be a burden on this society, that they must be a contributor to this society, then our freedom is diminished, and perhaps our constitutional Republic ceases to exist.

Mr. Speaker, I will submit this. There is a way we can pass this Fair Tax, and if we do so, no one any longer pays any federal income tax. Everybody gets roughly 56 percent more in their paycheck. And how do we transform this sense of responsibility? In this way, in billions of transactions at a time. When little Michael Dicks stepped up to the counter when he was 8 years old, he said, ``I want to buy this.'' He put a box of Skittles on the counter. It was 89 cents. He counted out his 89 cents. The lady at the checkout register said, ``that will be fine. I need 96 cents.'' And he looked at his father and said, ``Dad, I've only got 89 cents. The price says 89 cents and the lady at the register says you have to pay the sales tax for the Governor.'' He looked at his father with a pained look in his eyes. He said, ``Dad, I have to pay tax on Skittles?'' ``Yes, you have to pay tax on Skittles, Son.''

Think what that does. If every little child growing up in America, when they buy their Skittles or their Barbie doll clothes or their baseball cards, or whatever they spend their money on, if they have to put a couple of dimes up on the counter for Uncle Sam, they will be reminded at every transaction, millions of young people, billions of transactions, how expensive our Federal Government is. When that happens, it will slowly transform America, the core of America, the core of American responsibility. The two things transformational are we stop punishing production and we raise generations of fiscally responsible, independent-minded Americans. Those are the two transformational principles.

I would like to go to whichever one of my colleagues is the most urgently here. So, I would be happy to yield then to the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Nathan Deal.

Mr. DEAL from Georgia. I want to thank the gentleman for yielding. I want to join him in talking about the Fair Tax issue and to thank my colleague, John Linder, who is here on the floor, who is the primary sponsor of this legislation in the House.

We all talk about change. We all talk about reform. I can't think of a single bill that is before this House, in committee at least, that would have the transformational effect of passing a Fair Tax. As the name implies, it is a matter of fairness. It would do many things, and you're going to hear, in addition to Mr. King who has already addressed the topic, you're going to hear others today talk about some of the benefits that would be derived from this kind of legislation.

First of all, it gives people a choice, a choice over how they spend their money. We know that our country is in a deficit in terms of savings. This approach to taxation would say to every American, if you choose to save, then you're going to be able to do so, and the government is not going to tax you as a result of making that choice. If you choose to spend and to consume, then that is the basis on which your taxation will be founded. Those are the kinds of things that give people more of an involvement and a control over their own financial destiny. Of course, as has been referred to, it does much to restore our balance in the international trading community.

Coming from a part of the country in the Southeast which was the old textile belt, we have seen those jobs virtually disappear. It happened for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that made it at a great disadvantage was the tax structure that our country has in place. If we are going to compete in the international marketplace, then a system that does not add on a cost at every stage of the production cycle in the form of taxation is the best way to begin to make us competitive. I think it will be a step toward having those industries, many of whom have left for a variety of reasons, but taxation being one of them, to see them return back to our shores and to restore those job opportunities back to the American people.

For this and many other reasons, I support the Fair Tax. I urge those committees in this House who have jurisdiction over that issue to discharge it from their committee and give this House the opportunity for the elected representatives to express the will of their constituents on this very critical and important reform, the Fair Tax. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I thank the gentleman for coming down and weighing in on this subject matter. I appreciate each of you as you weigh in. Hopefully we will be able to do this more often in the future weeks.

I would like to then yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller).

I thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller) for coming down and standing up for the one big policy before this Congress that will give us back our freedom. He wouldn't be the only individual from Florida who would be on and be a supporter of the Fair Tax. As I cast my eyes around this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, I pick up another one. It would be the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) whom I would like to yield to and ask him if he can add to this cause that is led by Mr. Linder. As I came to this Congress, I looked around to find John Linder, because I knew that I wanted to tie up with him on this Fair Tax cause.

I yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica).

I thank the gentleman from Florida. I would just add that the Fair Tax does everything good that anybody else's tax proposal does that is good, it does them all, and it does them all better. And I do that right before I yield to the real American leader on the Fair Tax, an individual whom I met when I was a State legislator at an American Legislative Exchange Council meeting, and I heard from John Linder in that meeting. I had no idea at the time I was going to get to be his colleague, and I had no idea at the time I would be able to yield some time to our national leader on the Fair Tax, Mr. John Linder.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I know that this country is going to call upon him many times as we move forward in this debate.

I want to make the point that I have been challenged in the past, and people will say, well, I know that the Fair Tax is a great idea, I'm convinced that you're right on the economics of it--in fact, thinking economists won't disagree; but the rebuttal that I get is, well, you can't get it passed. My answer to that is, if it gets passed under two different scenarios. One is, if we elect a President who has run on it and receives a mandate from the American people for the Fair Tax. And the other one is, when you are in a downward economic spiral and Americans are actively looking for solutions, this is it.

I will yield back to the gentleman from Georgia.

I thank the gentleman. This good idea, I don't know that it has ever lost a debate and probably never will.

I am looking around and I am seeing a lot of my colleagues from south of the Mason-Dixon line--I'm glad there is one from the north side of the Mason-Dixon line. But before we go there, I have never met a Republican from Tennessee I didn't like. And we have one on the floor with us tonight, Mr. Speaker, and that's Mr. Duncan from Tennessee. I would be happy to yield.

I thank the gentleman from Tennessee for coming to the floor and engaging in this discussion.

Mr. Speaker, as we move through this and we get down to the last 10 minutes available in this hour, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

I thank the gentleman from Georgia, my good, longtime friend from the first day I arrived in this Congress. I look forward to more of these opportunities in this fashion.

To conserve our time, I will happily and quickly yield to the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Broun.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia for coming down and joining in this discussion, Mr. Speaker, and I am hopeful that we will have many more like this.

I want to reiterate a point that I made at the conclusion of Mr. Linder's delivery, and that is, as he went down through the list of all the taxes that get eliminated, corporate and personal income tax and payroll tax and inheritance tax and the list goes on and on and on, the Fair Tax provides an incentive for earnings, savings, and investment. Here's my point, and I want to make this clear and I will stand on it and I'll defend it and I have made this statement across the country, and it is this: The Fair Tax does everything good that anybody's tax proposal does that is good for our economy and the American people. It does all of them and it does them all better.

Now, that sounds like a real big position to take, and I'm taking it because I'm solid in that, and I'm happy to debate that. I'd be happy to debate anybody from the other side of the aisle that can come over here and tell me that any part of that's wrong and then let's have that discussion. When you take the punishment off of people who are producing, earning, saving, and investing, and you let them earn, save, and invest all they want to produce, and then you provide that incentive for that savings and investment on the other side, as John Linder said, the Fair Tax eliminates the taxes on capital and labor.

Now, Adam Smith said the sum total of the cost of anything that you produce or buy is the cost of the capital plus the cost of the labor. But we are taxing all capital and labor in America under the Federal income tax along with the whole array of other Federal taxes that we have. We have to be able to give that all back and let people earn, save, and invest all they want to earn, save, and invest. And I just urge that this Congress take a look at this Fair Tax. And let's get some hearings. Let's get something moving through the Ways and Means Committee. Let's continue to make this point.

Also, I will say this: I came to this conclusion in 1980. That's 29 years ago. I have looked at this Rubik's Cube of the Fair Tax every way I can possibly turn it. I turn it one way and another way. The colors show a little bit differently, but every time I turn it again, it looks better and better and better. The more I know about it, the better I like it. And I don't know if anybody has studied it as long as I have, 29 years, before there was anybody that had any science, any background on this. I took this to the people and economists and the tax lawyers that I knew.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia and all the participants.

I thank the gentleman from Illinois. I appreciate the recognition.

I wanted to come down here and thank John Shimkus for leading on energy all summer long with an intense effort, and for standing up for the fuel that means so much to the parts of this country, this massive supply of coal that we have, as a big piece of the entire picture of energy that we need to do.

What happens if they put this cap-and-tax on us? We are going to need more and more articulate voices to defend our values and to defend our economy. And the very idea that we can put a tax on energy is a tax on every consumer, it is a tax on our economy, it shrinks the American economy, and it lets the rest of the world out-compete us. And I just appreciate a minute to say so. I thank you. And congratulations to the gentleman from Illinois. I yield back.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding.

This is an issue that will bring me to this floor every opportunity I get. I believe I would be the one Member of this Congress who has lived under the oppressive burden of the Davis-Bacon Act

the longest and been impacted by it the most.

There is a second-generation King Construction that is impacted by this now, not of my interest.

The gentleman from Minnesota knows how much respect I have for him. I appreciate him bringing up Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover did sign this Davis-Bacon Act bill. It was about the same time that he was initiating the beginnings of the old New Deal. And I don't agree with either one of those decisions of Herbert Hoover, but I will defend his legacy when he's right.

This time, Herbert Hoover was wrong, and here is the reason: that we should, as consenting adults, have a protected right to enter into an agreement of our choice. If two consenting adults sit down and decide-- if I want to work for my neighbor for $10 an hour, what business is it of this Congress to tell me and my neighbor that I can't do that job for $10 an hour?

Under the 10th amendment, the Federalism concept, the powers that belong to the States stay with the States. This reaches across into the Constitution and it says to the States, this revolving fund, even if it's your own money, you can't make those decisions any longer at the State level, you have to let the people in Congress make that decision--which I know they're going to go back and say, well, this is a prevailing wage. Well, no, it's a union scale. If it were a prevailing wage, you wouldn't need to have the Department of Labor looking in to keep all of these records. I have had them come and ask me what are we paying our people. Sometimes it's more than union scale, sometimes it's less than union scale; it depends on where the job is. But if you report the prevailing wage as a merit shop contractor--which I have spent nearly 30 years doing--you can bet that the union organizers will show up at your door. And so for that reason, smart merit shop contractors don't submit themselves to that kind of organization. They just don't report the prevailing wage, so it becomes de facto union scale. That is the reality of this.

And my numbers are this--this is out of King Construction's books: The additional cost, when we go into a Davis-Bacon job, is between 8 and 35 percent. It depends on the region, and it depends on the amount of materials. This reaches down into this and tells the States, you're going to have to pay this for the remaining States that do not have many Davis-Bacon laws, like Florida, like Iowa. It imposes a Federal Davis-Bacon wage scale on all of us.

I have not heard a rational argument that upholds the side of Davis- Bacon from proponents of it. I stand in support of this amendment. We cannot take away the 10th amendment rights of our States to do business as they see fit with their money. That is a violation of the Constitution, in my view. There has to be a rational argument.

But I will add one more argument to this, and that is: Herbert Hoover may have signed the bill, but this is the last Jim Crow law that I know that's on the books, and that can't be defended.

I appreciate the judgment of the good judge from east Texas. I was listening to this dialogue, and I thought I would come over here and engage in it. And I appreciate you recognizing me and yielding.

The point that the gentleman from Texas makes that--I'll say it succinctly--corporations don't pay taxes, corporations collect taxes that are imposed upon their bookkeeping system and aggregate the money from people and customers and flow that money to the Federal Government into the Treasury. That's how the corporations function, they are tax collectors for the government. But it is always the people that have to pay the taxes, it is always the customers that have to pay the taxes. And by the way, neither do LLCs pay taxes, neither do sole proprietorships, or partnerships, or any other business configuration that has customers out there pay taxes. They have to transfer those to their customers. They have to add it in and calculate it in.

I made payroll out for 28 years. I transferred a lot of those costs onto my customers. I had to. And if you didn't do that, in the first place you couldn't cash flow a business; you would never get it started in the first place. You would never get it to expand. You've got to have capital. By the way, Adam Smith made this real clear. This is something I like to tell the people that will not respond to this charge. There are two components to the cost of everything we buy, it is the cost of capital and the cost of labor. And the capital cost is included in everything that we purchase.

And so if we are going to have policy in this legislature that raises the cost of capital--which takes place easily when you see the tax increase--if you increase taxes on businesses that are doing business, that are investing, that are holding mortgage-backed securities, there is a capital cost to that. If you raise the cost of capital, then you are putting more burden on the economy.

And the other component is labor. Adam Smith wrote it this way: ``The price of gold plummeted in Europe as the Spanish galleons began arriving on the continent from the new world.'' Adam Smith didn't say that because they stole the gold from the Incas and the Aztecs. He described it as they lowered the cost of labor for getting that gold out of the ground and getting it into the marketplace. And that's how this economy works. But corporations have been demonized by the people on the left side of the aisle because they don't understand that simple equation; the cost of capital and the cost of labor is the sum total of all of the things that we buy, and that the businesses in the country have been enlisted, by law, to collect those taxes from people, impose them on people. And what do we do? We impose the acrimony on top of the businesses that are the tax collectors for the government. I'm with Louie Gohmert; let's take the tax off of all these corporations. Let's take all the tax off of productivity, actually.

I would. I think I like where you're going.

I thank the gentleman.

When you describe this, this cap and trade tax that is on everything, I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that we illuminate this for the American people. Think if America were a continent unto itself, what if we were a planet unto ourselves; would we manage ourselves this way? And I would say no. Because we are wasting all kinds of resources; we are wasting labor, we are wasting capital--we're not even using sound science--if we were a planet unto ourselves. But we have to compete with the rest of the planet. So this cap and trade proposal ties our hands, ties our legs. And we are like Gulliver tied up by the Lilliputians with the cap and trade legislation that looks like it's coming down the pike which will immobilize America's economy while India's and China's are growing. And not only are they growing, but they're emitting CO2 gas and greenhouse gases at an accelerating rate.

So our little piece of this pie that we could possibly effect is so minimal a century from now that it really can't be measured by science. Sound science doesn't support this. Sound economics doesn't support this. And there are many better solutions, even if there was a prediction that could be made accurately.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I would add to this. Again, take it back to a big picture, and that is this is about freedom. It's about preserving the freedom we have, defending the freedom we have, and, in fact, we should be expanding the freedom that we have.

Our freedom has diminished generation by generation since the founders established this country. When you move to the left, it always includes an increase in taxes and an increase in government interference in every aspect of our lives, from raising our families to micro-managing energy to sticking their fingers into education, every aspect of our lives. So when you expand the role of government, you expand also the taxation and you diminish the freedom.

And whether you do it insidiously by saying I'm going to take your child now at age 3 or 2 or 1 as opposed to 5 or 6, as it used to be, or whether you do it in a blatant way by saying we're going to impose this Draconian regime on everybody in America and we're going to confiscate your income, the point that's been made by this administration and this majority, not in so quite many words is this: You're not really entitled to the money you earn, in their view, but the people that claim they have a need are entitled to the money that you earn.

That's the philosophical divide that's been turned. When you go to the left, you give up freedom and it's diminished. When you move policy to the right, you expand freed and it's enhanced.

We need to be about expanding everyone's freedom in this country. That's the foundation of America, and that's where our vitality comes from. That's why we are the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, because our vitality comes from our freedoms. Acts that diminish it diminish our vitality and handicap us.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for his indulgence.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida. The timing around this place being such as it is, I appreciate a chance to speak to the Jim Leach Resolution, the resolution that names the United States Courthouse at 131 East 4th Street in Davenport, Iowa, as the James A. Leach United States Courthouse.

Jim Leach served in this Congress for over a quarter of a century and he had friends on both sides of the aisle. If you know Jim Leach, you know that he is an intellectual. He is an individual that his cerebrum, his cerebellum, and medulla oblongata were all connected and all functioning. And I say that because he has a significant ability to retain in his memory and manipulate the information.

He also is a champion wrestler. So his athletic and intellectual capabilities that he demonstrated here, mostly his intellectual capabilities on the floor of this House. Although I have felt that temptation on the athletic from time to time, not Jim Leach. Jim Leach was a consummate statesman, someone who could work with Democrats and the Republicans, and is an individual who was the epitome of the balance between the two as he served here in Congress and today contributes to our overall broader society.

So I am very pleased to rise in support of the resolution naming the Federal Courthouse in Davenport, Iowa, the James A. Leach Courthouse. And I am happy to call him a friend, a former colleague, and someone who has brought honor upon this institution every day of his service here in the United States House of Representatives. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding.

I rise in opposition to this rule. And I rise, of course, in opposition to the underlying bill as well.

But speaking to the rule, my argument's about process. There's a tremendous amount of fraud that's taking place in the mortgages in this country, and people that have relief under this should have clean hands. And in recognizing that, I introduced an amendment in the Judiciary Committee that would exclude those who have misrepresented or, under false pretenses or actual fraud, achieved an extension of their mortgage and then brought this to the bankruptcy court. We've got to have people with clean hands, not those that are taking advantage of this situation. The door has already been opened. This opens the door more.

My amendment, Mr. Speaker, passed the Judiciary Committee by a vote of 21-3. It was a prudent decision on the part of the members of the committee. It's the judgment of the Judiciary Committee. The problem with it was that it was stripped out after the committee approved it and sent it to Rules as part of a change in a manager's amendment.

I took my amendment back to Rules to try to get back the process. The process ought to respect the will of the Judiciary Committee. The Rules refused to even allow me to offer my amendment here on the floor to try to get another recorded vote even when I'd been successful in Judiciary Committee. And now there's another manager's amendment before this committee that amends the amendment that was amended by the previous manager's amendment after it passed the Judiciary Committee. The will of the Judiciary Committee means nothing in this bill. It's the will of the manager's amendment that will be voted on here on the floor of this Congress.

I argue for the process. I argue we have to have a clean process. I also think that we have to maintain the covenant of the contract between the mortgager and the mortgagee. This amendment doesn't do that. This amendment tears that contract asunder and says to lenders that their capital's at risk and their interest rate is at risk. Why would anyone loan anybody money unless they could calculate in the risk that some judge would change the rules after the fact, just like the rules of the Judiciary Committee on a successful 21-3 vote have been changed after the fact?

Mr. Speaker, I oppose the rule.