Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman from Virginia for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment before us allows for actual fraud, misrepresentation or obtaining a loan or refinancing by false pretenses. It's specific. We passed an amendment in the Judiciary Committee that prohibited such things, but the language has been changed after the fact. The language has been changed now so that it reads that the court does not find that the debtor has been convicted of obtaining--by actual fraud--the extension, renewal or refinancing of credit that gives rise to a modification claim.

In other words, whatever kind of fraud and misrepresentation or false pretenses might be used, it's not going to be considered by a cramdown court unless there is an actual conviction. That's a breathtaking position to take in print here in the United States Congress.

I think this cramdown, when you break the contract, you allow a judge--a judge perhaps yet to be appointed, a judge with a different idea on what a contract is--to break that contract, sever it apart, and readjust the principal and the interest to meet what the judge believes is convenient to the borrower and give them two bites at the apple and let them pick whatever is the best deal for them?

I can tell you what happens, Mr. Chairman, and that is this: The degree of risk must be proportional to the potential for profit. That's the business equation. Lenders will not loan money unless they have a prospective profit on the other side of this.

So that means that they're going to ask for more down money, and they're going to ask for more interest, and there will be fewer people owning homes, not more. There may be some temporary relief over this window over the next couple of years, and maybe this economy comes back around. But the long run is this: We'll have fewer homeowners, not more. The price for that will end up being more public housing, not less, to replace the homeowners that aren't able to own their own home.

This is the public housing promotion bill in the end. That's where it takes us. It was misplaced thinking to pass the Community Reinvestment Act, it's misplaced thinking not to hold Fannie and Freddie, and it's misplaced thinking to push this cramdown.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the honor to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives.

As I came in here awaiting my appointed hour, I was fascinated to listen to the Members who have spent the last hour talking about what is happening to our country, what's happening to our economics. And I wanted to take this thing another step.

Listening to the gentlelady from Minnesota always has me entranced as to how deeply the thought goes on the economics on that viewpoint particularly.

But I will take it another level from the level of a million and a half mortgage down to $1 million in the pocket that has been described here. Let me say that a borrower can also misrepresent their income. They could fraudulently misrepresent an appraisal on that property. They can misrepresent their job status. They could commit actual fraud.

They could misrepresent or, under false pretenses, obtain this loan. And the bankruptcy judge, who would now, under the provisions of this language that passed the House today, this bankruptcy judge couldn't even consider the actual fraud or the misrepresentation or the false pretenses because we offered that language in the Judiciary Committee.

In fact, I offered it as an amendment, and it passed the Judiciary Committee by a vote of 21-3. It was not quite the unanimous judgment of the Judiciary Committee that we ought to prohibit any of these cramdown provisions to anyone who has misrepresented themselves in order to get this mortgage.

But, after the fact, after the amendment passed the Judiciary Committee 21-3, without any notice to any of the Members that I am aware of, the language was changed in the bill that came to the floor, which we found, out of due diligence of our staff, reading down line by line, to make sure there wasn't something going on behind the scenes, well, there was. They changed the language.

And the language in the bill, which they have refused to even allow a vote to correct, get back to what the Judiciary Committee approved, that language in the bill now says that the borrower will have available this relief under the bankruptcy law unless they have been convicted of fraud, not out and out open fraudulent action or misrepresentation or obtaining a loan under false pretenses, that's not good enough for the bankruptcy judge to even consider that in his evaluation on whether he is going to dial the 1.5 million mortgage down to half a million and let him walk away with a million dollars in profit out of the deal. But even if they walk away with misrepresentation, they can't consider that because this Congress has said only can he consider it if the borrower is convicted of fraud.

I yield to the representative from Minnesota.

There is no question, I agree, it's immoral. It undermines the underpinnings of this free market society that we are. It breaks the contract between property and assets and borrowers and lenders.

When that contract is broken, when the faith is broken--and I have sat in the bank many times with my hat in my hand trying to start a business. When I started a business in 1975 and I had a negative net worth of $5,000, I went into a capital intensive business. So I did a good job of marketing, at least that's one of the things I was able to sell, the business idea. But many times I was short of enough cash to make things work.

And I would going into the bank, and I would have to justify it every time. I would have to have the assets underneath that in order to convince the lender that I was going to be able to pay the loan. And I had to have the prospective accounts receivable and they had to be represented right and accurately. I had to have a balance sheet continually, at least annually, often monthly profit-and-loss statements--all of this to justify a business operating loan that I could keep my employees work and be able to pay the bills on time.

All of that level of integrity that's built into that relationship between the borrower and the lender, the time-honored relationship between collateral and credit and character and capital, is being ripped asunder by this bankruptcy bill, by this cramdown bill.

And, so, now what will happen is, lenders, those who decide they are going to still be in the business of mortgage lending, they have got to go back and reevaluate this equation, this business equation which says the degree of risk has to be proportional to the potential for profit. That's the equation. You put the equal sign in the middle, degree of risk, potential for profit.

Well, I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota, and I would point out that the point you made about these bundles of mortgage-backed securities that are tranched and sliced and diced and packaged and repackaged and sold up and down the chain and coalesced into certain values of securities, have created toxic, truly toxic assets. The value of these assets cannot be considered any longer. They cannot be evaluated.

This degree of risk can't be evaluated as being proportional to the potential for profit. And we watched these markets tank nearly every day, nearly every day during the Obama administration.

In fact, I had some interesting numbers that I ran today and I think they will be informative to everybody in this country, and I don't think anybody has asked this question until today. So I went back, and I am watching the Dow just tailspin. So I went back and took a look at has any president in history ever had such a, let's me say, negative start economically at the beginning of their administration?

So I went back to November 4, the election of 2008, took a look at where the Dow was on that day as our lead indicator of our economic growth or shrinkage, as it might be, and evaluated the first four months of President Obama's from the moment that the markets recognized that he would be the President being elected until today, 4 months from that period of time, November, December, January, February, roughly speaking, and compared that to the previous presidents as long as we had electronic records.

And it turns out to be this, as one might expect, FDR, up until this time, got the worst welcome from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In fact, he got the two worst we will comes on record. In 1932, in the first 4 months, the Dow drooped 16.63 percent. On Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that was their level of lack of confidence in his election in 1932. In his election in 1940, it dropped 9.3 percent. Those two drops are the two largest in history of welcoming a presidential election by the market reacting.

And, by the way, the most positive reaction was, both of us born in Iowa, I will tell you, was Herbert Hoover, and we could go into that, perhaps. But in any case, President Obama's start is the worst economic start in the history that I can trace back electronically that goes back at least to Herbert Hoover's administration.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the markets dropped 16.3 percent in the first months after he was elected in 1932. But, today, the first months after President Obama was elected, we have seen our Dow Jones Industrial Average drop 31.49 percent in that period of time.

It's almost twice as much of a drop and, under this administration, as any administration in our electronic history. I think it's breathtaking, the message that the markets have shown.

And this, by the way, isn't just a President Bush economy. If you will recall, President Obama supported the $700 billion bailout plan. He came to Washington to work on it too and decided he would support the proposal.

This Congress approved, I can go over our resistance, $700 billion, first half, $350 billion went essentially right away to pick up these toxic assets that then we thought were toxic today, are far more toxic than they were. The other $350 billion had to be released by Congress. That was done so under the Obama administration.

This is his economy. He is fond of saying that he had inherited a trillion dollar debt. Well, this debt is increasing more and more each coming week.

In fact, tonight on one of the networks, they announced that President Obama's wish list, if you add it up, comes to $20 trillion, $20 trillion. Now, I have not put all the line items in that, but that is a breathtaking number, $20 trillion.

And how can we have a level of confidence in this when you are seeing this kind of a response? Every day we have negative financial news. I am seeing

nothing that comes back that shores up confidence in this marketplace. The markets are going to react to an opportunity to make profit, and the government is stepping in and nationalizing and interceding themselves in the marketplace, the confidence in the marketplace is going down, not up.

You see the asset value of our lending institutions, our mortgage bankers, going down day-by-day. These institutions were going to be shored up, and they haven't been shored up. We haven't let the markets work. There is one thing we know for sure that if we keep our free markets together, if we don't get everything nationalized and all socialized, we will recover from this. But the question becomes, how long does it take?

I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota.

And I really appreciate your bringing up the suspension of the capital gains tax. That's an issue that I have advocated for strongly. I have advocated for suspending it for 2 years. I like the idea of 3 years. I'm not going to quibble over the 3rd year. But there is so much capital that's out there on the sidelines today. There is at least, or there was, at least, before the market spun downward, $13 trillion in U.S. capital that's stranded overseas because it's faced with capital gains tax if it comes back into the U.S. marketplace. If we suspend the capital gains tax, theoretically all that money could come back into the U.S. market. It will find the smartest place for it to be invested. I don't think it will be $13 trillion. I think it could be $2 to $3 trillion, which is a tremendously large number.

I want to also suspend capital gains tax on rescue capital that would pick up these toxic assets. That has shifted since then, since I introduced that legislation, but suspending capital gains tax does the job, and it freezes up the capital that sits along on the sidelines.

And in our corporate income tax, the second highest in the industrial world, to scare our capital out of the United States and send it overseas and then try to legislate a way that we can chase it with the IRS taxman is the wrong way to go.

There's a reason why that capital is going overseas. Because it's a smarter investment. Capital is always smart, and the death tax is just cruel. It is cruel. I have, and I think many Members have, received calls from constituents whose mother or father was lying in the hospital and they're making a decision whether to put them on life support or to take them off life support. And every time this subject is ginned up here in this Congress about whether and when the death tax will be repealed or, as people on the other side of the aisle advocate, whether it's going to be put back on again and there won't be any relief, there are decisions made that are just perverse, to put a family through having to make a decision on whether they're going to plug somebody in or unplug someone in an end-of-life decision. That's what government does.

So for me, I would eliminate the IRS and the entire Federal Income Tax Code. I would take the tax off of productivity. It was Ronald Reagan that said that what you tax you get less of. But the Federal Government in its presumed wisdom has the first lien on all productivity in America. If you have earnings, savings, or investment, Uncle Sam is there with his hand out to take the cash and put it in his pocket before you get the share you're working for. If you go to work tomorrow morning and you punch in at eight o'clock, just kind of think of that little ding when you punch the timecard. Uncle Sam's goes out. ``I want mine,'' he says, in a nice subtle way until he gets it and he puts his hand in his pocket. If you're investing, if you're selling real estate, if you're collecting interest on a deposit in the bank, your earnings, your savings, your investment, stocks and dividends and shares, all of that that's converted to Uncle Sam, he's there getting his share out of productivity.

But if we adopt the fair tax, the national sales tax, then the result of that is we take the tax off of production and we unleash the American production machine and everyone can be an entrepreneur, produce all they want to produce, earn all they want to earn, save all they want to save, invest all they want to invest, and then make the decision on when they want to pay taxes by when they do their purchases. Not a VAT tax, the last stop on the retail purchase, sales and service. It totally transforms the dynamic, and it gives America a 28 percent marketing advantage over products made in the United States versus products that are imported into the United States. That saves Detroit. It saves the UAW. It saves the National Association of Manufacturers. It puts them on the profit side and makes America again the industrial powerhouse for the world and improves our national security all at the same time.

In fact, to wrap it up in a little nutshell here, everything good that anybody's tax proposal does is done by the fair tax. And everything that anybody's tax proposal does that's good is done by the fair tax. It does them all. It does them all better. It changes the dynamics of taxation. It unleashes the free market economy.

But instead of that, we're here punishing producers. We're punishing the people that earn, save, and invest. We want to raise taxes on everybody in America. This 95 percent of Americans getting tax relief and taxing the top 2 percent or 5 percent under this idea of the President, Mr. Speaker, doesn't hold up. We've got the carbon tax at least that's imposed on this. That's a tax on everyone in America that uses anything that uses energy. And I would defy anyone to come up with anything we use that doesn't use energy. And the people who are at the lowest end of the economic scale are the ones that are paying the highest percentage of their income for energy. They'll pay the highest taxes as well.

I yield to the gentlewoman.

Reclaiming my time, the tax structure that we have and the language that was delivered here about everyone gets a tax cut unless you're in the top 2 or 5 percent, or above $250,000, but the insidious tax that goes in, the carbon tax that permeates every aspect of our economy and punishes the poorest among us, in a way it's like the cigarette tax. You add 61 cents a pack to cigarettes. The folks that smoke the most are the ones at the lower end of the income bracket. They are the ones who can least afford it. But we impose a tax on them and we call that a ``sin tax.''

Then you get a promise that comes out from the White House that says ``I am going to create or save 3\1/2\ million jobs.'' Now, the first time I heard that, okay, but somebody's going to call him on that, and really nobody has yet. The President is going to create or save 3\1/2\ million jobs. Now, think about what that means. If you were down there in maybe grade school and they were teaching you how to rationalize someplace between two plus two and two times two, you would come across the rationale of ``create or save'' leaves a little escape clause in there. Which jobs would be created and which ones would be saved? If they're not defined and we have a workforce of about 142 million here in America, as long as there are 3\1/2\ million jobs left, the President can claim he saved them.

So it fits the definition. That is how broad this is. And we are to be mobilized by this and moved, to leap into this giant leap of faith of trillions of dollars in borrowed money, the intergenerational theft that John McCain and Michele Bachmann will talk about and we talk about as well, it is intergenerational theft on a promise that 3.5 million jobs are going to being be created or saved.

Here is another one. Cut the deficit in half. I remember where I heard that. That was actually President Bush that advocated he was going to cut the deficit in half in 5 years. I remember that was the timing.

Our current President would cut the deficit in half by the beginning of his second term. But we are going to create this large deficit, and then well have something more easily sliced in half. Maybe he inherited a $1 trillion deficit, but we have a $1.75 trillion deficit advocated today. It is pretty easy to cut it.

Let's just say you weigh, I don't want to use your weight, say you weigh 200 pounds and say I am going to reduce my weight by 10 pounds. Then you could gain 20 and lose 10 and you have lost 10 pounds. That is kind of how this thing works, by cutting the deficit in half. We grow the spending and then slice the spending down and advocate or at least allege that the deficit has been cut in half.

I yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota.

Reclaiming my time, I will say the other alternative is to have a huge growth in our economy, a booming economy, a booming economy that would grow us out of this so we don't have to put so much money into the market that inflation devalues our dollar.

Now, I would ask, how is that going to happen in the face this massive growth in government and in government spending? Where is the entrepreneurial spirit, when it has been killed and squelched by taxation, by overregulation, by messages that come out that are against energy. Nearly every sector of our economy is under assault from people that don't believe in free enterprise.

I would go further and say there is a huge philosophical divide that goes about right down the middle of the aisle right here. This is free market people over here. They believe in personal responsibility and strong families and the Constitution and the rule of law. The pillars of American exceptionalism are often defined in the dialogue over here. They are often derided by the dialogue that comes from this side of the aisle. Now it is an all out assault on our institutions.

I had a time a couple of weeks ago where I sat down with some dissidents in Russia. They said to me that Putin had destroyed nearly all the democratic institutions in Russia. They said we don't any longer have a fair election, we don't have an independent press, we don't have an independent judiciary, we don't have an independent legislative body in the Duma. In fact, I had to stand in line for an hour just to get in the door.

But those are four of the institutions that they mentioned, and they said our freedoms are really gone. There is no place else for Putin to go to take away any more of our freedom, because he now owns the institutions and has taken over of the institutions of freedom. They called it democracy.

Here we have institutions all under assault. Each one I mentioned is under assault. We don't have an independent legislative process anymore, not when a bill can come out the Speaker's office directly to the floor without committee action, without amendments being allowed in subcommittee, no subcommittee action, no committee action, and the floor action is a bill that comes down from on high at 11 o'clock at night that hits the floor the next day with no amendments allowed and an hour's worth of debate, and then it is crammed out of here and on over to the Senate before the public can wake up and even understand what has happened. I don't blame them for not knowing. A lot of people in here don't know what is going on either, but there is no opportunity to intervene or even make the case.

The independent legislature now turns into Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the President. They could meet in a phone booth, the three of them, and make the decisions on where this country is going to go, to the dogs, if we let them. And that is what has happened to our independent legislature here. It is not accountable. The process has been subverted.

That is just one thing. We have the institution of the media. They have the mainstream media. If you look at where they donate their money and how they register their vote, that institution has been taken over. The educational institution has been taken over. The list goes on and on.

The rule of law doesn't mean so much any more, not when I arrived down on the border some time back and we happened to catch a drug smuggler that had about 450 pounds, excuse me, it was I think the number came to 218 or 220 pounds of marijuana under a false bed in his truck. It was 18 bales.

It was under 250 pounds, because we weren't prosecuting people that had less than 250 pounds of marijuana when they came across our border to smuggle it into the United States. They since changed that and raised it up to 500 pounds because we didn't have enough resources to prosecute.

The rule of law set aside? Another institution that is not respected universally, without question? And now the Director of Homeland Security, when there is a raid that is done for illegal employees that are working in an engine shop in Seattle, decides, well, I didn't know they were going to go in there and pick up those people illegally working, so I am going to investigate the investigators that are underneath her control. The rule of law suspended because there is a political equation involved in enforcing it?

Institution after institution are under attack in this country too, and I think they understand that in the place I have been.

The gentlelady from Minnesota.

I thank the gentlelady.

I point out I had a conversation with an individual that represents a company domiciled in your State of Minnesota who, because of the language that was in the stimulus bill that no one knew was in there, it cost their company $25.3 million with the stroke of President Obama's pen just for the provisions on health care that were slipped into the stimulus bill. A $25.25.3 million check they have to write just to get themselves even with where they were the day before that bill came raining down from on high here with no amendments allowed. That is some of the things that are happening under the guise of stimulus.

Now, if you need to stimulate the economy, one would think one could be restrained from slipping in this entire wish-list that has been an accumulation of a generation of liberal wishes, without a model of success, I might add, and with nothing to point to in history except failure after failure after failure. The discouragement of human endeavor is what comes out of the socialist approach. And yet the group that spoke before your group came to the floor and was advocated the Progressive Caucus, they put up two blue posters up over here, the Progressive Caucus.

So I found myself in my office. I ought to take a look and see what the Progressive Caucus really is. Well, I know how to find them. You go to dsausa.org. That's the Democratic Socialists of America, dsausa.org. They are the socialists. And they used to maintain the Web site for the Progressive Caucus until there got to be a little bit too much publicity, then they severed that relationship and the Progressive Caucus now manages their own out of the House here. But the connection goes back a long time. And you can go to that Web site, Democratic Socialists of America, and read, and the first thing they tell you is, we are not Communists. There's a difference between us. Communists believe that the state should own everything, including your dog. They didn't put that in there. But we, as Democratic Socialists, believe that, no, there should be some private property, and small businesses need to be able to run so they can be flexible enough to take care of the immediate needs of people like, I suppose, selling Polish dogs out here on the streets of Washington, DC. But big business--this is on the Web site. Big business should be run for the benefit of the people affected by it, which means they should be run by the customers. So if you have, let me say, a franchise chain of bars, they would be run by the drinkers. And if you have a company that makes bread, then it would be run by the people that eat the bread, not by the people that need to make a profit. It totally changes the reasons that we are in business. And it goes back to the idea that there can be central planning, central command, and somebody can manage an economy, instead of the invisible hand that makes it happen magically if you just let the market make the selections for you. That's their view.

And on that Web site it says that they want to nationalize the oil industry in America, nationalize the refinery industry in America.

Reclaiming my time, I absolutely agree with the gentlelady from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann). And I would add that there's this line down through the middle of the aisle. When you turn to the left and you shift these policies towards the socialist side of the ledger, it always diminishes freedom. And when you shift them over on the conservative side of the ledger, it enhances their freedom over to where you get to the point where it goes on to the other side.

Let me just say this, if you have no taxes and no regulation and laissez faire, then you have maximum opportunity for free enterprise. That's fine to do that if you have people who are a totally moral and ethical people. Now, that's the perfect model. But we have to have laws so we have to have restraint, and we have to have some taxation to enforce the law, and we have to have some taxation to fund our military and fund our security. And as Abe Lincoln said, the Federal Government's job should be to carry the mail, quasi private I will say, carry the mail, defend our shores, do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves, and leave us otherwise alone. That's freedom.

But the other said is servitude in the end, capitulating our freedom for the sense of security that doesn't give the Wall Street much security to speak of. I think it's pretty clear as you've watched this downward spiral go on now, for all of these days since the election, and almost twice as much

percentage drop of the market as you've ever seen in modern history.

The question of freedom vs. the question of dependency, with a socialist approach. And our urge needs to be this, our charge is this, our responsibility is this: We should be setting policies that maximize the average annual productivity of our citizens. If we do that, if 300 million people turn out a little bit more, produce a little bit more, give a little bit more, decide they have the inspiration to earn, save and invest and build, if 300 million people do that even a little bit, if they do it 1 hour a day or 1 hour a week or 1 day a week, it adds to the entire GDP. And when that happens then it adds to the industrial base. It adds to the capital base. It adds to our innovation, and it automatically improves the quality of life, on average, of everybody in this country.

And reclaiming my time, that is the other side of the equation. The positive side of the equation is, let people earn all they want to earn, keep all that they want to keep, obviously pay their taxes when they make their purchases. If we do that, we've raised the productivity on average of America. But the policies that are coming from this Congress are diminishing incrementally and sometimes in huge increments the aspirations and the inspirations of the American worker, producer and entrepreneurs. It will lower the average annual productivity of Americans. You'll see the GDP at least proportionally diminish. That means that the hope for our children and grandchildren is less, not more. And we have to be willing to take some risk. We have to be willing to let some people fail.

I've had to stare failure in the eye. I lived for 3\1/2\ years with a knot in my stomach that wouldn't go away because I didn't know whether I was going to be able to hold my business together or not during the farm crisis in the early 1980s. My bank closed April 26, Friday afternoon, 3:00, 1985. I'll never forget it. Red tag on the door. Highway Patrol guarding the door. It changed everybody's life that was in there, and it changed mine.

I know what failure looks like. I've watched some of my neighbors, their spirit be eroded because they had to fight the finances.

But the other side of that was, they had the opportunity of the, I don't want to say it's euphoric, but the good, strong, uplifting feeling of having built something that they can take pride in and having achieved and set an example for their children and their children's children, this example of a work ethic and integrity and giving your word and keeping your word and the value of contract, which I've made my living in the contracting business. And almost all of it on low-bid.

And I've worked for many of my neighbors throughout the years, going clear back into the early 1970s. Most of those were verbal contracts, most of those we didn't bother to shake hands. That's not quite our culture to do that. As a matter of fact, if you shake hands with somebody they say oh, I'll come do that work for 5,000 bucks. When will you be there? Next Friday. Okay. That's fine. If you shake hands, he'd be thinking, you must not trust me then; you're going to make me shake hands on it. Our word's our bond. The handshake is almost like a written contract. And I've only had one of those written contracts between my neighbors in all of those years.

But I know the value of a contract. And you've got to keep your word and not break your word.

Reclaiming my time. I'd just give an illustration of how that works. And I've had to make that decision a number of times in my business life because there are some areas that are quasi- sovereign. And I won't describe them any beyond that. They're quasi- sovereign, which means that there's really not relief to go and make a collection in their jurisdiction. So I've had to go in there and bid work, and I would calculate the materials, expenses, a little margin for profit and the insurance and those things, build that all together, and then I'd have to put a factor in and there's no place for me to go to get relief here except to the very people I'm doing business with. And some of you will know the quasi-sovereign regions I'm talking about. So I had to, and all my competitors had to also factor in a risk factor for what happens if the deal gets changed afterwards. I've done that on Excel spread sheets with numerous bid items and put a multiplier on each one of them that just simply was the number that evaluated the risk factor on whether they would change the deal after the fact because, in that quasi-sovereign region I couldn't count on the sanctity of the contract.

It's real clear to me there's a risk factor that will be factored in to any future mortgages that we have under this cramdown legislation. There will be higher down payments required because that will minimize the risk to the lenders, and there will be higher interest required that will minimize, and that means everybody pays it. Everybody digs in for the down payment, especially for their first home. And also, the higher interest rate that everyone will have to pay.

And meanwhile, we're going to reward people that openly committed fraud or misrepresentation or false pretenses because this Congress refused to accept that language, even though the Judiciary Committee passed that language out 21-3, changed the deal after the fact.

I thought we had a contract in the Judiciary Committee. That contract has been torn asunder. The sanctity of that contract is gone. I guess I shouldn't be surprised if the members of the party and the committee would come to this floor and vote for a cramdown legislation that would tear the contract of the mortgage asunder just as well.

Reclaiming the balance of my time and yielding it back to the Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence.

Mr. Speaker, we're here to address the extension of these two programs, including the religious worker visa program extension, which is set up to authorize now until September 30 of this year, until the end of this fiscal year.

I had recommended that we bring this bill back before committee for the purposes of a markup so that we could reevaluate the policy. We have had hearings on this subject matter in the previous Congress, and we all know that the actions of the previous Congress don't color the existing Congress.

The history of the religious worker visa program has had some problems with fraud. It was created in 1990, but from the beginning, it has been a magnet for people who want to perpetrate a scam on America's immigration system.

According to the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs--and this is dated September of 2005, their Fraud Digest--``The religious worker visas are known as some of the most difficult to adjudicate.''

The Fraud Digest then goes on to discuss various cases in which people were prosecuted for fraudulent use of the program, the religious worker program. For instance, in 2004, a Venezuelan national was convicted in Virginia visa fraud. He had filed 179 fraudulent petitions for religious ministers. In addition to creating fraudulent certificates of ordination, diplomas and other supporting documentation, he also obtained valid 501(c)(3) tax exemptions from recognized religious organizations without their knowledge.

The immigration subcommittee has long been aware of the fraud in this program. Mr. Speaker, I take you back to a 1997 GAO investigation which was requested by the subcommittee. The State Department conducted a field inquiry to get the views of consular offices as to the level and type of fraud. In 41 percent of the 83 responding posts, some type of fraud or abuse was acknowledged. The State Department also noted that, under the program's regulations, ``almost anyone involved with a church, aside from the explicitly excluded occupations of cleaning, maintenance and support staff . . . arguably could qualify as a religious worker.''

This clearly wasn't the intent of the program. It doesn't remain the intent of the program that will, I think, likely be reauthorized today.

When the GAO released its final report in 1999, the agency noted that the types of fraud often encountered in the processing of religious worker visas ``involved petitioners making false statements about the length of time that the applicant was a member of the religious organization and the nature of the qualifying experience.''

The report went on to state that ``evidence uncovered by INS suggests that some of these organizations exist solely as a means to carry out immigration fraud.'' That was then. This is more current.

Recently, I will say in July of 2006, Mr. Speaker, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service's Office of Fraud Detection and National Security conducted a fraud benefit assessment on the Religious Worker Visa Program. They selected 220 cases at random--of which we're very familiar with on the committee--they found an astonishing 33 percent fraud rate. That's one of every three were fraudulently based. In 32 of the fraudulent cases, the religious institution either didn't exist or only existed on paper. And 39 of the fraudulent petitions included fraudulent supporting documentation or material representations within a document.

Other instances of fraud included cases where the petitioner could not be located or connected to any religious entity and where the petitioning religious entity was unaware that the petition had been filed and was unaware of the beneficiary.

Also in the modern era, in 2003, Mohammed Khalil and three of his sons were arrested in connection with submitting false applications to bring over 200 individuals to the United States using the religious worker visa program. During court proceedings, prosecutors revealed that Khalil made statements to an undercover witness professing allegiance to Osama bin Laden. He also allegedly stated, ``Hopefully, another attack in the United States will come shortly.''

That gives you, I think, Mr. Speaker, the feel for how this program has been abused.

However, I want to make clear, Mr. Speaker, to you and to the Record, and eventually to the American people, that I recognize--as will every Member of this Congress--that there are very sincere religious workers who come to the United States that fit within the category and within the intent of this Congress. And I think what we need to do today is honor them, thank them, recognize that this is a country that was built upon religious freedom. And where we can promote religious freedom, we need to do so within our own borders and around the globe.

That's why I have raised the issue that we are receiving religious workers from countries that will not allow American religious workers to go into them unless they fit within their narrowly defined religious category.

So this being an American value of religious freedom and religious liberty, we need to also export that freedom around the world. We have many soldiers that are buried in foreign lands to promote that freedom. They've paid their price. There's been a price paid in this country continually for religious freedom. We need to promote it around the world.

For us to open up the doors of the United States of America to religious workers from countries who come here to advance their version of their side of society and not have those countries allow American missionaries to come into them, I think sets up a standard that we should not tolerate. So I will be introducing legislation that sets up a reciprocity program in this religious workers visa program. And I look forward to the opportunity in September or prior to September to raise this issue in a better format.

Until that time, and believing that we will have an open forum in this Congress and a real legitimate debate on the subject of religious worker reciprocity, I intend to support this resolution today and work in good faith to improve it before it comes up for reauthorization on September 30, 2009.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the honor to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and it is always an honor to address you, Mr. Speaker.

I have spent some of the last hour listening to my colleagues, whom I appreciate voicing their opinions as well. I would like to take up some of their issues at the beginning, and then I will roll it into the subject matter of this next hour that I have.

But first of all, when a statement was made by the gentleman from Tennessee that Rush Limbaugh wants Obama to fail, he didn't say that, Mr. Speaker. He can't be quoted anywhere as he wants Obama to fail or President Obama to fail. It wasn't his intent at all. You have to listen to what he actually said.

He said he wants his policies to fail. That was a message that's clear. It's been reiterated over and over again across the media and this country, Mr. Speaker. So I have to come here and

raise the issue in the beginning that that was a statement that was made, Mr. Speaker. Rush Limbaugh said that he wants President Obama's policies to fail so that we can go forward and preserve and protect and enhance our freedom and our liberties and our free market economy and perhaps, and I hope it's not so, perhaps our national defense as well.

I will stand with him on that. I have opposed these policies of overspending. I opposed the stimulus plan, and I opposed the bailout plan that came in the previous administration.

It was clear from where I stood that you simply cannot take money from the producers of this country and pour it into a void without a plan or a strategy and how it's going to emerge. Still, the U.S. Treasury couldn't tell us the results that would come from a $700 billion bailout plan. The President of the United States can't tell us the results that will come from hundreds of billions of dollars, and, actually, more than $1 trillion when you add the interest stimulus plan.

And so without a definable goal here, except the idea that spending is stimulus--and I disagree with that philosophy, spending is not stimulus. But, believing that, then the people on this side of the aisle have said, well, this is a comprehensive proposal, it's well thought out. We are going to have a more responsible budget than George Bush had, and in the end we are going to have this economy that is going to grow to the point where we will be able to do this magnificent thing called ``cut the deficit in half'' by the beginning of President Obama's second term.

I heard that over here, too, although he really said by the end of his first term, which I think is more likely if they keep going down this path.

So the words ``cut the deficit in half'' echo to me. That was a goal that was laid out by President Bush. So it seems to me that President Obama, Mr. Speaker, is following at least one of the patterns of President Bush.

And I will tell you I was not particularly moved by the idea that we could cut the deficit in half in 4 years or 5 years or whatever that might be. I didn't come into this political life with half of a goal. I'd want at least a whole goal. So if we can cut it in half in 3\1/2\ years or 5 years or whatever the case may be, why couldn't we just eliminate it? Or maybe we could just double that period of time. If we could cut it in half in 4 years, maybe we can cut it in half again in another 4 years, and then we'll be down to only 25 percent of this huge deficit that we have now.

But, Mr. Speaker, this deficit is breathtaking. We are looking at the current administration's budget of a deficit of $1.75 trillion. And we heard him speak to us of having to construct one leg of a multi-legged stool to get us out of this economic crisis that we are in. Well, the one leg, you have to add the bailout money from last fall and the $1.1 or 2 trillion from the stimulus plan from just a little over a week ago, package that together, and without many of these things that got poured into by administrative action, you're at a $2 trillion leg for one stool of what, according to the President, is a multi-legged stool. So if a leg costs $2 trillion and it's multi-legged, I know it's not a milk stool. That would be a one leg. It's not a two-legged stool. I've never seen one of those. It's not a three-legged stool or he would have said so. So I have to presume that this stool that's going to be the rebuilding architecture of this formerly free market economy is going to be at least four legs at $2 trillion a leg, which nearly doubles our national debt.

I remember the President's media personnel speaking on the morning of the President's address here in the joint session, Mr. Speaker, and he said our national debt is 10 percent of GDP, that we have to do something about that. It's too high.

Well, his current budget, the one that's just been defended by my colleagues from the other side of the aisle, takes that share to more than 12 percent of our GDP. In fact, it's 12.3 percent of our GDP. That's the current President Obama budget. So this 10 percent of GDP that is national debt today becomes a 12.3 percent of national debt if this budget is enacted into law, and a lament that comes from his spokesman is we've got too high a percentage of our GDP in our national debt.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I think there's another number that we should be concerned about. I'm concerned about that. I'm concerned about the daily interest rate, that if all of this is enacted into law, the American people will be paying $1 billion a year just in interest alone, $1 billion a year.

Now, I hearken back to 1992 when President Clinton was elected. He was elected under the belief of the American people that we were in a recession, and he convinced the American people we were in a recession, and you might go back and look at the definitions and parse that so that it was, I'll say, marginally true. But President Clinton came to this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and he asked for a $30 billion, that's 30 billion with a ``b,'' economic incentive plan, and that was supposed to put money out into the hands of people so they would spend it because the belief was that spending is stimulus. It was going to create, though, jobs like the AmeriCorps is today and put this $30 billion into this, and it was going to bring us out of this recession that was defined during the presidential campaign of 1992. President Clinton brought that argument to this Congress, $30 billion. And this Congress, being a Democratic Congress, debated the $30 billion, chopped it down from $30 billion, finally got it down to $17 billion, and then decided, well, we're not going to do it after all. So they threw the idea of the stimulus plan over the side in 1993, after having taken a $30 billion idea and reduced it to a $17 billion idea, and they pitched it overboard because it wasn't a good enough idea. Well, today we have budgets that are proposed by the President of the United States that brings us to the point where we'll be paying $1 billion a day, not $17 billion in an economic stimulus plan like 1993 but $1 billion a day. So, for example, when the fiscal year kicks in--let me say the calendar year. That's a little easier thing to think about, Mr. Speaker. But when the calendar year kicks in, if you want to keep track from the day you're watching your bowl games on how long it takes for the Federal Government to spend as much money on interest as it would take to have paid for the entire Bill Clinton stimulus plan, well, from January 1, 2, 3, 4, on up to the 17th of January, boom, you'd be done. That would be economic stimulus freedom day, the 18th of January, if you're paying this at the rate of this stimulus plan we have today.

Now, compare that 17 days at $1 billion a day to pay for the entire Bill Clinton stimulus plan to just the interest that we'll have here in the Federal Government if we let this all go forward that's being proposed out of the White House today. That's $365 billion just in interest. That's not a stimulus plan, I'll suggest, Mr. Speaker. I will suggest that's anything but a stimulus plan. It works against us. It drains capital from the private sector. It drains capital from the productive sector of this economy.

So Rush Limbaugh didn't say he wants President Obama to fail. He said he wants his policies to fail because he's about freedom. And I'm about freedom. And we ought to be about quoting people correctly. Maybe if the gentleman from Tennessee actually listened to the words that Rush Limbaugh said, maybe he wouldn't have been so outraged. Maybe he would have just said, well, we have a legitimate philosophical disagreement, que sera. It would be okay. But that's not what's happening. They are seeking to criticize a high-profile individual in America in order to demonize him so that that individual can be put up as a poster for the things that they want to claim is wrong with their predecessors.

Well, here's the problem, Mr. Speaker. This has been a Democratic Congress for more than 2 years. The 110th Congress was all in the control of Speaker Pelosi. She received the gavel up here in January of 2007. There's no Federal spending in America that doesn't start in this Congress by Constitution. So any of the spending that's been initiated since that day has been initiated right here on this floor in the end in the House of Representatives. And our budgets and our deficits become the budgets and the deficits of the Democrats that are in charge. That's Speaker Pelosi. That's Leader Hoyer. That's the committee Chairs

and the people who have been handed the gavel by the Speaker.

And the American people need to understand that this isn't something that's driven by the minority today. The minority that we have here today has always driven for balanced budgets, fiscal responsibility, strong national defense, strong personal responsibility, strong families, defended the rule of law, protected the borders.

So we are today with a President that's going to cut the deficit in half by the beginning of his second term, but he's got to create this huge deficit in order to cut it in half. So if you go out and start biting off chunks of the GDP and grow from a 10 percent deficit of GDP to a 12.3 percent deficit of GDP, if you have a President's budget that's being proposed that takes a greater and greater share of the GDP of America, it isn't just the deficit that counts here. The share of the gross domestic product that was being consumed by the Federal Government at the beginning of the Depression in the early 1930s was 3.4 percent, Mr. Speaker. By the time the New Deal had been implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and we got into the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which essentially ended his New Deal, the Federal Government was by then taking over 12 percent of our GDP. It went from 3.4 percent of GDP at the beginning of the 1930s, and under FDR it went to over 12 percent of GDP before you factor in the extra spending that had to take place in the Second World War.

Now, FDR had a significant utility to this country in leading us through the Second World War. I do not take that away from him. I applaud him for that stolid leadership that he provided. But he didn't solve the economic problem. And anybody that can come to this floor and engage in this debate and point out for me some data that shows that the New Deal, which was profligate spending, unprecedented growth in the Federal Government role, consuming from 3.4 percent of GDP up to 12 percent of GDP, and not having anything to show for it, there's not a legitimate debate on the other side. The New Deal did not get us out of the Great Depression.

To be charitable, it may have, and I emphasize ``may have,'' diminished the depths to which we might have otherwise fallen. I'm not convinced of that, but I will just concede that that could be the case. The data may show that if you didn't pour enough government spending in, maybe, maybe things would have completely collapsed and we would have had to build up from almost nothing or nothing as opposed to building up from almost nothing plus one. So maybe the New Deal programs diminished the depths to which we might have otherwise fallen. It certainly provided some soup kitchens and some WPA programs and CCC camps, and the Federal Government stepped in and hired a lot of people, competed directly with the private sector, by the way. That's what happened with the New Deal. And the recovery process that was needed to take place when capital was willing to take the risk again, when entrepreneurs were willing to take the risk again, that recovery took place through the Second World War.

This is where I don't see it quite the same way either as the President does, Mr. Speaker. I don't take the position that the Second World War got us out of the Great Depression. I take the position that the Second World War started our recovery from the Great Depression. It brought about a massive growth in production in America in our industry, and it positioned us that by the end of the Second World War, we were the world's industrial power because we had ramped up our industrial production here to meet the demands of the world in the Second World War. And at end of the war, we were essentially the only industrialized country that had maintained our industrial base without its being destroyed by war. So we had a comparative advantage, as Adams Smith would say, against the rest of the world. And our economy grew, and America built more things and sold more things both domestically and abroad. And by 1954 the stock market had recovered to where it was on the day that it crashed in October of 1929. It wasn't the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression. The Second World War gave us a very good start, as tragic as that world event was, but the recovery required another 9 years just to get back to where we were when the stock market crashed in October of 1929. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years before the stock market got back to where it was. So it's not his achievement necessarily. I think that it actually slowed our recovery.

And now we have, Mr. Speaker, a President who believes that the New Deal was a good deal, that FDR essentially lost his nerve and was too concerned about spending too much money. So he's concerned that FDR essentially backed down, and if he had just kept spending more and more money, then he would have been able to have this Keynesian effect, a real stimulus effect that would have brought us out of the Great Depression before the Japanese attacked us on December 7 of 1941. Well, the world will never know. That isn't what happened.

But the world also knows that there is no historical model for bringing about an economic recovery by taxing your citizens to death and transferring that wealth to other people and paying people not to work and by asking people to go forward and spend money that you hand to them. That's a temporary stimulus, if at all. And we tried that early last spring, a $150 billion temporary stimulus plan. And you can look for the blip in that. What happened to the consumer spending? What happened to jobs? It didn't even show. In fact, about 70 percent of those $150 billion that were injected into the economy in rebates were saved or used to pay off debt. They didn't stimulate the economy. So some of it was tax relief and to that extent it was good, but on balance it wasn't a stimulating plan. This is a huge plan based upon the same philosophy. Spending is stimulus is what President Obama has said, Mr. Speaker.

I looked back and I read through some of the documents written by John Maynard Keynes. This is pure Keynesian economics. It was Keynes that said I can solve the world's unemployment problem. We will just do this. We will go out to an abandoned coal mine and I will take U.S. currency and we will bury it in these holes around this abandoned coal mine. Then we fill the coal mine up with garbage, and then we'll turn the entrepreneurs in the country loose to go around and dig it up and be able to pick up this cash and take it out and spend it.

He said he can solve all of the unemployment problem in the country if you just give him enough cash and they could drill these little holes around in abandoned coal mines and then fill the coal mine up with garbage and then let the people dig through it. That would give them a job, of course, digging up the cash, and then they would take the cash out and spend it, and that would solve the economy.

Mr. Speaker, we are not going to solve an economic crisis until we produce. We have to provide incentives, which means getting government out of the way and reducing taxes so that people will produce. If they produce something that has value, they will take it out and market it and sell it and our economy will grow. And that is how you stimulate the economy, by increasing production, not by increasing spending. And it needs to be competitive production that gives people a comparative advantage against the rest of the world.

Innovations in the area of technology, for example, entrepreneurs that start businesses, people that are trading, buy, sell, trade, make gain, produce market, be smart about it, but do not punish the productive sector of the economy, or you will wait a long, long time for a recovery. We know that they waited a long time for the recovery of the Great Depression, from 1929 to 1939 to '49 to '54. All of that time, a complete and entire more than a generation before they saw the recovery that was brought about by two things, the Second World War and by the industrial productive might that we developed and the effect of that on the world's economy.

So, if you create, as a President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, a huge deficit, and then you say, oh, by the beginning of my second term in office I am going to cut my deficit in half, how would that be? It would be like the family budget, if I would go out and

spend, let's say $2,000 more per month than I make, I would have a $2,000 a month deficit. And that would then be a $24,000 a year deficit.

But I could make my pledge to my financial advisor that I am going to cut that deficit in half and just cut it down to $1,000 a month. And if I needed to really bite the bullet and say, well, I am going to have to do more than this, I could maybe increase my spending to $3,000 a month or $4,000 a month, and then next year it would be easy enough, I would just cut it back to $2,000 a month and say I cut my deficit in half. I am still spending the same amount I was, and I still have the same kind of deficit I had.

That is the kind of smoke and mirrors language that is coming out of the White House today, and the American people, Mr. Speaker, are sitting there accepting it. They are accepting the idea that if you spend a couple trillion dollars, if the White House spends a couple trillion dollars appropriated here, out of the beginning of the spending into the House of Representatives, and that $2 trillion in the stimulus plan is going to, get this language, save or create 3.5 million jobs.

All right. Have we lost our senses? Don't we see through that clearly? I mean, this isn't any kind of blurry, opaque lens we are looking through. This is crystal clear in focus. Save or create 3.5 million jobs. Not new jobs, not defined jobs, not in any particular sector. Not create jobs. Save or create.

So, I guess I could go back to a pretty low educational level and ask maybe one of our children, figure this out. If you are going to save or create 3.5 million jobs, and if you have got a workforce of about 142 million here in the United States, let's just say that it is really clear that President Obama is going to accomplish that objective. I can guarantee that President Obama will accomplish the objective of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs, because, first of all, they aren't new jobs, and second of all, if you don't create a single one and you still have 3.5 million jobs left in America, you have met your promise.

These are carefully parsed words and pieces of language. This isn't something he is speaking off the cuff and bouncing around in between other meetings. It isn't like he was ambushed by the press. This is the speech writers carefully putting this language together. It has been repeated over and over again.

As far as I know, the press hasn't said, Mr. President, isn't it true that if there are 3.5 million jobs left in America, you will have kept your promise? That is what the promise is, Mr. Speaker.

There are also many other promises. One of them is we are going to have a carbon tax. So we are going to tax energy. Well, everything that we have in America takes energy to produce or deliver. A cup of coffee takes energy to heat it. It takes electricity to fire up the coffee pot. It takes energy to transport it. Everything we have takes transportation. It takes trucks, it takes rail, it takes trains. All of that burns energy. Almost all of it takes energy, hydrocarbon energy that comes from petroleum.

So if we are going to tax the carbon that is petroleum, if we are going to tax that we are taxing everybody in America. They are going to tax your light bill and your gas bill. That is your heat bill. Your gasoline bill as well. And this tax isn't going to be something that is put on your invoice. It is going to be something insidious. It is going to be something that creeps and sneaks into your bills so you don't see it. It will be immeasurable.

I can just guarantee you if this happens, there won't be any study done in this Congress or anywhere else that is official at least by government that will tell you what it costs you to pay this carbon tax. But it is so far measured at $646 billion, the carbon tax.

We are going to pay a tax on carbon. Why? Because we have some scientists who have decided that they want to tell us all that we are suffering from global warming. Climate change now is the word. And I will just say, pay attention to language. We have gone from global warming, well, actually we have gone from ice age. I remember ice age in the seventies. There was one scientist that was a lead scientist on predicting that we had a coming ice age, and he has now shifted over to the other side. Now he says no, the Earth is in global warming and we should backpedal from that as it was as we can.

But we have gone from ice age to global warming, and now global warming is kind of hard to hold because the Earth has been cooling for the last 10 years, so we have to change the language to climate change.

Now, if you have to fix the climate change problem, you will be able to do that forever. In fact, we always complain about the climate changing on us on a regular basis, wherever we come from. In Iowa, the climate is changing all the time. Just wait 5 minutes, it will change, we say. I talked to a fellow in Mississippi this morning. He says the same thing.

Climate change is going on all over America in little microcosmic ways. But you can address that and say we are going to fix it with government. We are going to fix it with a carbon tax. We are going to tax your energy.

If you tax our energy, you are taxing every single component of America's economy. You can't turn on your computer without taking energy. You can't light up your Blackberry. You can't make a cell phone call. You can't turn on your lights. You can't get in a taxicab or on the Metro or drive your car. I suppose you can't ride your bicycle or go out to the farm and pitch a couple bales. But they have already figured out it takes energy to do that, and they are measuring against ethanol. A farm worker takes 4,000 calories a day to go out there and do the work. Now, I think he is overeating just a little bit. But they have measured it. Calories are energy. Human consumption of food is energy. Everything takes energy. Energy is based on carbon, and they want to tax carbon to the tune of $646 billion. Then, to make sure it really goes to the right place, the White House wants to tax oil and gas directly, $31.5 billion dollars.

And, by the way, if you thought you made a pretty good living and maybe jumped through all these government hoops and were able to establish an estate, then we have it set up so we were seeking to get completely rid of the death tax. But President Obama is convinced that they are going to come back with the death tax and eliminate the loopholes, so now you can't even hope to die for free.

That is all going on. And on top of that, we are in two wars, Mr. Speaker. Two wars. There is still a conflict going on in Iraq, and I am transitioning into that, and there is clearly a conflict in Afghanistan which President Obama has ordered a surge.

Now, it seems a little odd to me that the President of the United States would not admit that the surge worked in Iraq, but he would order one in Afghanistan, even though they are two different countries, I agree, and it is a tough battle going on in Afghanistan, and I am going to stand with him on the orders he has given.

There are many more components to it, and I trust the White House is going to build out the State Department side of this, the economic side of this, and the strategic neighbors, and hopefully put together a more cooperative approach to this so that we can have a broad and complete solution in Afghanistan. I will stand with him on that, as tough as it is.

I will not walk away from our military. Not our military. I stand with them and I stand with their mission. Their mission has been in Iraq, and everybody serving there in the last few years not only volunteered for their branch of the service, but they volunteered knowing that they would be likely called up to go to Iraq. Many of them volunteered for that mission. That is our military; selfless, noble, self-sacrifice, bravery like the world has never seen. The best trained, the most disciplined, the best equipped, the best armed military the world has ever seen.

Yet on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, in the 110th Congress, the previous Congress, there were more than 40 votes brought to the floor that were designed to unfund, underfund, or undermine our troops while they are at war under orders to face the enemy. And they face them in a way that was a 360 degree battlefield. You never knew when they were going to be hit, there was no one that was in a safe zone, some safer than others.

Yet in all of this, President Bush took a look and decided he did not

want to capitulate to the other side. And even though the advice that he was getting from many of his top military officers was essentially we are not in a position to win this war, Mr. President, and the implication was that he should just simply order a withdrawal, let me put it this way, a cynic would say declare victory and leave, but you can never declare victory and leave and call it a victory in a war.

In a way it is like a street fight. The person that is standing there when it is over is the one that wins. And if you don't occupy the territory you fought over, you don't get to say we won that war, we just got tired of it and left and when home. The world knows that, history knows that, President Bush knows that.

That is why he had the vision and the leadership to give the order for a surge. It was a well-researched strategy that had many components to it, not just the military tactical, but many the other components to it as well. And as that strategy was put together, and I made a number of trips over there and met with our top officers while this was being put together, I was sold on the strategy before it had a name, I was sold on the strategy before it was actually shaped. But we see now what has happened.

President Bush ordered the surge and we swelled the troops up to over 150,000 there. He made the order. And, of course, our troops nobly complied and they carried out their mission in a fashion that still amazes more than half of this Congress, most the country and even more of the world.

But, today the Pelosi Congress has established 18, 18 benchmarks that needed to be achieved in Iraq before they would be willing to support the efforts and the spending that is going on there. I took this in the middle of those 40-plus votes that were designed to unfund, underfund or undermine our troops, I took those benchmarks that were essentially imposed upon the Iraq effort to be setting the bar so high that it could never be achieved because so many were invested in defeat in this Congress.

Yet of the 18 benchmarks, 17 of the 18 benchmarks have been wholly or substantially achieved in Iraq. And I don't have that list in front of me, but I can tell you the one that is not yet been achieved, and that is the benchmark that requires the Iraqi Security Forces to be completely independent from U.S. military support.

So, that would be that the 613,000 Iraqi Security Forces that are in uniform today that have been trained and equipped by our military, standing up a military from a beginning takes years, but of those 613,000, by that 18th benchmark they would all have to be able to operate independent of U.S. communications, U.S. logistical support, U.S. training, U.S. intelligence, the list goes on of all the things that we are providing them and helping them with today.

I think that is a generation away before they reach that level. I think the 18th benchmark was completely unreachable, although they have made substantial progress. But I won't say it has been substantially completed or wholly completed at this point. So 17 of 18 benchmarks, and the remaining one is an independent Iraqi Security Force. Seventeen of 18 benchmarks have been achieved, Mr. Speaker.

I am introducing, I have today introduced a resolution that addresses this. The resolution is a resolution that acknowledges and recognizes the achievements there. Seventeen of 18 benchmarks have been achieved. That is one point.

Another is American casualties in Iraq. Since the 30th of June, 2008, we have lost more of our military to accidents than we have the enemy; more to accidents than we have the enemy, Mr. Speaker. That is a measure too of a war that is going in the right direction.

The civilian deaths in Iraq have gone down by 90 percent and the ethno-sectarian deaths in Iraq have dropped by 98 percent.

There's a long period there where you had no sectarian deaths, where statistically so low that they were not reportable.

And yet, I remember, some of my colleagues over here and some of our Senate friends saying the war in Iraq is lost. It can't be won. We've been defeated. It's a civil war. There are sectarian deaths. It's out of control, and we need to get out people out right away, just maintain enough of a rear guard so that they don't get shot in the back as they retreat from Iraq. That's essentially the message that came from a good number of people over on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, and a number of them in the Senate as well, and that was part of the debate on these 40-plus votes that were designed to unfund, underfund or undermine our troops.

But what's happened is there has been substantial achievement in Iraq. We have achieved a definable victory in Iraq. And I've introduced a resolution today that lays out the history on how we got there, the authority that was invested in the President of the United States by this Congress to engage in military action if he saw fit, and the responsibilities that he accepted and that our military accepted, as well as the things that went wrong, and then the things that went right.

But three elections almost, the last election was so successful there wasn't a single significant security event involved in the last election in Iraq in the last weekend of January, this year. And so they ratified a constitution. They've had three successful elections, they have an effective central government. And Maliki has become a powerful and influential leader that had the courage and the temerity to order his own troop actions to go down into Basra last year, and that turned out to be something that seemed to be tenuous but turned out to be successful, and it was a key component in establishing Baghdad and the central government as being in charge in the country of Iraq.

So however we measure this, by any complete objective measure, there has been a definable victory achieved in Iraq.

That's what this resolution does, Mr. Speaker. And it thanks and honors our military for their sacrifice of life and limb and blood and treasure and time away from their homes and having their destiny changed. No one served in that country without having the destiny of their life turned in one way other. Some of them lost their lives. Some of them lost their limbs. All of them were affected in a way that it changed them, in a small way some perhaps, and in a very large way, others. It caused the breakup of some families. There were divorces because of the long deployments. There was a price paid by wives and husbands and children.

And yet, in this country, we bicker here trying to undermine an effort. And now, this Congress has a chance to say thank you for all of that sacrifice. This Congress has a chance to ratify this resolution and put it into the Record, in the Congressional Record for all time.

And some of the language in this resolution, Mr. Speaker, follows like this: The United States House of Representatives extends its gratitude to all those within the military and civilian departments and agencies of the United States Government who were responsible for directing the implementation of the surge strategy, including General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

The U.S. House of Representatives recognizes the importance and significance of victory in the Iraqi theater of the larger global struggle against radical Islamic jihadists terrorists.

And the United States House of Representatives commits itself to working with President Obama and his administration to continue the progress that has been made on the ground in Iraq since the surge strategy was implemented, recognizing that a definable victory has been achieved in Iraq, and that history will judge President Bush's successor by his ability to maintain his predecessor's victory.

That's what's been achieved in Iraq today, Mr. Speaker. And I stand with President Obama in maintaining and in building upon the achievements that have been made in Iraq.

This resolution is about honoring the accomplishments to this point. And it's about asking and actually challenging all of us to stand with those who have sacrificed so much so that price has meaning, so that the destiny of America, the destiny of every individual that served there was changed by their experience there. The destiny of America then needs to be changed also, as

the benefit from the price that's been paid.

The destiny of America can be defined by the course of liberty and the course of freedom. And we have watched freedom be expanded around the world. I've watched it in a number of ways. Sometimes we've just fought them to a draw, and sometimes we expanded freedom dramatically. Free market capitalism expanded freedom around this world probably more than any war that there ever was. But those things fit in conjunction with each other.

The Second World War expanded freedom. If it hadn't been for that, we would have been either under the control of the imperial Japanese or the Nazis. And yet, we defended freedom. We expanded freedom.

Still, February 11, 1945, at Yalta, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin drew a line on a map, and the line on the map was the line west of which people would live in the free world and east of which they would live in the slavery of communism. When that line was drawn, February 11, 1945, that set the destiny for people for more than a generation to come, 2 generations to come.

But by November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. This Cold War that we'd fought for all of those years, along that line that was drawn at Yalta by Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, that line fell, that was the Iron Curtain. It came down literally with a crash, beginning November 9 when the Berlin Wall started to come down. And freedom echoed for a time, all the way across Eastern Europe, all the way across Asia, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. That was the result of this victory in the Cold War.

And the Yeltsin era came in, in Russia, and the satellite states for the Soviet Union declared their independence, and most of them are essentially independent today. But freedom has diminished back across that vast land of Russia. It's not what it was during that era. Most of the institutions of freedom have been diminished or eliminated by the Putin era within Russia.

But we advanced freedom, we advanced it in the Second World War dramatically. But the line was drawn, drawn between the east and the west, the line of the Iron Curtain. Then the Cold War was won and the Iron Curtain came crashing down, and hundreds of millions of people breathe free that would not have otherwise.

We found ourselves, though, in a conflict in Vietnam, which was the last direct military conflict between freedom and communism.

Now, the problem with losing your nerve and losing your will when it comes to foreign policy cannot be measured in, well, it's no longer convenient to support a war in Iraq. I'm unhappy and uncomfortable with the cost or the casualties that are there, so I'll make an objective decision to rationalize and pull out. That's something that was going on. That was some of the thought process that's going on by many of the people that are on staff today at the White House.

But there is a destiny of the free world that America leads that has to be attended to. It's our duty and it's our charge, and so, I'll submit this, Mr. Speaker, that America was viewed as the superpower of the world. We viewed the Soviet Union as the other superpower. We called them that. But much of the rest of the world saw us as the only superpower in the world. And we had never lost a war. The world didn't expect us to lose a war.

But when I picked up this book, this is a book, Vietnam's top military strategist tells how we won the war by General Vo Nguyen Giap. This is the general that commanded the North Vietnamese military during the Vietnam War. And General Giap, G-I-A-P, he writes in here some things that are illuminating.

Now, this isn't a very good book, and I don't recommend, Mr. Speaker, that people go out and buy it. I can give you the essence of it here in just a little phrase. And again, the title of the book is How We Won the War. The commander of the North Vietnamese, and he says here that the U.S. had already begun its decline from the position as the only superpower. This book is copyrighted in 1976, so it was written right after the fall of South Vietnam. General Giap said the U.S. had already begun its decline from the position as the only superpower. He viewed us as the only superpower in the 1970s and in the 1960s. That's one way to look at it. But he said the U.S. failure to win in Korea was the turning point.

So, Mr. Speaker, here's the lesson. We had a Korean War, and we negotiated a settlement rather than press for an all out victory. I'm not commenting on what was the right thing to do then from a military tactical standpoint. I am commenting on this: Settling for a negotiated settlement in Korea resulted in an inspiration for the North Vietnamese, that America didn't have the will to press for a victory in Vietnam, so they fought a war of attrition. They fought a war of attrition that went on for more than a decade. And the price for that was 58,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese lives. And this Congress voted to shut off all funding, not just to support American troops who had already been pulled out of South Vietnam. If you remember Vietnamization. The Vietnamese were taught and trained and equipped to defend themselves, and they had stepped up, and they were doing that.

This Congress shut off all funding. And I went back and read the legislation. And it says, no money, none of these funds or any funds heretofore appropriated shall be spent in Vietnam, North Or South Vietnam actually, and in Cambodia or Laos, on the skies overhead or the seas beside these countries. In other words, whatever money was in the pipeline to go help the Vietnamese boys defend themselves, as I think that was the language that they used at the time, that money was shut off too. Money that I was already appropriated by a previous Congress and already sent by a Commander-in-Chief was shut off by this Congress, along with any other appropriations. When that happened it starved the defense of South Vietnam. No wonder they capitulated. They didn't have anything to fight with. And the legacy is left that the United States walked away from one of our friends and our allies.

Well, it started with Korea, a negotiated settlement, and we got to Vietnam.

And then, Mr. Speaker, I find myself sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City, waiting to go into Iraq the next day. The date was June 11, 2004. And I didn't know at the time, I don't think, about General Giap's look at Korea as his inspiration. But I was watching Al Jazeera TV, and I couldn't understand what they were saying, but they had English closed- caption. And I heard this, I think, in Arabic, come out of the mouth of Muqtada al-Sadr, who said, if we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq, the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. And I wrote those notes down when I heard that. But it also was branded into my memory, Mr. Speaker.

Our enemies in Iraq and our enemies around the world are inspired if they see lack of resolve. General Vo Nguyen Giap was inspired when he identified lack of resolve in a negotiated settlement in Korea. And our subsequent enemies in places like Lebanon and Mogadishu were inspirations as well to Muqtada al-Sadr and our current enemies that we have. These are all the terrorists worldwide. They talk about this. I mean, this is not something that is an original thought of Muqtada al- Sadr. This is something that's being voiced around the world to encourage and recruit our enemies.

And I'll say, America didn't, they couldn't win in Korea. They couldn't win in Vietnam. They pulled out of Lebanon. They pulled out of Mogadishu, and they will pull out of Iraq, is what they were hoping.

Well, Mr. Speaker, there is no military tactical reason to pull out of Iraq to avoid the conflict that's there, because much of our enemy has been mopped up by U.S. and Iraqi forces working in conjunction with coalition forces that are still there.

We must maintain this victory that has been achieved. I have defined it tonight, Mr. Speaker, for you. We must maintain it because this is the point where we turn the destiny of America again at the price of the destiny of hundreds of thousands of military who have served in that country. Now we can turn the destiny of America toward

the positive side again, and we can hand to the next generations the world's only superpower, who may have lost its will in Vietnam, who should not have pulled out of Lebanon in the stage that it was in, who should not have left Mogadishu, but who did stick it out in Iraq and who did ensure that the Iraqi people had their chance at freedom, that they had their chance at liberty, that they had their chance to be as they are quickly becoming: a moderate Muslim state that is our ally in the Middle East in an ideal strategic location for them to influence the Middle Eastern part of the world and in an ideal tactical location.

The Iraqi people on our side are understanding this: We didn't ever go there for their oil. We didn't ever go there to occupy. We went there to end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and that happened.

Whatever you argue about whether the full spectrum of all of the reasons were intact or not, the fact remains that the President had to make a decision based upon the information he had. He made that decision. Once it was made, we stood with our troops and with their mission. Their mission has been wholly or substantially completed and will be, but we've got to remember that this is a fragile definable victory that has been achieved, and we cannot squander it, and we need to honor the Commander in Chief who gave the order of the surge, and we need to honor the people who brought it about. That does include the Iraqi people. It includes the Sunni awakening. It includes the commitment by them in understanding that, again, we didn't go there for their oil, and we didn't go there to occupy. We went there to give them a chance at freedom. They have their chance, and they will continue, and they're actually reaching harder and stronger than maybe they have the capability of doing.

When I sit in these briefings, I get this, and this wouldn't be a classified component. It's a concern that the Iraqis have maybe a little more confidence in their military capability than they actually have. Well, that's the right place for them to be, to be stretching and pushing this thing and to be asking for as much of their own military autonomy as we can give them. We've given them much. We've given them at least all of the security in at least 14 of the 18 provinces and maybe more, and I might have missed one or two. We handed over to them Anbar province, a place where 2\1/2\ years ago I couldn't go because it was too dangerous, a place where, in downtown Ramadi, there was not a building that was not shot up. It was a rubble. It was a city of rubble that had been fought over so many times--a city of death.

I went shopping in downtown Ramadi and, additionally, in Fallujah where I've been several times. By the way, the mayor of Ramadi sounds like the mayor of Peoria. He says, ``Get Baghdad to send me a little more money down here. I need more sewer, water and lights. We're rebuilding this town. We've got to get everybody off the dime. Why is it stuck? We need to go to work.'' That's what they're doing and what they've done.

In Fallujah, the mayor of Fallujah says, ``We are a city of peace, and we are going to repair every building in this city so there's no sign of war.''

If Fallujah is going to be known as the ``city of peace,'' well, Mr. Speaker, that's what has been accomplished over the last number of years and especially since the surge was ordered.

This resolution that I introduced today is a resolution that calls upon this Congress to recognize that and to honor the price, the sacrifice, the accomplishments, and the achievements. It also asks the President: Hold this together. Nurture this along. Let's not make a political decision on the deployment of troops out of Iraq because it's a promise that you made 3\1/2\ years ago when you were a State Senator. Let's make sure that this is a tactical decision and also a political decision and an economic decision and a strategic decision. If you're going to make decisions like that, when you make an announcement that all of the combat troops are going to be out by the last day in August in 2010, as a Commander in Chief, you've fenced yourself in politically. What's the point? You can order those troops to be deployed out of this and can have all of our combat troops out by the last day in August of 2010 without having to tell the world. Just start that progression.

We've already started it, and it makes some sense to do that. It may even make a lot of sense to do that. It just should never, ever be a political decision, and there is no need to announce it. Then also to announce that, by the last day of 2011, all of our military will be completely out of Iraq, that's actually what the Status of Forces Agreement says, but it also says that we can renegotiate this.

So, Mr. Speaker, I'll submit that we've accomplished a lot in Iraq. We have accomplished so much that we've achieved a definable victory there. This Congress needs to celebrate the achievement of the definable victory in Iraq. We need to applaud everyone who has served there in uniform and especially those who have given life and limb and their families. It is a noble, noble act by a noble, noble people.

It is best expressed, I think, at the Korean war memorial where it says, ``This Nation honors our men and women who answered the call to serve a country they never knew and a people they never met.''

It has happened over and over again from the United States of America. It has happened again in Iraq. It's happening in Afghanistan. We need to preserve those precious victories. We need to end this legacy of not having the will to complete the task that we've started. We need to end this propaganda that's coming out of the mouths of our enemies that says, well, we'll leave Iraq the same way we left Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu. We can't have Osama bin Laden sitting in his cave up there in Pakistan, saying, ``Well, they will leave Afghanistan the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu, and Iraq.'' If that happens, we've got a much larger enemy that we have to face and a much more determined enemy that we have to face.

They know they've lost in Iraq. They've said so. It says so in this resolution. We have quoted some al Qaeda leaders in this resolution that they have recognized they have lost tactically the war in Iraq. They don't have the ability to engage in any kind of an organized military way. They can cause some trouble, yes. There are a few of them left in pockets, particularly in Mosul, and they're being mopped up as we speak, but there has been a tremendous amount that has been accomplished.

If the President can make the charge that he inherited a $1 trillion deficit and somehow then the responsibility for this economic crisis that we're in all falls back on his predecessor because he has inherited a $1 trillion deficit, never mind he has offered a $1.7 trillion budget--but if he can take that position over and over again that he inherited a $1 trillion deficit and this economy, by implication, is all going to be on the shoulders of George W. Bush, then at least, Mr. Speaker, he can accept the responsibility of Iraq and the state that it's in and can preserve the definable victory that has been achieved.

That's what this resolution does. That's what it asks for. It's what, I think, the will of this Congress ought to be. I'm going to be asking the Speaker to allow this to come forward to the floor.

Right before I close, Mr. Speaker, I would yield to the gentleman from Nebraska so much time as he may consume of which I don't think there's a lot.

I'd be very happy to yield the balance I have.

I thank the gentleman, and I would yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 89 I was not able to reach the House floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 91, I was not present because of the birth of my grandson. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 92, I was not present because of the birth of my grandson. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 93, I was not present because of the birth of my grandson. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Madam Speaker, I was not able to reach the House floor to cast my vote on Rollcall 415 on June 17, 2008, prior to the vote closing. Had I been able to reach the floor before the vote was closed, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for yielding, and also for her diligent endeavor on the Rules Committee to try to hold together the integrity of this system and this process.

On this cramdown legislation, the amendment that I offered in the Judiciary Committee was an amendment that would have, and I'd just take the language right out of it, it would have allowed the court to find that there had not been misrepresentation, false pretenses or actual fraud on the part of the lender if there's going to be a change in this contract ordered by a judge.

Now, we don't want to reward people who are lawbreakers, or those who are disingenuous, or those who, by fraudulent or misrepresentative means to take advantage of a lender under these circumstances. This is new territory we're in. It's a narrow standard in a significant way.

This was an amendment that not only I thought was a good proposal, Republicans thought it was a good proposal, but the Democrats also thought it was a good proposal. And this amendment is an amendment that I negotiated across the other side of the aisle in committee. It's an amendment that the chairman voted for. It's an amendment that passed, the bill passed on a recorded vote in committee, 21-3, Mr. Speaker.

So when that happens in this process, the people who took government class all over America and read the Constitution believe that's the language that comes to the floor, that the language that's approved by the committee on a final markup is the language that comes to the floor.

But what happened was, H.R. 200 was switched out for H.R. 1109, or whatever this bill is that we're working with. The language of this cramdown was to be transferred into that, but it was changed in that process. It was changed after we had a committee markup, a committee markup that apparently doesn't have any value when the will of the committee can be usurped by the staff of the committee. And I say the staff of the committee, because when I asked the chairman about this yesterday in the Judiciary Committee, he didn't seem to be aware that my language had been changed. And so we talked to their staff, and their staff said, well, there were Democrats that had some second thoughts. Wouldn't that include the chairman of the committee? And so they reconsidered and they rewrote the bill after the fact. And the final answer that came from the staff, the unelected staff, probably still employed, not if they were working for me, is ``it is what it is.'' In other words, tough. You can pass an amendment. You can negotiate

an amendment. You can get a 21-3 vote. You can have the support of the chairman. But if they decide when the sun comes up the next morning that they want to change their mind, they will change the language in the bill without even having the courtesy of contacting the sponsor of the amendment, the ranking member of the committee or, apparently, the chairman of the committee.

And so I brought an amendment request to the Rules Committee last night. And thankfully, Dr. Foxx offered that amendment to the Rules Committee. It was voted down on a party-line vote.

So what we have now is a process that does not reflect representative government. It doesn't reflect the will of this Congress. It reflects the will of somebody's staff.

And there's plenty of means to change the language if there happens to be some kind of flaw in it. And I'll argue there is not. But there's plenty of means. That means would be come to the Rules Committee, bring your own amendment. Or bring this out on the floor for an up-or-down vote, or lobby the Senate to amend it over there, or seek to get something amended in conference. None of those avenues were followed, Mr. Speaker. And I think it brings a sense of shame upon this Congress that the integrity of a Member, of the entire Republican side of the aisle and many of the Democrats has all been usurped by what appears to be a staff decision, because I can't find a single elected Member that will say yes, I took responsibility and I didn't think you ought to know when I changed your language. That's what's going on.

I urge this body to vote down this rule. Take this thing back to the Rules Committee, bring us the language that was passed out of the Judiciary Committee, or at least let's have some dialogue on why it was changed in the dark of the night by staff without a single Member that will take accountability for what's happened here.

Mr. Chairman, this is a bad bill, and I would echo the statement of Congressman Louie Gohmert from Texas.

We have community bankers. We have independent bankers. They're good bankers. These are people who understand their communities. They understand their customers. They understand their depositors. They make these discretionary decisions at a community level.

I represent 286 towns in 32 counties in western Iowa. Some of those towns have shriveled up. Some other towns have actually shriveled up and have gone away, but when I look at what's left of the towns that are shrinking, often the last enterprise is the community bank, the independent bank, because they're investing back into the community.

When I watch these communities grow back again--and some of them have grown back again since I've been elected to Congress--it's because there's an investment locally because decisions are made at the discretion of the depositors. They are those who support the board members who hire the loan officers who make these discretionary decisions. They want mortgages. They want to invest in the community. They're invested in the community. This cramdown bill hands it over to an unelected judge.

We had an intense discussion in the Rules Committee last night about what kind of accountability there is for judges. I'd like to hear a list of the names of those judges who have been removed for incompetence, let alone for poor discretion. I'd rather give that discretion to the banker who is accountable to the depositors than to a judge who is not accountable unless Congress happens to find him.

Speaking of accountability, I do rise in frustration that an amendment that I introduced in the Judiciary Committee that succeeded by a vote of 21-3 was taken out of this bill after the fact. Even though it had the support of the chairman and of all but three Democrats and every Republican, when something like that happens out of committee, I have to trust as an elected Member of Congress that there will be a level of respect so that when the committee votes, that's the will of the committee. I would argue that the job is for the Chair or for the Speaker or for whomever it might be to bring out the will of the group.

The way you find out the will of the group is you have a vote, and there is a full expectation, when an amendment passes in committee, it is part of the bill. That's why we have the markup.

So I had an impromptu colloquy with the chairman, and he said, ``I accept responsibility. I'll find out what happened. I'll report back to you. I'll get back to you right away.''

I don't know the answer to that at this point. I can only draw the conclusion that, since no one knew this happened and since no member of the Judiciary Committee, no Member of Congress has said, ``I'm responsible,'' other than responsible for its happening, I trust it was a staff act that's not been held accountable. Until I get an answer, I'm going to operate under the assumption that no other agreement that's made between gentlemen is going to be valid until we can make this one valid.

Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I received as part of the FY 2009 Omnibus.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation Operations

Amount: $282,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Hungry Canyons Alliance

Address of Requesting Entity: 712 S. Hwy. 6 & 59, Oakland, Iowa 51560

Description of Request: Funds are made available to counties to protect infrastructure and farmland from the erosive powers of stream degradation. For every $1 invested in Hungry Canyons Project streambed stabilization structures, more than $4.25 of property value and an average of 1.05 tons of sediment are protected.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Watershed/Flood Prevention Operations

Amount: $1,146,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Natural Resources Conservation Service of Iowa

Address of Requesting Entity: 693 Federal Building, Des Moines, IA 50309

Description of Request: The funding would be used to continue the implementation of the Little Sioux Flood Prevention Project. This project continues to reduce flood damage, gully erosion damage, stream channel degradation, and improve water quality within the Little Sioux River Watershed of western Iowa. This will assist about 85 landowners and five communities that need assistance in installing soil and water conservation practices to slow water runoff and reduce erosion damage to agricultural land, public infrastructure including roads and bridges, and to reduce sediment and associated agricultural nutrients and pesticides being delivered to streams and rivers.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation Operations

Amount: $288,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Soybean Association

Address of Requesting Entity: 4554 114th St., Urbandale, IA 50322

Description of Request: Iowa Soybean Association's Certified Environmental Management Systems for Agriculture (CEMSA) program's overarching goal is to develop and disseminate a means for farmers to assess and improve their environmental performance, while improving agronomic and economic performance, using an adaptive management tool based on ISO 14001 and NRCS's 9-step planning process. This adaptive management system employs science-based applied evaluation tools to give each farmer baseline data, in the first year, then performance data in subsequent years giving them real feedback from their own operation on which to make management decisions regarding nutrients, soil, pests, energy uses and sources, wildlife habitat, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) and other atmospheric resources he or she may prioritize. ISA staff train and oversee contracted Certified Crop Advisors who provide technical assistance to producers in developing and maintaining their CEMSA plan. Cost and profit data is also plugged into the plan to guide the producer in determining the economic sustainability of environmental performance.

The public now demands from crop producers both increased production of food, fiber, fuel, and other biobased product feedstocks and increased, documented environmental performance to conserve soils, sequester carbon, improve water quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency and increase wildlife habitat. As independent business persons, farmers in the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) Basin and across the country need management systems to help them incorporate the best tools of science and business to measure and improve

both agronomic and environmental performance while sustaining profitability. This program has developed and piloted the basic management system and the technical assistance model producers in Iowa, the UMR Basin, and other agricultural regions need to meet these 21st Century demands. Expanding the scale of CEMSA in FY09, integrating individual planning with watershed planning, linking performance reporting to NRCS's system, and establishing recognized certification have significant implications in transferability of CEMSA throughout the UMR Basin and nationally. CEMSA is one of the ISA programs recognized by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council's study on the Mississippi River Water Quality and the Clean Water Act as exemplary of the performance-based, public-private partnership projects that should be expanded throughout the UMR Basin.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation Operations

Amount: $134,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Soybean Association

Address of Requesting Entity: 4554 114th Street, Urbandale, IA 50322

Description of Request: The Iowa Soybean Association's Watershed Management and Demonstration Program is a continuing project that links public and private resources and expertise to provide technical assistance to individual farmers, groups of farmers, and other stakeholders in Iowa watersheds for the purpose of improving agriculture's environmental performance and watershed health.

The project supports expert staff to assist watershed organizations and groups of farmers in developing and maintaining adaptive management plans and in measuring and reporting performance in optimizing fertilizer use efficiency, remediating agricultural pollutants, decreasing soil erosion, building soil carbon, improving on-farm energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing wildlife habitat, and maintaining or increasing yield and profitability.

Private-public partnerships among agencies, private industry, producers, environmental groups, all levels of government, water utilities, and the university are fundamental to the design of this project, and those functioning partnerships to achieve the above project objectives are a measure of the project's success. This project also enables farmers to engage in watershed leadership and planning, employing their expertise and motivating more effective environmental management practices.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Department of Justice, COPS Meth

Amount: $500,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Sioux City Police Department

Address of Requesting Entity: 601 Douglas St., Sioux City, IA 51101

Description of Request: National Meth Training Center--An informal poll of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs in the region conducted by the Sioux City Police Department, revealed that most rural communities had received little or no training in drug identification, investigative methods, intelligence gathering, search warrant preparation and execution or in the hazards of clandestine methamphetamine laboratories prior to the inception of the training center. The Sioux City Police Department National Training Center maintains a vision of providing the most current and relevant training in the area of narcotics law enforcement. The training center's mission is to support the overall effort to control and reduce methamphetamine production, trafficking and distribution on the local, regional and national level. The Sioux City Police Department is providing the leadership in developing training now and for the future. To that end the NTC strives to:

Provide the most current and relevant training in all areas of narcotics law enforcement provided by the most highly skilled instructors available. Provide skills based training through the use of simulation and scenario based practicals. Provide a central clearinghouse for the organization, coordination, research and curriculum development targeted towards the continued education of those in the law enforcement profession. Provide current situational awareness regarding the connections between narcotics trafficking and terrorist activities.

The NTC is in a unique position at this time to assist law enforcement professionals across the nation in their fight against illegal drugs. Officers and administrators from 40 states have attended training at our facility. Instructors and students who have attended training in Sioux City have also spread the word about the unique training opportunities available at the NTC. Students from as far away as Alaska, California, New York and Florida have attended training at the NTC. Officers have come from as far away as Oklahoma using their own vacation time just to attend the training provided by the training center because that same training would otherwise be unavailable to them.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Department of Justice, OJP--Byrne Discretionary Grants

Amount: $600,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Heartland Family Services, Inc.

Address of Requesting Entity: 515 East Broadway, Council Bluffs, IA 51503

Description of Request: Heartland Family Services Residential Methamphetamine Treatment in Southwest Iowa--The need for the Southwest Iowa Methamphetamine Treatment Program centers around the epidemic of methamphetamine use. One in three child protective investigations in the Council Bluffs area involves this drug. Some babies are born with methamphetamine in their system, and children are exposed to use of the drug in their home. Some children live in homes where methamphetamine is being manufactured.

This project will be a collaborative effort between Heartland Family Services, the Iowa Department of Human Services, the courts, and other social service agencies. It is a clinically managed low-intensity residential service for substance abuse patients, using Heartland Family Service's established residential treatment and counseling facilities. The program offers women an interim residential treatment service, and at the same time allows them to continue parenting their children. Treatment is directed toward applying recovery skills, preventing relapse, promoting personal responsibility and reintegrating the patient into work, education and family life. Services include individual, group and family therapy.

This level of care is a missing piece in the substance abuse treatment continuum of care in Southwest Iowa. Patients who complete residential programming ordinarily go directly home and receive outpatient treatment. To prevent relapse, many of these patients would benefit from a monitored interim treatment setting. Each patient has clinical oversight by a professional counselor who assesses the psychosocial history of a substance abuser to determine the most appropriate treatment plan.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Corps of Engineers, Section 206

Amount: $0--It is a named project

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Department of Natural Resources

Address of Requesting Entity: 502 East Ninth Street, Des Moines, IA 50319

Description of Request: Little Storm Lake Aquatic 206 Restoration Project--This joint project between the local Storm Lake Improvement Group, the US Army COE and the IDNR has as an objective to improve the aquatic species habitat in the Storm Lake watershed and to restore the wetland function of Little Storm Lake. Any funding made available to this project will be used to continue design and construction of the Little Storm Lake Aquatic 206 Restoration Project critical to improve aquatic species habitat and restore wetland function.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Bureau of Reclamation, Water and Related Resources

Amount: $27,000,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Lewis and Clark Regional Water System

Address of Requesting Entity: 401 E 8th Street, Suite 306, Sioux Falls, SD 57103

Description of Request: When completed, Lewis & Clark Regional Water System will be a wholesale supplier of treated water to 20 cities and rural water systems in northwest Iowa, southeast South Dakota and southwest Minnesota (an area the size of Connecticut). Over 300,000 people in the tri-state region will benefit from the project. Iowa members include Hull, Rock Rapids, Sheldon, Sibley and Sioux Center. L&C will have an immense impact on the quality of life and economic development of the tri-state region. The project is a unique cooperative agreement among the federal government, three states and 20 local governments. This type of cooperation and consolidation, which in L&C's case involves 20 cities and rural water cities banding together to address common water needs, is a model of efficiency that the federal government is encouraging.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Environmental Protection Agency, STAG Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Project

Amount: $150,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: The City of Spencer, Iowa

Address of Requesting Entity: 418 2nd Ave. West, Spencer, Iowa 51301

Description of Request: To continue design and construction of the Combined Sewer Separation Projects critical to eliminate the overflow of sewage into the basements of City of Spencer citizens during major thunderstorms. The City of Spencer continues to dedicate significant funding toward separating storm and sanitary sewers over 100 years old, which serves one-third of City of Spencer residents. Since 1990, five projects have been completed towards this goal.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration--Health Facilities and Services

Amount: $476,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Western Community College

Address of Requesting Entity: 2700 College Road, Council Bluffs, IA 51502

Description of Request: Iowa Western Nursing Center of Excellence-- Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs will use these funds to increase the number of highly skilled nurses in the state of Iowa. Since 2003, 100% of Iowa Western Community College's graduates have passed the state nursing certification test on the first attempt, which is better than many of the state's, as well as the region's, four-year institutions. Because Iowa Western Community College currently graduates many of the state's top dental assistants, dental hygienists, practical nurses, registered nurses, surgical technologists, medical assistants and emergency medical technicians, enrollment could be greatly increased to meet demand if the college had the necessary equipment and expanded faculties. Therefore, Iowa Western Community College proposes a new Iowa Western Nursing Center of Excellence, with multiple laboratories and high-tech equipment on which to train thousands of future nurses within the next decade. The college, community and private donors have recently committed at least $10,000,000 to the Center's construction. The new laboratories and equipment will strongly enhance substantial job creation within Iowa, improve access to health care for Iowans and expand the creation of a scientifically qualified workforce in the medical and health services arena. By greatly enhancing the teaching environment, as well as the physical learning space and equipment, Iowa Western Community College will alleviate the region's nurse shortage and double the number of nurses it trains annually by 2012.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration--Health Facilities and Services

Amount: $428,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Northwestern College

Address of Requesting Entity: 101 7th St SW, Orange City, IA 51041

Description of Request: Northwestern College's Health and Healing Nursing Project is designed to meet the needs of its growing Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program; the staff educational needs of the Orange City Area Health System (OCAHS); and continued collaboration between OCAHS and Northwestern. Funding is requested for equipment for the nursing arts laboratory that is being built as part of the College's Health and Healing Nursing Project. Operating collaboratively with the Orange City Area Health System, the project will directly address the nation's impending nursing shortage by providing excellent new BSN nurses in a particularly rural area, while also providing for the ongoing educational and assessment needs of the hospital. Western Iowa will gain a critical opportunity to educate new nurses at an advanced level, as the need for advanced nursing education in rural western Iowa is well documented.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Transportation, Community, and System Preservation

Amount: $570,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Department of Transportation

Address of Requesting Entity: 800 Lincoln Way, Ames, IA 50010

Description of Request: Requested funding will be used to continue construction of four-lane US 20 in northwest Iowa from the county line of Sac and Calhoun counties in Iowa to Moville, Iowa. The Iowa Department of Transportation continues to dedicate significant funding toward completing the final 90 miles of this expansion project. Activity ranging from grading to environmental study and design is taking place on each of the 90 miles with 45.5 miles in the DOT's Five Year Plan in the construction phase. The funding will assist in this critical project to increase traveler safety, economic development and stem population loss in one of the state's most productive regions.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Transportation, Community, and System Preservation

Amount: $237,500

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: City of Council Bluffs

Address of Requesting Entity: 209 Pearl Street, Council Bluffs, IA 51503

Description of Request: The funding will be used to reconstruct 24th St from I-80 to 23rd Ave in order to accommodate traffic volumes, improve safety, and provide alternate routes for I-80 traffic. The 24th St interchange with I-80 directs more than 11 million annual visitors to the city's entertainment corridor.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Economic Development Initiatives

Amount: $475,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: City of Council Bluffs

Address of Requesting Entity: 209 Pearl Street, Council Bluffs, IA 51503

Description of Request: The funding will be used to implement a targeted program of single family rehabilitation and new construction, acquisition/rehabilitation of single family properties and blight removal and site development in the Playland Park neighborhood. The significance of this project will be felt not only locally but regionally as well. The project's location is highly visible and is a gateway into Council Bluffs. It will complement a sizeable ongoing ``Rivers Edge'' project estimated at $50 million.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Transportation, Community, and System Preservation

Amount: $427,500

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Department of Transportation

Address of Requesting Entity: 800 Lincoln Way, Ames, IA 50010

Description of Request: The funding will be used for the planning and construction of the U.S. 34 bridge in Mills County, Iowa. The project begins at Interstate 29/US 34 interchange west of Glenwood, Iowa. From that point it curves northwesterly crossing the Missouri River north of the confluence with the Platte River. The relocated US 34 alignment intersects with US 75 (Kennedy Expressway) south of Bellevue, NE.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number: H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009

Account: Interstate Maintenance Discretionary

Amount: $1,092,500

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: City of Sioux City

Address of Requesting Entity: 405 6th Street PO Box 447 Sioux City,

Madam Speaker, I appreciate so much the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives on this 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.

I've watched, of course, Lincoln's life and history from the perspective of actually a youth who was pointed out to me by my family back in those years. So I have always paid a lot of attention to Abraham Lincoln.

As our 16th President of the United States, the man who saved the Union--who did a lot of things--but a man who saved the Union, kept us from being forever divided. I played a little with the history and the question of that. What would have happened if the Civil War would have ended with a division rather than the unity of the United States of America?

All history that flows from that date--from the 1860s--of this country, would be changed. The history of any involvement that we might have had during the Spanish-American conflict; during World War II; as we heard, from Judge Poe; World War II; Korea; Vietnam, all of the wars, but also the geopolitics, the economy. We would not have become the preeminent economic power in the world if Abraham Lincoln hadn't come along and this Nation hadn't been blessed with him at the time it was.

His perseverance to save the Union has positioned this Nation to go forward to a level of destiny I believe unimagined by our Founding Fathers and unimagined by Abraham Lincoln himself.

One cannot say enough about what Abraham Lincoln did for this country or for the free world, Madam Speaker. But here we are today, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, celebrating these two centuries of prosperity that we've had, and I mean the prosperity of liberty, the prosperity of freedom, the prosperity of the Union holding together, and the constitutional point being preserved that this is an indissolvable Union of the States, of the several States and, today, of the 50 States, Madam Speaker.

I can't help but reflect that today is the day that it was planned by our current President of the United States, President Obama, to bring this huge spending stimulus package to the floor of the House of Representatives for what they anticipated and hoped would be a final passage vote of the conference report here in the House so that the bill may or may not have been handled by the Senate today, but so it had the chance to at least have been passed in this Chamber--this Chamber--where Abraham Lincoln served one term before he went back and went through some political bumps in the road and then became President of the United States.

And one can walk through those doors and down the hallway and stand

on the brass plate, the very spot where Abraham Lincoln's desk was when he served this country in this United States House of Representatives, where we are today, Madam Speaker.

Abraham Lincoln, the man who saved the Union, the man who stood on constitutional principles, the man who abhorred slavery but still understood that the language in the Constitution allowed for it. The man who cleared the way so we could pass the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments. The man who made it possible that we could have constitutional protection for rights of all men, and later paved the way for the rights of all women. Abraham Lincoln, Madam Speaker.

Abraham Lincoln, his ghost is with us, his spirit is with us today. But this was the day that the man who's postured himself as a second Lincoln wanted to see this massive stimulus plan come to this floor for a final passage.

It's not going to happen today, Madam Speaker. And I'm grateful it's not going to happen today because for me to hold back my tears thinking about what that says about the memory of Abraham Lincoln, to move an agenda that is a massive, irresponsible spending agenda to the floor of the House as a way of commemorating and connecting the 44th President of the United States, who is from Illinois, with the 16th President of the United States, who was a conservative from Illinois who stood for these constitutional principles. I can't think how they can be any further apart from a monetary perspective, Abraham Lincoln and President Obama, than what we see here today.

Abraham Lincoln was a conservative, Madam Speaker. Abraham Lincoln was a constitutionalist. Abraham Lincoln was on a strong national defense. Abraham Lincoln believed a series of things that I think this Chamber needs to hear about. And they don't fit very well with the legislation that has been pushed out of the White House today, or with the legislation that has been pushed from the Speaker's office.

And so, Madam Speaker, Lincoln--Lincoln, the conservative; Lincoln, the objective person who believed in personal responsibility; Lincoln, the man who was credited with saying, You can't help the poor by punishing the rich, You can't help the weak by weakening the strong; the whole series of those other statements made by President Lincoln-- and here we are with this massive spending bill, this $838 billion spending bill. And when you add the interest on it, it has been back down now to something like $791 billion in the negotiations. And you add the interest on it and you come to $1.138 trillion sitting today in a conference report that is being printed, we think, with the idea that America's economy will be stimulated if we just spend enough money.

John Maynard Keynes wasn't born in time to influence Abraham Lincoln's philosophy. If he had been, I do not think he would have found favor with Abraham Lincoln or the cabinet. But Keynes was a contemporary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Keynes did advocate that spending money stimulated the economy. Just by the virtue of spending the money, it stimulated the economy.

And so the simplest way to describe that would be--first, I need to tie this together. That President Obama has often articulated his belief that spending money stimulates the economy. He has said that-- and the language is, ``Stimulus is spending,'' if we remember his angry speech the other day. ``Stimulus is spending.''

And so he's advocated this spending as if it doesn't matter where it goes, it just matters the size of it. And as I've listened to him speak, my disagreement is I don't believe the New Deal worked. His argument is that if FDR would have just not lost his nerve, if FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, father of the New Deal, which has directly reflected the policies promoted by John Maynard Keynes, if FDR had just spent enough money, the New Deal would have gotten us out of the Depression. Well, Madam Speaker, it didn't get us out of the Depression.

And the President, the current President, President Obama, has said that we are going to grow this economy by spending. Stimulus is spending. And indexing it into this belief of Keynes. Here's what Keynes said. ``When it comes to public works, the more wasteful, the better.'' Because if you waste a lot of money spending it on public works, at least you're not competing directly with the private sector and taking away the things they might be doing that actually stimulate the economy. That private sector is generally the productive sector of the economy, Madam Speaker.

And, Keynes went on. Now, remember, this is at the basis, the foundation for FDR's New Deal, which is the basis for Barack Obama's new ``new deal,'' this uber new deal that hangs out above us today, that seems to have been at least temporarily suspended by the image of Abraham Lincoln and maybe the conscience of Abraham Lincoln, holding this thing back, maybe for another day, maybe longer.

Here is what Keynes said: If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez fair to dig the notes up again, there need be no more unemployment.

Keynes said if we would just print a lot of Federal money and put it in bottles and go to the coal mine and bury it in the ground, and then dump the coal mine full of garbage and step back and watch the flurry of activity, that we would solve unemployment. That seems to be the approach that is brought today. It brings to mind for me the movie that the Beatles published some years ago, Magic Christian. If you remember the scene in Magic Christian where there was all kinds of garbage and refuse and just revolting material dumped into this swimming pool along with a lot of money, and there you had greedy people diving into the swimming pool and fighting each other for the money to get their hands on it. The same image: Keynes, the Beatles, Magic Christian; Keynes, FDR, Barack Obama. Their economic policy is the same. Nancy Pelosi's economic policy, the same.

We are here today doing all we can to hold back this disaster that is intergenerational theft of hundreds of billions of dollars cumulating into multiple trillions of dollars that are debt that we will not pay in our lifetime but will be debt that is passed along to our children and grandchildren. And if we saddle this economy, they may not be able to pay it in their lifetime, even if they come to the senses that we can't seem to get in a majority on the floor of this House.

I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Missouri. I am looking forward to the input that he would have on this economic issue, Mr. Akin, such time as he may consume.

Reclaiming my time, and thanking the gentleman from Missouri for his many hours here and for his many hours in front and behind the scenes standing up for our American values. It triggers in my memory how much money an aircraft carrier can be built for.

Bloomberg reported on Monday that if you add up the commitments that the United States has made within the last year in economic stimulus plan in one kind or another, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, including the rebate check, including the $700 billion bailout, the risk in Fannie and Freddie and these bailouts, it comes to $9.7 trillion. That is with a ``T.'' And if we applied the $9.7 trillion to the home mortgages in America, it would pay off 90 percent of the home mortgages in America. That is how much money is at risk here, taxpayers' money, the people's money in this country, Madam Speaker.

I would be so happy to yield so much time as she might want to utilize to the gentlelady from Minnesota, Mrs. Bachmann.

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota for the quick mind that she has and the background that she has not only as a tax attorney, but also as a mother and a foster parent. She is someone who has also plied the trade and understands taxes and the incentives that are involved. She has been involved in the private sector for many years starting and operating businesses successfully. All of this background gets threaded into the judgment that comes here. And that was how it was envisioned, that we would bring our skills from our private life to this Congress and work together.

The stimulus package, I might add, Madam Speaker, is not one of those. It didn't benefit from one side of the aisle here. It didn't have the bipartisan negotiations. It didn't really reflect the free market attitudes of the Republicans. It only reflects the grow government, grow entitlement and grow the dependency philosophy of Democrats. And part of me says, well, if it is going to be one or the other, then let the people decide. And if they can't decide for allowing for a legitimate debate and amendment process here on the floor of the House, then perhaps they will decide in the next election, Madam Speaker. And that is what this is about is making this case. I'm very well aware of the inertia that is there. But I still say, maybe, maybe the image of Abraham Lincoln is holding this disastrous stimulus plan back. Maybe America will come to pass and actually people will wake up tomorrow morning having had an epiphany and come to their senses that spending money for the sake of spending money is the equivalent, as Keynes said, of digging a hole and burying it. And the President said we're not just digging a hole and filling it back up. But yes, we are. We are with about $2 out of every $3 in the stimulus plan.

I recognize some Members here on the floor. Since I have spoken to the Illinois issue, I have been looking forward to hearing from a son of Illinois, since this is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, the gentleman with all of the vigor that Illinois could muster on any given day, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo) for so much time as he may consume.

I thank the gentleman from Illinois and appreciate listening to him.

I have listened also to the President of the United States. And one of the pieces of this recovery package as he describes it and in the stimulus package as some others describe it and the ``porkulous'' package as others describe it, is that there would be no earmarks. I remember the Presidential campaign. I remember John McCain and Barack Obama both taking the pledge that there would be no earmarks in their administration.

And I want to point out that President Obama made the point specifically about this recovery package that there would be no earmarks. And he said, ``we will ban all earmarks in the recovery package.'' I'm quoting the President of the United States. ``And I describe earmarks as the process by which individual Members insert pet projects without review. So what I'm saying is, we're not having earmarks in the recovery package, period.'' That is the clear statement the President of the United States recently made within the context of this recovery package.

And so, Madam Speaker, I brought along this little poster to illustrate how a deal doesn't long stay a deal. We've already heard that we were going to have a bill up for 48 hours for public scrutiny before it would come to the floor for a vote. That looks like that is a thing of the past. Remember the language, ``individual Members will not be inserting pet projects without review. So what I'm saying is, we're not having earmarks in the recovery package, period,'' Barack Obama.

Well, Madam Speaker, here we have a pet, a mouse, a pet project, a pet project of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. This little mouse here, a desert mouse, I don't know what he is, a sand mouse, it is a mouse that Nancy Pelosi has been seeking to create habitat for for some time. It is her pet project, this pet mouse.

I thank the gentleman. Hopefully I didn't offend the mouse. He is a salt marsh mouse, a salt marsh mouse from California, and conservatives are more numerous, I recognize. However, this $30 million is an earmark in the stimulus plan, in the recovery plan. It is a direct violation of the mark laid down by the President of the United States that there wouldn't be any special projects set up by individual Members, period. No earmarks. Well, here is $30 million for the salt marsh water mouse of California. This mouse, who has not affected my life in any way whatsoever, but will affect yours soon, because we will be paying taxes, interest and debt on this $30 million mouse.

I would yield.

I thank the gentlelady. I would hope they would not be San Franciscan monk mice. But I appreciate they are salt marsh mice with San Francisco leanings.

And I might say also if you take a look at this mouse real closely, there has got to be an earmark right there in that mouse. The salt marsh mouse with San Francisco leanings, not a monk mouse, has an earmark in him. And it is a $30 million notch punched in there that is identified by the Speaker of the House, who has taken positions against earmarks, but has not apparently sworn off them for herself. And so this is just one piece.

This is $30 million out of what is over $1 trillion stimulus package, a porkulous package. This is just a symbol of what we're up against. And by the way, nobody has seen the draft of this bill yet. We only see the reports on the discussions that leak out of the rooms where it is being drafted. It is not going to be hanging up on the Web for 48 hours. It is not going to have the scrutiny of the public. It is simply going to be a bill that is written in the dark and rushed to the floor under a rule that doesn't allow open discussion beyond a limited amount of debate on the rules and a limited amount of debate on the conference report.

So, since we have had a good look at this salt marsh mouse, and we have had a good look at his earmark, I think it is important to go to someone from California who knows a little bit about conservatives in California who I think hopefully are not an endangered species like the salt marsh mouse, the gentleman, Mr. McClintock, from California.

I thank the gentleman from California. And picking up on the point that you've made so succinctly, the projection, as reported this morning, is that this ``porkulus'' plan will create or save 3,675,000 thousand jobs. And the formula is that, this is a rule of thumb formula that's also used by the Federal Reserve, that if you spend enough money to increase the Gross Domestic Product by 1 percent, that equates into roughly 1 million new jobs. So if you increase it by 3.675 percent, by spending money, whether you dig a hole and bury it in the coal mine, as we talked earlier, wherever it goes, that's the rule of thumb.

And I'd point out also that the President has taken this position that it's create or save. Well, anything can save a job. Doing nothing would save jobs. And this formula that's only indexed back to a loose idea that investing, spending money, just spending money creates jobs, that's all it is. It's just that formula, that rule of thumb.

And looking at the order of arrival on the floor, I think it might be appropriate to hear a little from Texas before we go back to the other coast. And I'd appreciate it if the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), my good friend, would illuminate us with some of his wisdom.

Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Texas.

I'd like to briefly recognize the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann) before I go to California for an insert here of a piece of knowledge I think we need.

Reclaiming my time, we would soon have Al Franken's version of fair and balanced. And before we go to the salt marsh mouse expert of California, I just want to point out that President Obama said that there would be no pet projects, and no earmarks. But we have this pet project of the pet of the Speaker of the House, this San Francisco $30 million winner of this stimulus plan, even though it violates all the rules that have been laid out here, except maybe he will be on display for 48 hours before he comes to final passage.

Gentleman from California (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren) for so much time as he may consume.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from California.

I happen to remember that debate. The last one I heard on Fannie and Freddie was an amendment offered by Congressman Leach on October 26, 2005 right here, and it was the chairman of the Financial Services Committee today who came down and who most vigorously opposed requiring the capitalization and regulation of Fannie and Freddie, and they're beginning to clean up that which is now a $5.5 trillion contingent liability for the taxpayers of America.

I would like to turn to Ohio. I recognize our time is a little short, but we will grant however much latitude the gentleman from Ohio might like to have.

Mr. Latta.

I thank the gentleman from Ohio, and I thank all the folks who have come down here to lend some wisdom.

Recognizing we have about 2 minutes left, unless he should run out of material, I will be happy to yield the balance of time, or so much time as he might consume, to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to thank you for your indulgence this evening, and I appreciate your attention.

I would yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I very much thank Judge Carter for bringing up the issue of ethics in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. And it is not an easy thing to raise these issues on the floor of this House. There are pressures in this place that push a person who serves here to conform, to not make waves and to not expose themselves to legislative retaliation. So, there are many Members of this Congress who would think about those things instead of thinking about the standards that we need to uphold in this great deliberative body.

And we are going into the 220th year since the ratification of our Constitution. And it has been a long history in this Chamber with high standards. Of course, there have been disagreements and squabbles along the way. And there have been times back in those days of old when Members came to blows.

We have a different way of approaching things today. And if we look back upon previous Congresses, there have been standards that have been brought forth. I remember a Speaker of the House who saw 74 sets of ethical charges brought against him, and all in an effort to bring down the Speaker. Finally, to get away from that all, he accepted one of them that could have crossed the line, which melded the whole thing down.

And here we sit today with a dysfunctional Ethics Committee, an Ethics Committee that doesn't take up the issues that come before them. They are there deadlocked. And so, since we have a dysfunctional Ethics Committee, we have a place, Mr. Speaker, to appeal to. And that becomes you, Mr. Speaker, and the echo that comes from here to the American people.

And Judge Carter has brought this privileged resolution today. It has laid out a whole line of facts as we know them with regard to the activities of the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel). And he has spoken, I think well, to the standards that have been put up by the New York Times, which I previously haven't looked to for a standard, but by the President of the United States, who has said there will be only one set of standards, whether you're powerful or whether you're unpowerful, you have to live to the same ethical standard. And when you see the quote that comes from Speaker Pelosi, November 8, 2006, where she says ``the American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history,'' it's not bearing up very well considering that the Ethics Committee is not taking up issues, and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee still presides in a time of economic crisis, we all agree, when important bills like the stimulus bill have to be written, and they have to be written in cooperation, and they should be written in a bipartisan fashion, which we missed that train entirely over here, Mr. Speaker. There was no bipartisanship that applied to the bill that came to the floor. And we shall see if there is a conference committee that shows that bipartisanship. But if there is a question, if there is a question of whether it sheds light in an ill way upon this Congress, then it is incumbent upon those who wield some of the most power in this Chamber to step down and allow their name to be cleared or allow the charges to stick, whichever the case may be.

This privileged resolution raises this issue. One might note that there was no debate on the floor of this privileged resolution. There was a motion to table the privileged resolution, and so the only voice to it was the Clerk reading the resolution and the motion to table, which is an undebatable motion. And it was voted down on party lines, Mr. Speaker. I think the public will recognize that when you see ethical questions that are decided upon party lines, especially ethical questions that are difficult to raise because of the relationships, the collegial relationships that we have between Members here across the aisle, I think they will understand that politics is part of this. And the Ethics Committee is supposed to be above it.

And when it comes time to pay your taxes and report your income, no one should be above that. I agree with Tom Daschle on that point, and I agree with President Obama on that point. I would like to think that the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee agrees as well. But when the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee doesn't understand the convoluted taxes that he has helped to contrive over the years and so therefore can presumably take a pass for failure to pay those taxes, if there is an excuse for the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, then, Mr. Speaker, I would submit who in America is it not an excuse for? If the Ways and Means Chair doesn't understand the taxes and responsibilities well enough, if it was inadvertent, then say so. Bring this out. If it is not inadvertent, I think that also needs to be brought out. I suspect it was inadvertent. But it is still a responsibility.

It is a responsibility of the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, a responsibility of the Secretary of the Treasury, the boss of the IRS, to use TurboTax. And he couldn't get his taxes right, even though he cashed the checks that were reimbursement for the taxes he was to pay. And we are to overlook this because there is only one man in America big enough or smart enough to get us out of this economic crisis that we are in. That would be the Secretary of the Treasury. Apparently there is only one person in America that can wield the gavel over the Ways and Means Committee while we muddle through this economic crisis without having the confidence that all the best interests of the American people are in mind.

These are some of the things that flow into my mind as I watch this, Mr. Speaker. And I yield back to the gentleman from Texas. I thank you for the bringing this to the floor, and I thank you for the privileged resolution.

Well, yes, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. And I point out that according to the law, we're innocent until proven guilty. That is according to the law. We have a different set of standards here in the House. It's an ethical standard here in the House. And the House makes its own rules, and the House determines those standards that we must all be upheld to as Members. And I would point out that even though there was $90,000 discovered in the gentleman from Louisiana's freezer, the Ethics Committee couldn't quite get to that issue. Apparently it was a little vague for the Ethics Committee. That is a committee that should be able to act quickly, and they should see to it that these kind of things are headed off at the pass, so to speak, and dealt with in an early fashion. But we went through two elections before the voters of Louisiana came around and sent a new individual here to this Congress to represent them. They finally had enough. And I applaud them for that, for making that decision. Sometimes you will find constituents that will conclude that maybe they don't have that much confidence in their Member of Congress, but it's their district, and they see that there are resources coming back to the district, and sometimes they don't want to vote someone out of office. This must have been just enough down there, because it took two elections to end the issue. The Ethics Committee still hadn't acted. The Ethics Committee hasn't acted on Mr. Rangel. The Ethics Committee is immobilized at this point, Mr. Speaker.

And as the weight of these issues come up, one after another after another, I will submit that it sounds to me as I listen to the echoes through the national media and through the media in this town that we haven't heard the end of this. There are more posters there I know. And I'm of the understanding that there are a number of other individuals who have their own concerns that might have to do with warrants and perhaps subpoenas.

And, again, we've got to clean up this House. If we're going to have the confidence of the American people, then we have to stand on high ethical standards. And justice has to be swift and sure. It doesn't need to be played out until the end, till it becomes such a political liability that your own colleagues on your own side of the aisle will finally say, I'm tired of being associated. It's making me vulnerable. Why don't you please give up the gavel and sit down. That is one way that it does happen. But it becomes a political question instead of an ethical question. It becomes a political question instead of a legal question.

Again, we are held to the highest standards here. And I'll agree with the statement made by the Speaker, and I ask her to hold to this standard, that this be and becomes as honest, as open and as ethical as any Congress in history. That's the standard that we should have. It's not working out quite that way. It was good language when it was used for political purposes in order to win elections. But it's not such good language today when you have this many Members on one side of the aisle with this many national questions hanging out there and so many issues that are challenging us to hold a high

standard here in this House of Representatives.

I appreciate the Rangel rule. I'm a cosponsor of Judge Carter's bill, the Rangel rule, where if you don't get around to paying your taxes and you decide that your conscience kicks in or you find some money and you want to sign on the return, then the penalty or the interest can be waived, according to the same standards that were there and made available to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

I looked at the Tim Geithner case, spoke to a few moments earlier, about how he was reimbursed for taxes that he was advised that he owed, and that advice came four times a year. I don't know how often the check came. But he cashed the checks but didn't pay the taxes. And now we have him heading up the Internal Revenue Service.

Now I would think that most of us, Mr. Speaker, have a constituent or two or three that might find themselves in a Federal penitentiary because of failure to pay Federal taxes. That would probably be willful failure to pay Federal taxes. And of those constituents, American people that are in prison, I'm wondering if there's a pass for the Secretary of the Treasury, and if there's a pass for the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, then why wouldn't President Obama pardon everybody that's in the Federal penitentiaries for tax violations?

It seems to me that would be an open, honest, ethical thing to do. If there's going to be only one standard, and if the standard is that if you cheat on your taxes you can hold a government job, why would it not be that same kind of standard that would require, out of the sense of conformity, only one standard, a pardon for all those folks who have violated the same laws that some of the top officials of the administration have essentially admitted to in the public arena?

So let's have one standard. I think the standard should be, enforce the law, as Tom Daschle said about 15 years ago from the floor of the United States Senate. He didn't comply so well with it, but he did say enforce it. So let's follow that. Let's enforce the law. Let's enforce the ethical standards here in the Congress. And if we do that, however painful, however bitter the pills might be, we put it behind us and we can move on and we can do the right thing for the American people.

But this anchor is clattering as it is drug across the floor of this House of Representatives, it's an anchor being drug by the Speaker of the House. It's an anchor that's being drug by the majority leader in the House of Representatives, and it certainly is an albatross around the neck. We need to get to the bottom of this.

The American people need sunlight on all that we do. And let me further submit, Mr. Speaker, that we don't have sunlight on our own finances, not in the fashion that the public can track it. We need to have sunlight on what we do. We report our income and we report our assets and our liabilities. But there's a gap there. We report in a range. And the ranges, Mr. Speaker, are narrow if it's a little bit of money, but if it's a lot of money then the ranges are wide. Now, I'm going from memory a little bit, but it seems to me there's zero to $150,000. That might be one category of real estate assets. And then it goes on up, maybe $150,000 to 350 or $400,000. Those I am not so clear on. But I am clear on this; once you get over the $5 million category, then you report your assets or liabilities within a range of between 5 and $25 million, so there's a $20 million range. And then you have several categories, so you can stack those categories together. If you're on the low side you might be $5,000,001 and you might have five different categories of assets like that. So you'd have maybe a minimum of $25 million in assets in five different categories, or it could be $25 million in five different categories, $125 million.

We have seen a Member's net worth go, in a matter of 3 years, from the low six figures to about $6.5 million dollars. But no one can really track that because we are not required to report the direct dollar amount, and that gives a place for everybody to hide that wants to hide. And I think out of this needs to come a real requirement that we report real assets and real liabilities to the best dollar as we know it and to the best dates that we can produce, and then post it, as we did on the motion to instruct conferees today for the stimulus bill. All of our records, if they're going to be public records, need to be posted in a searchable, sortable, downloadable database so that the public can look in and have sunlight on these kind of finances that raise these kind of questions and maybe, just maybe there would be some good advice coming from somebody across America that would say, hey, Mr. Geithner, pay your taxes, Mr. Rangel, pay your taxes. That's the message that I think the public would deliver here if we gave them an opportunity to look over our shoulder. We can't even look over our own shoulder because there's protection built into the financial reporting requirements; and it was wrong from the beginning; it's wrong today.

And I'd just say, one standard for all people. I agree with the President, whether you're powerful or whether you aren't powerful, everybody should live by the same standard, and that is enforce the law to the letter, as Tom Daschle said from the floor of the United States Senate.

I yield back to the gentleman from Texas.

It's an honor and a privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. It's interesting and intriguing for me to listen to the dialog that flows forth from earlier this evening, the gentleman from Texas, and now the voices of the Congressional Progressive Caucus as they put their poster up on the floor that directs people to their Web site and make their argument as to the things that are in this stimulus package that they believe should stay and the things that are not in and may have been taken out that they believe should have stayed in or be put back in.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that this debate that we have is much deeper and much more profound than the components that have been discussed here in the previous hour. I think it goes to our vision of America itself. And the question that is before this country is, in some sense, What will we do in the middle of this economic crisis, this one that came tumbling down upon us on September 19, the date that Secretary of the Treasury Paulson came to the Capitol and very intensely insisted that we provide $700 billion for him to spend at his discretion, without a lot of oversight, perhaps with no oversight,

and provided that bailout money in two different increments, $350 billion in the first increment, and then congressional disapproval would have been required in order to block the second $350 billion.

So the entire $700 billion of the bailout money has been advanced into the hands of the Secretary of the Treasury who has some problems of his own. Those would be of his own intent to pay his taxes, et cetera, Mr. Speaker.

This discussion that we are in, this discussion that is being led by the President of the United States and his position that we must do something, we must do it fast, we can't do it halfway, we must do it all the way, and his insistence that we not flag and that we not fail, and that we come forward and support this stimulus plan has galvanized its support in the House of Representatives and in the Senate behind a single simple philosophy that seems to justify the capitulation of the responsibility to each of us Members to draw a reason and informed judgment and do the right thing for our country, for our State, for our district.

And this decision is this. Pulling back in behind this logic, which is, President Obama has called for a stimulus plan. It shall spend $800 billion, or more, plus the interest, which will be about $350 billion in addition to that, and it will have a mix that has some small business stimulation in it, some infrastructure in it, and a lot of other things, which are the bells and whistles and wish list to the left, Mr. Speaker. It's all packed in there.

And the Members, especially the Members on the Democrat side of the aisle here, and the U.S. Senators of the same political party, they will argue and defend component by component. But the rationale that's going on in the minds of the Members and the caucus is this: Well, we must do something. We know we have an economic crisis. This is the only thing that we can choose from because that is what has been served up to this Congress by the Speaker of the House, by the majority leader in the United States Senate, and by the President of the United States, who happened to be, not coincidentally, the three people in the United States that could come together in one room and set the direction for this entire country and not have to go outside that room and ask anybody for their input, for their knowledge, their wisdom base, that of their constituents.

A lesson from history, a look through the looking glass into the future? Sometimes it feels like we have gone through the looking glass here, Mr. Speaker.

But here's the question that is before us. In an economic crisis, with a crisis of confidence in our financial institutions, a crisis of capital that arises more out of that lack of confidence than it does out of a slowdown of production or slowdown in the markets--it's the other way around. It's the crisis in the capital that is backing up and causing these slowdowns.

But to look through the history of the economy of the United States, or the free world, for that matter, and for an economist to ask themselves, and all of us should be at least amateur economists here. We're making decisions for the people of the United States of America.

But they ask themselves, What has happened historically and economically that we have addressed from this Congress that has been improved, and how did we do so? So, we take ourselves back through this history, and I can think of the economic crisis we had in the eighties. I saw the charts, Mr. Speaker, that were put up here on the floor that show--well, what shall I call them? Bush 41's recession and then Bush 43's recession. That seems that's how it was presented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

No. We have had some real economic crises in our past. One of them was what we called in the Midwest the farm crisis, which was not limited to the farm crisis but it also was a real estate and an energy crisis. And during those years of the eighties, when things were very tough economically and statistically worse than they are today, although I won't argue that things today will not get that bad, Mr. Speaker.

But in the eighties we lost 3,000 banks. Many, many farms went under. We lost a lot of oil rigs out there that they were producing and tapping into our energy. The crisis in the real estate was a big piece of it too. Three thousand banks. The FDIC came in and closed a lot of them. In fact, they shut my bank down on April 26, Friday afternoon, three o'clock, 1985. I remember the red tag on the door. Closed by order of the banking commissioner. Highway patrol guarding the door, Mr. Speaker.

Those were some tough times. And what did we do then? Well, we didn't do a lot of the things that are being proposed today. There was some plans that came out. One of the things we did was we provided net worth certificates to shore up some of the banks that needed some collateral. They accepted a look over their shoulder from the FDIC and asked them to shore up their operations. Those banks that received that kind of collateralization, all came out of it. Every one of them was part of that. All succeeded.

We found a way through this, and we sold some real estate down to the value of the real estate. New buyers came in that could borrow the money or had the cash to make the purchases because there were some bargains out there. When those bargains got picked up, the markets came up. Real estate prices stabilized. Banks became stable again. The confidence was back in our economy again.

That was a long decades of the eighties. A lot was wrong. A lot was more wrong going into the eighties than we are seeing today. We had high unemployment then. We had high inflation then--inflation that ran up towards 20 percent. And I personally paid 22 percent interest for operating capital to keep my business running through a tough, tough decade of economic times.

We are not seeing 22 percent interest today, Mr. Speaker. And our employment rates, yes, they are going up, and we have over 10 million people in America that are at least statistically looking for jobs. It is not as bad as it was then, yet. And the eighties were not as bad as they were in the thirties. And when we look at the thirties, there should be some lessons there for us. And I sat in classroom after classroom getting my classical education; and one historian, government teacher, economist after another would fill our little brains full of the knowledge base that has been learned from history, that we had an economic calamity in 1929 and the stock market crashed and people jumped out of the windows to their death because they couldn't sustain the grief of watching their net worth go down. Well, if you look historically, it is pretty hard to find anybody that jumped out of the window. It wasn't as bad as they said, from that standpoint of Wall Street suicides, at least.

Then, through those times Herbert Hoover was President, and he had great confidence in his ability to manage. And so he came forward with the Smoot-Hawley Act, which was trade protectionism, and there was global retaliation. And then our industry and our manufacturing and our exports lost a lot of their markets because of the trade protectionism. Each country around the world did a lot of the same thing; they pulled back within themselves, and the economies began to shut down in that fashion. They opened up the legislation so that unions had a little more powerful leverage when it came to striking. They passed the Davis- Bacon Wage Act; that followed.

But as this economy went down, Herbert Hoover believed that he could manage his way through that. He didn't trust the marketplaces like Calvin Coolidge did, but he trusted his ability to manage, and he lost his reelect. My only Iowa President lost his reelect in 1932 to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt came in, and he had been influenced by the famous economist Keynes, who advocated that if government just spends enough money, it will create an economy that will have apparently its own inertia, and it will bring us out of this great depression.

So FDR's programs came in one after another, the WTPA, the PWA, the CCC, on and on and on, the TVA. And each time that the Federal Government stepped in and started another program, they competed with the private sector; they competed with the private sector for capital and they competed with the private sector for labor.

Now, if you go back and look at wealthy nations and see what Adam

Smith has to say about the value of any product, he will say and he has written there very extensively that the value of any product is the sum total of the capital and the labor that it takes to produce it, deliver it, market it, and get it into the hands of the consumer. So if you buy a gallon of milk, you add up so many ounces of milk is for the capital that it took, and the balance of it is for the labor that it took for it to deliver. And that is how Adam Smith analyzed it.

But the capital and the labor in the United States was being swallowed up in government. And capital, when it comes in significant quantities in the private sector, the productive sector of the economy, smart money goes to the sidelines rather than compete with government. And that is what happened in the thirties during the great depression: The smart money went to the sidelines, our economy stagnated, and we had soup lines and we had make-work projects and we had hand labor, stoop labor building dams and roads and parks. We commissioned and paid people to go out into the cemeteries and write down everything that they could read off of the stones in the cemeteries so there would be a record. We paid writers to write; we paid painters to paint, because we wanted to pay people to do something, or nothing, so that the borrowed money and those tax dollars could flow out into the economy, into the hands of the people that would spend it.

Sounding pretty familiar right now, Mr. Speaker, this idea of taking dollars and putting it into the hands of people so that they spend it to stimulate the economy. In fact, Keynes himself had I think some fairly radical ideas: Spending money would stimulate the economy. In fact, his approach was that the worse utility that a project had, the more useful it was from a government perspective, from the standpoint that if the government spent money on something that was completely ridiculous, at least they weren't competing with the private sector. So Keynes understood some of the argument that I have just made. He went so far to make the argument that he could solve the unemployment problem during the thirties if we would just take those good old Treasury notes or Federal bills, greenbacks, U.S. cash, put them in jars and take them out to a big old abandoned coal mine and bury those jars around there in that old abandoned coal mine--this is Keynes talking--and then fill the old coal mine up with garbage and turn the laissez fair loose, the free enterprise loose. Let the entrepreneurs go out and dig through the garbage to dig up the money, and that would solve, through the competition of digging up this money that had been buried by the Federal Government, that would solve unemployment.

Now, he may have been a little facetious in that description, I don't know his personality, so I can only speculate that. I hope he was a little facetious. But I think his point that he wanted to make, that it didn't need to be useful work, it didn't need to be productive work.

President Obama said, ``Well, we are not just going to pay people to dig a hole and fill it back up.'' I thought that was my vernacular; I am the person who spent my life in that business of moving dirt, and on one occasion actually did dig a hole and fill it back up with nothing in it, only one occasion. The man changed his mind in the middle of that operation. But for the President to say we are not just going to dig a hole and fill it back up, but he is modeling his economic model, the President's ``new'' new deal off of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ``old'' new deal, which really was dig a hole and fill it back up sometimes.

And here is the point that I intend to make, Mr. Speaker; and that is, however one would analyze the ``old'' new deal in the thirties, it is not possible to look at the numbers and come to the conclusion that the new deal solved the depression, the great depression for America. In fact, the best conclusion that one can come to, the most charitable conclusion is that it may have, may have, Mr. Speaker, diminished the depths to which we might have fallen without the new deal in place. Maybe the economy would have gone into a complete straightjacket and tanked and gone forever downward and waited another decade or two to get its confidence back. Maybe. Maybe. I don't believe it would have, but that is the best that one can say. And the trade-off is, if a new deal, a huge massive spending gets poured into the economy for make- work projects, if that diminishes the depths to which we might otherwise fall, the trade-off is certainly it delays the recovery as well. It delays the recovery, because smart money sits on the sidelines. Entrepreneurs have been hired by the government to dig a hole and fill it back up, and smart money always goes where there is some profit, and right now smart money is pulled back to the sidelines. That is why we had some bonds that actually went into the red for just a little bit, for a little while.

There are two sectors of this economy, Mr. Speaker, that we don't talk about very often. The one that is being stimulated and is attempted to be stimulated by the President's proposal, by the components of it that are the Speaker's proposal, or the Senate's proposal, in its aggregate, that one seeks to spend money for the sake of getting it in the hands of consumers. We did that with the rebate program not quite a year ago; and you can look back on the charts for that, Mr. Speaker, and you will not see a blip that that money was spent and injected as stimulus into the economy. $150 billion in the hands of the American people, and about 30 percent of it actually got spent on new goods and about 70 percent of it went to pay off credit card bills or went into savings. So only 30 percent of the overall proposal, less than $50 billion, actually went into the economy. It doesn't even show up as a little tick on the line.

Now, $150 billion I understand, Mr. Speaker, is chump change compared to this massive piece that the Senate has now passed that we expect will be before us very soon. And this piece, when you add it all together, is over $1 trillion, but it is not much of it money spent that is going into the productive sector of the economy.

The productive sector of the economy is the private sector of the economy; it is the sector that actually produces goods and services that have value. And I have said from this microphone many times, Mr. Speaker, all new wealth comes from the land. You either raise it out of the soil, or you mine it out of the earth. You can seine some fish out of the ocean. That is about the end of it. Otherwise, it comes out of the land. And it has to start there. And out of it comes food and fiber, and from the food and fiber comes the thing we need to live. And as we add on to that, the services that come from the food and the fiber, then you get your insurance man and your doctors and your lawyers and your teachers, and all of the facets of our economy flow from the new wealth that comes from the land. But the things that we need in order to live, the housing, the clothing, the food, the necessities of life and then the niceties of life, they come from the productive sector of the economy.

Then, we have this nonproductive sector of the economy that I sometimes call the parasitic of the economy; and that is the sector that looks over the shoulder of the productive sector and decides: Well, I am going to regulate you and I am going to tax you, and I am going to justify my existence by making it harder for the productive sector to produce. That is what government often does. Government overdoes the overseeing, the overregulating, the taxation, and inhibits production.

So, on the one hand we have the productive sector of the economy that has to carry the entire burden of government, the entire burden of, let me say, the nonproductive sector of the economy in my charitable moments, and we are loading up on the nonproductive sector of the economy and we are not giving enough relief to the productive sector of the economy.

That is what this argument is about: Are you going to have an economy that is stimulated by producing more things that have value, and building the kind of infrastructure that supports commerce and trade, and reducing the kind of taxes that allow smart money to make investments with the confidence that they won't be punished for their success by a Congress or a President that has the idea that a windfall profits tax, for example, is a good way to punish someone who turns a resource

into value and puts it into our economy and pays their share of taxes as it is.

We are heading down this wrong road, this road that the President has identified as: We have to construct the leg of a stool. He didn't say how many legs, but generally, if it is a three-legged stool, they will say so. If it is a two-legged stool, they will say so. It is not a milking stool, I wish it were, Mr. Speaker. But this single leg of this multi-legged stool that the President announces we have to construct and we are going to do it one leg at a time without an idea of what the stool looks like or what the other legs look like or what they are made out of except money. We have one leg that may be back to the floor of this Congress tomorrow and likely this week that cost $150 billion for a rebate plan not quite a year ago, $700 billion-plus for the bailout last fall, and 830 or so billion dollars plus $350 billion in interest on that that is sitting here now waiting to land on the floor of this House. Just add it up in round terms, Mr. Speaker, let's just call it $2 trillion: $2 trillion to construct a single leg, and I am tracking the President's words, of a stool that is supposedly going to get us out of this mess that we are in; $2 trillion. And no one will stand up and say: Here is the effect of this money? Here is what you can expect with the economic indicators? Here is how you will see jobs in the productive sector of the economy grow or investment increase or capital be freed up for entrepreneurs? None of that is there, except to say that we are going to create or save, well, 2.5 million, 3 million, then 4 million jobs. And sometimes they get a little lazy and forget to say create or save, and they just say create 4 million jobs, but in their lucid moments they revert back to the create or save.

Now, I would like to be the one who would announce that I am here, Mr. Speaker, and I am going to create or save 10 million jobs. And 10 years from now you can go back and look, and even if I didn't point to a single job that I created, I can easily point to 10 million jobs that have been saved.

A saved job is not a measurable, quantifiable means of determining any level of success. But it's a word that lets you slip away from being held accountable for a policy that is utterly destined to fail. The New Deal failed. It was a mistake. Historians looking back on it and economists looking back on it can only point to high employment numbers, low economic activity and a stock market that crashed in October of 1929. And in spite of all of the billions of dollars in new Federal spending in the New Deal program, the stock market still didn't reach the peak that it was at in 1929 until 1954.

Now, Mr. Speaker, the President says that World War II was the best, the largest economic stimulus plan ever. Now I don't exactly quibble with those words on their face. I would just add to that, that it makes it clear that the New Deal didn't solve the Great Depression. He understands that. He argues that FDR should have spent more money, not less, that he lost his nerve, he shouldn't have worried about a balanced budget, and if he had just done enough, if he had just doubled down two or three more times, he would have come out of there as a winner. But World War II came along as the largest economic stimulus plan ever. I won't disagree with that statement.

But I will say this: It didn't quite solve our economic problems. But I believe it did start us on the path to recovery. And by the end of World War II, we hadn't yet recovered. The stock market was still 9 years away from reaching its former apex that it was at in 1929. But I believe that the post-World War II industrial might of the United States, because we were the only industrialized nation in the world that hadn't seen our industry devastated in World War II, gave us a comparative advantage. The greenback was good currency all over the world. We built products for everybody because we could. And many of them had to put back their entire infrastructure in order to be up and running again.

So, yes, World War II was a stimulus plan. But the aftermath of World War II gave a marketplace for America's industrial might to continue, to switch from making tanks to making cars and making other products and exporting them around the world. So a quarter of a century later, after the stock market crashed in 1929, we reached the previous apex and Dow Jones Industrial Average, if that is our measure of recovery, in 25 years.

So here we are today, Mr. Speaker, with an economy that has had its ups and downs. And I could take you back through the short-term history of this. We have created a lot of capital, trillions of dollars worth of capital. Some of it was false. Some of it didn't represent the actual, real value of the assets underneath it. Some of it was because Wall Street had run amok, and they were betting on a long run of a bull market. And the checks and balances weren't in place. And AIG was not calculating the risk and didn't have the capital underneath them in order to back up the insurance that they were providing.

So this has tumbled. But in the end, we need to come back to what is the real estate worth that is underneath this? What are the businesses worth that are part of the shares that are there in our stock market? Let's get down to some real values. And the $2 trillion leg on a multi- legged stool and not knowing what the stool looks like or how many legs there are, but we just know the idea is spend money, spend money, spend money, and spend it over here, and spending brings us back out of this economic situation that we are in. Production will do that.

Mr. Speaker, I submit that we need to suspend capital gains taxes and do so for 2 years. Let that smart money find a place to go without being penalized for coming back into this economy. The smart money that is on the sidelines, the $13 trillion or so that are overseas that are invested in the economy in other parts of the world that are faced with a capital gains tax, if it is corporate, if it comes back into the United States, we can free that up, Mr. Speaker. And that $13 trillion is a number as of last September. So chances are that today it's not quite $13 trillion any more. And we won't get it all back. But we will get back 1 or 2 or $3 trillion. We will get back more money that is stranded outside the U.S. economy because of the impediment of facing capital gains tax that we're going to be able to put into this economy with this so-called stimulus plan that is before us, this Congress, as we speak. We will get more money into the economy.

And then the groan goes up on this side of the aisle because if we suspended capital gains tax, we will be giving up an opportunity to tax one of these greedy capitalists. How could you live with yourself if you passed up a chance to tax somebody and you let their money come in and get invested in our economy? Well, I can live with myself to do that. If you have a good argument, I will be happy to yield and hear that argument. But I don't think you have one. We need to bring this capital back into the United States and get it into this economy. But the lost revenue for an immediate suspension of capital gains if we did so for the year 2009 would be, Mr. Speaker, $68 billion. Now I'm going to say this: Only $68 billion as compared to a couple of trillion dollars in bailout money, $68 billion in lost revenue for suspending capital gains taxes to bring in $1 or $2 or $3 trillion from overseas, maybe more, into this economy to find its way to where it would do the most good, because smart investors will do that. If we suspend capital gains tax on picking up the toxic debt that is there, those were Secretary Paulson's words, suspend capital gains tax on the income off of those investments, smart money would go pick up these mortgage- backed securities. They would take them off the marketplace. Smart money would then go out into the communities and work with the people that have been evicted, or I should say about to be evicted, from their homes, find a way to renegotiate some of those terms or sell the home, turn around and remarket it to somebody that can make some reasonable payments.

But we've got to go through this. We've got to bite the bullet. We've got to take the pain. We've got to make the adjustments. And it is not going to work for us to borrow from our children, our grandchildren and our grandchildren's children trillions of dollars with no idea of how to pay them back and no way to even move towards a balanced budget, but to put all that demand out there in the world market for capital, borrowed money from the United States Government.

And where will we borrow that money from, Mr. Speaker? Do we borrow that money, then, from China with their economy going south? Because when we catch a cold, the Chinese get sick, as well. They're tied to our economy. Are the Saudis going to have that kind of cash that they will loan to us? Perhaps. But the interest rates are going to go up. To borrow that kind of money and put it into the economy in that fashion is irresponsible. It denies the very values of the economic lessons that we know. It denies that we need to produce something that has value.

Now, if Keynes is right and we can go out, borrow the money and then bury it in the coal mine, cover it up with garbage and turn people loose to dig it up and that would solve the unemployment problem, then I think he is way off, Mr. Speaker. I'm of the other side, of the supply side of this economy.

Let me take this to another step. Immediately, I would suspend capital gains tax for 2 years. I would lock it in in stone so smart money would know they had 2 years to find a place to settle it. And maybe I would back it up even and look at the numbers, perhaps even 1 year. But if it's 2 years, we will be giving up $68 billion worth of revenue for not collecting any capital gains tax for 2009, $61 billion for 2010, that's it, $129 billion, that would be the total cost of putting 3 to 5 or more trillion dollars into this U.S. economy in the right place where smart money would go.

Now that is one of the things we could do. We can go down through the list. We ought to be talking about reform. We ought to be talking about repealing the Community Reinvestment Act and about privatizing Fannie and Freddie and requiring them to be capitalized and regulated like the other banks are. And we need to be talking about amending the mark-to- market accounting rules, the credit-default-swap rules, putting these trades up on the Internet so that there is sunlight on all of them so they can be tracked and they can have oversight.

All of those things need to happen, Mr. Speaker, and all of those things are things that should be done immediately, along with having a commission to examine the situation of the finances in this country and the economy in this country to come to a conclusion as to where we went wrong and to make some more of those changes. I have listed some. What we need to do is build a structure so it doesn't happen again. It's unlikely to happen, Mr. Speaker, when we have the chairs of the committees that have been part of the problem in the first place. Albert Einstein once said that you never solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. And we're dealing with people that have gavels that have the same mindset that created this problem.

All of these things I have talked about need to be done in the short term and in the temporary. There is a broader solution that needs to come, Mr. Speaker, and that is to set up our taxes so that we can be free of these kind of burdens for all time. I have many times come to this floor and spoken about the need to eliminate the IRS, to move to a national sales tax and to understand a principle which is this, that what you tax you get less of. The Federal Government and the United States has the first lien on all productivity in America. If you're going to earn, Mr. Speaker, Uncle Sam is there with his hand out to tax. If you're going to save, he taxes the earnings off the savings. He taxes your proceeds off your investment. Uncle Sam is there with his hand out to tax it, earnings, savings and investment. If you're a producer, you're punished by being taxed. If you're a consumer, that's fine. Some of the States, many of the States have a sales tax. Beyond that, consumers consume without being taxed except for an additional excise tax that exists in some places as well.

What you tax you get less of. But we tax all of the productivity in America. And taxing all the productivity in America virtually ensures that there won't be as much productivity in this country as there would be if we passed a national sales tax. The Fair Tax, Mr. Speaker, took the tax off of our production and put it over on consumption. If we do that, we will allow the American producers an unlimited amount that they can produce, they can earn, save and invest all they want to earn, save and invest.

When I think about people that are working a job and they're working the angles on that job and they're thinking, well, let me see, I have got my 40 hours in this week, now when I start working overtime, I go into a different bracket, my withholding is a little different, I don't know, my payroll per hour isn't as good as I would like to have it, I'm going to limit the overtime hours I'm going to work. Or it might be somebody in sales that gets paid on commission. And they do a calculation on the taxes that they would pay the IRS. And they reach a certain point, and they realize how big a chunk Uncle Sam is taking out of them, and they decide, I'm just not going to produce any more than that. I can live comfortably enough down here without having to work twice as hard to get half again more out of that labor because the tax rate swallows up that much.

Now that is just an individual working sometimes on commission or on overtime. But think about the calculus when it's an investment for a small business, maybe a small business that employs six or eight or ten people, and a business that gets to the point where it's kind of comfortable. They can see some new market opportunities. But the owner of the business understands that the tax burden is such that it's not worth the risk. And so they don't invest the capital. They don't create that extra three or four or five or 10 new jobs. And the business sits there and stagnates. And the real estate that is there that perhaps is paid for gets tied up because there is a capital tax gains tax that will be paid if he sells his real estate and he hands that over so that maybe a new entrepreneur can take that location and take it up to the next level.

We have all kinds of property in America that is tied up because of tax reasons, not business reasons. Every single business calculation that you make in the United States of America is impacted by Federal taxes. And every calculation has to take into account the tax ramifications. When that happens, then our smart people are using their brains to figure out how to minimize or avoid their income taxes rather than figure out how to maximize their productions and their profits to create more wealth in this country.

Mr. Speaker, believe me, if we had more wealth in this country and that wealth doesn't fear the government, that wealth will create more jobs and there will be more wealthy people. You cannot help the poor by punishing the rich. Moving to a national sales tax just totally revolutionizes this economy. It opens up our production and makes unlimited production. Unlimited wealth can be created, and then the taxes are paid voluntarily by the people when they decide that they're going to consume. So we have voluntary taxpayers. We have voluntary producers. We have an economy that is virtually unleashed.

And here is one of the ways to draw a comparison. We have to rebuild U.S. manufacturing in the United States. We have watched a lot of our manufacturing go overseas because the price of labor has gotten low enough in comparison to U.S. labor that those factories would shut down and relocate overseas. The difference is also the taxes that are embedded. Now we tax corporations. We tax payroll taxes. When you add up the embedded taxes in a retail product in the United States, say on this ink pen, on average it is 22 percent. Let's say it's a $1 ink pen. Twenty-two percent of that would be built into the price, embedded taxes, so that the company that is producing them can pay their business income tax, likely their corporate income tax and their payroll tax. That puts us at a competitive disadvantage, Mr. Speaker.

And so here is an example. If we pass the Fair Tax, then the embedded Federal income tax comes right out of that price. Competition will drive it out of the price. So here would be an example. If there is a Mazda that is made 100 percent in Japan, and there are at least $800 million dollars worth of those Mazdas coming into the United States every year, and it's sitting on the dealers' lot at $30 thousand sticker price, that price is set by competition, what you can market at. And across the street on the other dealers' lot is a

Chevy, or a Ford, but let's say a Chevy. That would happen to be built 100 percent of it in the United States.

It has also a $30,000 price tag on it. And that's because competition now, two comparatively valued vehicles, selling for identical price, competing directly against each other, $30,000 each. Now, we pass the FAIR tax and over time, and not a very long period of time, perhaps some would be immediate, some would be longer, but about 18 months we'd see most of these adjustments. You pass the FAIR tax and your $30,000 Chevy price will go down to $24,600. That's the 22 percent embedded Federal tax. It's part of that price that General Motors has to have in order to recover the taxes that they're paying. Your $30,000 Mazda stays at $30,000 because the embedded Federal tax isn't part of their price. That machine, that car is made in Japan. So now you pull into the dealer's lot and here's a Chevy for $24,600 and a Mazda for $30,000 and they're of comparable value.

What do you buy, Mr. Speaker?

Does this lower the price of the Mazda too? Maybe. But the consumer is going to look and say I'm going to go for the $24,600 Chevy. I like that that much better. I like it 28 percent better than the $30,000 Mazda. And then we have to add back in the sales tax on these cars and that's an embedded tax of 23 percent that covers your corporate income tax, a rebate, so that we untax everybody to the poverty level, and the payroll tax that's associated with the labor that goes in. So your $24,600 Chevy goes up to $30,400. That's with the sales tax added on. You would write the check to drive the Chevy off the lot for $30,400. But to drive the Mazda off the lot you'd have to write the check for $39,000. That's the difference. It is a 28 percent marketing advantage, $8,600 advantage, American car over Japanese-made car or Korean or any other car.

What's that tell us, Mr. Speaker? I'll submit that it tells us that there would be many more American automobiles built and sold here in the United States because they would be competitive again. Imagine being able to take 28 percent off the price of every American-made vehicle today, at least for the components of them that are made in the United States. That's what the FAIR tax would do. Our auto manufacturers in Detroit can't seem to get to this conclusion, and neither can they carry a cogent argument against it. But they're stuck in their ways. They're negotiating with the unions who haven't made any concessions that I can see at this point. And we have a simple solution to a complex problem, that, like a Rubik's cube, and I've turned this over and looked at it every way I can for 29 years, Mr. Speaker, and every time I turn the Rubik's cube of a national sales tax again and look at it another way it looks better and better and better, not worse, not weaker, not something that has a flaw, better and better and better. And it always wins the debate, it always wins the argument if given an opportunity to match up against any other idea out there on tax reform. In fact, the FAIR tax, the national sales tax does everything good that anybody's tax proposal does, it does all of them and it does them better. And I'd put it up against anybody else's tax proposal. If you take the tax off of production and you put on it consumption, you also provide an incentive for savings and an incentive for investment. But you have more production. You will have a slight diminishment in consumption because there's a tax there, but over time there's more money in a person's pocket, a worker will get 56 percent more take home pay, and then they decide when they pay those taxes. This is where America needs to go, and in a short period of time, if we suspend the capital gains taxes and do that on a 2-year period and pass the FAIR tax, even just suspending the capital gains tax, we will see the Dow Jones industrial average jump up 30 percent or more, and it will be in a matter of weeks or months, not a long term, a short-term, you see immediate reaction and this thing would start to come around. If we pass the FAIR tax and on the night that the ball drops in Times Square, I'd set it up for December 31, 2009, midnight, and end the IRS as we know it. Abolish them and the Federal income Tax Code, set it over up as a national sales tax and we will see a dynamic economy role again, Mr. Speaker.

We have the solutions here. Republicans have the solutions here. Spending trillions of dollars for a leg of a stool that we have no idea what it looks like or what kind of results we're going to get is folly. And it's the kind of folly that Einstein was talking about when he said you can't solve a problem with the same mindset that created it.

So, I'll be opposed, Mr. Speaker, to this stimulus package because I think it has an oxymoronic name. I don't think it's a stimulus at all. I think it's a burden, an albatross that's hung around the neck. I think it is, as Michelle Malkin says, intergenerational theft, to put the burden up against our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. We can't balance the budget today. We couldn't balance the budget 5 years ago, and if we can't do that in the environment that we were in, how in the world do we think that we're going to pay off a debt that's multiple trillions of dollars and a national debt that maybe ends up doubling during the Obama term? No, that's folly, Mr. Speaker.

And let me just cap off one more thing here, before I close, and that is that there has been a significant achievement that's been reached in the nation of Iraq. I've made six trips over there. I know our leader just arrived back from there over the weekend. The reports I get from that delegation that visited Iraq and Afghanistan is that things look pretty good in Iraq. I had a long conversation with Ambassador Crocker last week on Wednesday morning, and we talked about many of the accomplishments that have been reached there; and how though, it is still delicate and there are political solutions that need to be provided, and there still are some military tactical things that have to happen, specially up in the Mosul region.

But here are some things that we know. The Iraqi people have had three successful elections. They have ratified a constitution. They are distributing their oil wealth from Baghdad out into the provinces and into the cities. They are producing more sewer, water and lights than they have ever have. The hours of electricity across the country are significantly greater than there's ever been. There are girls that have gone to school in the last 6 years for the first time. More Iraqi kids in school as well. The stability and the safety in the streets is significant. I've gone shopping in Ramadi, it's a place that a year earlier I couldn't even set foot because it was too dangerous. And I met with the mayor of Fallujah who said Fallujah is a city of peace and we're going to rebuild this city to where there's not a sign of war in this entire city. And I believe him and they're working on it and they're working on it hard.

This Congress imposed a series of benchmarks on Iraq and the President of the United States, 18 different benchmarks, Mr. Speaker. I've gone back and reviewed those benchmarks. And of those benchmarks, 17 of the 18 benchmarks have been wholly or substantially completed.

I thought it was inappropriate for this Congress to set those standards because that was definition of victory in Iraq, and those who voted for those standards believed that they were unachievable. They believed that the war was lost. They argued that it was a civil war that couldn't be won, that it was sectarian violence that could never be controlled, that al Qaeda was uncontrollable in Iraq. And sometimes they argued that al Qaeda didn't exist in Iraq until we attracted them there. I think that was the bug light theory.

But what's been accomplished in Iraq today is phenomenal. Three successful elections, the ratification of a constitution, Iraqi military forces that have been stood up and trained and deployed, 613,000 strong, Mr. Speaker, and a security and a stability to the point where they pulled off an election a weekend ago in Iraq without a single significant security incident, with the Iraqi people taking their children to the polls so they could experience with them what it's like to go and vote and be a free people. It's been phenomenal progress. 17 of 18 benchmarks reached. The 18th benchmark, by the way, that is not wholly or substantially reached

is the one that requires the Iraqi security forces to be completely independent of American forces, and that would mean logistics, intelligence, communication, supply, training, all of those things would have to be Iraqi. They're not going to be that independent, not this year or next year or the year after. You don't stand up a military like that in no time. It takes years to do that. But 17 of 18 benchmarks have been reached. The casualties in Iraq, and we had a tough time in Iraq here a little over a day ago. We lost four soldiers up by Mosul in a bombing. Regardless, as precious as those lives are and all of them that have been lost, since the first day of July, we've lost more Americans to accidents than we have to the enemy. Another measure of a definable victory in Iraq, achieved, Mr. Speaker, by our noble military under the leadership of Commander in Chief, President Bush, who had the clarity of vision and the courage and the leadership skills to order a surge when his advisors told him don't go there, Mr. President, this war can't be won. It's a definable victory today, by all of the metrics that I can identify, including a more than 90 percent reduction in civilian violence and sectarian deaths, so that they're almost immeasurable. The list goes on and on and on of the accomplishments in Iraq. And I charge and I challenge our current President of the United States to sustain the achievements of his predecessor or be judged by history as to have failed. That, Mr. Speaker, is an important message for the American people to understand tonight, that level of success in Iraq.

We need to also understand what made this a great country; that's the free enterprise system and the accountability that's in. There has to be successes and failures for our system to adjust itself. That will not happen with trillions of dollars of borrowed money and this huge debt to resolve itself.

And I would point out, as a matter of an example, that when Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, he came to this Congress in 1993 and he said, I want a $30 billion economic stimulus plan because we have this recession that was brought about by Bush 41. I notice these new Democrat presidents always have a Bush recession to blame their economy on. But in any case, he asked for $30 billion. And that $30 billion was negotiated down to $17 billion. I think that ended up over in the Senate, and finally they decided well that's not enough money to make any difference so we're just not going to do a $17 billion economic stimulus plan. But $30 billion was a lot of money to this Congress then. And that's why they debated it. And $17 billion wasn't enough to make a difference. But today $17 billion isn't even loose change in a $2 trillion bailout/stimulus plan. That's how far we have come in a matter of two presidential terms, two different presidents, Mr. Speaker, to the point where $17 billion, $30 billion is loose change in the maw of it all. And it will swallow us up.

And then, reverting back, Mr. Speaker, to the subject matter of Iraq, I'm a little disturbed that there's such a standard that has been raised that we should honor our troops and we should honor their families for the price that they paid, and a moment of silence on this floor is appropriate, an hour of silence would be appropriate, a long and enduring prayer every day for what they have done for our freedom and all of us would also be appropriate, Mr. Speaker. But that, brought out today by the same person that brought 45 different votes to the floor of the House of Representatives, those votes designed to underfund, unfund or undermine our troops is disturbing to me.

In the 110th Congress, we had brought by the Speaker of the House, these 45 votes to the floor that I said, underfunded, undermined or unfunded our troops. Some of those that I have in mind, supplemental appropriations H.R. 2642 that would prohibit establishing a permanent base in Iraq, among other things and reduce some funding.

We have another one, which is H.R. 5658, require the President to submit a report within 90 days of the bill's enactment for the long- term costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the cost of operations, reconstruction and health care benefits for how long, Mr. Speaker? Through at least fiscal year 2068 is what this report says.

That can't be constructive to tie the Commander in Chief up to produce a report that predicts costs until 2068. That undermines our troops, Mr. Speaker.

Here is another one. It followed along H.R. 5658, and it said that the United States Defender Act would have to be authorized by Congress in order to enter into any kind of an agreement with Iraq from a military perspective. Congress would have to authorize it. I don't think the Speaker of the House was going to allow the congressional authorization of those kinds of agreements. That undermined our troops again, Mr. Speaker.

Here I have H.R. 2082, which is to authorize funds for the intelligence portion of fiscal year 2008. It defines how we can interrogate prisoners. It's another way to handcuff the President of the United States and our military, whose lives have been in harm's way and remain in harm's way.

Here is another one on the same subject--on interrogation techniques and micromanagement. This Congress should not be trying to operate a war by micromanagement. The Continental Congress tried to do that. It's one of the reasons we have a stronger central government today.

The list of these kinds of transgressions goes on, Mr. Speaker. Here is another one.

The State-Foreign Operations Appropriations--Iraq Study Group establishes that. We know what came out of that. There is another one that reduces the spending, and it identifies the 18 benchmarks which I mentioned. On and on and on.

There were 45 different votes, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of this House of Representatives, 45 of those votes aside from the seven that were brought by Republicans, to recommit, defend or seek to overturn those. They all underfunded, unfunded or undermined our troops.

So a moment of silence is appropriate, but I cannot break from the thought that American lives have been put at risk and that we have lost some lives because of the actions on the floor of this Congress. These actions, Mr. Speaker, encouraged our enemy. In spite of all of this, we have a definable victory in Iraq today, and it is a definable victory that needs to be maintained by the current President of the United States and enhanced with a prudent utilization of the forces that are there and with a prudent transfer as the direction it is going over to the Iraqi security forces with a political, economic and military solution in Iraq so that they can sustain and defend themselves and can remain our ally in the Middle East to inspire the other moderate Muslim nations that are there.

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