Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman from New Mexico for yielding.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, I think it's named exactly what it is. Why, at a time when we have hurricanes that have hit the gulf coast, that's a time we might want to have to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. When we've got Putin sitting over in Georgia, Ahmadinejad threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz and we're opening up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for what, for political strategy? Not for strategy for the security of the United States of America. That defies logic, I would say.

And to swap out sweet Texas crude for heavy Venezuelan oil at the same time also defies logic to track this. Why would anybody come to the floor and defend opening up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

But, Mr. Speaker, I came here to address this overall energy piece. And first, I'm for all-American energy all the time. I want to open up all of it. And I'm also for an open process, not for a 290-page bill that hit the presses last night at 10 o'clock and the Rules Committee at 10:45. How in the world could they evaluate it? And furthermore, what's the purpose of this constitutional process if there is no subcommittee, no committee, no amendments allowed anywhere along the line, amendments denied at the Rules Committee as well, a closed process--yes, an open debate for 3 hours, but not a process that allows perfection?

So it seems to me that we've handed the entire authority of the United States Congress over to the Speaker from San Francisco, who writes a policy, 290 pages, that doesn't do anything for us.

And I would add, Mr. Speaker, that even the Outer Continental Shelf, if we do nothing, it opens up. If this bill passes and becomes law, then it blocks out the first 50 miles, and litigation blocks that out and all of the rest.

I have here a copy of the Federal Code. This is the legislation that ended litigation on the North Slope of Alaska in 1973. That's what it took. No one got through the environmental litigation; it was an act of Congress. If we don't have an act of Congress, we're not going to get through this litigation, and all of our energy is going to be locked up, Mr. Speaker.

So this bill does nothing for corn ethanol, coal, ANWR, nuclear, the first 50 miles, oil shale, natural gas, hydroelectric, or the litigation that's blocking it.

I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of the United States Representatives. I have a series of subjects that I am interested in moving forward on.

Before I broach those subjects that might be illustrated on my left, I yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from east Texas, Mr. Louie Gohmert.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, reclaiming my time, and I thank him for this transfer of wealth of knowledge to us, which we know in the brief time we have is a small component of the big picture but it adds a piece to the puzzle of the energy picture that we have been painting here every day in this 110th Congress for months and months and months, including every day, Mr. Speaker, that the House was designed to be adjourned for the August recess, as it's called. Republicans were here on this floor. Those cameras shut off, these microphones shut off, the lights shut down. We stayed here every single working day to carry the case to thousands of the American people who we brought down here on the floor of the House of Representatives to experience what a real debate was like, a real discussion was like.

I spent six to seven days here myself, Mr. Speaker. And although I saw a couple of Democrats lead a tour of people down here on the floor, I saw not one single one engage in this debate. The floor is always open for legitimate debate, and when it happens, I hope it is facts and not anecdotes.

A person who delivers this thing from a factual and occasional anecdotal but always a solid philosophical perspective is the gentleman from Michigan, the chairman of the Policy Committee, duly elected by his peers, and that is the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Thaddeus McCotter, to whom I will yield.

I thank the gentleman from Michigan. And it occurs to me as I listen that not only is there no energy bill on the floor, there has been only one appropriations bill come through the House of Representatives, where all appropriations have to begin, Mr. Speaker, and that appropriations bill, of course, hasn't gone anywhere in the Senate. And this is the longest period of time in the history of the United States of America that this Congress has failed to do its duty and responsibly pass appropriation bills, that have to begin here by Constitution, do go over to the Senate, are to come back here in a conference report, generally speaking, unless the Senate agrees, and go to the President for his signature.

We are here knew on the eve of the seventh anniversary of September 11th. Tomorrow is the day, the seventh anniversary. And yet a few days later, at midnight, September 30th, if this Congress doesn't act, if the responsible assignments that should come from the Speaker of the House aren't brought forward, Mr. Speaker, this government shuts down. That means it shuts off all money going to the various departments of government.

I do not think that will be allowed to happen, because that would be too obvious to the American people as to what is going on here. But there is no energy bill. There are no appropriation bills.

But what we have seen in this 110th Congress is 40 resolutions, 4-0, 40 resolutions have been brought to the floor of the House of Representatives designed to unfund, underfund, or undermine our troops. We took votes on them and debated them intensively. And none of them went anywhere, Mr. Speaker, except they made their political statement, which encouraged our enemies, discouraged our allies, discouraged our troops, and said to them that this Congress wasn't behind them.

I heard Member after Member say, ``I support the troops, but I oppose the mission.'' I would submit that that is philosophically inconsistent. You simply can't take a position that says I want our troops to know that I am behind them, but I am not behind them if they have to go out and put themselves in harm's way in an operation that I disagree with.

This Congress voted to authorize the President to use military force in the places and locations that we are. And once that vote goes up, we are to stand together, not divided, and we are not to be going to foreign countries to negotiate with terrorists, tyrants, dictators, or any parts of any evil empire, carrying on foreign policy out of this Congress. That is the President's responsibility, by Constitution the commander-in-chief, and he conducts our foreign policy, Mr. Speaker.

I am fairly fresh back from a trip over to some of those parts of the world that have given us a significant amount of grief since September 11th, and among those places in the world, three stops that I will speak of tonight are Iraq, Afghanistan and the sovereign state of Georgia, all in that order.

My report, Mr. Speaker, back from Iraq, is the easiest one and it is the most optimistic one of the three to deliver. It was my sixth trip into Iraq over the time that I have been in Congress since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Over that course of time, I have made it a point to get around the country so that I can be in the different corners to see what is going on in places like Kurdistan, in Mosul, up in Irbil, down in Basra, certainly Baghdad, up to Ramadi and over to Fallujah, a couple of times to Fallujah, Taji comes to mind, Balad comes to mind, Baja comes to mind, at some of the places that I have had the privilege to go to get a sense and a feel for the things going on in that country.

Always briefed by our top officers, always had an opportunity to sit down the State Department, usually the U.S. Ambassador, usually also the corps commander of our military there on the ground. I met General Petraeus for the first time in Mosul when he commanded the 101st Airborne, that was in October of 2003. And as this situation unfolded, I met with General Sanchez, General Casey, and now back to General Petraeus again as the commander of our troops in Iraq. He is posed now to be raised up to be the commander of CENTCOM, and we will see General Odierno step in as the commander of our military in Iraq, entirely capable, and I think an excellent and wonderful choice, and someone whom I have met over there as well over the course of the travels.

One of the things I do as well is I go into a mess hall and I meet with

Iowans. It is something unique about meeting with troops from your home State. The troops from the home State just know that you know somebody that they know if in case we don't know each other, and they will always give me the straight line because they know that we have got a reference point and they know that they can talk to me in confidence and I am not going to blow their cover, so-to-speak, and they won't get into a problem with their commanding officer out of anything that I carry on from that conversation.

So I am able to cross-reference what our troops on the ground know, our frontline troops, all the way up through our officer corps at all ranks, and on to our ambassador corps as well. And I find our military gives us straight answers, and they have been doing a selfless job, and they believe in their duty, and they believe in their mission, and they believe in this country, and they are there because they want to take this fight off of their children and grandchildren, and also, Mr. Speaker, your children and yours and mine grandchildren as well.

I agree with them and I honor and salute them for it, and I stand with them, I support them, and I support their mission, because supporting our troops and their mission is integral. It cannot be divided. You can't separate the two. They have to go together, Mr. Speaker.

Here is what I see in Iraq. The casualty rates, the civilian casualty rates have dropped off more than 80 percent. I know that a year-and-a- half or so ago they were picking up about 50 bodies every morning out of the river in Baghdad. The sectarian violence was that bad and the power struggle that was going on was that bad.

The enemies that we were fighting in Iraq a year-and-a-half ago came down to these definitions. We were fighting, of course, al Qaeda in Iraq was our number one enemy. We were fighting al Quds, the Iranian influence of their training of terrorists and their arming of terrorists. They foment terror with whomever they can. But the Iranian influence was there.

We were fighting Muqtada al-Sadr, his al Mahdi military, his militia. That was three. We were fighting also the Badr Brigades, a couple of different divisions, a couple of different separations or identities of them. Organized crime was another component. The pure power struggle going on within the communities was another component of fight going on a year-and-a-half ago.

But I would have to say that al Qaeda in Iraq was number one, probably al Quds, the Iranian influence was number two, Muqtada al-Sadr was number three. Former Ba'athists, I didn't mention them, was another enemy we had. Then organized crime, then the Badr Brigades and another Shia group that was in there.

So it comes to five, six or seven different enemies that were cluttering up the battlefield and causing a lot of casualties and making it difficult to know which way to turn because it was an asymmetric war.

Fifty bodies roughly a day being picked up out of the river in Baghdad I mentioned. The situation was grim. Al Anbar province was so dangerous that a Member of Congress could not go in there just a little more than a year-and-a-half ago.

So I reviewed that, and went and visited those areas that I could at that time. This was Thanksgiving, a year ago last Thanksgiving. And I went back about seven months later, probably eight months later, at the end of July last year. Things had gotten better. When I couldn't go to al Anbar province during Thanksgiving of 2006, I could go in there in July of 2007, and I did. And I went to Ramadi and in fact received a briefing there from the Marine general that was commanding that region, all of al Anbar province, and saw the change that had taken place.

That is the famous Sunni awakening, the Sunni awakening that was triggered by the surge, the surge which made a commitment to the military operations in Iraq, that said to the Iraqis, we are here, we are with you, and we are not leaving.

When that happened, it triggered the Sunni awakening, and they decided they would throw their lot in with the side that was going to be the winner. They were tired of the tyranny and the brutality of al Qaeda, and they understood who it was and what kind of people they allowed in their midst. They turned the other way and decided to join with us and provide the intel and also lead a good number of the military missions to go in and purge al Qaeda from al Anbar province. That was happening while I was there a year ago last July, Mr. Speaker.

And as I looked at the map that showed the mosques and what they were preaching in their services in the mosques, there was a time when it was about a 90 percent anti-coalition message. By then, by a little over a year ago, it was a 60 percent neutral message, 40 percent pro- coalition message. No mosque that they had for record was preaching an anti-coalition, anti-American message. It was a significant sea change that was taking place there. When the Iraqis, the Sunni Iraqis came around on our side, they began to purge al Qaeda from their midst.

A little more than a year later, I went back, 13 months later to be more accurate, Mr. Speaker, and went into some of the same regions and met with the Marine unit that was there, a different commanding general there this time, this time General Kelly. What I saw was something that was even safer yet, and much improved, al Anbar province.

In those trips, I went shopping in downtown Ramadi. I went back to Fallujah. There was a time I couldn't do that. Yet I'd been in Fallujah in June 2004. I wasn't able to go to Fallujah in 2006. It was too dangerous because al Qaeda owned al Anbar province, and they do not any longer. There are some traces of al Qaeda in the province, but they barely exist. They're in little camps out in the desert, and they're being mopped up by the Iraqi defense forces and by our defense forces as well, Mr. Speaker.

Now, 11 of 18 provinces in Iraq have been turned over to the Iraqis for primary security, and that 11th one just happened here this past week with al Anbar province being that large area. It's about a third the area of Iraq and the population only about 5 or 6 percent of it, but it was turned over to the Iraqis, 11 of 18 provinces. If you look at the map of those 11 of 18 provinces, there are those that are not yet turned over to the Iraqis for security. As to this incremental, one province at a time, if the security allows for that, those that are still under U.S. primary security responsibility are the provinces that are most likely to still have some al Qaeda in Iraq in them. They are being mopped up systematically. At the progress rate they were going, it looks to me like a year from now it's going to be hard to find ``al Qaeda in Iraq'' in Iraq. It looks like the progress that's being made is very, very positive. So there has been significant progress made there.

Civilian casualties are off more than 80 percent. Sectarian violence is measured this way by sectarian death. In Baghdad since mid-April, statistically, we don't have a single sectarian death on our charts. If you look at sectarian deaths in Iraq as a whole, in Iraq proper, there have been about a handful of sectarian deaths since mid-April till today. So, if you look at the line on the charts, that number was going on someplace over 2,000 in a matter of a limited period of time--and I believe it was a week--and I hesitate to say so specifically, Mr. Speaker, but that number on the chart goes up over 2,000, and now it goes down to zero on sectarian violence.

You see that measure. You look at American casualties in Iraq. There was a period of time for 7 weeks, from the 1st of July until into August--I think that date would be about August 18--where the combat deaths in Iraq were exactly the same as accidental deaths in Iraq for American troops. There were 15 accidental deaths and 15 hostile deaths that took place in Iraq on American troops. That's the measure that, I think, is the one that provides the most optimism for me when the relative risk to being, let's just say, in a Humvee wreck is equivalent to being shot by a sniper or from having an IED detonated in a fatal fashion. Those measures tell me that security is going up and that violence is going down dramatically. If you look at the charts on the attacks that are taking place, whether they be on Iraqi forces or on

U.S. coalition forces, all of those numbers are down. They're down to historically low levels, down to the levels where they were right after the liberation of Iraq that took place in March and in early April of 2003. That should give us great hope, Mr. Speaker.

The situation in Iraq today is not yet what we can call a victory, but it is, I believe, what we'll be able to look at to say we know what victory will look like from here if we can sustain these low levels of violence and if we can drive them down even further.

We have to remember that Iraq is a more violent country than we are here in the United States of America as a whole. So, traditionally, they've had more violence. They have more violence that comes from people settling scores, from having more grudge matches. They don't have the long tradition of the rule of law like we have in the United States.

I just came from a reception where I joined with Judge Juhi, who was one of the judges who sat in judgment of Saddam. Many of you will remember him--a youthful judge who was the first one to retort back to Saddam when Saddam asked him ``Who appointed you?'' Judge Juhi said, ``You appointed me and I'm doing my job.'' This man is now in the United States, and I'm proud to have him here. I'm proud to welcome him here to the American soil. I met with him in Iraq. He showed courage. He stood up for the rule of law at great risk. I recall at least one judge who was killed in this. Judge Juhi did survive this and has come through it all, and that's the kind of courage that we're seeing in the Iraqi people as they step up to defend their own freedom, Mr. Speaker.

Some of these measures are this: The level of security in Iraq probably never gets down to the level of security in the United States. They're a different kind of people than we are. There are more violent countries in the world than Iraq as well, and I could name you a few of them. One of them is Colombia. Their numbers have gone down, but about 3 years ago, when I committed some of their violent numbers in the world to memory, they had about 63 violent deaths per 100,000. The most violent country in the world is Swaziland. There are 88 violent deaths per 100,000 in Swaziland. That sounds horrible to think of that, that 88 out of 100,000 would be killed in a year in a country like that. Well, in Iraq, their violent death rate is down around 23 per 100,000 today. It was 27.51 back in 2005. Today, it's 23 per 100,000, and that includes the violent deaths across the country.

I have been accused, Mr. Speaker, of laying out, roughly, 3 years ago statistics and that this was a false quote. It was not something that I'd said, but I was accused of saying that it was more dangerous for my wife to live in Washington, DC--this is in 2005--than it was to live in Baghdad. In 2005, Mr. Speaker, we didn't have legitimate numbers on Baghdad's violent death rates, and so I didn't quote such a thing, but I can say today, Mr. Speaker, that now we do have legitimate statistics on Baghdad's violent death rates.

Mr. Speaker, I can tell you without hesitation that it is today more dangerous to live in Detroit than it is to live in Baghdad. It's safer to be in Baghdad than it is to be in Detroit. Do you know it's safer to be in Detroit than it is to be in Washington, DC, and it's safer to be in Washington, DC than it is to be in New Orleans, and it's more dangerous to be in New Orleans than it is to be in Swaziland? That puts it in perspective, Mr. Speaker.

The violent death rates go like this: 88 per 100,000 for Swaziland, 23 per 100,000 for Iraq, 41 per 100,000 for Detroit. I've got to guess at this number now because Washington, DC's numbers have gone down. They've gone down from, I think, about 46 per 100,000. That number is a little bit lower than that, but it's still above Detroit's at 41 per 100,000. New Orleans used to have a number of about 53 per 100,000. Post-Katrina, it has posted violent death rates of up to 90 violent deaths per 100,000. It's more dangerous in New Orleans than it is in Swaziland. It's more dangerous in Detroit than it is in Baghdad. It's more dangerous in Washington, DC than it is in Baghdad. That puts this all into perspective for us. As for the safety in the entire country of Iraq, aside from Baghdad averaged into that, it is still safer to live in Iraq than it is to live in Oakland, California, and it actually has been for some time. That's a sign of success. We see the film on the violence that comes constantly out of that part of the world, Mr. Speaker, but we ought to also pick up on some optimism because our troops have done their job.

The Iraqi Government is stepping up. They're sitting on a $79 billion fund. I want to call it a surplus, but it really is not. They're having difficulty allocating those funds and in getting them out to the local political subdivisions and in getting them out to the Iraqi people. They don't have a tradition of anything except central command, and people are reluctant to make decisions for fear they will be accused of fraud or corruption. So, if you don't make a decision, you cannot be accused of doing very much, and that delay that's part of a culture of not having a delivery system is starting to cause some problems in Iraq, but it's the right kind of problem to have: $79 billion and not being able to figure out quite how to spend it.

They need to develop their oil industry, Mr. Speaker. They had, I believe it was, five oil companies and six contracts that they had signed to ask these oil companies to bring their technical expertise into Iraq and to evaluate inventory--the wells inventory, the supply of untapped energy that they have and the inventory of the pipelines, the delivery system, the processing, the entire network of oil. These companies were negotiated contracts. I understood they were no bid contracts. They would now be working on developing those oil fields in Iraq. Instead, Senator Schumer from New York, Senator McCaskill and, I believe, Senator Kerry from Massachusetts all lined up and signed a letter, criticizing the no bid contracts that Iraq had entered into.

The result of that was they pulled those contracts down, and Iraq has been set back another year on developing their oil. They're doing that at a time of record high oil prices. So the delay on this won't just be they don't get to sell that number of barrels of oil next year or the year after or the year after, but the profit that comes from high oil prices needed to be capitalized on. They're set back at least a year, Mr. Speaker, because of interference on the part of the United States Senate in the sovereign business of Iraq. We said we didn't go there for their oil. Why are we sticking our nose in that business? They wanted to award contracts to U.S. companies on a legitimate basis. Because they needed to move, they didn't have time to do bid contracts on this. They wanted to agree. They had the money. They could be working today, and they're not because of interference on the part of the United States Senate.

But Iraq is still moving forward, and they're producing more oil than ever before. They're producing more electricity than ever before. The oil is being refined in Baji, and it's going up the pipeline to the north and out to Turkey. It's also going down to Baghdad and on down to Basra, and it's being exported off of the two platforms that Iraq has out in the ocean. Their navy is patrolling those platforms and is providing security there. Progress is being made. There's a lot to be done in the country, but they do have an infrastructure, and they do have a tradition of education. They do sit on a lot of oil, and I believe they will for a long time be a moderate, Arab, prosperous ally to freedom in the Middle East. I'm hopeful that they will provide an inspiration for the Iranians to reach out and to grasp their own freedom in a fashion that the Iraqis have today.

That's Iraq, Mr. Speaker, and I'm encouraged by it, and I hope to be able to look back on this time and this date, perhaps, and see that the progress continues to be made and that the Iraqi people step up.

If there is anything that I'm concerned about there--and there are a number of things--it is that I'm concerned that the Iraqis are a little overconfident on their current military capability. I believe they undervalue American communications and American air cover and our backup firepower that we have and the logistics that support their operations, and so that's one of the concerns that I have about the Iraqis.

Another one would be, if Muqtada al-Sadr and the Iranians decided to light

it up again in Iraq, this could go south pretty fast. I don't think that al Qaeda can mount a tactical military approach again in Iraq under the situation they're in. They can do some terrorist attacks, but they can't do coordinated terrorist attacks of the magnitude they have done in the past. That's why the attacks and the violence have dropped off substantially, but you can see what victory can look like from where we are today in Iraq.

On the other hand, Mr. Speaker, Afghanistan is a bit of a different story. I went back to Afghanistan also a little over a week ago, and I traveled to the central and eastern and a little bit of the southern parts of the country in some regions that I hadn't been before-- Kandahar. I traveled to the central and western parts of Afghanistan, to areas I hadn't been before. I had been to the east into the mountainous regions, to the northeast where the mountains go up pretty sheer, pretty vertically. It's sheer stone and rock, and there's not much going on with the exception of a little bit of civilization in the valleys. There are very narrow, little, green valleys with some vegetation.

I traveled west in Afghanistan, over to Kandahar, and then on down to a camp called Camp Bastion. The flight over that way is a different topography. It's mountainous, yes, but the mountains are simply dust all the way to the top with little valleys in between that are the narrowest slivers of green areas where there is some population that lives, Mr. Speaker. Then there are the high plains that lay out in a high plains desert. If you describe it in one word, Mr. Speaker, the prevailing situation in that part of Afghanistan--and it's a vast part of Afghanistan--is dust. There's dust everywhere. There's dust all the time. There's dust in the air. There's dust settling on everything. Actually, this is from Kabul all the way to the west as far as I've gone.

When you go through the market, you'll see the watermelons and tomatoes at this time of the year covered with dust that hovers in the air. The visibility is limited. There is meat hanging in open markets, some of it with the wrapping on it and some of it hanging out in the open, collecting dust from the air. Many times, our planes are grounded because the visibility is so low that they can't fly on or off the runway. There's dust everywhere.

And so dust is a prevailing piece. The roads, we built a ring highway around Iraq, and that is paved and that let's traffic get around the-- excuse me--the ring highway around Afghanistan. And that's paved. It lets traffic go around that current in the ring highway, but the balance of the highways, with few exceptions, are dust, dirt, not gravel and not asphalt, not paving. They're dirt.

So in the summertime, this time of the year when the temperatures got to 125, it cooled off to 115 when we were there. Then the vehicles and any traffic, any animal traffic fills the air with dust. The wind blows and it fills the air with dust. Our troops get stuck in the dust. Their equipment will get stuck in the dust. It's that deep and that soft on some occasions.

And as the weather changes and we go into the winter time and the rainy season, then that dust turns to mud. And of course the equipment will be stuck in the mud instead of the dust. But the dusty covered mountains and the dust covered high plains going to the West from Kandahar on over, and looking across that countryside, and I asked the question of the veterans who were there that served for a long time in Afghanistan, do these mountains ever turn green? Do these high plains ever turn green? Is there vegetation that grows during a time of the season when it rains? And the answer is no. They just stay dust. And it's all dustier, except down in the narrow parts of the valleys where civilization goes up and down the valley. And that's of course where the Taliban travel, up and down the valley. And Helman Province is one of the places where we were.

Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world's poppies for opium and heroin. And 90 percent of that, 80 percent of Afghanistan's poppies are raised in Helman Province. And so we were there.

It wasn't the poppy season. But the Taliban come up and they will front a crop and they'll say, here, I'll give you some money, half of what your crop is worth. Raise some poppies this year and I'll be back at harvest time to pick up the crop and I'll pay you the balance of what I owe you. We've got Taliban brokering, it's kind of like a farm bill or a banker; here's the front money, put your crop in, and we'll come back and collect the harvest of the opium crop that you have. We'll pay you the balance that we owe you and then they go back to Pakistan.

Taliban and al Qaeda will penetrate as far as they can go until they run into American troops, whether it's Marines in that area or Army troops in other areas. And there is far too much ranging of the enemy across that countryside. They've got too much freedom of movement. And yes, we're doing, I believe, as much as we can with the resources that we have there. But I look across at Pakistan, and up until a few days ago the leadership there was a jump ball. Yet, Pakistan is a sovereign sanctuary that neighbors Afghanistan.

I continually ask this question of our military historians, Mr. Speaker. Give me an example of an insurgency that was defeated by a foreign power, an insurgency that had a sovereign sanctuary to retreat and be resupplied and retrained and rearmed from. I've yet to get an answer to that question from any of our military historians as to when a foreign power has defeated an insurgency, when those insurgents could retreat to another country that was a sanctuary. I don't believe it's ever happened in history.

So the situation that we're in today, Mr. Speaker, is, we either have to rewrite history, excuse me. We have to write new history. We have to write a new precedent for how to defeat a sovereign sanctuary that had, how to defeat an insurgency that has a sanctuary in a sovereign country. We either set new precedents for history, or we are slowly learning a bitter lesson of history. And today, Mr. Speaker, I don't know the answer to that question. It will be determined by history.

But at this point, I don't believe that we have a lot of options for September and October or November, except to maintain and limit the movement of our enemies there. There are at least nine different identifiable enemies there. I went through the list of enemies we had in Iraq a year and a half ago. The list of enemies is down now to where they barely exist there today.

But over in Afghanistan they list nine enemies for me and they call them the syndicate of enemies. I can't list them all from memory, but they include the Taliban and al Qaeda, seven other groups that are, most of them are camping in the mountains and training there and mounting their attacks from those locations where they believe that they are safe from American attacks. They aren't always. Sometimes we find an opportunity to strike a target in that region as well.

But with the unrest in Pakistan, with the new leadership that's just taken place there, with a presidential election coming up in this country, with resources that I believe need to be refurbished and reinforced in Afghanistan, this is the time that we begin to move on the political and the economic fronts until we can set the stage to eradicate that habitat that breeds terror in Pakistan.

It is a very tough nut to crack. It will be very difficult. I have said for years that we would be in Afghanistan longer than we'll be in Iraq. I said that because Afghanistan is closer to the stone age. They don't have the oil wealth that Iraq has. They don't have the prosperity. They have a Gross Domestic Product of $7.5 billion, Mr. Speaker, and $4 billion of that Gross Domestic Product is the poppies.

So I would submit that we should just simply remind Afghanistan, Afghan farmers, it's against the law to raise poppies, and we're going to enforce the law and it'll be Americans that do it if we need to. And as I had that discussion with some of the powers that be in that country, they said to me that the poppy crop in Afghanistan was the equivalent to, it was either one or two football fields wide all the way around the world. It would be impossible to go in and spray all those poppies.

And I brought up the fact that we've sprayed almost, we've sprayed most of

the acres of corn and soybeans in Iowa. And we did so in 6 weeks. And we have enough spray planes parked in the hangars in Iowa that that's the off season to go over there. I think that we could take care of the poppies in Afghanistan without breaking a sweat. Might get shot at a few times, but we would end that trade in opium that is funding our enemies.

This is a strange, strange war, Mr. Speaker, when we're paying an exorbitant price for oil, and that money goes into the pockets of people that don't like us very much. And some of it gets into the pockets of our enemy, called the Taliban and al Qaeda and a number of other enemies.

At the same time, the American demand for illegal drugs is funding the poppy trade in Afghanistan, along with the European demand for illegal drugs as well. They're tapping into that, and it's another place where we're funding our enemy. So we're paying for both sides of the war.

We're watching our economy atrophy because the cost of energy is going up and up and up while we're marching through this long hard slog.

As much optimism as I have for Iraq, as much caution as I lay out here for Afghanistan, I relate to that concern, Mr. Speaker, concern for Georgia. That was the last strategic stop on the trip, unless you count St. Paul, at the convention. And what I see in Georgia is this: I believe that----

Well, first, to take it to the Georgia situation, Mr. Speaker, I actually went in and Googled the exact quote so I could get right. Here's my recollection, and then I'll take it to the exact quote.

Back in the year I believe it was 1984 was the year, if I remember correctly, that Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick stepped down as Ambassador to the United Nations. She was appointed by Ronald Reagan. She served there and served honorably and served well, and she left a legacy, but she decided it was time for her to leave that post. And so as she stepped down as Ambassador to the United Nations, I remember seeing an article, tiny little article on page 3 or 4 of the newspaper that I was reading at the time where it quoted her as saying that was going on in the Cold War was the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. The contest between the super power of the United States, super power of the Soviet Union, playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the question was, would we bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before they checkmate us militarily. Now that statement, and she sadly passed away a couple of years ago, Jean Kirkpatrick. But that statement was made by my recollection, 24 years ago. And it has often framed the viewpoint with which I look at this super power contest that's going on. And it really framed it when I watched the Berlin Wall begin to come down on November 9 of 1989, and it framed it more when the Soviet Union imploded, and I'll pick the date December 31, 1991. We might call that the end of the Cold War, Mr. Speaker, but it was not to be.

Jean Kirkpatrick's exact quote, this is the way it shows up when you check it, as opposed to checking my 24-year-old memory, reads this. 1984. ``Russia is playing chess while we are playing Monopoly. The only question is whether they will checkmate us before we bankrupt them.'' That was the statement that Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick made in 1984. That's the statement I think illustrates what was going on then during the Cold War, and I think it's the statement that illustrates what's going on now in places like Georgia.

Putin has expressed that the most tragic thing that's happened in his lifetime was the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I would say, no, that marked the end of the Cold War. It was one of the best things that happened in my lifetime, perhaps the best thing that's happened globally in my lifetime. We see that differently.

He saw the Soviet Union as a power that perhaps needs to be reconstructed. And so when Putin came to power, we saw him consolidate his power and make his moves to negate legitimate elections, set himself so that he could be the power broker in Russia and really the true power in Russia.

We know that President Bush has said that when he looked in Putin's eyes he sees a friend. I understand the reasons for him saying that. But when John McCain said, when I look in his eyes I see KGB, and I think John McCain sees it clearly.

Putin is a KGB chess player, Mr. Speaker. And he saw what happened when the wall came down in 1989 and when the Soviet Union collapsed in the end of 1991. He saw that the Soviet Union had been bankrupted economically before they could checkmate the United States militarily. He saw that Jean Kirkpatrick's analysis was correct, and he saw it play out because we were better Monopoly players with our free market economy than the Soviet Union was chess players. We got there first because our economy was stronger. We upped the ante.

And by the way, we played chess on the board too. We had a military escalation. We built up our military, built up our troops. Ronald Reagan called for it. And he walked out of the nuclear missile negotiations in Reykjavik, Iceland he walked away from it, to the gasps of his own staff. And he went into Berlin and he said, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall; and down it came. And down came the iron curtain, crashing with it. And the end of the Cold War on the last day of 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union.

But Vladimir Putin has been putting this back together again. Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and had a great fall. But Humpty Dumpty is being put back together again by Vladimir Putin.

And here's where this--now he's learned. Now, Mr. Speaker, he's learned this; that you can play chess or you can play Monopoly, but if you're going to be a master at this global hegemony that he is playing today, if you're looking for dominance and if you're looking to be a super power, then you have to play Monopoly and chess on the same board, and you have to do it master fully.

So the Soviet Unions's economy wasn't that strong. It's never been that dynamic. It's been focused on central planning, Mr. Speaker. But what has come along for them as a windfall because they happen to sit on a massive amount of the world's energy and the world's oil, and with high oil prices that went up to $140 a barrel and perhaps more than that, Putin saw the cash come rolling in, so he didn't have to do a lot of smart things economically. All he had to do was keep producing oil, keep selling oil. And if he's doing that, then Russia is building up wealth and we're watching the West, the free world, we are energy consumers and we have energy deficits.

Europe, eastern and western Europe imports a lot of their own energy, natural gas and oil, and they import a lot of it from Russia. In fact, Europe imports 25 percent of their oil from Russia, and they import 40 percent of their natural gas from Russia.

So if Vladimir Putin can shut down the oil valve going into Europe, a huge oil pipeline coming into a free country means cheap energy. Energy is a component of every part of our economy. Everything that we buy and sell and trade, it takes energy to produce it, energy to deliver it, it takes energy to receive the delivery of it. It takes energy to heat our homes and our factories and air condition them and light them and get from place to place and manufacture and produce food, clothing, fiber, you name it. It all takes energy. And a nation that has an abundance of real cheap energy has a real big advantage over NATIONS that have only a little bit of energy. The high priced energy. And nations with costly energy cannot compete with other nations that have cheap energy, all other things being equal.

And so Putin knows that sitting there looking at this global chessboard, this global Monopoly board, simultaneously sitting on top of this oil, that if he can decide whether oil goes east or west, he can determine whether going to the east, whether China's economy prospers, or maybe the same oil going to the West, whether Eastern or Western Europe's economy prospers.

He built a Trans-Siberian pipeline to go to China to take Russian oil to China. And in Kazakhstan, they built an oil pipeline to take some of the massive amounts of oil they have in Kazakhstan into China. But from the same locations, Kazakhstan and that region--and here I have in this chart,

Mr. Speaker, I think I have got some of these countries, here is Kazakhstan--there's a significant amount of oil in this region here. Uzbekistan less oil, Turkmenistan even less. But this amount of oil in this region needs to come through.

There's a pipeline across the Caspian Sea, and then it comes from here into Georgia. This little country here, 4.6 million people, is Georgia. Tbilisi is where I was about a week ago, the capital of Georgia. This square right here is the square through which the pipelines across the Caspian Sea, the central Asian energy, oil and gas, if it's going to go to the west to get out through the Straits there at Istanbul and out into the Mediterranean and out into western Europe, it has to come through Georgia. Putin knows that.

He sits up here and in control of the Russian region looking at this oil that he has next door watching how it can be controlled, and it must come through Georgia. When I met with the Georgians, they said to me, ``We always knew he was going to do this. We always knew the Russians would come in and occupy our country,'' because this square, Georgia, is the square on the chessboard where he can control whether this oil in this region comes into Europe or whether it goes on to the east on over to China, just off the chart here.

A pipeline exists to go from Kazakhstan to China. There's a pipeline that exists from Russia that goes on into Europe, several of them actually, and a pipeline from Russia that goes down into China, Mr. Speaker.

This is where the valve is right here. That's where he can turn it on and he can turn it off, and he can decide if it goes east or if it goes west. If it goes to the east to China, their economy prospers; if it shuts off the oil going to the West, these economies in Europe atrophy.

If he can team up down here with Ahmadinejad and the Straits of Hormuz, and they can threaten to--or close the Straits of Hormuz, they can also decide whether oil goes to the West, the free world, the Western Hemisphere, or whether it is stuck up in here in the Middle Eastern region. That is a powerful position to be in.

If he continues to build this triumvirate--which is, I believe, Putin, Ahmadinejad, and Hugo Chavez--Chavez's oil, he can shut that off as well. He can decide whether to sell it or not and who's going to get it.

So if you put those three guys at the same table, Putin, Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, they would have control--presuming the Straits of Hormuz could be shut down by the Iranians or with Russian help--they would have control of more than 50 percent of the world's export oil supply. They could decide oil prices for the world: running them up, allowing them to go down and/or they could decide whether that oil actually goes to those economies. They could decide whether the free world's economy would atrophy or whether it would prosper.

If you're in a position like that and you've had the lesson that Putin has had, he lost the Monopoly game and he checkmated his chess game, because their economy collapsed. He's learned the lesson. Now he's playing Monopoly and he's playing chess, and he's sitting on this square in Georgia. He's sitting on a massive amount of oil. He has a diabolical plan, and we're Americans sitting here naively arguing that well, we don't want to develop any American energy.

Mr. Speaker, we must open up all American energy now. Every form. It's imperative. Whether we're going to be a superpower 10 or 20 years from now depends on the decisions we make in this Congress today. All energy all the time. Drill ANWR, drill the Outer Continental Shelf, develop the oil from the oil shale areas in the West, open up all of our natural gas. Let's do coal, let's do nuclear, let's do ethanol, let's do biodiesel, let's do wind, let's do solar, all forms of American energy.

Let's save our freedom, Mr. Speaker.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, September 11, 2008, at 11 a.m.

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

S. 2403 designates the new Federal Courthouse on East Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia, as the ``Spottswood W. Robinson III and Robert Merhige Jr. Federal Courthouse.'' Both Judge Robinson and Judge Merhige were exceptional leaders and prominent figures in the desegregation and civil rights movement.

Spottswood W. Robinson III was a distinguished jurist and a Virginia native. His was a career of firsts, beginning with his graduation from law school, first in his class. He then became the first African American to be appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the first African American to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the first African American chief judge of the D.C. Circuit.

Beyond simply being the first African American to serve in these positions, Judge Robinson worked on many important cases that helped to pave the way for those who followed. During his time working at the NAACP, Judge Robinson worked on the Brown v. Board of Education case and was part of several other groundbreaking civil rights judicial decisions.

Prior to his appointment to the bench, Judge Robinson served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights and was dean of the Howard University Law School. Much like Judge Robinson, Judge Merhige will be remembered for, among many other accomplishments, his significant impact in the civil rights movement.

Judge Merhige's 1967 opinion to desegregate Virginia schools was one of the most important and groundbreaking steps in the civil rights movement. Following the issuance of the opinion, Judge Merhige had an around-the-clock guard to protect him from those who disagreed. While his decision was unpopular at the time, it was a vital step towards educational equality in Virginia.

Prior to his service on the Federal bench as a judge, Merhige served honorably in the United States Air Force during World War II. He returned home to work as a lawyer and an advocate for a variety of clients in his adopted State of Virginia.

The naming of this courthouse after these two well-respected judges is an appropriate way to honor their service. While their service as jurists had an impact on the entire Nation, they will also be remembered as distinguished Virginia judges.

The bill has the support of the two Senators from Virginia and the entire Virginia congressional delegation. I support this legislation and urge my colleagues to do the same.

And I would just ask that we reflect upon the circumstances in Virginia today, the progress that we have made since these decisions and since these judges led us out of segregation and into this modern era where we are in a society where our children grow up without real comprehension of what some of their predecessors lived through.

I would urge adoption.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

I just wanted to say a few extra words about this resolution and about the progress that this country has made.

I have by now a few years on me, longer than a half century, and having grown up in the very Caucasian Midwest but traveled almost all the corners of this country and a lot of places in the world, and I have seen some examples of the segregation that existed back in those years that flowed through post-Civil War all the way up through the 1950s and 1960s and began to break down in the 1960s. And as I mentioned in my brief remarks in the opening, it is a condition today where we have a desegregation and integration that is far, far superior to what we had in our society a generation or two ago. And the young people growing up today really don't have, I think, a touch or a feel for what this Nation was like or the culture that was there. The South has transformed remarkably from what it was to where it is today.

I would submit that the leadership of these two gentlemen is part of the solution. They deserve significant credit for the leadership to move out of this.

I would state that we are all God's children, and because of that we need to pull together and recognize there is

much more that identifies us together than separates us apart. And when we get to this point where we are pulling together as one Nation, one people, and one cause and erase the divides that are easy to identify, we get to the point where we can joke with one another and laugh with one another and work with one another and love and fight with one another in a fashion that enhances this country and glorifies our Creator, then that is where this Nation needs to go. This is a big step in the right direction. It's timely. I urge the adoption of this resolution, and I appreciate all the gentlemen and gentlewomen from Virginia that are cosponsors of this resolution.

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

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

S. 2837 designates the United States Courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, as the Theodore Roosevelt United States Courthouse.

Theodore Roosevelt, one of our most famous Presidents and a true American icon, was born in New York City in 1858. In many ways, Teddy Roosevelt defies easy description. Over the course of his amazing life he was an historian, explorer, a hunter, a frontiersman, a conservationist, an author, a soldier, a political reformer, a Governor, and he was our Nation's youngest President.

After graduating from Harvard in 1880, he was elected to the New York Assembly, where he was a prolific Republican activist.

In 1884, after the tragic loss of his first wife and his mother, he struck out for the Western Frontier. In the Dakotas, Roosevelt became an avid hunter and rancher. As a deputy sheriff, he chased down horse thieves and criminals. The tough cowboy persona Roosevelt developed on the frontier would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Roosevelt made his mark as a political reformer when he became President of the New York City Police Commissioners and took on the corrupt practices of the time.

When the Spanish American War broke out in 1898, Roosevelt resigned his position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to organize and lead a volunteer cavalry brigade, known as the Rough Riders. Roosevelt and the Rough Riders became famous for their assault on San Juan Hill.

After Roosevelt's success on the battlefield, he was elected the Governor of New York, as a Republican. Roosevelt's reputation as a political reformer grew as he took on the State's machine politics and corruption.

His reputation as a reformer helped put him on the McKinley Presidential ticket. Roosevelt was a powerful campaign asset and helped lead the landslide Republican victory in the 1900 election. Roosevelt became the youngest American President ever, at age 42, when President McKinley was tragically assassinated. The year then was 1901.

Teddy Roosevelt was a strong political reformer, a conservationist, which I identify with, and the President that elevated the United States to a world power. Roosevelt busted up monopolies and trusts. He created the National Park Service, the Forest Service, he built the Panama Canal, and he expanded the United States Navy into a fleet capable of projecting U.S. power

into every corner of the globe. Roosevelt's foreign policy can be summed up in one sentence: ``Speak softly and carry a big stick.''

President Roosevelt will be forever known as an American icon and one of our best Presidents. It is fitting that this courthouse in Brooklyn will bear his name. I look forward to the inspiration that will be given from that courthouse to especially the young people who walk into those doors in Brooklyn. I urge that my colleagues support this bill.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, last year the U.S. Judicial Conference submitted a proposed addition to the Rules of Evidence governing waivers of the attorney-client privilege or work product immunity. Rules governing evidentiary privilege must be approved by an act of Congress.

The Judicial Conference concluded that the current law on waivers of privilege and work product is largely responsible for the rising costs of discovery, especially discovery of electronic information. The reason is that if a protected document is produced, there is a risk that a court will find a subject matter waiver that will apply not only to the instant case and document, but to other cases and documents as well. The fear of waiver also leads to extravagant claims of privilege.

Mr. Speaker, the Judicial Conference devoted great process to drafting their proposal. For more than a year, the conference's Advisory Committee on Evidentiary Rules conducted hearings that featured testimony that was submitted by eminent judges, lawyers and academics. The advisory committee later coordinated with the Conference of Chief Justices to assure that the evolving draft addressed federalism concerns raised by the individual State court systems.

In April of 2006, the advisory committee held a conference at Fordham Law School at which a selected group of academics and practitioners reviewed the draft. More revisions were developed that resulted in a revised rule that was published for public comment in August of 2006. The advisory committee received more than 70 public comments and heard testimony from 20 witnesses at two hearings.

In April of 2007, further changes were made based on this process, and the new rule 502 was released. This draft was approved by the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure and the full Judicial Conference. The text of S. 2450 incorporates the submission developed and approved by the Judicial Conference. The Senate passed the measure on February 27, 2008, by unanimous consent.

The content of the new rule includes the following provisions: If a waiver is found, it applies only to the information disclosed, unless a broader waiver is made necessary by the holder's intentional and misleading use of privileged or protected communications or information. An inadvertent disclosure does not operate as a waiver if the holder took reasonable steps to prevent such a disclosure and employed reasonably prompt measures to retrieve the mistakenly disclosed communications or information.

If there is a privileged or protected disclosure at the Federal level, then State courts must honor the new rule in subsequent State proceedings. If there is a disclosure in a State proceeding, then admissibility in a subsequent Federal proceeding is determined by the law that is most protective against a waiver. A Federal Court order that a disclosure does not constitute a waiver is enforceable in any Federal or State proceeding.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, parties in a Federal proceeding can enter into a confidentiality agreement providing for mutual protection against waiver in that proceeding.

Mr. Speaker, the cost of discovery has spiked in recent years based on the proliferation of e-mail and other forms of electronic recordkeeping. Litigants must constantly sift through a mountain of documents to ensure that privileged material is not inadvertently released. While most documents produced during discovery have little value, attorneys must still conduct exhaustive reviews to prevent disclosures. The cost to litigants is staggering and the time consumed by courts to supervise these activities is excessive.

The system is broken and must be fixed. S. 2450 does just that by providing a predictable standard to govern waivers of privileged information. The legislation improves the efficiency and the discovery process, while it still promotes accountability. It alters neither Federal nor State law on whether the attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine protects specific information. The bill only modifies the consequences of an inadvertent disclosure once a privilege exists.

The process devoted to the development of new Federal Rule of Evidence 502 by the Judicial Conference was extensive. The Senate has reviewed the measure and approved it by unanimous consent with an accompanying committee report. The House Judiciary Committee spent months informally reviewing S. 2450, a process that included intense discussions with representatives of the judiciary and a Fordham Law School professor who assisted in the drafting of the rule.

Now, Mr. Speaker, it is time to act. I urge my colleagues to support

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 2135, the Child Soldier Accountability Act of 2008, which prohibits the use of children under the age of 15 in military forces or armed conflicts.

Children are currently used as soldiers in over 20 countries. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are used as soldiers for rebel groups, militias and government armed forces. The individuals who recruit children do so because children are physically vulnerable and easily intimidated. Many children are recruited by force and often compelled to follow orders under threat of death. Child soldiers are a global phenomenon. The problem is most critical in Africa and Asia, but armed groups in the Americas, Eurasia and the Middle East also use child soldiers.

The United States is a party to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. President Clinton signed the Optional Protocol in 2000 and it was ratified by the Senate in 2002.

The Optional Protocol requires states to raise the age of voluntary recruitment from 15 and to impose a binding declaration of the minimum age for recruitment into their armed forces. The protocol also requires states to take all feasible measures to ensure that members of the armed forces under the age of 18 do not participate in hostilities and prohibits the conscription of anyone under the age of 18 into the armed forces.

The protocol prohibits the recruitment or use in hostilities of children under the age of 18 by rebel or other nongovernmental and armed groups and requires states to criminalize such practices.

In addition to joining the Optional Protocol, the United States funds programs to, one, rehabilitate children who were abducted in Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda; two, demobilize 4,000 children soldiers in Afghanistan and enroll them in education and counseling programs; and three, reintegrate former child combatants in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia.

The bill before us today complements the ongoing efforts of the United States to combat the use of child soldiers. S. 2135 is the product of several months of good-faith negotiations among Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate and the administration.

The amended version of S. 2135 that the House will vote on today includes several technical changes to clarify the intent and scope of the bill. Most notably, the bill ensures that U.S. military recruiting practices are not impeded by this legislation. The bill also authorizes the government to deport or deny admission to any individual who recruits or uses child soldiers under the age of 15. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, as I listen to the debate here and contemplate the global situation of 200,000, 300,000 child soldiers and

what that means, and the repatriation, so to speak, of the child soldiers in Afghanistan, having just returned from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia, and having walked in some of the dust-covered mountains and in the dust-covered plains over there and been brought up to speed in briefings in both of those countries, it occurs to me how tough it is over in that part of the world, how close they are to the Stone Age, and how difficult it is to live in that country, let alone stand and fight, and the generations of warfare that have built one on top of the other. There is not a generation there that can remember not having fought.

Life expectancy in Afghanistan, 44 years. Up until a couple years ago, Afghanistan, by my recollection, was the only country in the world where men could expect to live longer than women, even though men were the ones that were most often killed in the conflict. The health care is that bad.

When young people are brought up in warfare and they are conscripted into the military and they are confronted with armed conflict at an early age, they may not know any other way of life. And to bring them back into education and try to repatriate them into more of, as we would see it, a normal lifestyle is a very difficult task. But Mr. Speaker, we must. We must break that cycle of violence. We must break that cycle of violence and the culture that reconstitutes at each generation. That is the case in Afghanistan, it is the case in Iraq, it is the case in the West Bank and in the Gaza strip and Israel proper. And it goes on and on and on around this world.

When little children, when little girls are raised to wear a pseudo suicide belt as part of perpetuating a culture of violence, when they are taught to hate people because of their religion or their ethnicity and they see that practiced on the news every day, when I turn on al- Jazeera TV and I see the venom and the hatred that is there, when I watch the leaders of the people that oppose us bring it back home to be inspiring in recruiting people who believe that their path to salvation is killing people who are not like them, then I understand how important it is to break this cycle. I don't know if we are going to be able to do that. I think this bill will move us a little bit closer along that way. At least it stands on the right principle for the right cause, and I urge its adoption.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, in deference to the passion and conviction that the gentleman from Arizona brings to the floor, I would yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake).

I thank the gentleman for his commitment to fiscal responsibility of this Congress.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, my amendment is an amendment that has come to this floor in different fashions in the past, and it deals with the Davis-Bacon federally mandated wage scale. The amendment simply says none of the funds made available in this act may be used to enforce the Davis-Bacon Act.

Davis-Bacon is a federally mandated wage scale that was established in about 1932, and the motivation for it was New York contractors that wanted to keep black American workers out of the trade unions as they began to bid projects such as Federal buildings in New York and reach down to places like Alabama to get cheaper labor, bring that labor in, and undercut the trade unions in New York. Congressman Davis and I believe it was Senator Bacon, or vice versa, came forward with this legislation.

It is, Mr. Chairman, the last vestige of the Jim Crow laws we have had in this country designed to keep African Americans out of this work. That is the legacy of it. The fact of it is that it's a federally mandated union wage scale. It is not prevailing wage. I worked under it all of my life, and the people that report these wage scales to the survey are people that report union scale. Merit shop employers do not report those wage scales very often because they know that the union will show up to organize them, and there is a penalty for filing those report that has to do with fight off union organizations.

The effect of it is a high cost to taxpayers, Mr. Chairman. A high cost to the taxpayers, by my calculations of being 28 years in construction business and dealing with these wage scales on a regular basis, that ranges, depending on how much of your project is labor versus how much is material, my own calculations range between 8 percent on the low side of inflated price, to 35 percent on the higher side.

It inflates wages by about the 22 percent, according to a Beacon Hill study of 2008. Their studies shows a 9.91 percent increase in the overall cost of the projects that is anchored to this federally mandated union scale.

It raises public constructions costs by about $8.6 billion a year. According to a CBO estimate, the Federal Government could save $10.5 billion in construction costs if Davis-Bacon were repealed. I am committed to the overall repeal of Davis-Bacon, and taking a bite at it every chance I get.

The small business burden is another component. Small employers avoid Davis-Bacon wage scale jobs, and I know and those of us in the business know that if there are federally mandated wage scales on projects, there are fewer bidders. Larger contractors that are union contractors bid those jobs without much competition from smaller contractors because the bureaucracy is so heavy, the reporting is so heavy. In fact, I myself have sat in there hours and hours, way into the night,

filling out minute paperwork so that it can go gather dust in some bureaucrat's desk until something comes wrong and then they come back and bring charges against you. I put it all on an Excel spreadsheet and track every motion of every man, every machine that operates or maintain or moves the machine so that we can file a report that will be full and complete. In fact, that strategy was adopted by the regulators.

The small business burden is too great, the taxpayer burden is too great. This is a union-mandated scale. We don't need to be building less projects or less work on our bases for military. We need to build more. We don't needless bang for the taxpayers' buck, we need more, Mr. Chairman.

So imposing a Davis-Bacon wage scale in the MilCon appropriations bill here moves us backwards from a progress standpoint. It will make sure that we produce fewer projects and it will mean that it will inflate the cost of the projects that we do some place between 8 and 35 percent. My number that I use is 20 percent, to pick an average. The number that Beacon Hill uses 9.91 percent increase in prices. Why would anybody buy into that?

By the way, their measurements measure a calculation compared to today's merit shop employers, but today's merit shop employers, and the union scale employers, but those wages do not reflect the actual supply and demand, like labor is a commodity like any other commodity. They reflect already the impact of federally imposed wage scales in the neighborhood. So there is no real measure of those wages from a competitive standpoint.

I want to get back to free market. I want the merit shop employees, who do a great job, to receive their reward for the work they do. It also is an impediment to an employer, like I have been for most of my adult life, because under the scale that you pay in the merit shop, you can put people on payroll for all 12 months of the year, and I put them in the shop when I need them, hand them a shovel, or put them on a crane or excavator when I need them there and I don't have to dance through all this paperwork. It's an impediment to bring people in that are low skilled because you can't afford to pay them those imposed wage scales it.

It keeps us from bringing people up through the process. It is inflationary. It's unjust, it's un-American, and it's the last vestige of Jim Crow.

I urge adoption of my amendment and I yield back the balance of my time.

Would the gentleman yield?

Just one point, and not to belabor this at all. But a thought occurred on the study, the Economic Policy Institute. If Davis-Bacon didn't increase the cost of projects, then what would be the point in Davis-Bacon?

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Speaker, I wish to make the following disclosure in accordance with the new Republican Earmark Transparency Standards requiring Members to

place a statement in the Congressional Record prior to a floor vote on a bill that includes earmarks they have requested, describing how the funds will be spent and justifying the use of Federal taxpayer funds.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King.

Bill Number: H.R. 6599, the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2009.

Account: MilCon, Air National Guard.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Air National Guard.

Address of Requesting Entity: 7700 NW Beaver Drive, Johnston, Iowa, 50131.

Description of Request: Appropriation of $5.6 million for the construction of a new Vehicle Maintenance Facility and remodeling of the existing Communications Facility located at the 133rd Test Squadron in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Updating facilities at the 133rd Test Squadron is of the utmost importance and highest priority for the Iowa National Guard. This project is approved on the U.S. Air Force Future Year Defense Plan (FYDP), and has been assigned the number HEMT039066. The facility is significantly short of space due to the expansion of the unit's mission, manning and resources. Since it is the only unit designated to test future Command and Control (C2) projects for the U.S. Air Force, the performance of the 133rd Test Squadron is vital to Air Force missions. A detailed financial plan based on form DD 1391 required by the Department of Defense for military construction projects follows.

Thank you, Mr. Smith, for your long work on immigration issues. I often come across legislation that was put in place during the nineties in particular and find out what kind of wisdom was there.

I want to also thank the Chair of the Immigration Subcommittee and the support on both sides of the aisle for bringing this 5-year reauthorization of E-Verify to the floor. But I especially want to thank Ken Calvert. It is a rare legislator that has the vision to put something in place that has the legacy that has already been created by E-Verify. His face and his name will be forever identified with this policy, which I think is the smartest, most technologically adaptive, and the most useful tool that we have for employers that want to hire legal workers in America.

I look at this and I think, this is a reauthorization. It is a status quo. I would have liked to have had an opportunity to upgrade E-Verify, because we know a lot of things now that we didn't know when it was put in place.

One of the things that we know are 98.6 percent of the names that are submitted in through E-Verify on the computer database; and, by the way, I have it in my office and I have run it and operated it and I am familiar with its inner workings in a way--98.6 percent of the first requests are approved. Remaining in that 1.4 percent are people who are not authorized to work in the United States and that very small piece of the database that does need to be upgraded. 99.9 percent of those that are born in the United States and are American citizens and are legal to work here are approved the first time through.

So that remains in those statistics those who aren't authorized to work, who may be here illegally, or those who are here legally that aren't authorized to work. And the balance of that is mostly people who have gotten married and women who have not changed their name and the database doesn't match. USCIS has brought that up to speed here within the last several months and set it up so that their database search goes out to two different categories. It looks for those name changes that have to be cleaned up. And the other are naturalized citizens. Sometimes the paperwork of naturalized citizens doesn't catch up in time, and there has been a little delay gap that has caused a little bit of error. That gap has been narrowed substantially by I think a good technological move by USCIS.

What I would have liked to have seen is that we reauthorize E-Verify and provide that employers can simply check those prospective employees and make it a condition that E-Verify could be used with a job offer. Not hire the person and wait for the answer in the 8 days to come back but make a job offer conditional to an E-Verify approval. And I believe an employer should be able to use E-Verify for current employees.

Those two changes would have gone a long way towards allowing an employer to verify that their entire employee base is legal. Otherwise, under the circumstances that we have, an employer is compelled to hire someone and then find out if they are legal. I think that is the wrong message to send.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

I support this reauthorization, but I submit that we can do better. When you require an employer in the United States to hire someone blindly as to whether they will be a legal or an illegal employee, and then after they hire them and put them on the payroll and set them up for the salary and benefits package, then they get to put the request in to go out through the Internet database, search the Department of Human Services' database, the Social Security Administration's database, and have it come back verified or not verified, that is the wrong side of this equation. I want it on the right side. I want an employer to be able to say, I didn't hire anyone illegally. But we put them in a bad position with this.

We could have done better. We could have upgraded. But this is a very, very good tool. To add to this, I am hopeful that and do expect that we will see USCIS link to E-Verify the digital photographs of those who are here working on a green card and those kind of cases. If we are able to do that, then we can verify that the face of the individual who presents the documents actually matches the documents of the individual. That is another improvement that comes along hopefully administratively.

Additionally, I will add to this that I am extra invested in E- Verify, because I have introduced legislation and will reintroduce it again this week that is called the New IDEA Act. That lets the IRS come into this mix, deny Federal deductibility for wages and benefits paid to illegals, gives safe harbor to employers that use E-Verify, and now it puts together the team and requires the IRS to communicate with the Social Security Administration and communicate with the Department of Homeland Security.

We have the tools to do this. We can work and cooperate and coordinate together with our different departments of government in the same fashion that a company would work and cooperate and coordinate with their different departments of their company. We are not doing that yet. We are taking a step in the right direction, and I am very glad to hear the bipartisan support that we have for E-Verify.

I again congratulate Ken Calvert for a work in progress, well started, not yet well done. I urge adoption of this, and I appreciate the extension and the reauthorization.

Mr. Speaker, again, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith).

First I wanted to say that the narrow gap that we have in efficiency that has received some criticism, if you don't use a list, you can't improve the list. Using the list improves the list. And as good as it is, as close as it is, and the improvements that have been brought forth, we can get it to become among the best lists in the country if we just use E-Verify, and I expect that will be the case.

As I look at the overall immigration picture, and we talked about enforcement and how effective is enforcement. There was an announcement that came out today, a press conference this afternoon, I think about 2:30, that rolled out a study done by Citizenship Immigration Services, CIS, Dr. Steve Camarota. And as I read through the report, and I am speaking from memory, not from a document, that report, I believe, references this way. Since last August, by their study, 1.3 million illegal aliens have self-deported, have gone back to their home countries, have left America. 1.3 million. And the analysis that is there predicts that at the present rate of self-deportation, and that is what it is, that we will see the illegal population in the United States be cut in half if that pace continues. That is a huge accomplishment.

And the people that said, well, we can't deport them all, didn't understand that they got here somehow. They got here on their own, and many of them have now decided to go back on their own. And here are the reasons.

The first one is enforcement; that ICE has begun to enforce immigration law, and as they have begun to do so, and it is the same time, in conjunction with an economy that doesn't have as much demand for lower skilled laborers. And then additionally, the publicity that surrounds the more intense enforcement that we have seen has put that all together in a package that is saying to some people that are here illegally that it is better for them to go home.

Now I have argued for a long time the administration should enforce the law. I have never believed that they enforced it consistently enough nor aggressively enough. But this is an exact response to this. The Swift raids in Iowa, the Postville raids in Iowa, ICE doing their job. And if ICE does not do their job, we don't have this 1.3 million.

And additionally, during the Eisenhower administration, they got about a 10-1 self-deportation for every one that was picked up and deported. This is a 7-1 self-deportation. That is a real difference and a real change.

I support this. We can do better. And I urge its adoption.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of Congress, and to kick off this Special Order moment, I would be pleased to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Broun.

I appreciate the gentleman from Georgia's coming to the floor here tonight, Madam Speaker, and for addressing these issues that matter to America, also from a Georgia perspective.

There are a lot of things I do want to say about energy tonight, Madam Speaker. Yet I think it's important for me to address first the situation that's going on in Iowa with the disasters that we've had.

To lay some of this backdrop out for you, I have significant background when it comes to the experience of having been flooded myself. I go back to '93 when we had the 500-year flood event in Iowa. I can remember earlier than that, in about 1991, sitting down and actually playing gate tag in the airport with Ellen Gordon, who was the director of Iowa Emergency Management at the time.

We worked out a system by which we could respond to disasters in Iowa. She was very, very good, and was in the business of making sure that we were prepared for disasters. Yet our discussion didn't really cover the breadth of the floods. It was more the idea of the more localized tornadoes that do come and that have visited our State and many others throughout the centuries.

Our focus was on: What if there is a large fire? What if there is a series of tornadoes or of bad tornadoes? How could we put the equipment in and the people in to respond to that kind of disaster and clean it up?

Yet, just a couple of years later, we had the 500-year flood event, and so it wasn't something that we had had previous significant experience with in our memories. Although, anyone can look back at the times before we did some of the Corps of Engineers' work that stabilized the Mississippi River on our east side and the Missouri River on the west border and some of the other major rivers, including the reservoirs that we built throughout the State on up through the Des Moines River that are designed to protect Des Moines. For example, there is the Saylorville Reservoir and the Red Rock down below Des Moines and the Coralville Reservoir that protects Iowa City. At least it did a respectable job of doing so. Those would be the major reservoirs in the State. Then additionally, there's Rathbun down in the south.

It turns out that we have actually done work on all of those reservoirs, Madam Speaker. Having been under water myself and having delt with four of our major projects in 1993 and having volunteered to go over to Keokuk to spend some days on a rock pile, which at that time was out in the middle of the Mississippi River which today is on the shoreline of the Mississippi River at Keokuk, I'm not without experience when it comes to floods and disasters.

Having been one of the first Members of Congress to go down into New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and having flown, really, all of that--most of it in helicopters, some of that in a plane--and having gone down on the ground and having traveled on the ground around New Orleans and into Louisiana--Slidell, Louisiana comes to mind immediately--and having slept in a Red Cross cot and having felt bad about it because I found out that a Red Cross personnel had given up his cot for me to sleep on, I've been in the middle of this. I've watched people when they've been hit by floods. I know, I think, what goes on in their heads and how it is when the flood waters come up. The faster they come up, the more adrenaline you get to try to stave off that flood and the more sandbags you can throw and the more you can mobilize, let's say, manpower and machinery to protect us from those floods and to try to keep the floodwater out of our critical infrastructure.

When it crests and if it runs over the top of your levees and over the top of your sandbags and when you watch that fill up, it's a feeling of despair. It's a feeling of we tried as hard as we could. We did everything we could do to be ready for this, and then when it was time for all hands on deck, all hands were on deck. All men and women came to the levees, and they pitched the sandbags, and they did everything they could do to get ready. When the flood crests and you lose and when the water fills up in places where it has never been before, like in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and in places like Iowa City and Coralville, when that happens, you have a crushing feeling of despair.

Sometimes there is that long wait, the wait for the water to go down because, especially on the eastern side of

the State, along the Mississippi drainage area and in the Mississippi Valley, the water comes up slow, and it goes down slowly. So there's a longer period that it takes to be in a position to recover.

On the west side of the district that I represent, the water goes up fast and comes down fast, and there's a shorter period of time that it takes for it to dry up and a shorter period of time for us to recover, but all the while that's going on, your adrenaline peaks at about the crest of the flood, and then it diminishes in the aftermath of the flood.

As to where we are now, I was actually, I will say, surprised, sadly surprised, internally taken aback to see what I saw last Saturday in Cedar Rapids and in Iowa City. I know those towns. I know those cities. I know those river valleys. I've seen them flooded before, especially the Iowa River Valley, not so much the Cedar River Valley. I've not seen the cities of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids under water like I did when I flew over that just after the high watermark. First, I'll tell you what happened.

It rained perhaps more than ever before in a section of Iowa that would be the northern half of the State, almost exactly the northern half of the State. It would be 100 miles from north to south, from the Minnesota border down to the south--that line and 300 miles roughly east and west. That area also expanded into southern Minnesota and into other places of the east and west of Iowa, but in that area in Iowa, 100 miles by 300 miles--and there were intermittent rains and additional rains, but in one rain on one night and on one morning, Iowa took in that area of 100 by 300 miles no less than 4 inches of rain, something meeting and exceeding 10 inches of rain in other areas within that 100- by 300-mile area, three-30,000ths square miles with more than 4 inches of rain and up to 10 inches of rain.

When you see something like that, you see that it's probably more water than has ever come in a single rain before. When it came on saturated soils and as the water ran off of those hillsides and down the rivers and it crested at Cedar Rapids, the Cedar River cresting at Cedar Rapids--it did its share of flooding in Cedar Falls and in Waterloo, but when it crested at Cedar Rapids, that city had already been seeing the worst in '93. When the high watermarks in '93 were noted, the businesses looked at that and said this is as high as it's ever going to get. This is a 500-year event.

And so if I make sure that my business is above that elevation of the water crest in 1993, put it up, say, a foot above, who above that line would need to buy flood insurance? The rational thing is, when you get a 500-year flood event, you're probably not going to live to see another event where the water gets higher than it did.

And it might be something that one could understand if it came back and it approached that level or exceeded the 500-year flood event level by a foot or so, but what really happened in Cedar Rapids was the high water mark there was in 1851, and the new high water mark set in the floods less than a couple of months ago crested 11.12 feet above the previous high water mark, which was set in 1851. That's not a level that anyone could have anticipated. It's not something anybody can build for. Its not something the Corps of Engineers can tell us that we can adjust for. It was a weather anomaly where huge rains came in--and just in the watershed areas, and broader, but it focused on those watershed areas. It sent the water down through the funnels that are the river valleys, the Cedar River Valley and the Iowa River Valley.

And Cedar Rapids, the second largest city in Iowa, had its downtown flooded with something like 600 to 800 businesses flooded, and now, 1,300 square blocks of residences that were flooded--probably more than that, but that would be one of the measures. And I'll submit this, Madam Speaker, that I've been to those places where we've had natural disasters and had floods and hurricanes.

And I did a number of trips into New Orleans and I walked the streets of New Orleans and I went back to see their downtown dark when the power was off and the utilities weren't functioning and the businesses were gone. And some of them had the windows out and the doors open and they were being aired out, trying to dry them out. To go in and strip out the drywall off the walls--the wet drywall, I would add, if that's not an oxymoron--to have to go in and replace all the furniture and the carpet and the walls and the appliances and re-wire and come back in with new walls and new flooring and new carpeting, for example, and new furniture, to get all of that done takes time. It takes time to find people, it takes time to find the resources. And the sad thing is it takes a lot more time to find the money and know what you can plan on. All of that I've worked with in New Orleans. And all of that that I've described exists in downtown Cedar Rapids today and in the residential areas.

To go into downtown Cedar Rapids on a Saturday afternoon and look around there and see there isn't any business functioning down there, that there are generators set up to run light plants to carry just some streetlights at night because the utilities aren't back up. There is a steam power system that has been providing that utility for the downtown Cedar Rapids; about 25 percent of the businesses have access to that and all the rest do not.

There were businesses that were established businesses that have been there for--the building was functioning in that fashion for perhaps a century or more; never been flooded--or not flooded in our memory, anyway--but under water six, eight, 10, 12, 14 feet of water that went in and destroyed these businesses, depending on the elevation of the business and where the water decided it would want to go.

This Congress, however much empathy they've provided--and I appreciate it all. And I appreciate, of course, the how responsive they had for Katrina--but this Congress has not reacted fast enough to the situations in Iowa and in Illinois and in the Midwest from these past floods.

What we have done in this Congress to date is, in a supplemental bill, we brought $2.65 billion in funding to backfill FEMA, an existing account for FEMA. And that's all that's been done from an appropriations standpoint or from a policy standpoint.

We do have a whole series of tax packages put together by Senator Grassley. And this tax package that he has put together is a good one, it does what can be done for tax relief. And it is the tax relief that was offered to the people and the businesses in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and Rita. It was that with some loopholes closed that were found by some folks down there--we were happy to close the loopholes. That tax package hasn't been moved. We don't have a response from Ways and Means here. I don't know that we have a response from the Finance Committee in the Senate and how that might be. Those things need to happen.

The business people in these communities, in Iowa City and in Cedar Rapids, and the smaller communities up and down the river, including Columbus Junction and including Oakville, they need to have some definitive action on the part of this Congress. This Congress can act definitively when they see a disaster that grips their heart. Here's how they acted in Katrina back in 2005:

September 2, 2005, we appropriated, in a special supplemental spending bill, $10.5 billion for the initial down payment on Katrina relief; $10.5 billion, September 2. Six days later--not a week later, six days later--Congress appropriated $51.8 billion for Katrina relief. That was September 8. Then December 30, Congress appropriated $29.1 billion, Katrina relief. Then June 15, 2006, $19.3 billion, Katrina relief. Then on May 25, 2007, $7.7 billion, Katrina relief. And on November 13, 2007, late last year, $6.4 billion, Katrina relief. That adds up--and don't hold me to this math, this is a memo note--$123.5 billion in Katrina relief that began when--the disaster declaration was made August 29, 2005. And on the second day of September, the first $10.5 billion came through. And then 6 days later, and then late December, then June of the following year, then May of the following year, then November also of last year; $123.5 billion, Madam Speaker.

And this Congress--and the only measure is not how much money did we appropriate to backfill FEMA, that was

$2.65 billion, in that same bill, Katrina relief, more than twice as much went to Katrina, $5.8 billion, Madam Speaker.

So I wouldn't make a big issue of this if I didn't think that there was a desperate need. And even though I had flown over the entire flood area--that we could identify at least in eastern Iowa--and western Iowa for that matter, and we had some of our own flood that wasn't as broad and probably not as severe, even though I've flown all over that and looked at that--and I know what floods look like from the air and the ground and I've lived them and I've been flooded myself--I was sadly surprised and gripped when I saw especially downtown Cedar Rapids with the businesses dark on a Saturday afternoon.

And also, to talk to the businessmen and the businesswomen there that are trying to figure out what they can do without definitive answers and response, I know it's difficult. And I said with Katrina that even if Mayor Nagin and the Governor of Louisiana--let me just put it this way: Even if the city of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana and the Federal Government, all of our agencies, if they had all performed at their maximum statutory authority, we still didn't have the resources and we didn't have the mechanism in place to save everybody, and as many resources as possible in that disaster down in New Orleans.

We've learned a lot from that. I'm not here to criticize FEMA or Small Business--they're certainly not the Corps of Engineers--and the balance of the Federal agencies, and certainly not to criticize the Red Cross. Everybody mobilized, they went to the rampart, so to speak. The volunteers came out in numbers to the point where sometimes they were actually turned away because there were more volunteers than there were sandbags, so to speak, in some areas. I'm proud of that. I'm proud of that response, and I'm proud of the work that got done and I'm proud of the example that got set.

And I'm proud of the spirit of our Iowa people. And as I met with the business leaders and the businessmen and women in both of those cities, Cedar Rapids and Iowa city, as I went back to FEMA headquarters and stayed and spent some time--about 2.5 hours on a Sunday morning--with the State Disaster Coordination headquarters of FEMA, I met with many of their people, and even right down to a second generation FEMA employee. There is a lot of accumulated knowledge, a lot of disaster expertise within FEMA. I'm not here to criticize that.

Madam Speaker, the issue that I raise is, downtown Cedar Rapids is dark. Their power is off. They've been flooded out. Six hundred to eight hundred businesses are out; some will not come back. Every day that goes by, the odds of losing another business and another business and another business get greater and greater.

These businesses that have been flooded have lost a lot of their capital base, a lot of their assets. Some of these people have worked for a lifetime and put all of their resources back in their business. And their business was above the 100-year flood event. They didn't have flood insurance because that was a rational decision, not an irresponsible decision. And the water got 11.12 feet higher than ever before and they are caught by an act of God calamity of rarest proportions, and yet they don't have anything that they can really hang their hat on as to what will be the sequence of events? What resources will be deployed in the area?

Yes, we know that Small Business Administration is in there offering loans. And I think they've done an acceptable job of processing the paperwork and giving people something that they can count on. They showed me the numbers of the loans that have been written and approved. And yet I know that, even though the loan is approved for people in residences, for example, as well as businesses, that isn't the only thing required to get people up and going. For example, if your business has been flooded and wiped out, and let's say you qualify for a small business loan, you still have to come up with locating the materials and you have to locate a contractor, and you have to put together a real business plan that's going to carry you on.

I had to make some of those decisions when I was under water in 1993. And at that time I was in my early forties. So to look at something that was capitalized over 20 or 30 years was a different equation for me than it is today in a place like Cedar Rapids or Iowa City, where some of the business owners are retirement age, 63, 64, 65 years old. And when they're looking at a disaster that's cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the equity that they've used to leverage their business through these years is gone and they're looking at a 4 or an 8 percent loan--and by the way, the higher the risk, the higher the interest--a 4 to an 8 percent loan, they have to make a decision, when they're borrowing money, when the last payment on that 30-year loan is beyond their life expectancy and they've already reached about the end of their working life expectancy, how, then, do you pay the bills? What do you do with your life's work?

When you think of the Enron people who had all their pensions wrapped up in Enron stock and found out that the Enron loophole allowed for the fraud and their pension funds collapsed, many of those people that were retired had to go back to work. And some of them that stayed retired had to dramatically shorten their budget and squeeze everything down. The happy golden years of retirement didn't materialize because of something that was beyond their control. And yet we have a situation here that was beyond the control especially of the business people and the residences, and all of the region. And I'm using Cedar Rapids as an example because that's where this chart is.

Madam Speaker, I have here a picture of a residential area in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And this is very, very typical. Although the report from FEMA is that essentially the debris removal and clean-up is caught up-- and I don't disagree with that--when they pile this out in the middle of the street, they come along and pick it up and load it way. We don't have what I saw in Katrina, which was huge wind rows of debris that were piled out there. And sometimes you had people objecting to having the debris hauled out. That's not happening in Iowa. When people haul debris out, they put it by the edge of the street, sometimes right in the edge of the street so it's easy to pick up. It's being picked up and removed.

I saw the city of Palo was entirely under water. Every house in that city had suffered major damage. And they carried their furniture and their appliances and the ruined material on out into the street and began to strip out the wet drywall--which is now a common phrase. And most of that debris is all picked up.

This is an example of a pile waiting to be picked up. You can see it has furniture in here, it has appliances in here, it has some clothing and waste. There are pieces of lumber and boards and furniture all piled out here to be hauled out. And all of this, Madam Speaker, has got to be replaced, and it's all got to be put back again.

And the homeowner back here doesn't know whether there is going to be an initiative to buy this all out, whether there will be an initiative to come in and rebuild, whether there is going to be a flood insurance premium that will be too costly and it might be wiser to move on out. They don't know if they can get a building permit to go in and rebuild their house and put it back into pre-flood conditions with or without a loan, with or without a buyout, with or without a city plan, they don't know.

And the hardest part of being in a flood--and it isn't easy to answer all these questions--the hardest part is you can't make decisions because there are so many variables that are beyond the scope of being answered or can be answered by the local officials. But that's an example of the debris that's there last Saturday.

This is a relatively fresh picture. This is an example of the spirit of America and the spirit of Iowans. This is in Cedar Rapids. These buildings are all empty, they're all flooded. The high water line I'm going to guess is someplace about right here.

The defiance of America shows up this way, Madam Speaker. That is, you go find the largest, boldest American flag that you can find and you hang it up there for all to see, and that says,

We're going to beat this. We are coming back. We're not going to let this get us down. That is what that flag said.

If you look up this street off in this direction, there was flag after flag coming out from the buildings that were set up. That is the message that I am proud of. But these buildings are stripped empty now. They have been flooded out. They have all got to come back again. These are businesses that probably don't get a grant of any kind. They will have to settle for a loan, if they can qualify. And then for 30 years they can pay it back.

This also, Madam Speaker, is another example of along the street in Cedar Rapids. Again, Cedar Rapids is just the epicenter. This goes up and down the river valley, town after town.

You can see the appliances that are laid out here and the debris that has been stripped out of the homes right along the street so it's easy to pick up. Nobody is resisting here like they did in New Orleans and taking the position that the workers, the volunteers, and the cleanup crews shouldn't set foot on this ground. They are saying, I put it out here for you to pick it up. Please do so. Thanks for helping me. Let's all get to work.

We have some people that don't know whether they are going to have enough money to fix their house or not, but they want to do something. So they go in there and they strip it out, they clean everything out, they throw everything away that they can throw away, that they need to throw away, and fix that house so that they can start rebuilding if they come up with the money, if they get a grant, if they get a loan, and if they can come up with the materials and the contractor.

But that looks to me like New Orleans looked. I spent a lot of time walking the streets in New Orleans. If I would take this picture and ask the question of our friends from Louisiana, I think a lot of them would say, Oh, yeah, I saw that down south. I saw that along the gulf coast in 2005. Well, it's 2008. It's Iowa. They are still looking for some answers and looking for some relief.

This also is an example of what we saw for the disaster. This is a bridge that was taken down. They knew that the bridge was going to take a lot of water so they ran train cars out here, filled these train cars with stone and ballast, and I believe they said water, to put some weight on the bridge so the bridge wouldn't go out. The bridge went out anyway.

Here's the train cars still sitting on the bridge. This is a little bit older picture. Some of these are actually floating homes that were pushed down up against this bridge. I saw this all from the air when I flew over Cedar Rapids.

So that is an idea of how devastating this was when you see this kind of carnage with a railroad bridge taken out and the homes that are floated down against it.

This, City Central, this is an island in the middle of the Cedar River, where city hall and some administrative buildings are. This is at not quite the peak high water mark, but that shows you what happened.

We have, Madam Speaker, a grant system that comes primarily from FEMA that does this. It allows for residences to qualify. So a residence like this potentially could qualify for up to a $28,800 grant. That grant then can be used to refurbish and rebuild the interior of the home and put it back in its pre-flood condition. That is there for the residential homeowner.

We also have qualified grants to help the city out. Political subdivisions, say the city, the county, perhaps the State, and I believe the State, so that if they have damage to their buildings, they will be rebuilt. We have a Federal building that was flooded, the Federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids. It's slated for reconstruction, to be built new, but I do believe that it's going to be refurbished before we can get a new building built. That's a pretty big check to replace the building. It's also a big check to refurbish the building.

But my point is that political subdivisions, the institutions of government, will receive Federal dollars to be reconstructed, Madam Speaker, and the residences will receive Federal dollars to be reconstructed. Even some of our critical infrastructure can qualify. Our railroads will likely qualify in some areas, as we have in past disasters seen that our utilities qualified for grants to put power poles back. Say in the case of an ice storm that might take the power out in a large area, we provided Federal dollars to go to those utilities, put the poles back up, the lines, and at least take some of the sting out for the utility companies.

So it's not unprecedented for us to cross a line, a line from a residence here, a line that includes municipal government and county and State government here, a line that includes a railroad bridge here, a line that includes utilities occasionally. All of those things qualify for Federal grant.

The only people that we're asking to go without any kind of a grant in this are the people that are paying the taxes on everything else, and that's the businesses in the communities. So if you run a business in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, in the valleys of the Cedar or Iowa River or the Mississippi River Valley, likely below the confluence of the two rivers in Oakville, if you run a business in those areas and your business is flooded, chances are you're going to be applying for an SBA loan, if you qualify. If you're a large business, you may not.

But there is no provision in law that allows the Federal Government to step in and provide a grant for the small businesses that are as devastated, in fact, in many cases more devastated, than the residences are themselves.

I don't know that we have got this entirely backwards, Madam Speaker, but I will submit that if you have the healthy, economic, social, and cultural ecology of a community, it was the evolution of that community that was formed around the commerce in the first place. It's likely somebody set up a trading post. Maybe that trading post was on the Cedar River or the Iowa River and then they traded furs through there and the trading post began to sell goods and then, after a while, services, and they built a residential house. They probably slept in the store when they first moved there. Then they built a home to live in and then they needed more services. As the businesses expanded, they justified the people that would be building more businesses around them. They needed a place to live. So they built homes. It wasn't that somebody moved to Cedar Rapids 150 or 180 years ago and decided that they just wanted to live there like a vacation home, Madam Speaker. It was the first people that built the towns and the cities in the Midwest at least and in the United States, for that matter, they set up the businesses first and the residences came next. Then they had to have government to provide order and the government buildings were built.

Sometimes it was the transportation links like the railroads that caused the towns to be built along them, especially at the intersections of the railroads, and where we had the intersections of the rivers, which were the flow of commerce back in the day. All of this was surrounded and came together because somebody went out there and established a business because there was an opportunity to make some profit. The residences were built around the businesses.

And so we have our priorities in a condition where they need to be rearranged. Our priorities, I believe, should be this. Recognize that the source of the taxes are the businesses that earn the wealth and pay the taxes and hire the workers to pay the wages so that people can afford to live in the houses that they live in.

So we here in our government response to disasters of, let me say, epic proportions, help out the residences and the railroad and the political subdivisions but not the businesses.

I have legislation I have introduced in the Congress this week, Madam Speaker, and the number of the legislation escapes my memory for the moment, but what it does, it goes in and amends the Stafford Act. The Stafford Act is the language that allows FEMA to provide grants to residences and this allows businesses with 25 or fewer employees to qualify for disaster relief grants in the same fashion, on up to the $28,800 limit that is there today in statute for residences.

This, I think, is a change that is a long time coming. It's been endorsed by all of the Iowa House delegation. We are asking to go out then to the Representatives from the other States that are affected by this flood, asking them

to sign on as well. The idea being this: Small businesses can perhaps be put back on their feet very quickly if their damage is such that a limited grant, and I know for some of these businesses, it won't amount to a lot, and some will turn up their nose and say, You're not really helping me enough. But it's something and it's what we can do. It may in fact be all we can do. I don't think that it's more than we can do. But, for me, if we are going to justify grants to residences and grants to railroads and municipalities, then I don't know how we say no to the businesses that are funding it all and the reason for it all in the first place.

So what is the point in fixing up homes and providing residences for people that won't have jobs in the businesses that are closed? Why is Cedar Rapids dark? Why is there not a plan, a plan that they can at least count on, and if the answer is no, then it's no, and they can make their plans accordingly.

But right now, under the current statute that we have, the answer is, well, maybe. And there will be some decisions made later. The city will work in cooperation with the county, with the State, who will work in cooperation with the Federal Government. I endorse all of that. The working groups that have been put together look to me like they are good people, working in a good cause, but we still don't have the definitive response.

So I am encouraging this, the adoption of the language to amend the Stafford Act so that small businesses with 25 or fewer employees qualify for grant relief in the same fashion that residences do, up to $28,800, and that can be enough to keep a business open, it can be enough to refurbish the inside of the businesses.

I walked into a number of them on Saturday. Some are under reconstruction and some are just sitting there. Some have been stripped out but they don't have a plan to put it back together. That is what we are working with, Madam Speaker.

We have got to move on this. If Speaker Pelosi is not willing to move the tax relief package that is drafted and introduced by Senator Grassley and endorsed by Senator Harkin, the package that was good enough for Katrina and Rita, it should be good enough for Iowa floods, Madam Speaker.

This $123.5 billion that flowed through to Katrina relief, we are looking right now at $2.65 billion for the Midwest flood relief, which includes a number of States, including parts Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas. Those States come to mind right away.

We have got to move some relief, and this Congress is ready to adjourn for August, the August break, by late Thursday night or sometime on Friday. We will go home for 6 weeks and during that entire 6 weeks that this Congress doesn't at least send a signal that we are willing to step up and help the people that are in distress, then if we do not do that, we have failed them. They need a definitive response from this Congress. You have to be able to plan on something.

I believe that the people have performed well in Iowa. One of the things that they said was that they just went out and worked. They didn't ask for anything. I have talked to the FEMA people that have been around the country in these disasters for a career--and they were constantly complimentary of the way Iowans have responded to this. I hear anecdotes about Iowans that will say, Yes, I could use some relief, but don't stop and help me because my neighbor needs it worse than I do. Go help my neighbor.

It's been neighbor helping neighbor. What has been missing here is not volunteers, not good cheer, because there is a smile on their face in a lot of the cases no matter how the dire circumstances are, no matter how much adrenaline has drained off, and no matter how much they look through that tunnel looking for the light at the other end. No matter how much that is, their spirit has been strong.

But the joke came up, Well, we didn't have any protesters, we didn't have any looters, and we didn't have much media. So if we'd had protester, looters, and media, maybe we would have had some of this legislation moved by now. Maybe Speaker Pelosi would have had a little more sensitivity. But these polite and quiet people, these respectful people, these salt-of-the-earth people, as Congressman Loebsack referenced earlier tonight, haven't been beating the drum, they haven't been demanding relief. They have just been doing their work and pulling their end together.

It reminds me, Madam Speaker, of our debate on the Medicare reimbursement language that we fought through here in this Congress back in I believe it was 2003, perhaps 2004. When one calculates the relief, or the funding for Medicare patients, the per-patient funding for Iowa was last in the Nation. Medicare reimbursements, last in the Nation. Of the 50 States, Iowa ranks 50th. Before we passed that legislation, Iowa ranked 50th, and it was a long ways up to 49th. It is more than a coincidence that Louisiana ranks first. They ranked first then. We passed the reform relief, and they ranked first afterwards.

So the analysis goes this way. Back in the seventies, when Richard Nixon imposed a wage and price freeze, Iowa health care providers honored that wage and price freeze, so they didn't give increases in wages. They lost some people to other States that didn't respect that and gave wages anyway, but Iowa respected that.

There is another situation. That is Iowans don't use health care services with the frequency and regularity that they do in Louisiana, for example. So, historically, at least, Louisiana didn't honor the wage and price freeze imposed by President Nixon, and they utilized the medical services more regularly than those in Iowa.

So the formulas that were put in place that were based upon frequency of usage and cost reflected the two things: More wages were being paid in Louisiana than Iowa because they didn't freeze their wages, and they used the health care services more. Those two indicators, multiplied over the years from back in the early seventies to today, where the reimbursement rates in Louisiana were far higher, highest in the Nation, and Iowa, lowest in the Nation. We were 50th, and a long ways up to 49th. We have made some marginal improvements in that. We are still 50th, it is just not so far up to 49th.

But what happened is Iowans not using health care services is similar to Iowans not demanding services from this Federal Government. It was said by the former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, here is how it works: Iowans will not go to the doctor or the hospital sometimes when they need to. Sometimes they will stay home and die in bed instead. So they aren't running up health care costs, because they are independent and want to be self-reliant and take care of themselves. But that former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee said, but Louisianans are a little different. They will wake up in the morning and feel good and go to the doctor and ask them why.

Well, if those two things are right, and they are just used to describe the stark differences and not meant to be a particular representation of the people in either State, because we know there are outstanding people in all States, that is the kind of people though that we have here in Iowa right now that have been underwater and seen floods of epic proportions; the kind of people that will stay home and die in bed; the kind of people that won't go to the streets and demonstrate; the kind of people that aren't criticizing the Federal, State, county or city government for not doing enough. They are not criticizing their Governor or Members of Congress or their Senators. They are not criticizing FEMA in an intense, significant way. They are saying, just give me some answers so I can plan, and I will do what I have to do. And if I have lost my entire life's work and all I have left is a chance to go on Social Security, I am going to figure out how to adjust to that. But give me some real answers.

I think this Congress needs to give some real answers, and I think we need to expand the Stafford Act to include small businesses so they qualify for grants in the same fashion that residences do. And if we can't do that, I don't know how I can justify the grants that go to the residences.

The businesses are essential in the entire economic ecosystem of the communities, because if it weren't for the businesses, the residences wouldn't be there. If it weren't for the businesses, the railroad wouldn't need to be there. If it weren't for the businesses, there won't be anything there.

Nobody is going to go out and move out in the countryside and just live there and live on the land, because, sooner or later, somebody has to start a business. They are the key, and they are the source of at least 80 percent of the new employment in America. We need to get them on their feet quickly.

One of the smart people in the meeting on Saturday is a city council member who is also a CPA who said, these businesses that have taken the flood losses have been kicked into a business startup mode. The risk of failure in a new business startup is significantly greater than it is in a business that is established. Even though these businesses were established, for the most part they have lost so much capital and they have got such a deep hole to come back out of, they are essentially startup businesses.

So they don't need to have a 30 year liability. That doesn't help their cash flow. And, by the way, these losses that they have are losses that aren't going to be funded. It isn't like a new investment that you put in when you go in and replace the floor and the furnishing and appliances and the walls and the wiring in your business, and the inventory. It isn't like you have added on to a production line and you kick up your gross receipts and help your bottom line. This is a great big hole that has to be filled in the equity that has been created often through a lifetime of work. That is what is up.

I am asking the leadership in this Congress to quickly go to work with us, and let's get the tax package passed that all of the Members of the Iowa delegation in the House and Senate support. Let's get some relief there. Let's provide some grant money for the businesses that all the members of the Iowa delegation in the House of Representatives support, the amendment of the Stafford Act. Let's send a message from this Congress that there is hope to the people that live in the city that has seen more water than ever before, a city that is indistinguishable from New Orleans at the peak of the recovery of its disaster, a city that is the second largest city in the State of Iowa, as an example, which represents the cities up and down those valleys of the Cedar, the Iowa, the Turkey River and others, and along the Mississippi River Valley.

All this needs to be done by this Congress. When one goes and looks at the example of the appropriations that have taken place to try to lift the people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, along the Gulf Coast and parts of Texas out of their Katrina and Rita disasters, we can do the same for people in the Midwest. Not just Iowa, Madam Speaker, but also across the river, up the river and down the river. We need to do the right thing.

Once we cross the line and make the commitment, we need to do a balanced commitment and help these businesses out, as well as the residences. And it needs to be a definitive response, a response that they can count on, and one that build their future on.

That is what I am asking of this Congress. That is what I am asking of our leadership. And I am asking for the cooperation across the aisle between the Democrats and the Republicans. I am going to ask my colleagues in this Congress to come down to this floor and raise this issue and join me in the next opportunity we have to do a special order together.

That, Madam Speaker, concludes this subject matter. I believe that being this close to our adjournment time, I am going to just fit in one more subject quickly for the matter of information purposes for the Congressional Record.

It is something that is continually distorted on the floor as we have these energy debates. The statement is consistently made, why would you drill in ANWR? It will take 10 years to get any oil out of ANWR. Then that moves up to 15 years, and then 20 years I heard last week; 20 years to get oil out of ANWR.

Well, we passed ANWR legislation out this House not that long ago, I am going to say not 20 years ago, but about 4 or 5 years ago. Had that made it to the President's desk, instead of having been filibustered in the Senate by the same party that opposes energy expansion in this Congress, we would have oil coming out of ANWR today.

I was signed up to go up to Alaska to open up the oil fields in the North Slope of Alaska. I was signed up to do that in 1970, and as I prepared to go up there, there was a court injunction that was filed. That court injunction in 1970 froze the development of the Alaska North Slope oil fields, and as it froze that development, there was no development that took place. It took until 1973 to open up those oil fields. I actually reported that to be 1972. I was operating from memory. It was actually 1973. I went back to get some of those records, and here is what I find.

The court injunction stopped the development of the Alaska pipelines in 1970, and it froze that development with an injunction that prohibited their development until 1973.

In 1973, the Congressman for Alaska, who is here in this Congress still, Congressman Don Young, introduced legislation, because the environmentalists had successfully blocked access to a massive supply of crude oil that this country needed. Mdand this legislation was introduced and became law, and I see the date here, and I believe this is the date that it was enacted, but I am not certain, and it is November 16, 1973, when legislation was passed to open up Alaska for oil, and it reads like this. There had to be legislation that blocked all of the litigation, all the environmentalist, extremist lawsuits, and allowed for the development of the oil fields.

It says in this piece of legislation, Public Law 95-153, November 16, 1973, Section 203(a): ``The purpose of this title is to ensure that, because of the extensive governmental studies already made of this project and the national interest in early delivery of North Slope oil to domestic markets, the trans-Alaska oil pipeline be constructed promptly without further administrative or judicial delay or impediment. To accomplish this purpose, it is the intent of the Congress to exercise its constitutional powers to the fullest extent in the authorizations and directions herein made and in limiting judicial review of the actions taken pursuant thereto.''

In other words, Article III, Section 2, court stripping said you don't have any jurisdiction to hear any cases that are going to block the development of the North Slope of Alaska, the right-of-way roadway to go from Fairbanks north up to there, nor the about 850 miles of pipeline that was built from milepost zero up on the North Slope at what is known as Dead Horse access on down to Port Valdez.

Reading again from Public Law 93-153, ``The actions taken pursuant to this title which relate to the construction and completion of the pipeline system and to the applications filed in connection therewith necessary to the pipelines' operation at full capacity as described in the final environmental impact statement of the Department of Interior shall be taken without further action under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.''

Congress said enough with the litigation. We want the energy out of the North Slope. Environmentalists said, you will destroy the ecosystem. What happened? Article III, Section 2, stripping, said courts, you don't get to hear any more cases. This is going to go forward, because Congress says so.

This Congress can say so to open up ANWR the same way, the same ecosystem. That is right, neighbors. It takes 74 miles of pipeline to be added to connect it to the 850 miles or so of Alaska pipeline that is there.

This legislation, November 16, 1973, opened it up. We had to build the road. We had to build the pipeline. We had to drill the wells. We had to put the feeder tubes together. We had to get it to the terminal, get all of that done. And 3 years later, by our calculation, actually 35 months later, crude oil came out of the pipeline in Valdez.

Now, if that can happen back in 1973, with the technology we have today, who would believe that we can't drill ANWR, build a 74 mile pipeline and get that oil coming out of that pipeline at Port Valdez in a lot less than 10 years, and a far lot less than 20 years. I would submit it is easily less than 3 years.

This Congress has vacillated on this subject matter. We can't get a vote out

of this Speaker because they don't believe that we ought to have more energy in the marketplace. I believe we should. I believe that it is the law of supply and demand.

We need more energy into the marketplace of all kinds. We need to drill ANWR; we need to drill the Outer Continental Shelf; we need to drill the non-national park public lands; we need to open up the natural gas, the vast supplies we have, about 420 trillion cubic feet on the Outer Continental Shelf; we need clean burning coal, and lots of it; and we need to take the oil out of the coal shale in the heart of the west, in the Rockies.

We need more nuclear, and this Congress blocked access to another location for uranium, the last place that I know we can go to. We need to expand our nuclear. And, yes, we need wind and we need solar and geothermal. Those are the only three sources that were not met with vigorous opposition. But those three sources altogether, wind, solar and geothermal, only comprise 0.74 of 1 percent of the overall energy consumption in the United States. My friends on this side of the aisle, that really don't have a plan except to shut down access to energy, would want to take those three little pieces and expand them into 100 percent of the new energy supply for the United States and then say, well, we want to be energy independent.

Now, how are you going to do that? It is not possible to do so, unless we expand and grow the size of the energy pie, produce more of every kind of energy that we use, in an environmentally safe fashion, add another piece to the pie called energy conservation, and take that 72 percent of the energy that we are consuming, 72 percent of the energy we are consuming is the energy that we are producing, we need to expand the 72 percent to 100 percent to be energy independent.

We can do it. We must believe. We must do it in all ways, and we need to act now before it is too late and our wealth is transferred overseas to the Middle East, to people that don't like us all that much.

Madam Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence and the privilege, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, July 31, 2008, at 10 a.m.

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

Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 194 appropriately reminds us of the horrors of slavery. Slavery was a stain on our original Constitution. It took the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans who died in the Civil War to erase that stain and to pave the way for passage of the Civil War amendments to our Constitution. We must never forget that.

This resolution exhorts us not to repeat the mistakes of the past. I would like to address two of those mistakes in some of this time.

One of the clauses of this resolution notes that after emancipation from 246 years of slavery, African Americans soon saw the fleeting political, social and economic gains they made during Reconstruction eviscerated by virulent racism and lynching.

It is worth noting in that regard that the government's campaign against the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction Era included the use of military commissions approved by Congress to try those vicious terrorists of the day. Klan terrorists disguised in plain clothes embarked on a campaign of terror that included lynchings, assassinations and even the disemboweling of their innocent victims.

The experience, Mr. Speaker, of that period, presaged the dangers of extending habeas corpus litigation rights to enemy terrorists today. The campaign to defeat the Klan collapsed during the Reconstruction Era when Klansmen asserted habeas litigation rights in Federal court against their captors.

As one historian has written, the result of the required legal release of the Klan was that Klansmen not only escaped punishment, they turned the law on their erstwhile prosecutors with a series of suits and harassments that drove some of them from the State as fugitives. No sooner had Colonel George W. Kirk, the local commander, brought his prisoners to Raleigh, then two of them sued him for false arrest. He was released on bond and returned to his command, while other similar suits accumulated against him. In effect, he became a refugee from process servers and sheriffs, protected by his own soldiers.

I fear the Supreme Court has repeated that mistake today by granting terrorists habeas litigation rights to challenge their detentions in Federal Court. Resolutions like the one we consider now help to remind the Nation of the mistakes of the past so they will not be repeated in the future.

This resolution also expresses a commitment to rectifying the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow. Those misdeeds, of course, were premised in the notion that people should be treated differently on account of their race.

One the most significant civil rights developments out of the 2006 elections was passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, an amendment to the Michigan State Constitution that passed by a wide margin, 58 percent to 42 percent. The Civil Rights Initiative in relevant part reads simply, and I have heard Ward Connerly make this statement in person and it booms from his voice and it reaches my heart, Mr. Speaker. It says, ``The State shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.'' Similar efforts are underway in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma. This resolution reminds us all that American government should operate on a color-blind basis.

As I read through this resolution, I pick out some pieces that don't fit my sense of history. I would add that the Civil War is often taught to being fought over slavery. The people on the south side of the Mason Dixon Line would say it was fought over States' rights. I would say among those States' rights was the argument that the Southern States could declare their policy with regard to slavery.

Slavery has put a scar upon the United States that was a component of history as it arrived here, and it has been a component of most of the history within the continents. It has not, as it says here, imposed a rigid system of officially sanctioned racial segregation in virtually all areas of life. Subsequent to the Civil War and the emancipation, there were many areas in the North that were integrated, socially, economically, with a heart to do so, and I think they deserve some credit here as well, Mr. Speaker.

The vestiges of Jim Crow law today, I hope we learn what they are. The one I can think of is the Davis-Bacon wage scale. That is a vestige of Jim Crow. I can't think of the others.

I do appreciate the language that says, ``However long the journey, our destiny is set: Liberty and justice for all,'' and I mean that sincerely. And as this resolution apologizes to African Americans, I would correct that and say that there are many African Americans in this country who are immigrants from other countries, and they do very well here in America. They haven't felt the same sense as those who are descended from slaves that lived in this country. So I would say this resolution more speaks to the descendants of slaves and those being in this country exclusively African Americans.

I would add that there are some missing components altogether. I brought this book because I think it puts some more perspective on this as well, Mr. Speaker. This is a book written by Robert Davis, ``Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters.'' He is a professor, I believe, at Ohio State University.

I have read this carefully. It grips my soul like this subject grips my soul. It tells the story of 1.25 million Christian slaves hijacked on the seas of the Mediterranean who were subjected to slavery and forced to build the edifices along the Barbary Coast and the northern coast of Africa. They don't have descendants because they were worked to death and dumped overboard from the corsairs, those who pulled on the oars instead of built the edifices. Some of the women were pushed into being concubines. But, for the most part, this is very instructive. It says many of us are descended of relatives of slaves, but there are no descendants from these slaves because they didn't survive. That is 1.25 million.

So I think that in this context, this Nation is rising above this debate, and I would like to think we have put this debate behind us. I know that Chairman Conyers knows my head and my heart on this, and I have spoken about how deeply it has affected me to walk into a church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, and look up to the balcony and see that that balcony was made for African Americans, while white people went to church downstairs on the ground floor. It is hard for me to fathom a faith that would recognize a division like that, Mr. Speaker.

I know also that Abraham Lincoln spoke to this subject matter, and perhaps I will come back to that.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

As I listened to this debate, Mr. Speaker, I looked back through some documents that I made sure that I could take a look at before I came to floor, and one of them is H. Res. 1237. That is a resolution that passed here on 18 June 2008. And that date is timely, because it recognizes in the House of Representatives President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but it recognizes especially Juneteenth, the date upon which the last slaves were freed. And that was roughly about 2 years from the time that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. And it takes me to this point that I think is an important discussion.

This is a piece of information that I gathered from a Washington historian, and I qualify it a little bit because I haven't gone back and Googled it, I haven't checked Wikipedia, but I like this story so much that I want to tell it as qualified in that fashion, from a respectable Washington historian, but this way:

When President Lincoln was considering signing the Emancipation Proclamation, he reportedly called his cabinet together. They sat around the cabinet table, and President Lincoln laid out his argument that he wanted to emancipate the slaves. And so as he made the argument, the men--it would have all been men sitting around the cabinet table then in 1863. He turned to the first cabinet member and said, ``What say you?'' The first cabinet member reportedly said, ``Mr. President, you can't free the slaves. Those who are under your control and authority and jurisdiction are already free; they are north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Those on the other side, you can't reach because they are protected by the Confederate Army.''

And Lincoln turned to the next cabinet man and said, ``What say you?'' The next cabinet member said, ``Mr. President, I would suggest that there are men fighting in Union uniforms today that aren't so enthusiastic about ending slavery. They really want to defend the North and they want to defend the colors that we have, but there are really some racists in the Army. So you are going to lose their support if you emancipate the slaves.''

And he went to the next cabinet member and the next cabinet member, and each one came up with a different argument. As it came around the table, every single cabinet member had said to President Lincoln, ``Mr. President, do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation. My advice to you is there isn't enough upside to offset the downside.'' Or, as we say today, the juice is not worth the squeeze.

President Lincoln reportedly said, ``Well, gentlemen, the aye has it,'' and signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Now whether that story is true or not, and I know there are a lot of urban legends around Lincoln, I really love that story, because that shows the character and the quality of leadership that we had in the White House at that time, and also a man who gave his life for the emancipation of the slaves. A man who believed it. A man who had such a strong conviction that when I

stand at the Lincoln Memorial and I read the words of President Lincoln's second inaugural address that say, ``Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsmen's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said `the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' ''

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, the central part being: If the price to be paid was until every drop of blood drawn by the bondsmen's lash be paid by another drawn with the sword, Mr. Speaker, that is the powerful vision that there was a sin on this Nation, and Abraham Lincoln understood that. And 600,000 Americans died in the conflict to free the slaves.

I brought with me, this is my great, great, five times great uncle's Bible. This is the Bible that he carried in his shirt pocket for 3 years during the Civil War. If I open it up, I can show you fly specs and verses that are written in this Bible. His sister presented to it to him on the eve of his departure for the war, and he returned with it in his shirt pocket 3 years to the day. I found his grave when I was trimming grass around the gravestones for Memorial Day. No one knew where he had been buried. This is John Richardson's Bible. My great grandfather five times great was killed in the Civil War. All of his artifacts are lost. This remains. This remains as a connection to me, to my family members who were strong and powerful and committed abolitionists, and some of them gave their lives to free the slaves.

So as I read this resolution today, Mr. Speaker, I don't see a reference of gratitude for all the blood that was given by people to end slavery. I think that needs to be part of this record as well. The horrible price that was paid to pay back in blood drawn by the sword for every drop of blood drawn by the bondsmen's lash. That is a point, too, that the next generations need to learn and need to hear.

And then with the balance of this discussion, Mr. Speaker, I just would emphasize that this Nation threw off the yoke of slavery. We rose above it because we had a strong conviction as a people, we had a strong religious faith that rejected slavery as a sin against this Nation. We can be proud of the price that was paid to free the slaves. And it was a struggle of 100 years to pass the Civil Rights Act that lifted another level. And here we are today at a point where I look forward to the time when we can say we are fully integrated and there is no vestige of slavery and no vestige of racism, and an understanding that we are all God's children created in his image. And because he has blessed us with enough distinctions that we can tell each other apart, it is no reason for us to discriminate for or against anyone, as Ward Connerly says and as the Civil Rights Initiative in Michigan says so.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. I thank the gentlemen for their cooperation along with this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

I yield myself so much time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I support House Resolution 1357, recognizing the significance of the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to authorize the tragic internment of

Japanese Americans at the beginning of World War II. In 1942 President Roosevelt authorized the Army to evacuate more than 100,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast States, including Washington, Oregon, California and Arizona. This grossly broad approach to maintaining America's security serves as a continuing reminder that the civil rights of American citizens should never be lost, even in the midst of the chaos of war.

President Roosevelt authorized the mass expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans by signing Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. He took this ill-fated action, even though, in the words of Stetson Conn, a historian with the Army's Office of Military History, he said, ``The only responsible commander who backed the War Department's mass evacuation plan as a measure required by military necessity, was the President himself, as Commander-in-Chief.'' Even Attorney General Francis Biddle and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover advised against it.

That tragic misuse of power was met with an equally powerful response but, unfortunately, much too late.

In 1976 President Gerald Ford issued Proclamation 4417, in which he said, ``Learning from our mistakes is not pleasant, but as a great philosopher once admonished, we must do so if we want to avoid repeating them. I call upon the American people to affirm with me this American promise, that we have learned from the tragedy of that long ago experience forever to treasure, we have learned that we should forever treasure liberty and justice for each individual American, and resolve that this kind of action shall never again be repeated.

Congress eventually enacted the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which this resolution before us recognizes. It apologized on behalf of the Nation for ``fundamental violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights of these individuals of Japanese ancestry.''

President Ronald Reagan signed that action into law on August 10, 1988, proclaiming it a great day for America. 20 years later we stand here today to renew our Nation's commitment to remember the past, and to shepherd its lessons into the future.

I have in the past, and I would again today, Mr. Speaker, address the subject matter of how we should understand history. And quite often I find that we, in this Congress, are judging our ancestors with contemporary values and trying put their actions into a modern context, rather than for us to try to understand the context in which they made those decisions.

And even though I have made the case that J. Edgar Hoover advised against and the Attorney General advised against, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did go ahead with the Executive Order that began the internment of 100,000 or more Japanese Americans here in the United States. It was just months after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, very much the same scenario, from a national apprehension standpoint, as we had just post September 11, 2001.

And so I think history should not judge our ancestors harshly. We should seek to learn from these examples of history within two contexts; one context being looking back upon it, and another context would be try to place ourselves into the shoes of the people that had to make the decisions in that environment.

I am convinced that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the best interest of America in mind. I think he was very afraid that there would be some lost intelligence. That was the mind set of the time.

But we have come a long, long way since then, Mr. Speaker, and so far that one of our most important trading partners is Japan. One of our most important strategic partners is Japan.

We have come so far that my father, who spent 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific and forbid rice to be in our household, this young man had dinner with the Minister of Defense of Japan 60 years later. This Nation has many times shaken hands across the Pacific with our good friends in Japan. And this resolution that is before us today acknowledges the history and says that if we had it to do over again we would have done it differently. But it also builds upon it so we can expand our relationships with our good friends, the Japanese.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren).

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

I appreciate the remarks from the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank), and particularly we do have the benefit of hindsight; and I don't know that there is a generation that's compelled to apologize for a previous generation or its ancestors. And I would question the real value of descendents of people who had to make decisions in that context apologizing for their actions.

And I look across at some of these that we've done. I remember President Clinton apologizing to Africa for slavery--and we have a resolution that's going to come up for a vote a little bit later on slavery--and I regret those things. I would point out that if indeed these are the sins of our fathers, they're not necessarily visited upon the sons and daughters unto the second or third generation and that we should learn from history. And we do have the opportunity to be Monday morning quarterbacks, to have the perspective of hindsight, as the gentleman from Massachusetts said. I definitely agree with that emotion that's there and that thought process.

But I would caution us that I am watching us move down a path of apologizing for one thing and another, and I'm not watching us stop and give thanks for the wonderful and noble things that this country has done. And I think when we look across the globe at the results of that great effort of World War II, that wonderful victory of the Greatest Generation that this country has ever produced, that we can see that millions of people breathe free air today because of the prices that were paid. And there's never been a war that's been fought without mistakes. There's been mistakes in judgment and in political judgment and military miscalculations, and lives have been lost over and over again in those miscalculations. But we had to find ways to persevere and we have.

And what came out of World War II was the United States emerged as a global power. Our industry was the most powerful industry in the world, unchallenged, because ours was not destroyed and the carnage that visited the competing ideology, so to speak. And our currency became the currency of the world, and American-made products became dominant throughout the world. The American culture spread throughout the world. And our sense of freedom and our language and our civilization rose up to be predominant.

And it was unchallenged at that time until such time as the Soviet Union was quickly formed and came up against the United States. And we saw the Cold War begin within years of the Second World War. That fought for 40 to 45 years, and our way of life succeeded.

All of that flowed out of something that had some mistakes along the way. And anyone that's ever done anything in life knows that there are mistakes, whether you raised a family or fought a war or started a business or entered into public life. All of us made mistakes along the way, but I do not believe that we carry guilt from preceding generations.

But we do have a responsibility. If we fail to learn, then we would carry guilt ourselves if we fail to learn from those actions of our ancestors whom today we judge to be wrong. And I do believe they were wrong, and I do support this resolution. And I support it with the spirit that I have articulated here.

I would reserve the balance of my time.

I'm going to pass up the opportunity for the last word because I have had it. I would urge the adoption.

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

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

Mr. Speaker, our State and local prosecutors are the heart of our criminal justice system. These dedicated men and women prosecute the majority of criminal cases in the country.

Every State has its criminal problems, and in my home State, we have 350 deputy county attorneys and assistant attorneys general who prosecute thousands of crimes each year. In 2007, for example, State and county prosecutors handled over 68,000 criminal cases in my State alone.

The National District Attorneys Association, working in conjunction with the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Education, provides training to State and local prosecutors at the Ernest F. Hollings National Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina. This comprehensive training improves trial practice and advocacy skills needed to successfully prosecute crimes against children, gang crimes, and other violent criminal activity.

The National Advocacy Center contains over 200,000 square feet of classrooms, conference rooms, and full-size

courtrooms equipped with state-of-the-art audio technology for training. The National District Attorneys Association offers a variety of courses at the center, often including visiting lecturers and experts in specific areas of criminal prosecution.

Since 1998, the NDAA's, National District Attorneys Association, program at the National Advocacy Center has provided specialized training and education to approximately 3,000 local prosecutors each year. And over that time, the center has trained a total of over 20,000 State and local prosecutors.

Unfortunately, Federal funding for this training has significantly decreased in recent years. In fiscal year 2007, the program received no Federal funding. This lack of funding has required the NDAA to lay off employees and require students to pay for their expenses in order to keep the training program up and running.

H.R. 6083 authorizes $6.5 million a year for fiscal years 2009 through 2012 to the Attorney General to carry out this important training program.

It's critical that our prosecutors are properly trained to hone their courtroom skills and adapt to changing trial practices. These prosecutors come from all across the country and converge on South Carolina, where this center of education is there for them, and that means there's also a standard that goes back across the country, and I think that's an important piece of this as well, Mr. Speaker.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting H.R. 6083.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.