Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself so much time as I may consume. I rise in support of S. 3295, and I urge the House to adopt the bill.

Mr. Speaker, 9 years ago Congress enacted the American Inventors Protection Act as part of a larger intellectual property and telecommunications reform measure. Among its many provisions, this law confers a measure of autonomy on the Patent and Trademark Office. At the time, inventors, trademark owners, and Members of Congress believed the agency would function more efficiently if it were allowed greater operational freedom. In fact, some of the earliest drafts of the legislation, dating back to the early and mid-1990s, sought to transform the Patent and Trademark Office into a public corporation.

Consistent with this goal, the 1999 law enhances the authority of the Patent and Trademark Office Director to oversee agency affairs. This includes empowering the Director, not the Secretary of Commerce, to appoint administrative law judges serving on the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, as well as the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.

Unfortunately, this small and seemingly innocuous change may very well violate an obscure provision of the United States Constitution, the so-called ``appointments clause.'' That's article II, section 2, which enumerates the powers of the President, including the right to appoint various judges, ministers, and other government officials. The last portion of the clause states that ``Congress may . . . vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.''

In other words, a straightforward reading of article II, section 2, which I strongly endorse, suggests the 1999 authority that Congress bestowed on the Patent and Trademark Office Director to appoint administrative law judges is unconstitutional, inconsistent with article II, section 2. Instead, this right is more properly reserved for the head of the relevant department, the Secretary of Commerce, because the Patent and Trademark Office remains an agency within Commerce.

But what does this mean as a practical matter? Why it is a problem? The answer lies in the number of judges appointed since the 1999 law took effect.

Of the 81 judges serving on the two boards, 50 were appointed by the Patent and Trademark Office Director under his new authority. Those judges have rendered hundreds of decisions, all of which may be constitutionally suspect if challenged. And that is already happening in one case, the Translogic Technologies versus Dudas case, which is pending before the Supreme Court.

This body knows how important intellectual property is to our national economy. With all the other problems plaguing the patent system, the last thing we need is a crisis that reopens settled legal disputes. This isn't fair to the litigants, especially those who won, and it places rights and fair access to inventions in limbo.

The solution we must adopt is S. 3295. The bill transfers the authority to appoint administrative law judges from the Patent and Trademark Office Director to the Secretary of Commerce and makes it consistent with article II, section 2 of the Constitution.

The legislation also adopts two features developed by the Patent and Trademark Office and the Department of Justice. One empowers the Secretary to ``deem'' or ratify all the appointments made by the PTO Director under the 1999 law. The other creates a ``de facto officer'' defense to any challenge made to the appointment of a patent or trademark administrative law judge.

Pursuant to the defense, the acts of a public officer performed under color of authority are considered valid and immune from collateral attack. Born of policy and necessity, the defense protects the interests and reasonable expectations of the public who must rely on the presumptively valid acts of public officials.

In closing, we must enact S. 3295 much sooner rather than later to avert a potential litigation crisis that would prove wasteful, unnecessary, and unfair.

S. 3295 does provide a measure of immunity. Congress clearly has the authority to do so. And today, we have the responsibility to quickly move S. 3295.

Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption and 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.

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

Mr. Speaker, on August 5, 2008, thousands of communities and millions of individuals will once again participate in National Night Out. It's an annual event created to raise community awareness of and participation in local crime-fighting programs and organizations.

H. Res. 1324 calls on the administration to coordinate Federal efforts to participate in this nation-wide campaign as well as other community crime-prevention initiatives.

In 1984, the National Association of Town Watch, NATW, decided the 5 to 7 percent of neighborhood residents actively involved in their local crime watch and prevention programs was just not enough. It was out of that concern that a National Night Out was born. Since then, it has been the mission of the National Association of Town Watch and National Night Out to promote and increase the membership of these local crime- fighting initiatives and organizations, to strengthen police community relationships, and to send a message to criminals that neighborhoods and communities are united in their fight against crime.

This year's event will celebrate a National Night Out's 25th anniversary. Since its creation, the event, which began with 2.5 million Americans in 23 States illuminating their homes, has expanded its participation to 35.4 million in all 50 States. And the traditional ``lights on'' has grown to include block parties, neighborhood walks, police meetings, cookouts, and parades.

Unfortunately, crime has found its way into even the safest of neighborhoods. And while our law enforcement officials play a tremendous role in fighting this criminal activity, united communities committed to crime-prevention awareness is essential to this ongoing fight.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe).

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the remarks made by the gentleman that came to the floor. As I listened to Mr. Poe and his remarks, I come from an entirely different environment. I do a little inventory, and within a mile radius of my house there are four houses, and that's all, perhaps, in limit of a mile. Not only do we know who drives down our road and where they're going, if the ambulance comes by, we know who's in it. It's a very thinly populated rural area, but we have a neighborhood.

And when I come to Washington, D.C., where my wife and I maintain a residence, we live in a neighborhood. And neighborhoods are similar whether they're in the city or whether they're in the country because you need to get to know each other. And a National Night Out is a way to do that. And when we get to know each other, that opens up our communications. And when we open up our communications, we provide the intelligence that supports our law enforcement so that we can fight crime in a direct effective fashion. That's the essence of the reason that I support this resolution, and I urge its adoption.

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.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 3294, the United States Parole Commission Extension Act of 2008.

This bipartisan legislation will extend the authorization of the United States Parole Commission for an additional 3 years.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Ranking Member Lamar Smith introduced the House version of this bill earlier this month. Crime Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott and Ranking Member Louie Gohmert also joined as cosponsors.

The Parole Commission is an independent agency within the Department of Justice that has the responsibility of supervising Federal offenders that are eligible for parole. The Parole Commission also has jurisdiction over offenders from the District of Columbia who are parole-eligible and those convicted under current DC law, under which they cannot be paroled.

Today, the great majority of the Commission's workload concerns the District of Columbia offenders. That's because the group of offenders that the Commission was originally intended to supervise--Federal offenders that are eligible for parole--are a small category of prisoners getting smaller every day. This decrease in the number of parole-eligible Federal offenders is the result of a decision by Congress to end indeterminate sentencing, and therefore Federal parole, with the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act, or SRA, of 1984.

As a result of the SRA, the arbitrary and disparate sentences imposed by judges under the old system were replaced with determinate sentences mandated by strong guidelines created by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. This new Federal sentencing arrangement has been an unquestioned success. Determinate sentencing makes incarceration terms more meaningful and ensures that offenders actually serve most of their sentences. Determinate sentencing also helped to restore the credibility of courts by making sentencing more uniform.

Over the last 25 years the national crime rate has dropped. This decrease in crime can be attributed to determinate sentencing, which keeps the violent criminals in prison and off the streets, and it also provides a deterrent.

In an effort to lower local crime rates, the District of Columbia followed the Federal example and abolished parole. Under the new DC system, the DC Superior Court imposes a term of incarceration and supervised release, and the Parole Commission enforces the conditions of the supervised release.

Like the population of Federal offenders eligible for parole, the parole-eligible DC offender population is declining over time, although at a slower rate than Federal offenders.

However, because all incoming offenders are now sentenced under the new law, the DC supervised release offender population is increasing over time.

The Department of Justice has indicated that it will evaluate the future of the commission during the 3-year reauthorization period. The department will review whether any changes to the commission are necessary to reflect its decreasing Federal parole responsibilities and its evolving supervised release responsibilities for the District of Columbia. These changes may include transferring all or some of the commission's functions to an entity or entities inside or outside the Department of Justice.

We hope the department will share the results of this review with Congress as it will help the legislature make an informed decision about the future status of the U.S. Parole Commission.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege and the honor to address you on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

This is one of these evenings that is a hot and sultry night here in Washington, D.C. It strikes me as the kind of day that actually was in August when the first hearings happened out here in Washington that were addressing the global warming issue. They had a Dr. Hansen--he happens to be from my hometown--who testified before that first hearing. The temperature was, oh, approaching 100 degrees; the humidity was, oh, approaching 100 degrees, and it wasn't an air-conditioned office about 20 or more years ago, maybe 25 years ago. It wasn't an air-conditioned hearing room, I should say, committee room.

As the first testimony unfolded, Mr. Speaker, about global warming, it was

a lot easier to convince Members of Congress that that could be a problem when they were sitting in that 100-degrees-feels-like temperature with the high humidity in the committee room here in Washington.

You know, this kind of weather is the reason there is an August break. Why, as far back as our founders, they went home, and they tried to find some high ground where there was a breeze because they didn't have air conditioning, but August was used about 20, 25 years ago to kick off global warming.

We know that there has been a long debate since then and that the foundation for that science is in question. There are some 31,000 trained scientists who have signed off on a petition that says, ``We don't buy the science of global warming.'' Now, I don't know that you can find very many people on the street, Mr. Speaker, who really understand the science of the idea of global warming--I can surely find plenty who disagree--but I think, when you're going to do something that alters the state of our economy and the state of our culture and the global economy and the global culture in this fashion, then the proof has got to be on the people who want to make the changes and who want to shut down energy and energy access and energy production.

What's going on in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, is what has followed from that hearing those more than two decades ago. It's a belief that, when you use energy, it puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the Earth. It's a belief and not proof that a warmer Earth, in all categories, is bad for humanity. The people who are so concerned about global warming are not the kind of people who draw a line down through the middle of the paper on their legal pads and who write on one side ``these are the things that are bad about global warming'' and, on the other side of that line, in the center, ``these are the things that are good.''

No, Mr. Speaker. This is all a one-sided argument. In their minds, everything that has to do with the Earth--and it is very marginally, statistically, warming up. We don't know whether there's an increase in sun spots or whether there's a little bit of increase in greenhouse gases. Whatever the case, in their analysis, if the Earth warms by a degree, it's always bad in every case. Even when the Earth gets colder in certain places, it's still the fault of global warming because, after all, it's the average of the temperature; it's not the extremes that we should be looking at.

Last winter was one of the coldest winters we've had. We see the dynamics in the weather extremes. As to those dynamics, by some of the weather forecasters, they say that it's not because the Earth is warmer but because the Earth is cooling in certain locations that we're seeing more extreme weather.

In any case, this is not conclusive. Yet there are many people over on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, who have concluded that we should shut down energy consumption, that we should slow it down, back it down. Park your car. Park your SUV. Maybe even park your Prius because, right now, if you plug it into an outlet with a plug and you charge it up with electricity that was generated from coal, you're driving a coal-fired automobile down the highway. So they're saying park all of that. Get on your bicycle and ride your bicycle. If you do that, then it will slow down the greenhouse gas emissions. If that happens, it will save the planet for our children and grandchildren. Whatever the price is to our economy, to our way of life, to our culture, and whatever it does to shut down the economy, in their minds, it is all worth it.

That's what we're working with here.

On our side of the aisle, we're saying we need more energy. We're arguing that, in all forms of energy, we need to provide more of it, that high prices slow down our economy.

Everything we do takes energy, whether you're delivering Pampers or Pablum, or whether you're delivering French wine to the restaurants here in downtown Washington, D.C., it takes energy to do that. When that energy costs more money, everything costs more money. We say, let's put more Btus on the market of all kinds. When there's a huge supply, you'll see the demand doesn't meet the supply and prices go down until the demand meets the supply. That's something we understand over here. It's something that seems to be beyond the comprehension over here.

That's what's up, Mr. Speaker. And I think we need to articulate this over and over again until the American people understand. There is one side of this argument that has pushed for more energy. And we passed a number of bills in the last several Congresses, passed them out of the floor of this House and over to the Senate. If they had not been blocked over there by extreme environmentalists that had an ability to put a hold on a bill, that had an ability to filibuster, many of the pieces of legislation that expand our energy would already be law, and 6 or 8 or more years ago we would have started to open up places like the Outer Continental Shelf, non-national park public lands.

We passed pad drilling in ANWR some years ago. We would have oil coming out of that pipeline up there today from ANWR if we had just signed it into law the day it was passed out of the House of Representatives.

That's some of the backdrop, Mr. Speaker, on the energy issue. And I know that when you go to a place and you're looking for people that know something about energy, the first place you would go in the United States of America would be Texas. And I'm not sure it would be east Texas, but that's where I want to go, to the gentleman from east Texas, Mr. Louie Gohmert, and yield so much time as he may consume.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

And as I listened to your presentation, reclaiming my time, just going down through a list of some of the things that jumped out at me, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as the gentleman from Texas said, at a time when Iran has threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz. And through that closed strait comes 42.6 percent of the world's export oil supply. That isn't just the valve through which 42.6 percent of the world's export oil supply goes. That valve, if they turn it down, let alone turn it off, that shuts down the world economy. It nearly shuts off the world economy, and the dynamics of everything we do change dramatically. That's why in past decades we have had the United States Navy in there to keep those straits open during times of crisis because that is the pressure point in the world for the world's economy. If they follow through on this, and there is a relatively unstable leader in Iran, they shut down the straits and we drain out our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, what are our alternatives? Hard-core rationing, and even then we get down to the point where we don't have the fuel for our own military and the scenario of how the Battle of the Bulge was won by Americans instead of won by the Germans falls into play. We won't have the gas. We won't have the gas for our military. We won't have the gas for our economy. We won't have the juice. This is not the time to drain down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It's a political ploy on this side of the aisle. That's, I think, clear to all of us.

And, Mr. Speaker, the statement with ``use it or lose it,'' the argument that we have oil companies that have leases that are not being drilled upon, that's another one of those red herring arguments. And if we were serious about this, if we really thought the oil companies weren't developing leases that are on lands, they're just not developing dry holes. That's why those leases that are not drilled aren't drilled on yet. And if we would allow them to trade out those acres, 1 good acre for 5 bad ones, you would find out what the good land was and what the bad land was, what the good leases are and what the bad leases are. That would be my proposal, but that's not what happened here because we had to do another red herring. We had to stand up another strawman and make another argument because the American people aren't going to tolerate very long a Congress that refuses to act to open up energy.

The belief that tightening down the energy supply, see gas prices go up. If gas prices go up, people burn less. If people burn less, the god of sky is happy. Mother Earth is happy.

Human beings suffer. Grandmothers aren't going to get on their bicycles in January in Iowa and ride them down the gravel road 7 miles to town. That's how far it is for me to go to town, and it isn't all gravel, but the first mile is. It doesn't work for us. We can't drive those little Priuses either because the most recent time I had to shift my SUV into four-wheel drive to get home was still in April when the roads were soft and the frost was going out. So it's not an option for us unless we have a summer car and a winter car, a fair weather car and a foul weather vehicle. No, people in my part of the neighborhood drive the vehicles they do because that's what's necessary to get the job done. And a lot of those vehicles are farm pickups that are doing work every day.

There's a whole different mindset going on. And the reason that the people who represent the blue zones, the inner cities, the ones who hold the gavels in this Congress today, can get by with higher energy prices, one of those reasons is because the people buying gas in places like Texas and Iowa, and it's a long ways between towns in Texas, further than it is in Iowa, the people buying that gas that are going from town to town and doing the things they need to do to maintain their life-style and their businesses are paying 18.4 a gallon Federal tax and a lot of States have 20 or more cents on that to maintain the roads, and 17 percent of the Federal gas tax goes to mass transit. And so the people that are voting, the inner-city people that are voting for the folks that are environmental extremists that refuse to allow the energy development in America, our own energy, those people are subsidized by the folks that are buying gas. And their ticket to get on the metro down here at South Capitol and ride out to Falls Church is about a buck and a quarter. It would be a lot more than that if they had to buy the whole price of the metro. And a ticket on the subway in New York is cheaper than it would be if they had to pay the full fair cost for travel, and a ticket on the ``L'' in Chicago and the cable car in San Francisco, those transits by my measure are all subsidized by the people who are buying gas. And the constituents who allow their Members of Congress to drive up these prices are going to push us gas buyers to the point where we say, ``I'm not going to subsidize your mass transit anymore on my gas dollar. You pay for your own ticket.'' That's going to happen too in this Congress, and that will be when they squeal. And then they'll say, well, gas is too high; let's have some more energy.

Here's what has happened during the Pelosi Congress. This was going to be the Congress that was the most open in history, by the way. I think it's the most closed in history. It was going to be the most effective and hardest-working Congress in history. Well, it's sure not open, and, Mr. Speaker, it's sure not effective. And, additionally, we still haven't passed an appropriations bill as late in history as that has ever happened. And this cheaper gas price that was promised if we would just hand the gavel to Nancy Pelosi and apply her San Francisco values to all of America, we would have this wonderful world where everybody got along and gas would be cheaper. That was the promise. We are going to get you cheaper gas, cheaper than it was than Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker, took the gavel.

Here's what gas prices were when President Bush was sworn in, Mr. Speaker: $1.49. And it slowly crept up. And in about this area, we passed energy legislation, and it went over to the Senate, where the Democrats in the Senate filibustered our energy legislation that would have put many more Btus of energy into our marketplace. They said no. That blocked the smart legislation that came out of the House. And when that happened, prices of energy went up. And they went up to all of $2.33 a gallon for gasoline on the day that the new Speaker took the gavel here just behind me, $2.33, and gas prices were going to get cheaper. And here is what the promise results in. Now, it's fallen off a little bit more in the last week or so: $4.08, I saw $4.10, $4.11, more than that on the board in other places. But gas taking a leap like that, and why? Because there's less energy on the market, not more; because the people that are hedging because they need to have diesel fuel and gasoline see the supply that's there and they see that it's going to be harder to develop energy in the United States because of folks in this Congress in their majority won't let it happen.

We say drill everything, drill it now, produce more energy of all kinds, drill

ANWR, drill the Outer Continental Shelf, drill the nonnational park public lands. As Mr. Gohmert said, open up the Green River shale oil and go into that massive amount, 800 billion barrels, maybe a trillion barrels that are there; go in and get that natural gas in that huge find in Hainesville. Do all of those things. Produce more of every form of energy that we have.

The argument that we can't go to the Outer Continental Shelf and drill because it's environmentally unfriendly, Mr. Gohmert spoke about how that's the place where you go if you want to go fishing out there is to the oil platform because in the shade of the structure is a place where the fish congregate. So it has been better. There are places where they sink ships out in the ocean because it's fish habitat. Well, the structure of the ship is structure for fish. The structure of an oil platform is structure for fish. And there was at least one oil platform that was torn loose during Hurricane Katrina that blew 60 miles across the ocean, and it went up near shore near Mobile, Alabama. No leak, but a platform that was pushed 60 miles by a terrible storm. But they are set up now with the kind of connections that if they're torn loose, there are not leaks. And we have met this technology.

The North Slope of Alaska is essentially identical topography and identical environment to that of ANWR. They're right next door. It's like Nebraska and Iowa or Iowa and Illinois, and that's how the difference is between North Slope and ANWR. Well, the habitat for wildlife in the North Slope, after we went up and built the pipeline, has done about the same thing, maybe even better, than the platforms out in the gulf coast. In that the count in the caribou herd in the North Slope in 1970 was 7,000 caribou, 7,000 head of caribou walking around out there in that frozen tundra. For a couple months out of the year when the sun shines 24 hours a day, it thaws the permafrost down a foot to 18 inches. Sloppy old tundra in there. And those caribou that were 7,000 caribou in 1970 today are over 28,000 head of caribou.

Why is that? Well, one environmentalist said to me when I made that point, well, of course there are more caribou today. That's because the people that went up and worked on the pipeline shot all the wolves. That was their natural enemy. Now, I would not have come up with that. But this is what I can tell you, Mr. Speaker:

I was signed up to go up on that pipeline, and they had to pay good money to get a man to go up there and work in that climate, not just 80-below temperatures sometimes, though real men can do that, but the rules were this: First of all, there were no women allowed; so you're going to lose some of these men who don't want to go someplace where there are no women. It's tough for me. And the second thing was no gambling. The third thing was no booze. And the fourth thing was no guns. No women, no gambling, no booze, and no guns. That's why they had to pay such big money to get somebody to go work in 80-below temperatures. That was some of the worst of it. Most of it wasn't that bad.

So the reality is that if there were no guns up there and nobody shot any of the wolves and that isn't why the caribou herd increased, they increased because they had a nice dry spot where they could have their calves, not down in the ice water in the frozen tundra.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. Yes, the polar bears are doing well, and they are probably dining on a seal diet. They'll eat caribou. They'll eat anything they can get their paws on. That's what a bear does. And 28,000 head caribou herd up there on the North Slope.

But there is no resident caribou herd in ANWR next door. There's a migratory herd that comes in in the spring from Canada. They come in and have their calves there, and when the calves get to where they can walk, they all walk back to Canada. So it's a kind of a maternity ward for caribou there in ANWR. But no one can come up with any reason why they would stop coming over to have their calves or think that it would hurt their population. It would probably help their population because they like to get up out of that cold, frozen water and the tundra and get up on something kind of high and let the breeze blow the flies away and have their calves up there where they have a better chance of survival.

Another gentleman that has come to the floor to address this issue is one of the three judges from the State of Texas, and they all come here from Texas knowing something about the law and something about energy.

I would be happy to yield to Judge Carter, the gentleman from Texas.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, one of the outstanding judges from Texas, Judge Carter, and my wing man on the Judiciary Committee for 4 years, and my voice of reason as well.

This is a chart that was far harder to put together than it should have been. This should have been something that a simple little e-mail down to the office would have produced. You would think that when you ask a question, What is the energy production in the United States, what are all of its sources, and put it altogether and put it into the common denominator of Btus. Well, it didn't quite work that way because we don't measure electricity in Btu's. We measure it in kilowatts or megawatts, and sometimes coal doesn't give you that measurement either.

So we got some help from some people and this chart is the energy pie chart, I call it. Each one of these different colors here is a different source of energy. And so I will take us around.

This is the energy we produce in the United States. Overall, this is the number: 72.1 quadrillion Btus. Here's the number down here. That is 15 zeroes or so. But we will get to the meaning of that number here in a moment.

When I go around the horn and I start with gasoline, gasoline that is produced the United States amounts to 8.28 percent of the overall energy production in the United States. Then you go to diesel fuel and heating oil. That is 4.20 percent. Kerosene and jet fuel together is 1.57. Less than I thought it would be. Other petroleum products, heavy oil, those things, 4.8 percent.

Now there's a big piece here, the natural gas. The natural gas that Judge Carter talked about. Roughly 27\1/2\ percent of the overall energy that we produce is natural gas. Coal is 32\1/2\ percent of the overall Btu's. Nuclear, 11.66. Maybe bigger than most folks would think. We got to hydroelectric, which Judge Carter mentioned. Out of all our energy production, hydroelectric is 3.41 percent overall.

Then you get to these tiny little pieces here. We want to do all of these things, as Judge Carter said. We want to do them all.

Now we are getting down to the list of the things that the folks on this side of the aisle will do. Here they are. They will be okay maybe with geothermal as long as they don't have to watch it happen because they can't stand the thought of seeing a drill rig punch a hole down to turn the heat back. But once it's over, it's kind of okay.

Wind. Well, they don't like wind so good. If Teddy Kennedy can see it, they don't want it. But out in Texas it's probably all right. T. Boone Pickens said this is one problem we can't drill our way out of. Well, I believe that may be true, but it's also a problem we can't get out of without drilling. That is what I would add to the gentleman's wisdom. Here's solar, at .11 percent.

Here are the three sources of energy that are not objectionable to environmentalists, geothermal, wind, and solar, and they represent just a little bit more than 1 percent of the overall energy production in America, and that is what they would expand that into the entire energy supply for America.

These tiny little slivers here that are so small, you don't even get a color in there. It's just the line, the black line. Expand those into the whole circle and let the rest of this wither and die on the vine. Because if we drill an oil well, it's going to reach maximum production pretty quickly. From there on, it's statistically a little bit less oil on a daily basis until it finally dries up. We have got to keep exploring.

Same with natural gas. These wells don't last forever. They don't get bigger, better. They get to be a little lesser. With coal, you have got to keep opening coal mines. You can't be closing the uranium, by the way, or our nuclear will slowly get shut down.

There's the little sliver they would have, geothermal, wind and solar. But the rest of us, we would expand all of this, and I include with that ethanol, biodiesel, biomass. All of that source of energy needs to be expanded because I have the chart that shows not just the energy production in the United States, but the energy consumption compared to it, and it is actually the more interesting of the two charts, Mr. Speaker.

This chart shows the outside circle is the energy consumption in the United States. I showed you the number before, 72.1 quadrillion Btus of production, 101.4 quadrillion Btus of consumption. This circle in the middle is our production circle. The outside is our consumption circle. This inner circle is 72 percent of the outer circle.

So, however we want to measure this, we need to grow more natural gas so it comes out to the width of the outer circle. We need to grow more coal production, more nuclear production, more gasoline over here, and on and on with the diesel fuel, jet fuel, et cetera.

This inner circle, which is the energy production in the United States, has got to grow up to match up with the outer circle, which is energy consumption. If we do that, we are energy independent, however you measure it.

Now, I'd change the proportion of these slices of the pie. I would use a lot less natural gas to general electricity because it's a finite source and I'd rather see it go to manufacturing, where natural gas is the mother's milk of manufacturing. I'd rather see it go to fertilizer. We have nearly lost the fertilizer industry in American because natural gas has been pushed to high.

I would change the proportions and the priorities and I'd produce a lot more nuclear because we can and we should and it's environmentally friendly and it's the safest source of energy that there is on the one planet. The French produce 78 percent of their electricity with nuclear. Ours is 8.29--actually, 11.66 percent of our production and 8.29 percent of our overall consumption.

I will yield. I will add to the slice of the pie, just as I yield, one of these needs to be energy conservation. That changes the equation too.

The gentleman from Texas.

I thank the gentleman from Texas. I would add to that that the free market solutions that we have, they constantly adjust. If government gets out of the way, the demand will create the supply, and when the supply gets to be oversupply, then the price comes down.

Instead, we have people that have their hands on the gavel that don't believe in free market economy. They never sat down and read through Adam Smith's ``Wealth of Nations'' word-for-word and understood it. They don't live to appreciate it. They think there are a handful of intellectual elitists in the world that can manage the economy.

We have had two Members of this Congress that have called out for nationalization of at least part of our oil industry or all of our oil industry. One of them, the gentleman from New York, called for the nationalization of our oil refineries. In other words, that word doesn't fit too good with Americans, but it happens in places like Venezuela, and it happened in Libya to the Hunt brothers with their oil fields. Nationalization means the United States Government would take over the oil refineries and run them.

One other Member, the gentlewoman from California, argued that we should nationalize the entire oil industry in the United States, run that with the government.

I wonder, where does this come from? Where I come from, we are steeped in free enterprise. We are steeped in free market capitalization. We understand that ambition and the desire and need for profit has done more for the standard of living of all humanity than all the missionaries that ever went anywhere. And God love the missionaries for all they have done, but it has been the desire for profit that has driven our technology, in math and science and in the oil industry and in information technology.

It wasn't done because some intellectual elitist was sitting somewhere and decided let's invent a software package and a microchip and an oil drill rig and a derrick and a platform and a refinery. That was done because there was profit in it, and some good, solid, smart people put capital together and they worked hard and took risks and our lives got better.

There is a book that I read years ago called ``Trashing the Planet'' by Dixie Lee Ray, former Governor of the State of Washington. She since has passed away. She served one term out there, as I recall.

She starts the book out about how in 1900 the world was a very smelly and dirty and dangerous place, and she writes about how horses were going up and down in the streets, and they didn't wear diapers like they do in Central Park in those days. They left their mess behind them. The garbage got dumped out the window.

There was a time there in transition when a gentleman walked on the inside, away from the curb, so when the garbage got dumped out, it landed on him instead of the lady. Then, after a while, it got to be where the vehicles were splashing water up, so the gentleman walked on the curbside instead of the building side. That is how the culture changed.

We didn't have clean water and we didn't have clean air and we didn't have modern medicine, and she wrote about how we took a step up and new technology came, every new invention improved the standard of living and the quality of life on average of all Americans, and, in fact, most people in the world.

I read that book next to, side-by-side, simultaneous with Al Gore's book ``Earth in the Balance.'' It was quite a thing to see the difference between the good, solid, commonsense of Dixie Lee Ray, that was full of footnotes and references, a very respectable, scholarly work, compared to the work of ``Earth in the Balance,'' that I didn't find a footnote, and I found quotes from a respected politician, a noted public figure, but not even names.

So we are always better off with technology. Energy produces more technology, cheaper, and lets our economy flow. If we decide we are going to shut down, say, the coal mines here in the United States, shut down the oil drilling and for natural gas or for our crude oil, and, by the way, in the last 25 years, our oil rigs have gone from 4,500 of them operating and working in the United States down to 2,000 is all. Only six rigs working in Alaska. Only six up there in that huge oil.

So we need more energy so that we can have a more effective economy. That is the bottom line. We believe in free market capitalization. We believe in supply and demand. We believe that if there is more demand, there will be more supply created, if government gets out of the way.

You folks all believe get in the way and then drag a straw man out and a red herring and say, well, we will take some oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or we will say ``use it or lose it.'' The American people know better.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

I thank the judge and the judges from Texas. It has been a big help to me and a boost to hear

your insight on this energy issue. I intend to continue to turn this up and do all I can to open it up.

I am tired of $4 gas. The American people are tired of $4 gas. They know that this if Congress shuts down energy, the price will go higher, not lower, and it is up to us. We have got discharge petitions down here that many, many Members have signed. When we get to 218, they will come to the floor, whether it is blocked by the Speaker or not. That is one of the key pieces of this.

I also wanted to add, first I will go back and recap this energy pie piece. The inside circle is energy production in America. The outside circle is energy consumption in America. The colored components of this, blue is gas production; diesel fuel is red; and you have got the yellow is natural gas; the kind of orange is coal; green is nuclear; and then you get hydroelectric is this little sliver right here in that faded lavender color.

But when you go around the corner and you ask the question, can we bring more biomass into this equation, environmentalists say no, you are burning wood and stuff, so you are polluting the atmosphere with the emissions from burning cellulose. So you can't do that.

Well, we get to diesel fuel and gasoline. We surely can't do that, because that comes from an oil well. That is a crude oil product. You can't do jet fuel, you can't do heavy oils, because that is all petroleum out of a well product. Here is natural gas. You can't do that. That is Outer Continental Shelf. They don't want to create fish habitat out there with those oil platforms.

And the idea for some people in Florida that out there at 199 miles away from shore we might punch a oil or natural gas well down and somebody might not come to Florida and sit on the beach because there was once a drill rig 199 miles away and now there is a platform that might even be underwater, that can't be seen? That has about as much sense as somebody sitting on Iowa's border with Missouri in a lawn chair saying, I don't like the idea there could be somebody with a drill rig up there in Southern Minnesota, right across the line. Same distance, 200 miles north to south.

Why is anybody worried about a drill rig 200 miles offshore of Florida? They can't see it from the beach. Chris Columbus, remember, said that is how he figured out the Earth was round. He saw the mast of the ship first as it got closer. He figured the Earth was curved, because you should have seen all the ship at once if it were flat.

We have to grow the size of this energy pie, Mr. Speaker. All of these things are off the table from environmentalists: No more natural gas, no coal, no more nuclear. Hydroelectric, we surely couldn't stop the water in a river and save a flood, like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Iowa City, Iowa, in the process. No, we can't have any more of that. All we can have more of is geothermal, wind and biodiesel. They represent approximately 1 percent of the overall energy, the overall energy production in America, and they are only 0.74 percent of the overall consumption in America.

So clearly something has to change. The American people will not tolerate expensive gas, as long as there is a logical, commonsense solution. We know what that is. We have talked about what that is, Mr. Speaker, and I call upon the Speaker of the House to let these energy bills come forward for votes and let the American people see where everybody stands in this Congress.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 10 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, July 30, 2008, at 10 a.m.

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 3: Insert after section 407 the following:

Sec. 408. None of the funds made available in this Act may

be used to enforce subchapter IV of Chapter 31 of title 40,

United States Code (commonly referred to as the Davis-Bacon

Act).

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be recognized on the floor of the United States Congress. I also appreciate the presentation that has been delivered by the gentleman from Ohio and from the gentlelady of Minnesota, and I appreciate being able to listen to the presentation, knowing that they have been to ANWR just recently, within the past week or so, and have seen some of the things that I had seen there several years ago. What they see today is much of what I saw then.

It's interesting that they flew across that coastal plain for 2 hours with everybody on the plane looking and looking for wildlife, and they didn't see any. I remember I did see some. I saw four musk oxen. I remember the pilots actually spotted them, and they announced back to the plane that they had seen four musk oxen, and they were quite excited that they had seen wildlife in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This was the airplane crew who had flown that coastal plain over and over again. I was surprised at that excitement.

I wouldn't have gotten that excited if I'd have looked down and had seen a deer. I might have if I'd seen a buffalo but not a deer.

In any case, it's quite a thing to see that the people who had made the trip to ANWR saw the things that I saw, confirmed the things that I confirmed, gave speeches here on the floor of Congress tonight, and then let the rest of the world know that the things that I've been saying have been true all along, right down to ``there are no trees up there, Mr. Speaker, not a single tree.''

I recall giving a speech at the Iowa State Fair where I made that statement. The allegation was made in a very impolite way that that wasn't true. So the newspaper that Iowa depends upon decided they would go find a contrary view from mine when I said there were no trees in ANWR. They found a botanist--I believe he was at Iowa State University--who must have gone through and searched the Internet and found out that there is, at least allegedly, a tiny, little weed up there that grows about 10- to 12-feet high at the most, and it's technically a tree. There's not enough wood in that to make a toothpick, but it's technically a tree.

So, if they found a botanist who said there was a tree in ANWR--and supposedly that's a rebuttal--I'd just say: Who has seen one? I don't think anybody has seen one up there. We know that the Arctic Circle is the line north of which trees cannot grow. This is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a frozen tundra coastal plain. When it has had any disturbance on the tundra, it has not been from the oil pipeline, and it has not been from the drillers in a significant way, but it happens sometimes when Native Americans get to moving around up there. They tell me they just drag it smooth, and in 5 to 6 years, the tundra has all grown back where it was. I've seen it. I know what it looks like. What my eyes see confirms for my head and for my heart.

So I think this point has been made very clear. I don't know how a thinking, living, breathing American could listen to the dialogue that took place here in the last hour and conclude that we shouldn't drill in ANWR. It is an ideal place for there to be oil. It's an ideal place for us to extract oil, and we have the transmission system up there. I think we'd have to add another 74-mile pipeline.

There is something on which I might have a little bit of a marginal-- not disagreement, but I'd just say here is the little way I see it differently from Mrs. Bachmann's statement, which is that, in 3 years, we'd have oil coming out of ANWR and coming down the pipeline. We did the entire North Slope and the entire Alaska pipeline and 600 miles of right-of-way. We drilled the wells, put it all together, built the industry up there, and had oil coming out of the pipeline in 3 years, from '72 till '75, marginally a little bit more than 36 months, but still, within 3 calendar years, there was oil coming out of that pipeline. There was an 800-mile pipeline. There were 600 miles of right-of-way. Drill the wells. Pick up the collection. Get it to the terminal at Mile Post Zero where the caribou congregate. That was in 3 years.

So I believe this, that if America makes up its mind, we can do it, if we did a Manhattan Project and started to build an atom bomb after the beginning of World War II and, to end the war, we'd had two ready and two dropped. We did that. President Kennedy said--and I think the year was 1963--we're going to go to the Moon. In 1969, we were on the Moon.

How can a nation that has that technical ability, a nation of smart, industrious people who have tamed everything we've decided to tame and that we've always done in record time--has something happened to our soul? Has something happened to our spirit that we would capitulate to the Lilliputian ropes that tie down America's greatness--the ropes of regulation? the ropes of environmental extremism? What's wrong with our spirit that we would let people like this hold America back? They would shut our economy down.

If somebody shuts down the valve at the Strait of Hormuz, that shuts off 42.6 percent of the world's export oil supply. Ahmadinejad has threatened to do just that, and he has also threatened to annihilate Israel, and he is determined to move forward in building nuclear weapons. He has said so even if the CIA in the NIE report some months ago said, no, we concluded back in 2003 that they quit trying. Not true. They're continually trying to enrich uranium. They are enriching uranium. They showed it to us on our own television sets. They're developing missiles to deliver a weapon. They showed us that on our television sets.

Why would we argue with the Iranians? Do we think they're perpetrating some kind of hoax?

It didn't work out so well for Saddam Hussein when he sought to perpetrate some kind of a hoax. They thought we were bluffing, and now we won't take them at their word, and we will watch in this Congress as the San Francisco, Pelosi-led Congress shuts down every avenue of energy development that we can create? Well, every one except maybe they're okay with wind as long as it isn't out off of Nantucket. As long as Teddy Kennedy can't see it from his yacht, we can have some wind energy. They aren't so bad with geothermal because they don't see it very much, and they don't understand it as much as they see it. Then let's see. There must be some other things--solar, wind, geothermal. So we can have a little solar, too, but not if it means we've got to put solar panels out there across the desert, because that's unsightly.

So they worship the goddess, Mother Earth, and despise the idea of free market capitalism. They shut down the economy. You know, I think they're also aware that, as to the energy supplies that we have, as soon as we drill a well and we get that well up to production, that's the maximum that that well is going to produce for a day, and then its production day by day tapers off. That's the case with the energy as we develop it, so we constantly have to be out there exploring for new energy. That's the point, I think, that maybe wasn't made in the last hour that's essential for us in this hour.

I see that my good friend from California, Mr. Royce, has arrived on the floor, and he knows that I have offered an open invitation by my very presence here. I'd be so happy to yield so much time as he may consume to the astute gentleman from California.

I thank the gentleman from California, and I appreciate you bringing this to the floor and laying it out with the clarity that you have.

Supply and demand, as you're speaking, I'm thinking, let's see, if there was 32 percent more corn on the market--being from Iowa, I think in those terms--that might be, say, 4\1/2\ billion bushels more corn on the market, maybe a little more than that. I'm pretty sure if we dump 4\1/2\ billion bushels of corn supposedly that we found somewhere on the market, the price would go down.

I was also thinking about Adam Smith when he wrote in his famous book ``Wealth of Nations,'' published in 1776, how it was that the cost of everything that we produce is the sum total of the capital and the labor required to produce whatever the commodity is. And he wrote about how the price of gold plummeted in Europe when the Spanish galleons returned from the New World loaded with gold. But he didn't say because of supply and demand strictly. He said it was because they had figured out how to take the price of labor out of the production of gold. They stole the gold, but the effect was the labor got cheap.

Supply and demand works for gold, it works for corn, and it works for oil. It works for everything including labor. They're all commodities. And some of the things that can affect that, of course, are the value of our dollar. I'd like to see that dollar shored up.

When I look at these bushels--excuse me, I'm thinking like an Iowan-- when

I look at these million barrels, 3 million a day off the gulf as described by the gentleman from California, 1 million a day out of the arctic region up there, 2\1/2\ million in oil shale, those are really just for starters. We've always found more oil than we predicted was there, and it will be the case this time.

On the subject matter of what it is that this Imperial Pelosi Congress won't let us vote on, this is the production chart for the United States of America for energy. And we need to, Mr. Speaker, talk about energy from the concept of total Btus of energy. We have to put it in one common measurement. So, rather than gallons or cords of wood, whatever it might be, we put this into Btus and energy.

This is all of the energy sources that we have here that we produce in the United States. And as we go around the edge here, I'll start right in here. Hydroelectric power, nuclear. Coal, 32\1/2\ percent of our overall production is coal. Natural gas, 27\1/2\ percent of our overall production is natural gas. Then you've got heavy petroleum, like asphalt and those kind of oils. Jet fuel, kerosene, diesel fuel's in red, and gasoline in blue, biomass, and a lot of that's wood. People are burning more wood today because of the cost of energy in pink. Then you get down to these tiny little slivers, biodiesel, nine-one hundredths of 1 percent. Ethanol fuel, .76 of 1 percent; solar, .11 of 1 percent; wind, .44; geothermal, .49. This is it.

Now, I would take you around this chart, and we're going to find that the folks that, I will say, worship at the altar of Mother Earth object to nearly every kind of energy that we produce in the United States. They object to a lot of the biofuels because it is burning wood, and it puts carbon dioxide in the air. The biomass, they've objected to.

Gasoline, we know the objection to that, and we have people in here that would rather have you ride your bicycle and they think that if gas prices go to $4 or $5 or more a gallon, more people will ride their bikes.

Fewer will get in their car. That will save the environment, and they can save Mother Earth. That's what they're thinking. So we can't develop anymore gasoline here in the United States or diesel fuel or jet fuel or heavy oils. That's all in the same kind of hydrocarbon, comes out of the same well, the crude oil well. That's all verboten, according to the Speaker's team from San Francisco.

And you get to natural gas. They have to drill wells to do that, and they've got us blocked offshore. They've got us blocked on non-national park public lands. Sometimes we can drill there, but we can't get access, and we can't lay pipelines, and we know that we can't transport natural gas unless we can conduct it through a pipeline or turn it into liquefied natural gas.

By the way, we had a vote on the floor today on a motion to recommit on a bill that would have opened up a bridge that's blocking tankers that are coming into Massachusetts with liquefied natural gas. They blocked that. They don't even want liquefied natural gas coming in up their little river, even though the Federal taxpayers pay for the bridge that's already replaced the one that's keeping the tankers from going underneath it.

That tells you where they are with natural gas, and that's Massachusetts mentality that teams up with some of that left coast mentality, not all of it by any means.

And the coal, it's almost to the point now--I happen to know of one expansion of a coal-fired generation plant. There may be more. But the people that are putting these plants together say we can't meet the regulations anymore. They're getting tighter and tighter. So coal-fired generating plants are pretty much off the table.

You kind of see, and I'm going around here, off the table all the way around. Nuclear, no, off the table. They're afraid of a Chernobyl, even though our technology doesn't melt down that way. It actually cools, instead of warms. So the greens are afraid of nuclear.

Hydroelectric, boy, now there is a superclean, wonderful, natural resource that renews itself. It rains, water runs down the river, comes through the turbine, spins it, generates electricity. What could be better than that? But a strong contingent of environmental extremists want to put all of our rivers back to where they were before because they don't believe we should even think or attempt to improve upon Mother Nature.

So I've gone all the way around here. Hydroelectric power, that was the piece there. And what's left?

When you add this all up, all of these things are forbidden by one entity or another. Even wind has resistance to it because people think that birds are going to fly into those windmills. And I can tell you, I can see 17 of them from my house. They have hundreds of them in my district. There aren't piles of dead birds underneath there. It's more dangerous to the birds when you drive your car down the road. They can at least see that windmill coming and they tend to avoid it.

So I can only find three sources of energy that maybe, maybe we could expand, and that would be--by the way, ethanol, biodiesel, that's food versus fuel, so there's a resistance there. So we end up with wind, unless Teddy Kennedy can see it; geothermal, as long as you can't see it; and what do they have, solar.

Now, these tiny little pieces here, if you add up of our overall production, that's .49, .44 and .11. Now I haven't done that. That's a little bit over 1 percent of our overall energy production is what they're going to let us expand to produce 100 percent of the energy that we can consume.

And Mr. Speaker, we're producing only 72 percent of the energy that we're consuming. So this energy pie isn't big enough. It's only 72 percent big enough to provide the energy necessary to fuel the United States and keep our economy going.

By the way, just providing enough energy isn't good enough. We can always buy enough energy until we go flat bloke. We have got to have enough energy that's economical for our industry to run, that's economical for people to engage in travel and enjoy life and be able to exercise our freedoms.

Well, I think that we already see the heavy signs of those consequences, that when dictators become rich, they also become belligerent, and they begin to think that--well, actually, they're measuring their power. It's their economic power, and a lot of them run contrary to our values here in Western civilization. So we have more conflicts to face, and we're going to have to do it with less resources, and a Nation whose economy could no longer be thriving will have transferred our wealth overseas.

I thank the gentleman from California for coming to the floor and bringing this issue forward, helping to frame it in the fashion that he has.

And the segue gave me an opportunity to put up these two charts, and the chart that I just took down was the energy production chart. That was 72 quadrillion Btus of energy. The inside circle is the energy production chart, 72 quadrillion total energy production in the United States. The outside circle is the energy consumption in the United States. That's 101.4 quadrillion Btus.

Now, those numbers don't mean a lot to anybody, I don't think, until you just put it in perspective. We are producing 72 percent of the energy that we're consuming, and if we're going to be energy independent, if we're going to stop transferring American wealth overseas, as the gentleman from California said, then we've got to produce as much energy as we consume.

And I'm not stuck specifically on producing just as much gas as we burn or just as much diesel or just as much electricity in whichever fashion it is, but I'm insistent upon the idea that we go to full energy production, that if we produce enough Btus and natural gas to offset something we might use in coal, let the size of the proportion of these pie charts change a little bit depending upon what's most economical.

But I do think natural gas needs to remain, as John Peterson of Pennsylvania said, the mother's milk of manufacturing and that it should not be the kind of energy that we're using to expand our electrical generation.

And natural gas is also the feedstock for 90 percent of our nitrogen fertilizer.

And so there's two essential uses. And we can't turn over the nitrogen fertilizer production to places like Venezuela and Russia, but that's where it's going. We've almost lost the entire fertilizer industry in the United States because we haven't acted to open up these energy supplies. We know that we have 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and that's known reserves. That's known reserves, and we still can't go offshore in many places and explore.

So here's our answer: It is, expand all of these forms of energy, every single one. And yes, we need to expand--even the energy that Teddy Kennedy objects to, let's expand some wind and some geothermal and some solar. That's the three that seem to be the least objectionable. But let's do all the rest while we're at it.

And this green one right here, nuclear; when you think we haven't built a nuclear plant since the mid-1970s, about 1975, there is a brand new one that's under construction in South Carolina today--and boy we're on a blitzkrieg to get that built--and it's going to be going online in 2017. Can you imagine a nation that--we can put the erector set together a lot faster than that, we just can't jump through all the regulatory hoops any faster than that. So the master switch gets thrown and the lights come on in South Carolina in 2017. And that is then the master manual for how to go through all of the regulatory and environmental red tape to build the next one after that.

And there was a vote in South Dakota, a public referendum to build a new refinery in Union County, South Dakota, Elk Point area, $10 billion investment. The referendum passed in favor of it, 59-41, so they said most of us think it's okay to have a refinery in our back yard. That refinery is one that I think it has a very good chance of going, but even those who are driving this don't have the answer to every question on how they jump through all of the regulatory hoops that have been created.

So here's an example: In 1970, when the oil companies wanted to go up to the North Slope of Alaska and open up Alaska for drilling, there was a court injunction that was slapped on them. That was a new thing then. I can remember being shocked that someone could come along and file a court case and shut down an entire region from development for energy.

There used to be a thing called property rights in America, constitutional property rights, and that would be a taking of the property. They went in there and acquired those leases with all good intent and above board, and they were shut down by an environmentalist lawsuit that went to court in 1970. In 1972, the final litigation hurdle had been leaped and they began the construction of the 600 miles of right-a-way and the 800 miles of pipelines and all the wells and collector tubes and the terminals on the Alaska Pipeline.

It took 2 years. And in 1972, I was astonished that anybody could hold up an operation like that for 2 years. And yet today, that seems like a blink of a litigative eye, 2 years. If we could resolve all the litigation that's holding up energy in 2 years, in 4 years we could have the energy problem solved. And that's because the trial lawyers, the environmentalists, the people that want to make their money off of litigation, the same kind of people that held up the Intelligence bill and put our Nation at risk, those who see profit in squeezing it out of somebody else, that's holding us up on energy, and the environmentalists.

So now I add this up on production. All of these things are off the table by environmentalists:

Can't do biomass, that burns wood, puts greenhouse gas in the air. Can't do motor gasoline, same reason. Can't do diesel fuel. Can't do jet fuel. None of the crude oil can we do because they're afraid it contributes to global warming. And as we come on around the horn, kerosene fits in that same category. Natural gas, I spoke to that. Coal, can't build any more coal-fire plants, or if we do, we've got some new hoops to jump through that no one has jumped through before.

You get to the nuclear, and the French are producing 78 percent of their electricity by nuclear, and we're down here where our overall energy consumption is 8.29 percent. The percentage of our overall energy production is 11.66 percent. But nuclear is also off the table. I spoke about hydroelectric, off the table.

So we get to add up geothermal and wind and solar. I add up those three things. And I happen to know that in our overall consumption, those three sources, geothermal, wind and solar, total .74 of 1 percent of our overall energy consumption. And if we're going to be independent, we're going to only expand those? What's your answer? Do you have an answer? I don't think so. I think you worship at the alter of mother nature.

And your default position is to always go back to pre Garden of Eden. I don't think you can think beyond that. I'll say this, that I know who created this Earth; God created this Earth. And he gave us dominion over it, and the animals and the plants in it to be used respectfully. And yes, we can improve upon mother nature, we've done it many times. That's why we're given the gift of the intellect and free will that we have. And we're to be tested in this fashion. And I'm more than happy to rise to that occasion and be tested in this fashion. And this side of the aisle over there, you all think the default position is, go back to pre Garden of Eden, mother nature, whatever the random grab-bag thing it was that came out of Darwin's ``survival of the fittest'' before man intervened as an intervening species, whatever that was, that's the utopian version that you're after because you have no other standard. We'll, I just described the standard, look it up in Genesis.

We can do this. We can produce all the energy that this country consumes by expanding all of these sources of energy from the production chart. Stretch it out to the outside limits of the consumption chart. We can do this, we must do this. And if we fail, the other people in the world--whom we are sending money to every day by the billions--will own us. And when they

own us, then they will tell us what to do and they will be our boss and our freedoms will be gone and diminished. And by the way, the people we're sending the money to for the most part don't believe much in freedom.

And we're doing our best to encourage others to buy into the freedom model that we have. If we besmirch the freedom responsibility to make good decisions for the best long-term interests of the American people, we trail in the dust of golden hopes of the Founding Fathers.

So much has been said about energy tonight, Mr. Speaker, and that makes my point on energy. I may come back and reiterate it, but I'll take up another subject matter that has me significantly concerned. And that is, that as we watch the Presidential race unfold, and we're watching as one of the Presidential candidates does his photo-op stops around the Middle East and Europe, and as that Presidential candidate-- and specifically the junior Senator from Illinois--has said that he expects to be in a leadership role for the next 10 years or so, he has already anointed himself as President. And so I would submit--and I don't hear anybody on the Democrat side say, wait a minute, calm down, that Presidential seal was a little bit of an overreach and the statement that you're going to be in command for the next 10 years means that, even if you win the Presidency this year and get re-elected 4 years later, it's still not 10 years. So perhaps you can amend the Constitution and make such a prediction. Maybe you're such a marvel of nature you can do all of that, Mr. Obama.

But even if you're half of what you say, that makes you the leader of the Democrat Party in the United States of America. That means that the people over here on this side of the aisle are seeking to accommodate the positions that you've taken, trying to make you look good as you run for the Presidency, applauding and supporting the globe trotting and the speech--that didn't take place at the Brandenburg gate today-- all of that adulation that goes on is surely affecting the agenda here on the floor of Congress. It has to be and it has to have been.

For example, 40 different bills and resolutions brought to the floor of this House in the 110th Congress, all designed to underfund, unfund, deploy our troops out of Iraq and undermine the spirit and the will of our own fighting men and women, while they encourage our enemy. Forty bills and resolutions. All of those fit exactly with Obama's foreign policy, ``get out and get out now.''

I'm a little amazed that he can argue that, when asked if the surge worked, he couldn't agree that the surge worked. He said it was a hypothetical question. What's hypothetical about sending 170,000 troops over into a combat zone? What's hypothetical about some of them that come back with a flag draped over their coffin? That's not hypothetical, Senator Obama. That's real life, it's real death, it's real families that gave their son or daughter, lost their husband or their wife for our freedom. And you can't answer frivolously and flippantly that it's a hypothetical question, did the surge work or didn't it work? Obviously it worked.

And to argue that you have four points out there that the rest of-- the President and John McCain are coming around to, that they're agreeing with you because you said we ought to get out of Iraq back in 2005--I think 2005 was the year that he said my position on Iraq is identical with that of President Bush. So I'm not sure when the first time was he said I think we should get out, but I know it was when we were under combat stress and pressure and things weren't going that well over there. And now I see him walking around the tarmac at Baghdad International--where I've been five times and I'll be again before this election cycle is over. And each time I've been there--hmm, I don't know about that. I think maybe the first time I arrived there I didn't wear a bullet-proof vest and I didn't wear a helmet. I think I went in there in casual khakis because the threat wasn't deemed to be as high as it turned out to be. The rest of the time I wore a bullet-proof vest and I wore a helmet. And I look there now, Senator Obama gets off of the plane or the helicopter, no bullet-proof vest, no helmet. Why is that? Senator, it's because the surge worked. The surge worked, and it's safe enough for you to walk around at Baghdad International in your shirt sleeves.

A couple or 3 years ago, when I was walking around Baghdad International and I had security personnel standing between me and the line of fire, the other side of the concrete wall was the Mahdi militia, Muqtada-al Sadr's militia. They were controlling the civilian side of the airport. And the military side, by some truce--we didn't shoot each other much, I guess, through that concrete--held the other side. And today, the Mahdi militia is decimated and gone. Muqtada al- Sadr, the bane of peace in Iraq, has gone from doing something he's not very good at. Now he's studying. He's no longer a general. When he loses his army, he goings off to be a scholar instead. And for him to get ramped back up again and ever be commanding a Mahdi militia looks pretty slim to the people I'm talking to.

The reason, Obama, you can walk around on the tarmac at Baghdad International in shirt sleeves is because the surge worked. And the reason that we can pull some troops out of Iraq incrementally, as situations adjust on the ground, as they have been adjusting and continue to adjust on the ground, the reason is because the surge worked. And to take credit because some troops can come out of Iraq when you said ``pull them all out now, right now,'' and when you said, ``I will, on my first day in office, order the immediate withdrawal of the troops from Iraq,'' the only condition, the only caveat was, I'll maintain a rear guard so they don't get shot in the back as they run off and get on board the troop ship, that's what's going on. You can't fool the American people in that.

And you say that you want to send a couple of brigades to Afghanistan. Do it now, do it before the election. We can't wait until January 20--presuming, of course, that John McCain won't make the right decision. He's far more likely to make the right decision. And I actually think he's actually more likely to be President today. But to argue that we should send troops from Iraq to Afghanistan immediately is an obscene contradiction to the sacrifice that's been made by our military personnel that are there.

It works like this; here's how the logic in the rational world goes: If President Bush has the insight and the courage to empower General Petraeus, recognize his leadership, allow him the time to go back and write the counter-insurgency manual, appoint him to command the troops in Iraq for the purposes of initiating the surge, make sure General Petraeus comes here before this Congress, explains it to us, we appropriate the money--you didn't have the nerve to shut the funding off because you didn't want to say, well, absolutely no to the troops because the disgrace of shutting the funding off and watching 3 million people die in Southeast Asia in 1975 comes back to haunt.

The President had the vision to appoint General Petraeus. He had the vision to buy into that vision. He made the tough order. He put the troops on the line. They went there. The surge worked. The political solution flowed behind it and with it and in anticipation of it because they knew that we were going to be there for a period of time and would give the Iraqis time to get themselves established.

If the surge worked in Iraq, Obama, tell me why----

Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge that statement as correct. And Mr. Speaker, I will direct my remarks to the Chair. I appreciate that.

So Mr. Speaker, when I speak to you and echo this message across to the other Chamber, the idea that a surge didn't work in Iraq but it allowed Presidential candidates to walk around on the tarmac without a bullet-proof vest or a helmet, but it will work in Afghanistan?

That's a rationale that doesn't fit for the people in the Midwest. They know better. They've watched this. They stayed up to speed with what's going on, and they will not be fooled. And I will not be fooled either.

So what we have is we have a situation where the political climate in this

Chamber, Mr. Speaker, seeks to meld and shape itself to a presidential campaign, to adopt those policies, to make it so it increases the odds that their candidate will be elected President.

And part of this, Mr. Speaker, is unfolding tomorrow morning in the House Judiciary Committee. I don't know that this is published in the news media, but I know what I got in my Judiciary Committee hearing notice here within the last hour. This is a notice that says that there is going to be, for the first time in this millennia, impeachment hearings in the United States House of Representatives in the Judiciary Committee, impeachment hearings to consider impeachment of the President of the United States and the Vice President of the United States, starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning in room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

I can only conclude, Mr. Speaker, that the initiative for this has to be approved by the presidential candidate of the party that controls the Judiciary Committee and this Chamber. There's no other conclusion that can be drawn. It is all politics all the time. There are no coincidences in politics. If a presidential candidate didn't want to have impeachment hearings going on, he'd make sure that they weren't going on. If a Speaker of the House or a chairman of the Judiciary Committee was considering such an idea to hold impeachment hearings, they would surely run it across the powers that be within their party so there wasn't a conflict that rose up to bite them. I have to believe, and I do believe, that this is with the full support and endorsement of the presidential candidate chosen by the party on the other side of the aisle.

This is what we're up against tomorrow, Mr. Speaker. It's going to be an interesting day.

I was not in this Congress during the impeachment hearings of 1998, although I was in this city. I came to this city to do a couple of conferences, and I picked up the Washington Post, and on about Page 4, there was a little clip in there that said impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee, room 2141, open to the public, staring at 10 o'clock in the morning. I believe the dates were the 7th, 8th, and 9th of December, 1998. I looked at that, and I concluded that these were historical times and that in spite of whatever the conferences were that I'd come out here to attend, attending the impeachment hearings would be far more instructive, that I would then be part of history.

Well, I observed those hearings for 3 days in a row. I was sitting behind David Shippers when he delivered the summary of the prosecution. I happen to have a copy that was handed to me that day by the Judiciary Committee staff. I keep that in my file. It's an historic event. These events tomorrow will be historic too, although they are far from as serious as what was taking place in 1998 because in 1998 there was an impeachment in this House. This House voted to impeach the President of the United States, Mr. Speaker. They did so based on solid evidence, and they went over to the Senate to bring forth the prosecution.

And I see things in this notice that goes this way: ``Full Committee Hearing, Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations'' being the subject, the subject being three resolutions introduced by Congressman Dennis Kucinich and different resolutions to either impeach President Bush or Vice President Cheney. It says that interest groups have advocated for the impeachment of the President and the Vice President. Nobody's talking about this where I live, but there are enough radicals to bring this thing forward.

We are going to hear from several Members of Congress, one, two, three, four Members of Congress tomorrow. We are going to hear from a former Associate Deputy Attorney General from the Reagan administration. We are going to hear from the Mayor of Salt Lake City, Mr. Speaker, who has said publicly this: ``This President has engaged in such incredible abuses of power and breaches of trust with both Congress and the American people and misleading us into this tragic and unbelievable war, the violation of treaties, other international law, our Constitution, our own domestic laws, and then his role in heinous human rights abuses, I think all of that together calls for impeachment.''

Well, I would reject all of those allegations as having substance, and I don't think that substance is going to come out tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, because this is a dog and pony show. This is a political exercise.

Actually, I tried to get the chairman to yield to me the other day, and he declined to do so, because I was watching the progression of these judicial public lynchings that have been taking place of Bush administration officials in the Judiciary Committee over the last month or better. We had David Addington, the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States, brought before the Judiciary Committee under threat of subpoena. And he was told by one of the committee members, ``I'm glad al Qaeda can see you now.'' Brought before the public, a man who has been a private individual, and whipped up one side and down the other with verbal assaults, trying to find to trip him up so that he could go the same path as Scooter Libby, whom no one can still tell me what it was that Scooter Libby said or did that was wrong. All they know is that he's been beaten up on so much, there must be something there. Well, Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the politics in this Chamber, I can tell you there doesn't have to be anything there to be beaten up upon.

But here's what's going to make it a problem for some of the members in the Judiciary Committee. They were on the committee in 1998, many of them. They are on record as to what they thought was an objective constitutional means, reason for which a President should be impeached. They said such things as, and this is a quote, ``We are using the most powerful institutional tool available to this body, impeachment, in a highly partisan manner. Impeachment was designed to rid this Nation of traitors and tyrants.'' That's the chairman of the committee.

Here's another quote from a committee member. This is Maxine Waters, California, who believes we should nationalize our oil industry, by the way, but, Mr. Speaker, here's the quote: ``How must our American soldiers feel to have their Commander in Chief under attack''--this is of President Clinton during the impeachment hearings. ``How must our American soldiers feel to have their Commander in Chief under attack while they are engaged in battle? They have the right to feel betrayed and undermined. Today we are here in the People's House debating the partisan impeachment of the President of the United States of America while the Commander in Chief is managing a crisis and asking world leaders for support. This is indeed a Republican coup d'etat.'' Mr. Speaker, that's Maxine Waters, 1998, during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I wonder how she is going to conduct herself tomorrow, if she is going to be consistent with her words then or if she's going to contrive another argument manana.

Here's another quote from a current Judiciary Committee member speaking of the Clinton impeachment in 1998: ``We have been warned repeatedly that these allegations are nowhere near what is necessary to overturn a national election and to impeachment a President. Despite these cautionary flags, this committee has turned a deaf ear to hundreds of years of precedent and to the Constitution that has kept this country strong and unified.'' That's Congressman Robert C. Scott of Virginia, a Judiciary Committee member.

Here's a statement made by the current Chair of the Immigration Subcommittee back in 1998 of the Clinton impeachment: ``The people's will must not be overridden by those who claim to know better, by those who believe they know what is best for the American people,'' Zoe Lofgren.

You get the idea, Mr. Speaker. Let me just do another one just to put some of this on the record, Mr. Speaker. Here's another quote of the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Judiciary Committee member and Constitution Subcommittee Chair: ``It's an enormous responsibility and an extraordinary power. It's not one that should be exercised lightly. It certainly is not one which should be exercised in a manner which is or would be perceived to be unfair or partisan.''

Well, get ready for tomorrow, Mr. Speaker. I don't expect it's going to be fair, but I don't think there is a single

pundit in America that could analyze it as anything except partisan. Not a witch hunt anymore. They've found their witch. They're bringing impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, all of that on the heels of the attempted public lynching of David Addington, the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States; Doug Feith, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, also brought before the committee; and then behind that last week, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, another attempt made at him yesterday or the day before. I guess it was the day before. We had Attorney General Mukasey. All of this before the committee, all of this under at least the implication that a subpoena can be issued, sometimes the actual vote and threat of a subpoena. I don't know if a subpoena has been actually issued under any of these cases. But these are honorable men. They'll come testify. They have got nothing to hide. But it's a grueling thing to sit there and look at the Judiciary Committee panel and know that it's exactly what, Mr. Speaker, Jerry Nadler said it should not be. He said, ``It certainly is not one which should be exercised in a manner which is or would be perceived to be unfair or partisan.''

Well, I am very convinced that Jerry Nadler thought that it was unfair and partisan in 1998. I don't know that a majority of the American people think that, but today if you would walk down the streets of America, at least inside the coasts in America, and say, ``What in the world would the Democrats want to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney for?'' I would be hard pressed to find constituents in my part of the country that could give me an informed answer. That means to me that it's unfair and it's partisan, and this entire exercise is about discrediting the Bush administration so that the landing zone is prepped for Election Day in November. That's what I see.

I don't think there are coincidences in politics. I think it's all real. And it is not a game. It is hardball. This is the hardest of hardball that's unfolding here tomorrow. The unbelievable, the unanticipated, the breathtaking, the illogical, the major reach, the deja vu feeling with a different pair of figures in front of it.

Mr. Speaker, I will take us back also to another little event when I had exposure to some of the things going on by the hard left in America.

March 18, 2003, just a few days before the liberation of Iraq began, there was an anti-war protest that took place out on the mall. Now, I had not been to one of those before. We don't have them in my part of the country. But I thought I should take a look at this one. And so I put on my Redskins sweatshirt, an old one. I looked like a native, put a cap on, walked down there amongst the people that were getting ready for this march on the White House to protest the war that hadn't begun. And as I was there and I watched a photographer wash the lens of his camera with an American flag he kept in his pocket for a rag, and he was pleased to do it, as I watched some of the countercultural signs be put up, I took a lot of pictures down there, many of which couldn't be published and many of which you wouldn't show your children. There was a big stage. A big stage with big speakers up on it. And the orators that came forward to stand between those large speakers were there to gin up the crowd so they got all wound up and then they could march off across the mall and march around the White House and go protest the war that hadn't begun. And I did watch that entire march and that whole protest, and that's a longer speech than I've got time for tonight, Mr. Speaker. But I saw the chairman of the Judiciary Committee call for the impeachment of President Bush before the operations began.

And now here we are, March 18, 2003, fast forward to July 24, and tomorrow will be July 25, 2008. Just a little over 5 years later, we're there. It's happening. It's coming before the Judiciary Committee tomorrow in room 2141, 10 o'clock a.m. I think it will be a day that lives in infamy, a shameful day, a day when the American people wake up and realize there is a connection between a committee and the United States Congress seeking to impeach a President without cause during a time of war, during a time when our energy is tied up and trapped up and we're looking at $4 gas, during a time when we have economic difficulties and there needs to be confidence in the American system and the American economy, during a time as we move up to a presidential election. All of these things are affected. They are all wrapped up together. They all have to have, Mr. Speaker, the imprimatur of approval stamped on it by the man that wanted to give a speech at the Brandenburg Gate today.

It's his agenda. It's his motive. It's them working with him. It's his impeachment hearings. This all ties together. And I believe the American voters will hold the kind of people who pull these kind of moves accountable. And I'm going to see to it that at least the information is out. And I trust the wisdom of the American people.

Join me tomorrow, Mr. Speaker. I will hold a chair for you. All of us will be looking in and see that at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning, room 2141, the House Judiciary Committee, impeachment hearings, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, held tomorrow. They ensue at 10 in the morning. I will be there. Mr. Speaker, you be there. And let's right this ship that is going off tacking so hard to the left. It's going to sink if we don't turn it around.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 1 minute p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, July 28, 2008, at 11 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the greatest deliberative body the world has ever known--the United States House of Representatives.

I am pleased to be a part of this institution that has elections every 2 years, which requires us to put our fingers on the pulse of the American people. Even though most of us don't like the idea of a 24-24- 7 campaign, that being 24 months, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you set up a perpetual motion machine, and you make sure that the people on your staff and those who are working with you are out there constantly with their fingers on the pulse, listening, talking.

Part of my job is to listen, and part of my job is to project the things that I learn and the things that I know. We have people in this Congress who decide, well, their job is simply to vote the majority opinion of their districts. They don't necessarily consider whether the district is right or wrong as far as the majority is concerned. They just try to put their fingers on the pulse and decide, well, let's see. If 51 percent of the people think this way and if 49 percent of them disagree and think the other way, then if I come down on the side of the 51, then I'll be able to keep coming back here to Congress and sort out the opinions and be, let me say, the barometer of the people in their districts.

Mr. Speaker, I think that's wrong; I think that's narrow, and I think that's shortsighted, but I do believe we have a responsibility to listen to our constituents. We have a responsibility to listen to the people in our States whether they're in our districts or not. We have a responsibility to listen to the American people across the board.

In the end, each one of us--each of us 435 Members of the House of Representatives and every one of the 100 Senators on the other side of the rotunda--has a responsibility. We owe Americans and especially our constituents our best judgment. That means we listen to the people in the district and across the country. It also means that here we are where we are, in a way, the epicenter of information for the world, where information comes pouring in here, and if I need to find an answer to a question, I ask somebody and the answer comes, and it comes almost always in a form that I can use it and incorporate it into the argument that I'm making and further enlighten.

So we have access to more information here than most people have, at least across the country, and they're out there doing a good job. They're on the Internet, and they're reading, and they're watching the news, and they're thinking and having these conversations across the country. Their conversations help shape the middle of America. If some people weigh in on the right and some people weigh in on the left, it kind of comes out to a balance. It's going to balance. It's a moving fulcrum in the middle.

What we need to do is to take this access to information that we have--and we owe the people in this country our best judgment--and we need to weigh the information. We need to apply our best judgment to the real data that we have, and if we disagree with the majority of our constituents, that doesn't mean that we go vote the way they think we should. We may do so, but we have an obligation to let them know, perhaps, both sides of the argument and to step in and to make the case. Sometimes we're called upon to go back and to inform the people in our districts of the things that we know even though we know very well that they may disagree with our positions.

The first thing we have to do is to do what is right for our country. The second thing we have to do is to do what's right for our States. The third thing we need to do is to do what's right for our constituents. I have said a number of times that, if it's good for America and not good for Mom, I'm sorry, Mom; we're going to find another way to take care of you. My first obligation is not with individuals but with the broader, overall good for the destiny of this country. Often those things come together, and almost always they do.

I actually can't think of a time when I've had to put up a vote that was contrary to the wishes of my district or was contrary to the best interests of my district, but that's where I draw the line--an obligation. I owe the people in this country my best judgment

because that's essentially what they have endorsed in the election, and I owe them my best effort.

When you put those two things together and if we all did that, if we all stood on principle and offered our best judgments and our best efforts, if every motive in this place, Mr. Speaker, were an altruistic motive, this country would be a lot better off than it is today.

I lay that backdrop, Mr. Speaker, because I'm watching what has unfolded as we near the Presidential election in November of this year. We've all seen on the news the massive media coverage of the trip that was made over to the Middle East and to other parts of the world by the presumptive nominee for President for the Democrat Party.

I am troubled by what I read in the New York Times on January 14, in an article written by Senator Obama, where he laid out his plan and his strategy for Iraq. He was going to Iraq. He is there today on a factfinding mission. Today is the 21st or 22nd of July, but his article was posted on the 14th of July. It told everybody in America what he was going to find when he arrived over there on his factfinding mission, and it had been almost 900 days since he had been there. He had been there one time, Mr. Speaker, one time, and he drew conclusions. I don't actually know what he saw then, but he drew conclusions, and he had conclusions before he went. He didn't change his conclusions when he came back.

So, this time, he posted an op-ed in the New York Times that said, in part: On my first day as President, I will order a troop withdrawal from Iraq. That's what he said a week before he arrived in Iraq on a factfinding mission.

So, Mr. Speaker, I pose this question: I think he got it exactly backwards. I think, when you go on a factfinding mission, you can lay out what you think before you go. That's perfectly appropriate. To lay out the decision you're going to make after you're there and you gather the facts and you announce that before you go gets that exactly backwards. A factfinding mission needs to be just that. If you go into an area, you can say, ``Here is what I know. Here are my fundamental beliefs, but I'm going to talk to the people on the ground.''

He met with General Petraeus. I would go and do that again myself. I've done it a number of times. I would meet with Ambassador Crocker. I would meet with General Odierno. I would meet with troops from my home State. I don't know if he did that.

I have many times walked into a mess hall over in Iraq and also in Afghanistan and have just hollered out ``Anybody here from Iowa?'' Then they'll come around and gather around the table. That has actually been successful all but one time. There was once when I went into the mess hall when there wasn't anybody from Iowa, but that's how I find out what's going on over there. I know, when I sit down at the table with soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines from my home State, they will look me in the eye and will tell me the truth as straight as they know it. Sometimes they'll ask me to come off to the side, and they'll tell it to me real straight. They do that, and I can believe them because we're from the same State. We always know somebody whom we both know or somebody we're both related to or somebody whom they're related to or they're from a town where I'm from. As to this level of credibility that comes from people from the same locale, they're going to tell the truth because they know that those conversations go back and forth through the neighborhood. Plus, they're honest people and they're solid people, and they're honorable soldiers and Marines who are over there with their lives on the line for us.

I wonder what those soldiers from Illinois might have told the junior Senator from Illinois. I wonder if he gave them a chance to do that. I wonder how he interpreted it. I wonder what kind of message it would have been to a fellow who had served 147 days only in the United States Senate who had then decided that he had had enough experience to be President of the United States. I wonder if they told him what they tell me.

I can tell you what they tell me, Mr. Speaker, and it is consistent, and it is without dissent from the people I talked to, and I'm open to all of them who come to me. They say, ``Let us finish our mission. You can't pull us out now. We are all volunteers. We're volunteers for this branch of the service. We knew there was a high likelihood that we would be ordered to deploy to this part of the world. We re-upped knowing that. Everybody in here signed up knowing this was a mission that they were most likely to be ordered on. We want to stay here and take on this fight and finish this fight to take the battle away from our children and grandchildren.'' That's the direct message that I've received over and over and over again in those parts of the world where we have troops deployed. I have an obligation to go over there and to visit with them and to pick that up from our line troops, from those people who are out there on patrols on a daily basis, from those people who are out there working in 125-degree heat with bulletproof vests on.

I notice that the junior Senator from Illinois arrived and got off the plane in Baghdad and had some pretty good photo ops while in shirt sleeves. I listened to the former admiral from Pennsylvania who spoke in the media here in the last couple of days. He would be Joe Sestak, Congressman Sestak, who made comments on, I believe it was, Good Morning America and also on Hannity and Colmes that there were at least three points on which the President and John McCain had come to Obama's position. I listened to that and thought: How could that be?

Well, he alleged that the President is adopting Obama's position on pulling out of Iraq and in setting a timeline. He also spoke about a couple of other issues there that he argued were Obama's positions--set a timeline, pull out of Iraq, et cetera.

I'll submit this, Mr. Speaker: The junior Senator from Illinois could not have stepped off of the airplane in Iraq in shirt sleeves or in a bulletproof vest and wearing a helmet, which most had to do when they went over there during the height of this conflict. He could not have done that today or yesterday if it hadn't been for the surge, if it hadn't been for President Bush in ordering the surge and if it hadn't been for General Petraeus in designing the surge and if it hadn't been for John McCain in supporting the surge and if it hadn't been for people like me who also supported the surge.

I introduced a resolution in this Chamber in February of 2007 that endorsed and supported the surge. I'm on record, Mr. Speaker, and I'm on record tonight in saying Barack Obama could not have set foot in the places that he did in Iraq if it hadn't been for President Bush's being bold enough to issue the order to follow through on Petraeus' idea and if it hadn't been for the support of Members of this Congress and of the Senate and of the support of people like John McCain who said this is a good alternative. It's a far better alternative than pulling out of Iraq and turning it over to al Qaeda.

In fact, if we had followed the leadership of the junior Senator from Illinois, we would have pulled out of there in 2005, and we would have turned Iraq over to al Qaeda. Instead of saying, ``well, Prime Minister Maliki, I think you ought to adopt my timeline on 16 months to pull troops out,'' he wouldn't be over there. The prime minister wouldn't be Prime Minister Maliki if we'd followed the leadership of the junior Senator from Illinois. It would likely be Prime Minister Zarqawi who would be there. Al Qaeda would be in control, and the Iranians would have flowed over across the Strait of Hormuz, and their influence within the Shiia regions in the south would be controlling much of the oil in the southern part of Iraq.

We have to think about what the consequences would have been had we pulled out when this supposedly visionary Presidential candidate, as the gentleman from Pennsylvania said, argued that the vision, the insight, of the junior Senator from Illinois is outstanding and impressive.

I say, no, it's utter failure. It's failure to understand that Iraq is a strategic part in the world, and the consequences of failing there cannot be measured against the advantage of having a couple of extra brigades that can be deployed into Afghanistan. When America accepts defeat, other Americans die. Later generations of Americans die. Other people, free people in the world, lose their freedom, and many of them die.

I have a constituent who is a refugee from Cambodia. She came here when she was 9 years old, and she lost a number of her relations in the killing fields in Cambodia, and she didn't see her father for years. She was kept away from her mother because she was put into a labor camp, a re-indoctrination camp, because the leadership in Cambodia concluded that the parents were a bad influence on the children. They wanted to change the culture of a generation, so they killed many. This is a result of our lack of will.

We didn't lose the war militarily in Vietnam. That didn't happen. We won every battle. We won every engagement. We tactically checked the North Vietnamese. We lost the battle in Vietnam right here on floor of the United States House of Representatives when they passed appropriations legislation that prohibited any dollars appropriated and any dollars heretofore appropriated, that means money that's already been sent that way and any new money, none of it could be spent on the ground or in the air over Vietnam, North or South Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or offshore in the South China Sea.

We could not support the South Vietnamese. We trained them up, we gave them munitions, and we made them available, and they were ready so they could defend themselves. This Congress shut off the money. They shut off the ammunition to the M-16s that were in the hands of South Vietnamese soldiers. They shut off the heavy weapons like tanks and artillery, and they shut off the air cover that we had guaranteed. We guaranteed them we will provide you with the equipment that you need, the munitions that you need, and the air cover so that you can defend yourselves.

And we went through Vietnamization, and we trained the South Vietnamese military, and this Congress pulled the plug on them and broke that faith with the South Vietnamese people, and we wonder why they ran in front of the invasion when the North Vietnamese stormed down into South Vietnam? And the answer is, they didn't have a lot to shoot back with, Mr. Speaker. They didn't have anybody to support them, Mr. Speaker.

And 10s of thousands of them died. Many of them got into boats and tried to get out of the country. Many of them were sunk in ships going off of South Vietnam. A lot of them, though, got here to the United States where they started new lives, and this calamity flowed over into Cambodia.

All together, people in this Congress that were here then, a few, those that put up that vote, those that advocated for pulling the plug on our commitment to support South Vietnam seem to think that they saved American lives, and in reality, they probably temporarily saved American lives but 2 to 3 million of God's children died in the aftermath because we didn't keep faith with our word and we didn't keep faith with the South Vietnamese.

And so I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that in General Giap's book, the North Vietnamese general who is credited with being the mastermind to what they celebrate as a victory over the United States, wrote in his book on page 8: ``We got the first inspiration that we could defeat the United States because the United States didn't press for a complete victory in Korea.'' In Korea, Mr. Speaker.

The Vietnamese understood that because we didn't press for a complete victory there, we settled for a negotiated settlement, and we set up a DMZ on, I think, it's the 38th parallel. When we did that, they saw that we did not have the resolve to finish the fight.

And so they began a tactic of undermining American public opinion, and the people in this country that marched in the streets and those who would undermine our troops just assuredly empowered the enemy.

And so this Congress put up the vote that shut off the support for the South Vietnamese, pulled all of our troops out of there, and in the collapse that happened, we saw the shame of lifting people off of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

The people in Iraq remember this. Our enemies across the world remember what happened in Vietnam. Al Qaeda and Pakistan, and to the extent that they're in Afghanistan, and the very few remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq, they all understand. They've been marketed to by their leaders. They know what happened. They believe the United States lacked resolve in Vietnam.

They saw when the terrorists bombed the Marine barracks in Lebanon that we pulled out of there. They saw that even though there were all of 500 that were killed in the other side in the battle at Mogadishu, we lost 18 soldiers there, they saw us pull out of there. They saw us blink in the face of a conflict and not have the stomach for it. That's how they saw it.

I saw brave Americans step up every time they were given the order to do so. I never saw an American back up. I saw American politicians back up. I didn't see our soldiers, airmen or marines or sailors back up.

But when the politicians backed up, that put a marker down that inspired our enemies, and it may have, in Vietnam, saved some American lives, but in the long run, it put American lives at risk because our enemies were empowered throughout the generations.

I know this to be fact. Osama bin Laden has said so. Some of his other leadership has said so, and on June 11 of 2004, I was in Kuwait waiting to go into Iraq the next morning. I had a television station on, Al Jazeera TV, and there was an English closed-caption going on while the language was in Arabic. Moqtada al-Sadr, the infamous leader of the Mahdi Militia who now seems to have taken a far lower profile, Moqtada al-Sadr came on television and he said on Al Jazeera TV, If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way that they left Lebanon, the same way that they left Mogadishu. That's the message that he was pounding through Al Jazeera TV. Everybody in the Middle East could hear that message.

Now think for a moment, Mr. Speaker, what kind of a message does that send out to all of the rest of the sympathizers of our enemies, the radical Islamists, the jihadists, the people that are inclined to be supportive--and by the way, I asked the question of Benazir Bhutto while she was in Iowa giving a speech after September 11, I said: What percentage of Muslims are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda? What percentage of Muslims are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda? A straight, objective question that some will say, well, there's a bias built into the question. I don't think so.

I asked her that directly, and her answer was not very many, perhaps 10 percent. And the way it came off of her tongue said to me she had been asked the question before, she had answered the question before. Daniel Pipes puts that percentage at 10 to 15 percent, Mr. Speaker.

And so when you do the math, if it's 10 percent of 1.3 billion people, that's 130 million. That's a lot of people that are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda. They are scattered across the world. And as we know, look in this country, the radicals in America show up, they come from really every State and many of the walks of life, and they're a small percentage, probably not 10 percent, but when they come to the streets of America, you get an entirely different message. And they recruit to each other, and they use the Internet to do that, and they come out on the streets and protest.

And so think of it in those terms. If you're a radical and you are marketing, trying to recruit other radicals, you aren't going to get 90 percent of the society. You're only going to be able to market to 10 percent, maybe 15 percent, those that are inclined to be supportive, but from that 10 to 15 percent, you can recruit a lot of fighters.

If you're al Qaeda and you are marketing to that 130 million people or maybe as many as 200 million people, if you take Daniel Pipes' number of going as far as 15 percent--let's just say 200 million people--on the planet that are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda, as high as 15 percent of the Muslim religion that are those inclined to be radical, and now what happens when you have Moqtada al-Sadr say, If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu, some of those out there hear that message and some of them migrate towards the center, the center to where they can be recruited to fight for al Qaeda and attack and kill Americans.

That's gone on. That's gone on in Iraq since the beginning of the operations in March of 2003. It goes on in a far weaker effort today, but think of this. Think what happens if we pulled out of Iraq. If we have a Commander in Chief who has said we can't win, it's a loss, we're already defeated, the surge is a failure--oh, yes, the junior Senator from Illinois said repeatedly the surge is a failure, it can't work. Now, today, he can't say that out loud, but he said that in the past. He tore the things down off of his Web site that declared the surge to be a failure. And now the posture is, well, some things have happened there that have provided better security, but we need to pull our troops out and we need to pull them out on a timetable.

Well, here's something that you need to know. When there is a war, there is a winner and a loser. Both sides will seek to declare victory if there's any way that they can do that, but a declaration of victory does not constitute a victory. What constitutes a victory is achieving your objectives. Our objectives in Iraq were to provide freedom for the Iraqi people, leave them in control of their country, promote a moderate Islamic State that actually will have people going to the polls to elect their own leaders and direct their own destiny. And we hope against hope that they will be a strong ally to the United States.

And Mr. Speaker, in the times that I've made the trip over there, I surely have concluded that the Iraqis do intend to remain a strong ally to the United States. When I talk with their leaders, when the Mayor of Ramadi comes in and begins to talk about needing sewer and needing more electricity, needing more power, needing some roads, that sounds to me like maybe the Mayor of Des Moines, as opposed to the Mayor of Ramadi.

They do appreciate the sacrifice of the American people, and 4 years ago, the situation was this. Yes, all the Iraqis wanted the Americans to leave, just not anytime soon. They wanted to have control of their country. They wanted to be able to provide the security so that they didn't have violence going on constantly, and now that they're close enough, they are starting to feel like they can control their own country and provide security in their own country.

So that's the political push that Maliki is playing to as he gets ready for the elections that come up there later on this year and which will be perhaps as late as December or January of next year. There's politics going on, and if Prime Minister Maliki needs to tell the Iraqi people that he would like to see a timeline by which the United States would pull troops out of Iraq, yes, I wish I had that timeline, too. I understand why he has to say that politically, but truly, it would be foolhardy to set a timeline and declare our troops are going to be out of Iraq and not prepare for the enemy.

The enemy has a play in this, too. General Petraeus said the other day, The enemy has a vote, and not only does the enemy have a vote, but they are an independent variable. A very diplomatic way of saying you can't just declare that we are going to be in a position where we can draw our troops down to significant levels. It does look likely, and that's been the plan all along.

And you can go back through the announcements that were made by the Secretary of Defense, and let's just go through Secretary Gates back to Secretary Rumsfeld, we can go back through the commanders on the ground in Iraq, General Odierno, General Petraeus, and General Casey and General Sanchez, all the way on back to the commanders on the ground, the core commanders there on the ground, and what you will find is that each of them have had a plan that draws troops down when violence is reduced to certain levels. That is nothing new.

I mean, that's a plan, a strategy for all wars. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to come up with the idea--and I said that on purpose, rocket surgeon--to come up with the idea that when you win the war, the troops come home. The idea was to win the war and bring the troops home, and bring them home while leaving enough of a force there to maintain security.

The surge was about taking over control and security within Iraq and then setting up the Iraqi military which has been growing and being trained all along. I saw the first Iraqi troops being trained in Mosul in October of 2003, and guess who was training those troops, General David Petraeus. Now, that was October. They went in and liberated Mosul in March of 2003.

Things not known by the American public, Mr. Speaker, General Petraeus set up elections in Mosul and two of the adjoining states, did so in May of 2003. They elected a governor, a vice governor and several other officers to be the civilian authority there in the country.

And so, as this has unfolded and developed in Iraq, the situation has gotten worse because over through the mid-years of 2005, 2006 and parts of 2007, that happened I think because we left too much of it in the control of the Iraqis, and we didn't grab a hold of the bull by the horns and reset the destiny.

That happened when General Petraeus came back from writing his book on counter-insurgency and when he took charge and we gave him the resources he needed to put the surge in play. It happened when President Bush ordered it.

And if it hadn't been for the surge, Obama wouldn't be able to set foot in many of those places that he's visiting today, pontificating on how right he was. He was utterly wrong. It was wrong to pull the troops out in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. It's wrong to immediately order them out today. But we are bringing troops out of Iraq on a timely basis. And it's going to likely be right to bring more troops out in 2009.

And those levels that we can bring down, the concern we need to have is, what's the casualty rate there, and what does it take to sustain a level of stability? That's the questions that need to be answered, Mr. Speaker. And the very idea that because one junior Senator from Illinois has said that he disagreed with the war and that he disagreed with our troops there throughout the full duration, that we should pull the troops out immediately and that we should deploy some troops to Afghanistan, that he was right all along doesn't hold up, Mr. Speaker, because he's been wrong all along.

He would have turned Iraq over to al Qaeda. Al Qaeda would own a big chunk of that country today if we had listened to the junior Senator from Illinois, and Ahmadinejad would own the rest. Except for the Kurds; they would have declared independence and been immediately in a two-front work, with the Iranians on one side, the Turks on the other side. All of that would have been wrong. It would have been a tactical blunder. And all of that to, what, free up a couple of brigades to go to Afghanistan and talk about the broader picture for the world?

I think the American people have a better feel for the broader picture of the world than that. I think they understand this: If Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu are enough to inspire Muqtada al-Sadr to mount a Mahdi militia and fight the way they did and die the way they did, and enough to inspire al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi, if those three countries of the United States demonstrating lack of resolve were enough to inspire al Qaeda to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania--which was either destined likely for the Capitol here where we stand or the White House--if our lack of resolve in Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu was enough to inspire all of that, think, Mr. Speaker, what kind of inspiration it would be to al Qaeda, to the Taliban, to all of our enemies if we lack the resolve to finish this war in Iraq that is so nearly finished.

If we handed it back over to the enemy, if we let it collapse around the Iraqi people, and if millions of them died as millions in Cambodia died because we lacked resolve there, Iraq would be declared a victory for al Qaeda, it would be declared a victory for our enemies because, here's the fundamental truth: It's like a street fight. When there's a street fight, usually the one who loses is the one who runs away, maybe cursing and shouting or is carried away by his buddies. The one who wins is still standing on the corner. That's who wins a street fight, that's who wins a war. You've got to own the ground, Mr. Speaker, and you've got to destroy the will of the enemy to commit war.

We've nearly destroyed the will of al Qaeda in Iraq. And I have set foot and walked around in most of the regions in Iraq, but particularly al Anbar Province, a place that I could not go a year and a half ago, I went there less than a year ago. I couldn't go there a year and a half ago because al Qaeda owned too much of al Anbar Province. That's a third of the real estate in Iraq. And the mosques were preaching then an anti-coalition, anti-American message. Today, there aren't any Mosques in al Anbar Province that are preaching an anti-American, anti- coalition message. The last numbers I saw were 40 percent were preaching pro-coalition, 60 percent were preaching a neutral message.

And the example of al Anbar Province, the very intensive Sunni Province, where the Sunnis joined up with us and provided intelligence and the Sunnis rose up and drove a lot of al Qaeda out and took them out, there was no place for al Qaeda to hide in al Anbar Province as long as the Sunnis were willing to team up with coalition American troops. And they did so. They did so because they believe that we're going to stick it out and we're going to be with them. They also believe that the future for Iraq is far better when the Iraqi people are determining their destiny rather than al Qaeda. They did so because of some of the very brutal tactics against civilians that were committed by al Qaeda. They did so for a lot of reasons. But in the end, people want their freedom. They want to be able to control their own destiny. They don't want to be ruled by a tyrant, and they don't want blood-thirsty al Qaeda in their regions.

So the good work that got done in Iraq could be thrown away with the stroke of a pen of a potential future Commander in Chief who said, before he went on his fact-finding mission, ``On my first day in office I will order a troop withdrawal from Iraq.'' That says to me, regardless of the conditions on the ground, regardless of the input that comes from the commanders on the ground, regardless of the facts, regardless of the intelligence, regardless of whether he hears this message that I have described, that pulling out of there creates a vacuum that hands over some of the control on the Iraq side of the Straits of Hormuz to Ahmadinejad, and pulling out of there will open things up for al Qaeda to reestablish a base camp there, and pulling out of there sets up the temptation for the Kurds to declare independence and end up with a two-front war and pits the Iraqis against the Iraqis. And without anyone to keep order, that is a very, very big gamble. And the most disagreeable consequence, Mr. Speaker, is that it would add Iraq to Muqtada al Sadr's list and make him right.

Then, Osama bin Laden would say, we have won in Iraq. And if we keep attacking Americans, they will leave. They will leave Afghanistan the same way that they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. And if Obama is elected President, they will say, and also the same way they left Iraq.

Al Qaeda will declare victory and they will be right because we will not be standing on the ground. We will not be standing on the street corner. That's the measure of victory: If you're there, they can't declare victory, they have to come back and take it from you. It puts me in mind of a famous flag that I saw, it was an early flag during the Texas independence fight. The flag is a white battle flag, and it has on it the black silhouette of a canon, and it says, ``Come and Take It.'' It's an inspiring message that comes from Texas. And that's what they need to do if they're going to declare victory, they have to come and take it. But they have taken defeat in Iraq. We need to solidify our victory. We can't have a victory if we pull out, if we cut and run, if we order troops out of there regardless of the situation on the ground. It takes time to nurture this.

It was interesting to compare the history of the insurgency in the Philippines with the battle that we have going on against al Qaeda globally today. A lot of the same kind of enemies, by the way, with some of the same kind of ideology. I will say, perhaps, the spiritual descendants, al Qaeda is likely the spiritual descendants of the enemies that we fought in the Philippines. That was from 1898-1902.

We sent the Marines there and we sent the Army there. General ``Black Jack'' Pershing was there. We took on those insurgents and we fought them for 4 years, and we lost over 4,000 Americans during that period of time. And during that period of time we also sent, by the numbers presented to me by the President of the Philippines, 10,000 teachers there. We sent priests there, we sent pastors there. We sent our culture over to the Philippines to lift them up and help them out.

It took a long time to put that insurgency down. And the violence went on several years after we were finished with our main part of the conflict going on in the Philippines. But a few years ago, President Arroyo of the Philippines came here to Washington, DC. She gave a speech in a downtown hotel, not to Members of Congress particularly, but to whoever happened to be in the crowd and attended that dinner. And she said, and I'll never forget it, ``Thank you, America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to our islands in 1898''--she forgot to say the Army. ``Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to our islands in 1898. Thank you for liberating us. Thank you for freeing us. Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers. Thank you for sending your priests and pastors. Thank you for teaching us your way of life, including our economy and our culture,'' because she said today--and language, ``thank you for teaching us your language'' because today, 1.6 million Filipinos go anywhere they want to go in the world to get a job, and they send the money back to the Philippines. And it's a significant percentage of their gross domestic product. She said the percentage, I've forgotten it, but I remember the theme and the rest of the things that she said. It was a clear thank you that came in more than a century later to thank America because we were there to give them their opportunity for freedom. And they hung onto that freedom and in fact fought with us through the Second World War and fought bravely and valiantly. And today, they're set up as a free and democratic country.

That's the result of a battle against an insurgency when we had confidence in ourselves, when we weren't undermining our military with defeatist comments. And by the way, I happened to notice this in the USA Today newspaper today, the Presidential election that went on during that period of time was about whether we would stick it out or whether we would pull out. And the Presidential candidate that advocated for pulling out was William Jennings Brian, a young charismatic Presidential candidate who was essentially a populist who said, ``let's get out of there, it's wrong to be there.''

I'll make this point, Mr. Speaker: Americans voted for McKinley in that election, and they did so because he was a tough, crusty fighter that was going to stand up for the values of the United States. He wasn't going to back off. Once we engaged in a conflict, he intended to win. We did win. The Philippines are free today, they're free today because of it. We could have handed it back over, we did not.

The American people sided for freedom. And where American soldiers have gone, they've taken freedom with them. And by the way, wherever the English language has gone around this planet it has taken freedom with it as well, whether it was carried by the Brits, the Aussies, the Americans, the Canadians. I can't find an English-speaking country that is not a free country today. The English language is the best carrier of freedom that there is. And that doesn't mean if people speak English, they're free, but the culture of freedom goes with the language called English. That's the historical fact.

Today, the Philippines are free. And we won the insurgency there and there are lessons to be learned. General Petraeus references the Philippine insurrection in his book on counter-insurgency. It's an instructive lesson, it's a lesson of resolve. But additionally, if you look through the conflicts and the history of America, while we had elections during those conflicts--and the most instructive is the election in 1864 during the height of the Civil War and the carnage that took place there. We lost over 600,000 Americans--that would be total from each side--during that conflict of the Civil War; bloody

and brutal with thousands of casualties, actually thousands killed in a number of different battles.

And the will of the American people was tested on the north side of the Mason-Dixon Line and on the south side of the Mason-Dixon Line. And when the election came up in 1864, America was tired of war. They didn't know whether they could win or not--and I'll talk about the North didn't know if they could overcome the South. But the candidate that ran against Abraham Lincoln was General George McClellan. And General George McClellan was not an aggressive commander. He commanded the Army of the Potomac. And the Army of the Potomac was a large and massive army that had a chance at victory south of here and didn't press the enemy or he might have been able to close on Richmond and end the war within the first year. He didn't do that.

And so he went back and dug in and fortified Washington, DC to protect this city, and drilled and trained and fortified and drilled and trained and fortified until Abraham Lincoln sent him a letter that said, ``Well, if you're not going to use this Army, can I borrow it?'' That was the general that ran against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. And General McClellan's agenda was, ``we will sue for peace. We will negotiate a settlement so that this horrible war is over.'' And you know, if McClellan would have been elected, we wouldn't be one country today. The Mason-Dixon Line would have been the boundary between the United States of the North and the Confederate States of the South.

If that had been the case, if the American people had chosen to side with the candidate who wanted to accept less than victory, the United States would not be the United States. We wouldn't be the great Nation we are today. We wouldn't have been able to engage in some of these large conflicts that have turned the destiny of the world. We wouldn't have been, perhaps--I'll say almost certainly we would not have gone into the Philippines. We would have fought a defensive war in the Spanish-American War. Who knows who would have prevailed in that. They might have pitted the South against the North; clearly, that's what happens. There would have been residual animosity left over from the Civil War. We don't know the results of the Spanish-American War if we hadn't had a successful resolution to the Revolutionary War that tied this country back together.

If we were two countries instead of one, we wouldn't have engaged in World War I in the fashion that we did. An entirely different result might have happened. It might have been the Germans that won World War I instead of the Allied Forces. And when you get to World War II, the conflict that forced this country to mobilize, 16,000 men and women in an effort in uniform to win the global war, win the war in Europe and win the war in Asia, you put that all together, it would have been impossible to do so if there had been a United States of the North and the Confederate States of the South. We would not have been able to be one country. And when Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, I'd question whether there would have been a Pearl Harbor for them to attack. And who knows what would have happened if they had landed on our west coast which States would have been North and which ones would have been South. And would we have carried that resentment on to the next century and said, ``I'm not going to defend the Confederate States of America. After all, we fought a war with them less than 100 years ago.'' Who knows? But we could not have pooled our resources if we were two separate countries.

Abraham Lincoln had the resolve. The greatness of the man was he saved the union. Yes, it was bloody and it was brutal and it cost a high price. But the millions of lives that have been saved because of that weigh in favor of Abraham Lincoln's resolve to save the union.

And so who would have saved the world from the tyranny of Nazism, of Stalinism, the tyranny of the Cold War that would have washed over us, who would have saved the world from all of that if the United States had been two nations instead of one? I suspect it would have been nobody, and perhaps the last flames of freedom would have been snuffed out by the totalitarian regimes that came from imperialistic Japan and Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. How would anybody on this planet have stood up against that if we weren't one Nation under God, 48 States pulling together with our vast resources and our strong spirit, the spirit of freedom, and the confidence of American destiny that we had then, that has since been besmirched by Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu?

But not, Mr. Speaker, not Iraq, I pray. Not another huge inspiration for our enemies. Let's seal the deal there. Let's demonstrate our resolve there. Let's stand on the principles that took us there. And when this country goes to war, it's our country, right or wrong, it's our country. And we need to sing off the same page of the hymnal and get to this point where we have a victory that is legitimately declared, not a retreat that we're going to try to redefine as a victory. We stay. We stand together. We finish the fight there. And when we do so, the legacy that's left will be one to build on instead of one to run away from. And let me just say we can never, never let leaders in the world, tyrants in the world, say, ``If we keep attacking Americans they will leave''--name your country. Let's say Afghanistan-- "the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Mogadishu, the same way they left Iraq. Those ``the same way they left Iraq'' words can never be legitimately spoken. They must never be allowed to be legitimately spoken because if they are, more American lives will be lost, more of God's children across this planet will be lost, and the forces of evil and tyranny will be strengthened. Their resolve will be strengthened. Their recruitment will be strengthened. Ours will be diminished. And for the purposes of freeing up a couple of brigades to go to Afghanistan, it's not a bad idea to bolster some troops there, but NATO needs to send their people in there in big enough numbers and be willing to fight. The United States can't carry this alone.

What happened to the argument that we needed to have coalitions to fight these wars? We had 30-some nations on the ground fighting in Iraq. I stood in a place in Basra, where the British commanded, and at random counted officers there from eight different countries. In fact, I lined them up and took their pictures because I thought nobody's going to believe that we have this kind of a presence here in this country. We did. We had coalition troops in Iraq. We still have a good presence of coalition troops in Iraq. And for the junior Senator of Illinois to talk about pushing more troops over to Afghanistan, which I will support when they're freed up and I think we can produce enough troops to do so, but I would say back to him what about a coalition? Let's put some troops in there from the NATO countries in the world. Let's ask for a little more from them instead of America carrying this load all the way. Those things I think are components of this entire discussion.

So, Mr. Speaker, Americans wouldn't be walking around in the streets of Ramadi shopping, as I did, if it hadn't been for the surge and if it hadn't been for General Petraeus. Americans wouldn't be thinking of coming back home out of Iraq instead of being redeployed to Afghanistan if it weren't for the surge. Americans wouldn't be in a situation where we could say all of the indicators there define victory for us if it weren't for the surge.

I mean this Congress, and I thought imprudently, set up 18 different benchmarks for the Iraqis to meet. Of those 18 benchmarks, the Iraqis have met at least 15 of them and they are working on the other 3. They have accommodated this rather skittish Congress that we've had, and they have done that in the face of--since Nancy Pelosi took the gavel as Speaker in January of 2007, since that time to this floor there have been brought 40 resolutions, 40 resolutions that undermined our military, weakened our support for our military and our troops, and sought to unfund the troops, 40 resolutions sending the message Congress doesn't support our troops in the field. And I can say that, Mr. Speaker, because it doesn't work to say ``I support the troops but I oppose the mission.'' It

doesn't work to say ``Put your life on the line for me and my freedom and my security, but I think it's the wrong mission.'' When you ask somebody to put their life on the line, you've got to believe in their mission, you've got to stand with it, and you've got to make sure they have all of the equipment, all the training, all the support that's possible that can be generated by the treasure of a country that owes so much to its military people.

This situation, the idea of declaring what he finds out and then going there to find it, that does not hold up in a logical society. And declaring his first order would be to order troops out of Iraq, regardless of the situation on the ground, and then still maintaining a standard that if things get bad, we'll go back in, if you don't have the will to stay there now when the war is essentially won, you won't have the will to go back in. The American people know that, Mr. Speaker.

So there's much at stake. We need a strong Commander in Chief. We need a tough, ornery patriot.

And, furthermore, to tie this all together, in the history of America in every election when we have had a conflict, when we have been at war, there has been a presidential candidate that was less aggressive, a presidential candidate that was more of a pacifist, and in all but one of the circumstances that I can think of, there has been an opponent that said end this war at any cost, shut down the violence, let's get out of there, let's bring our troops home. And in every single case that there's been a presidential election during a time of war, the Commander in Chief whom the American people had the most confidence in winning that war and boldly moving us to victory, that's the person who won the election. That's the person who was elected to be Commander in Chief or the person who was elected to another term like Abraham Lincoln. McClellan lost the election because the American people are winners. We are winners because we know that when you engage in a war, you must win. The consequences for that multiply across the ages.

I can remember growing up and asking my father, who served 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific, ``Have we ever lost a war?'' And his answer was, ``No, the United States of America has never lost a war, son, and I pray we never do.''

It's not that easy to say that today. I can make the argument. It wouldn't stick with a lot of people. But that's where we are. We must maintain the resolve. The American people will step up and they will elect a strong Commander in Chief who will see us through to the end in this war in Iraq. Someone who understands this global threat of al Qaeda, who understands that the infiltration that's coming in from Pakistan into Afghanistan is where the threat comes from; that the sanctuary that exists in Pakistan needs to be addressed; someone who understands that in the history of the world, it's hard, difficult, and maybe not even possible to come up with an example of an insurgency that was defeated when it had a sanctuary in another sovereign country that it could be armed from and deployed from. I can't think of an example, and I can't get an answer from others when I ask that question. Perhaps there is one.

But as this lays out, the American people need to understand where we are in the continuum of history, and where we are is that we must be able to chalk Iraq up as a victory. It is in a critical strategic part in the world. Iran is developing nuclear weapons as fast as they can. And if we pull out our position to leverage Iran without warfare, it gets weaker and weaker, and it puts us strategically in a worse position to do something about it if we do pull out. Every indicator is negative if we pull out of there. If we stay and we finish this thing with honor and we can declare it a victory, a victory that historians will sustain as a victory, then under those circumstances we discourage our enemies. We shut off their recruitment.

They are, by the way, on the run now, and they have a place to hide, and we need to eliminate their places to hide, and I will agree with that. But I'm looking forward to the American peoples decision, their verdict in November.

And I just cap this off by shifting to an important piece, Mr. Speaker, and that is this circumstance right here, that is the number one issue on the minds of the American people. This, Mr. Speaker, is gas prices. And where we are today, and actually I haven't looked today, but I had them check the prices when we built this poster, $4.08 a gallon. I listened to the rhetoric through this Congress as we moved through the Bush administration when gas was $1.49 back here when President Bush took office January 20 of 2001. And then gas prices went up not a buck, they crept up to $2.33 over time. As we tried to open up more energy, as this Congress passed six to eight bills out of this House when we had a Republican majority, every one of them provided more energy, more access to refineries. They would have built refineries. It would have opened up natural gas drilling, Outer Continental Shelf, ANWR. We passed all of that off the floor of this House, Mr. Speaker, and sent it over to the Senate, where the minority over there, the people who are opposed to energy development, filibustered our energy bills.

If we would just simply apply all those energy bills, if they would have been applied at the time we passed them, this gas wouldn't be $4.08. It wouldn't even be $2.33. The Senate was blocking this legislation clear back here. This legislation in 2003, 2004, 2005, we passed smart energy legislation here, and I have given many speeches on the subject matter during that period of time and since. But what happened, Mr. Speaker, is they shut down the development of our energy.

If we're not going to develop new energy in the United States, then the supply is going to diminish. For example, if you drill a well down into the zone and you start that well producing, that well is going to peak out about right then. When it does so, then what will happen is it diminishes in its production. So when you make your discovery, that's the peak. If you stop discovering, if you stop exploring, if you stop drilling new wells, or if you slow it down, our overall energy production goes down too.

Well, gas was $2.33 when Nancy Pelosi took the gavel, and she said, We are going to get you cheap gas prices. I have no idea what the strategy was, any kind of a rational approach on that. So I'd leave that to them to answer that question.

But my strategy is more energy of all kinds. Let's take this gas price back to $2.33. It's $4.08 today. Let's drill ANWR. Let's drill the Outer Continental Shelf. Let's drill the nonnational park public lands. Let's drill the Bureau of Land Management locations. Let's open up the oil shale. Let's produce more ethanol, more biodiesel, more wind. If you add up all of those sources of energy, grow the size of the energy pie, produce more Btus--we are only producing 72 percent of our energy consumption. Let's produce 100 percent of the energy that we are consuming.

If we do that, these prices go down, and we get this gas price back to $2.33. And the people that are blocking energy production need to be held accountable by the American people. That is the bottom line.

Supply and demand sets the price. You cannot suspend the law of supply and demand any more than you can suspend the law of gravity. If we do that and shore up the dollar, Mr. Speaker, we will see gas at $2.33 again. I will continue to work on that. I will sign every discharge petition I can to get there. And I will ask my colleagues to do the same. And I will ask the American people to have a referendum on who is producing a policy that will generate more electricity for the American people.

It's my side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, not the other side of the aisle.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, July 23, 2008, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor to address the energy situation as well and point something out that I don't believe has been very well illustrated here.

This chart that I have, the inside circle is all of the Btus of energy that are consumed in the United States annually, 72 quadrillion Btus. The outside circle is all of the different sources of energy. Excuse me, this is the production chart on the inside. The outside circle is the consumption chart. We are producing only 72 percent of the overall energy that we are consuming. We need to grow the entire size of the energy pie. But if you take out of it all of the things that the environmentalists don't want us to do, it leaves only a little bit of solar and wind and geothermal. That is only 0.74 percent of our energy production.

They want to grow it into 100 percent of our energy production. That cannot be done. We have to grow all sources, not the tiny little sliver, three-quarters of 1 percent that the environmentalists would let us do. Let's go for all of it, as the gentleman from Illinois said.

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota. Thanks for organizing this Special Order and thanks for taking a leadership role on this energy issue and a number of other issues and establishing yourself here in the United States Congress.

The issue of ANWR is something that I've talked about some in the past. And I will try to confine my discussion to ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

And I will start this way: A couple or 3 years ago I was at the Iowa State Fair where they asked us, as elected representatives, to give a 20-minute speech while the press listens to the 20-minute speech, then they write some stories about what we said and we get into the news. So Members of Congress line up there and candidates line up. And I drug a bale of straw down to stand on.

And so I was standing there on a bale of straw at the Iowa State Fair, and I began to tell people about ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And one of the things that I said was, there are no trees in ANWR. And if you've seen a commercial, perhaps a commercial published by the Sierra Club, that shows or imagines a pristine alpine forest, if you see a picture of a pristine alpine forest and people are telling you we can't drill in ANWR, I can guarantee you it's not a picture of ANWR. It's not a picture of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The first thing we need to remember is that ``arctic'' means up in that area north of the Arctic Circle. The definition of the Arctic Circle is--go back to your eighth grade general science, Mr. Speaker, and ladies and gentlemen, where we learned in about eighth grade that the Arctic Circle is that circle around the globe north of which trees can't grow. And so, by definition, if it's the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, there are no trees up there.

And so, in any case, there was a trucker standing in the crowd that began to scream at me, ``liar, liar''--which is no way to treat a public servant. And I was ready to come down off of that bale of straw and deal with him like the boys who grew up in the corn fields, but in the end I convinced some other folks to go down there and do what I would do if I didn't have to give the speech.

And the paper wrote up a story about how Steve King wasn't entirely accurate because they talked to a botanist who alleged that there was a tiny little sliver of plant that grows within the tundra that doesn't get more than 10 to 12 inches tall that technically could be considered a tree, not one you could cut a log out of, not one you could climb, not one that a squirrel would recognize as a tree, but according to a botanist, a tree just the same. So I guess you could say that maybe there are some trees in ANWR, but they aren't as tall as the tundra grass. And that's all that you'll see out there for millions and millions of acres.

Part of it's the Brooks Range, a lot of it is mountainous, mountainous bare stone with snow that's on it 12 months out of the year 24 hours a day. But we're talking about drilling in the oil deposits in the Arctic Coastal Plain. The Arctic Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge people imagine as just teeming with caribou and arctic wolves or fox or whatever they have up there, all of this teeming with wildlife because they've given it a name called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, and Mr. Speaker, there are 19.6 million acres in ANWR. Most of it is mountainous--and we don't want to go in there, you couldn't get a drill rig in there anyway. We want to drill the Coastal Plain. The Coastal Plain is just a flat coastal plain, pretty close down near sea level. It undulates a little bit, and it has permafrost all of 10 months out of the year. And then when it thaws and when the sun shines and the midnight sun shines on it, it will penetrate down through the permafrost a foot to 18 inches, something like that.

And so we hear people like Senator Tom Harkin say, I went to ANWR and I camped up in ANWR and I floated a river in ANWR--now I didn't see any rivers there, but I take him at his word--he floated a river in ANWR, and he could dip his cup into the water and take a drink. And he thinks that's pretty nice and we ought to keep it that way.

Well, it still is that way. You can float the rivers on the North Slope of Alaska and dip your cup in the water and drink them and they're just as clean and pristine as they ever were. I would be a little worried about the polar bears walking through it, a little worried about what the salmon do in it, but nonetheless, if you choose to drink out of that river it's going to be as safe for you today as it was 50 years ago or 100 years ago. But that's no reason to deprive the United States of America of energy.

And so, the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for example, the North Slope of Alaska, which we've already developed, has a caribou herd there--actually, it has several of them scattered around. In fact, in 1970, when we began to open up the North Slope of Alaska and they said, you'll destroy this environment, and so we can't go up there and drill. And the environmentalists stuck some court injunctions on it and they were successful for 2 years in keeping us out of there.

But when they started that, there were 7,000 caribou on the North Slope of Alaska running around out there, eating the Arctic tundra grass that was there. And then we went ahead and started building the pipeline in 1972 and completed it in 1975--and perhaps I'll go back to that. And then we watched that caribou herd that went from 7,000 head of caribou in 1970 to--about 3 years ago when I did this trip and we had the count--28,000 caribou on the North Slope of Alaska. Well, that would convince me that the environment, if there was any damage up there, surely it didn't damage the reproductive capabilities of the caribou. And I made that statement to a reporter one day, and he said, well, of course there's a lot of caribou on the North Slope of Alaska, that's because the pipeliners shot all the wolves. Now, you've got to be a little bit off on the other side to come to an immediate conclusion like that.

And I can tell the gentlelady from Minnesota and the Speaker, I can tell you that that aim that he took was way off the mark on pipeliners shooting all the wolves that would have eaten the caribou and held the herd down to 7,000 head. That didn't happen. It didn't happen by the pipeliners because I was signed up to go up on that pipeline. And I can tell you what it paid, it was $9.75 an hour in 1972. And we worked seven 14-hour days of the week, and we did that for six weeks. We got 2 weeks off. I didn't get to go because of the court injunction--I was actually signed up in 1970--the court injunction shut down my travels up there. So that was the situation.

And that was a lot of money in 1972. They had to pay that kind of money, $9.75 an hour, then because here were the rules: We're going to hire men to go up there and build these roads and these pipelines and drill these wells and open up this oil field. And the rules are this; first rule is, no women. You have to pay a man a lot of money to go someplace where there are no women. Second thing, no booze. And I'll add a little more to the per-hour scale of that. Third thing, no gambling. Well, it's pretty tough when you've got nothing to do up there, with no booze and no women, to do anything but gamble. The fourth thing was, no guns. So if there's no women, no gambling, no booze and no guns, there were no pipeliners shooting any wolves on the North Slope of Alaska. Therefore, one could conclude, short of another one of those crazy explanations, that the caribou thrived with the new environment that they had, which allowed them to get up out of that ice cold water, where they were dropping their calves during calving time, and up on the dry near the Alaska Pipeline, where it's warm, too.

So what we have is this: We've developed the North Slope of Alaska. We did

that from 1972 until 1975. We built a 600-mile road from Fairbanks North to get up there to Prudhoe Bay and Deadhorse access--milepost zero of the Alaska Pipeline--to build an 800-mile pipeline from Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean down to the Port of Valdez, drilled a bunch of wells up there, sunk the casings down, cemented the casings and put pumps down in those casings. You can fly over that area today, the North Slope of Alaska, the identical environment and topography of ANWR, and I can take Dennis Kucinich up there, my friend, and I would have to point to him and say, here's a well, here's a well. He wouldn't recognize them from the air, even flying along at about 4,000 feet or less, because, first of all, there are no derricks up there, not one. There are only six drill rigs working in Alaska now because of the environmental lawsuits that have shut them down. And so you'll have a hard time finding a drill rig, there won't be derricks in the North Slope.

And when you think of the pump jacks, the traditional oil well pumps that have the counterweight that chug around, they aren't up there either. So unless you're an expert, you're not going to even see where the wells are.

But if you look real close and you know what you're looking for, you will see these work over pads that I judge to be about 50 feet wide and maybe 100 or 125 feet long, big enough to bring a rig up on if you need to pull the pump out. And it's a pad of white rock, maybe three feet thick or so, and they use that in the wintertime, come in on an ice road if they need to work on a well, and go in and pop the cap off and go down and start pulling the pump pipe out, they go down and pull out a submersible pump from down there, work the pump over, put in a new one, drop it in, get the well going again. But there is not a pump sitting above the surface of the North Slope of Alaska that I could find. There may be some out there that I couldn't see.

So what we've done is, in a very environmentally friendly fashion, gone into identical environment and topography on the North Slope of Alaska, developed an oil field with 1970s technology, built a pipeline 800 miles long, built a road 600 miles long to get up there, built a service road alongside that pipeline part of the time--and most of that's ice roads today--got all of that done from '72 to '75, and pumped oil. And yet I stand on the floor of this Congress and I hear people on the other side of the aisle, you and you stand up and say, well, it's going to take 10 years to get oil out of ANWR. And the other night it was 20 years to get oil out of ANWR.

And so I look at that and I think, wait a minute, we had the Manhattan Project. We started after the beginning of World War II to build an atom bomb, a series of them, figure out how to deliver them and how to penetrate the air defenses of Japan. We built the atom bombs, we flew them over Japan and we dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Three plus years to do the Manhattan Project.

And then, what else was amazing? Let's see. It was in 1963, when John F. Kennedy said, hey, let's go to the Moon. That little nudge that he gave in that important speech inspired America and NASA, and 6 years later we're on the Moon with Neal Armstrong. One giant step and we're on the Moon, 6 years.

And they are telling us that we can't build 74 miles of pipeline from Prudhoe Bay, Deadhorse access, east over into ANWR and hook onto some wells that we would sink down and not get oil coming out for a decade or two until another generation has come and gone? That's a defeatist attitude. That's not the America I know.

And there is no argument that the environment was damaged on the North Slope or they would have brought up posters here and put this on the floor over and over again.

So we need to drill ANWR. We need to drill the Outer Continental Shelf. We need to drill the nonnational park public lands. And we need to drill everywhere all the time. It's not an environmental issue. The issue is people that want to ride bicycles instead of drive cars, that's the people on that side of the aisle that are shutting down our access to energy.

I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota.

Will the gentlewoman yield for just a moment?

Thank you. I had forgotten that you're going, and I am so glad that you're going up there to see it for yourself.

Now, when you get in that 19-passenger twin-engine Grumman and you fly out of Deadhorse and you fly over to Kaktovik, ask that pilot to get down real low and have everybody on that plane looking for wildlife. We did that. We zigzagged around across the Coastal Plain looking for the wildlife.

I forgot to tell you there is no resident caribou herd in ANWR. They live in Canada. They come over to have their calves mid-May until mid- June. When the calves can walk, they go back. It's a kind of migrant maternity ward is what it is. They go back to Canada and live over there, and they're doing fine. So this is after mid-June. So fly around out there and look around for wildlife. What we found when we looked were four musk oxen standing there with their heads down. They wouldn't have known if they were standing next to an oil well or not either.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress.

All of this subject matter that we have before us, we have weighty decisions here before this Congress. As we prepare to go forward into a Presidential election, these issues come more and more to the focus.

But also I know that while we are deliberating on our intense issues that will set the destiny of America, we have great Americans that have served in this Congress that have helped set the destiny and direction of this country as well. And as we move towards those dates, it's important that we recognize those people.

One of those folks that is among that group I'm talking about is with us here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and that's the gentleman from California, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, the former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, a brave patriot in his own right.

I would be happy to yield so much time as he may consume to Mr. Duncan Hunter of California.

Well, I really thank the gentleman from California as I reclaim my time, and I'd be glad to yield however much time might be needed to continue the compliments to myself. I'll be quite as generous with that particular time.

But I want to say, Mr. Duncan Hunter from California is a brave and great patriot and has poured forth his appreciation for many of his colleagues, and I'm sure as the months unfold we'll hear this emerge in many accolades for the accomplishments of Duncan Hunter.

And I want to say as you came to Iowa to campaign for the Presidency, and sometimes it was late nights, and it was often early mornings. And I remember this situation, the night of the straw poll, August 11, 2007, when it was the big test. And everybody had to count their straw polls and votes that came in, and however that shook out, that gave some people momentum, and other people lost momentum. And some people that had momentum had already left the State before the votes were counted.

But I had an early press call to be down to the State Fair on the east side of Des Moines fairly early the following morning. It was a Sunday morning. I arrived there, but I had to wait in line because Duncan Hunter was there with his cowboy hat, and he was already working the State Fair. I don't know if it was before the sun came up, but it was right away in the morning. That's the kind of tenacity that we expect in your successor, and I yield back to you.

There is that. And we have some county fairs that are larger than a lot of State fairs.

We live our fairs there in the State and we live our politics. And it's all politics all the time, 24/7. And that brings people to where they're paying attention to the issues and they take it seriously. And we have a statewide conversation going on constantly--over the telephones, the e-mail, over the back yard, in the coffee shop, at the fairs, all the activities that are going on.

Thanks for your comments. I thank, again, the gentleman from California as I reclaim the balance of my time.

I think that my transition, as I watch the former chairman of the Armed Services Committee walk from the floor, I take this over to the subject matter of Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. It's been a little while since we've had intense discussions on that here on the floor.

I would point out, as a matter of refreshment to those who haven't been so focused on our situation, we are a country at war. And we were attacked on September 11, 2001 and we lost 3,000 Americans in those three locations where we were attacked.

The President then launched an offensive in Afghanistan, drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan, and people on that land voted for the first time in the history of man. Ever since Adam and Eve there hadn't been people go to the polls in Afghanistan. That happened fairly quickly; I believe it was about a little more than 1 year from the time that we went in.

And in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was violating, let me say, the United Nations Resolution 1441--and many others--the decision was made, based upon global intelligence, to go in and remove that tyrant who was killing his own people on a regular basis. He had started a war against Iran, where there were more than 1 million killed. And he had used weapons of mass destruction to destroy thousands of his own country men, women and children.

I have made a number of trips into Iraq. I sat with the chief justice who was on the panel that was lined up to try Saddam. And I asked the chief justice and the other justices, what is the penalty that Saddam is looking at? Now, he was in jail, and no one knew whether he was going to face the death penalty. And one of the other junior judges tried to explain to me, and he said that the penalty that Saddam is facing, well, we have a series of penalties; we have prison terms, we have life without parole--well, actually, he said we have the death penalty, then we have life in prison, and then we have other shorter terms, and it goes on down just like it does in the United States.

And as I watched the chief justice listen to the more junior justice explain that to me--which didn't explain a lot, actually--the chief justice, sitting there with a big white mustache, was tapping his pencil on the table and he wanted to be recognized. And I turned

to him for clarification and he said, Saddam is charged with crimes against humanity. Under Iraqi law, there is only one penalty, and that's death. And that's, ladies and gentlemen, when the world found out that Saddam was actually facing a death penalty. And about a year later then he did meet the end of his rope.

And that was a dramatic time in the history of Iraq. It took the fear away from the Iraqis. They were never sure whether he was going to emerge, whether he would be found not guilty and released onto the streets. They were never sure if he would light up again or reconfigure his Baathist political machine, reestablish his force of tyranny across the country, take over the control of the people and terrorize the Shias, and control the oil again and use that country for his own evil purposes. They knew that Uday and Qusay were dead, but they didn't know that Saddam would not come back until they knew he was dead as well. That changed the dynamics in Iraq. And thousands, in fact, millions of Iraqis are grateful for the sacrifice that's been made by coalition troops, American troops and American taxpayers, who have given up a fair amount of treasure to match a significantly large loss of blood and humanity in that country.

But what do we have today and where are we today and how did we get here? Well, in this Congress, this 110th Congress, Mr. Speaker, when Nancy Pelosi took the gavel--I will not forget that moment in time--and they began, on that side of the aisle, to bring resolutions to the floor in an attempt to unfund the war in Iraq. A whole series of pieces of legislation came raining down in this 110th Congress, directed to the floor, approved to coming to the floor by Speaker Pelosi, forty resolutions to undermine our military effort in Iraq. Forty different resolutions on the floor of this Congress calling for votes, trying to divide us, trying to see where they could find a way where they could squeeze off the resources to our military and ensure defeat, which is what it surely would have done. But we stood up, and we put the pressure back on the other side. And enough Democrats voted with Republicans to save this agenda that so many have sacrificed their lives and their blood for.

When I talk to the soldiers that serve there, and the airmen and the Marines and the Navy personnel, and when I talk to the parents who have lost a son or a daughter, they say, You can't pull us out of this fight. Don't do this to us, please. We're all volunteers. We're all volunteers here to carry out this mission. We want to take this fight away from our children and our grandchildren. We want it done in our time.

They put their lives on the line and they set aside years of their lives, many of them multiple deployments to go over there, 100 percent of them volunteers. Not just for the military. They didn't just sign up, they knew when they signed up or when they re-upped that the odds were good that they would be deployed into the theater of either Iraq or Afghanistan.

And so they're all volunteers, Mr. Speaker. And they volunteer because they love this country, they understand our history, and they understand that we need to direct its destiny, not people that live in foreign countries, not the people that hate America, but the people that love America are the ones that protect our destiny. They're in uniform, they're in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, they're standing up and defending our freedom, and we need to stand with them.

And so I'm troubled, Mr. Speaker, when I pick up an op-ed, and it was written by the junior Senator from Illinois, the junior Senator who served 147 days in the United States Senate, his only Federal office exposure, until he decided that he wanted to be the President of the United States. That junior Senator has been to Iraq one time, one time almost 900 days ago, but for more than 900 days he said, We've got to get out of Iraq, we've got to get out now, we've got to pull our troops immediately out of Iraq. And the only conditions are leave a rear guard there to guard their backs so they don't get shot in the back on their way out of Iraq. That's what I heard. I heard it not exactly in those words, but I heard that theme over and over again. And it was exactly the words ``immediately pull our troops out of Iraq.'' That's what the junior Senator from Illinois said. That's the position he holds today.

He does understand that to pull 142,000 troops out of Iraq takes a little bit of time. He has said in his op-ed that's printed July 14 in the New York Times that he would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi Government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely and our interests protected. Well, that's the only consultation he's willing to accept is if somebody else will plan the logistics of the retreat.

And I would remind the body that victory in a war is defined by who's standing on the ground that was fought over when the war is over. It's like a street fight; whoever is standing there on the corner won the fight, and the one whose buddies drug him off or walked or ran away is the one that lost. We all know that. You can't run away from a fight and declare victory. It doesn't work in a street fight, it doesn't work in a battle, and it doesn't work in a war. And you can say what you want to about history, but they're going to write history according to the facts; and the facts will be who was standing in Iraq at the end of the war, not who declared defeat and pulled troops out.

But it is not just tantamount to a declaration of defeat to pull troops out and run away from an enemy, it is a declaration of defeat itself by any measure, by any judgment of history. I would just remind, again, Mr. Speaker, that we pulled out of Vietnam, ``peace with honor,'' I remember, ``peace with honor.'' And I remember this Congress voting to shut off all dollars to go to the South Vietnamese where they were, by then, trained to defend themselves. And we had made a sacred oath to the South Vietnamese people that we would provide for them all of the military equipment, all the munitions, and all of the air cover that they would need and use to defend themselves. And they were trained and equipped and they had their military squared away to do that. And this Congress passed legislation on an appropriations bill that said, ``These monies in this appropriations bill and any monies heretofore appropriated shall be prohibited from being spent to defend any military mission in Vietnam, on the ground of Vietnam, in the skies over Vietnam, in the seas around Vietnam''--North or South Vietnam it actually said--``or in the skies or land around Laos and Cambodia, neighboring counties.'' They covered it pretty good.

Any money that was in the pipeline was prohibited from being spent to allow the South Vietnamese people to defend themselves. And any money in the Department of Defense appropriations bill would be prohibited from being used to let the South Vietnamese people defend themselves with those resources.

We failed the South Vietnamese people. We gave them a solemn promise and a solemn oath, and we pulled out on them. And this country remembers people hanging on to the struts of helicopters as they lifted off of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, a disgraceful image in the minds not just of patriotic Americans who saw that, sadly, but an image in the minds of people like al Qaeda who are inspired now because we didn't stick it out then.

And I read General Giap's book, the general who is credited with being the mastermind that set up the strategy that historians will describe as the defeat of the United States in South Vietnam. I would argue that we were not defeated there, but we were defeated here on the floor of this Congress. That's the fact of it, Mr. Speaker.

And on page eight of General Giap's book, he writes that he got his first inspiration that they could defeat the United States because we were willing to settle for a negotiated settlement in Korea. Because we didn't press forward for a complete 100 percent total victory over North Korea, he got the sense that we didn't have the stomach to finish a war that we were in. And so he set about with a strategy of the war of attrition, and they lost over 100,000 of their troops, killed in the Tet Offensive in 1968. And Walter Cronkite turned that into a defeat for the United States rather than a victory for our troops that so gloriously defended their positions and their compounds and the

South Vietnamese people. Over 100,000 North Vietnamese troops killed in the Tet Offensive, and Walter Cronkite interpreted that as a defeat for the United States because he didn't know why there were sappers inside the wall but not inside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

That's how history turned. History turned because it was redefined by liberal media people, and has since then been redefined by historians. And it's defined this way in the minds of Osama bin Ladin, General Giap, and also people like Muqtada al Sadr. And as I was actually in Kuwait, June 11, 2004, watching al Jazeera TV, Muqtada al Sadr came on and he said--and I was watching the closed caption going underneath the screen, he was speaking, I presume, in Arabic, the closed caption said--and I heard the voice of Muqtada al Sadr, he said, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq, the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.''

The inspiration for our enemies doesn't come from some ideology that causes them to rise up and move in a fashion that--they're not seeking a better world or a better life, it's hatred for us. And they think they can defeat us because they believe we're soft and we lack resolve. And they go back and keep score of our history and they say, well, they pulled out of Vietnam, they pulled out of Lebanon, they pulled out of Mogadishu, surely they'll pull out of Iraq. Well, they're dealing with a different Commander in Chief today than who was in charge in any of those circumstances. This time it's George W. Bush who is sticking this out. And I'm sticking it out with him, Mr. Speaker, because he's right. The central battle in this global war on terror is now and has been for a long time Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.

That's changing. It's transitioning over to Afghanistan, perhaps Pakistan, but today it's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. And we have everything but a sewed-up victory there.

When I look at the statistics that come out of Iraq, it tells me this: that civilian violence is off. It's down by about 80 percent from its peaks. Our military casualties are down dramatically as well. There has been 1 week where the accidental deaths in Iraq, 1 by my record so far, where the accidental deaths in Iraq were greater than the combat deaths in Iraq. That means you're getting down to one or two or three for the week. The casualties in Afghanistan have been for the last 4 to 6 weeks roughly equal to or greater than they are in Iraq.

Now, I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that you consider this: that we have about 140,000 to 142,000 troops in Iraq; we have about 26,000 troops in Afghanistan. So the numbers work out to be that there are about 5.38 times more troops in Iraq than there are in Afghanistan. And if the casualties are roughly equivalent in each of the two countries, the casualty rate in Afghanistan is 5.38 times greater than the casualty rate in Iraq. That is a dramatic sea change, Mr. Speaker, in the numbers of casualties within the two countries. And it isn't just because the casualties have gone up in Afghanistan, which they have, but it's because they have gone down dramatically in Iraq.

And the Department of Defense issued a couple of weeks ago sectarian attack statistics. Now, if you remember, we had people like the gentleman from Pennsylvania, who professes to be an expert on these issues, the one who said pull the troops out now, let's cut and run out of there and move them back to their horizon, who said that we had a civil war in Iraq and we had sectarian violence in Iraq and the place was melting down in shambles and chaos and the war could not be won. It was already lost. That from a retired Marine, that we already lost. Well, the sectarian violence, the violence that was described as uncontrollable, unmanageable, and going to get worse, the last report that came from the Department of Defense was sectarian violence, Shias killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shias for the sake that they are opposite sects, sectarian violence: zero. No recorded cases of attacks for sectarian reasons. Civilian violence off at least 80 percent, our casualties down to a level below where they are in Afghanistan for the last couple of weeks at least and spanning over the last 6 weeks equivalent roughly to Afghanistan. But the casualty rates in Afghanistan are 5.38 times higher than they are in Iraq.

Now, why is anybody unsatisfied with this? When I kept asking the question: Describe for me, define for me a victory in Iraq. How do you define that victory in Iraq? These folks over here are pretty cagy, Mr. Speaker, because they're not going to define a victory in Iraq. They know that we can achieve that. So they set up these benchmarks, 18 benchmarks for the Iraqis to reach, and if they didn't meet the benchmarks, then they were going to pull the plug on the funding and shut off the support for the troops and bring them all home. That was the strategy. And that was the strategy when General Petraeus came here to Congress--I think it was the 12th or 15th of September last year-- and he gave a report on the situation in Iraq. And the junior Senator from New York said, ``It would require the willful suspension of disbelief to believe you, General Petraeus.'' ``The willful suspension of disbelief.''

Well, look where we are today, Mr. Speaker? Who was telling the truth then? Was it the skeptic that came forward and denied the facts that were in front of her? Was it the general that laid out objectively the circumstances, with proper cautions, with proper caveats, but still with the proper strategy? And he sat down at Leavenworth and spent months writing the manual, the counterinsurgency manual. And I have that manual, and I have pored through it. I haven't read every word of it, but I have read a lot of the pieces in it. And that strategy was put together, as I sense it, as I read it, from the experience that General Petraeus had in Iraq and other experiences around other locations where he had been deployed, plus a lot of reading, a lot of experience, a lot of activity with other officers.

I remember going to Iraq for the first time in 2003, and I talked to the officers. They didn't know very much about the culture in the Middle East, and they didn't have a lot of books that they'd read about it. And I came home and started to read. I went back to Iraq, and I saw the bookshelves in their offices in places like Baghdad and Fallujah with more books on the Arabic culture, on the Muslim religion, on ways to understand the culture and the religion and the military tactics. We saw our officers start to get up to speed and learn, and they got up to speed and learned. And no one has learned that I can tell any more or any faster than General Petraeus.

And when I read this op-ed in the New York Times, written by the junior Senator from Illinois, who spent 147 days in the Senate and decided he should be the leader of the free world, he writes a few things in here that are quite disturbing. I will just take this kind of from the top. This is his op-ed that says what he is going to learn when he goes to Iraq. Now, this is a classic case of really getting the sequence of things wrong.

Now, I'm a cynical person sometimes. That's what it takes to maintain sanity in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and I would say that I could name more than one individual in this Congress that decided that they were getting enough pressure from their constituents that they wanted to flip and change their position on the war on terror and particularly the central battlefield of that, which is Iraq. And I can name more than one individual that I believe decided they wanted to change their position, turn against the war, and so they set up a trip to go to Iraq so that they could learn what was going on over there, having already made up their mind that they were going to flip and turn against it. I could name more than one person. I choose not to do that, but I can do that. And they aren't all Democrats either, Mr. Speaker. That is a cynical thing to do. It's a cynical thing to do to come to a conclusion without the facts and then set up a trip so that you can validate the conclusion that you've already come to and come back and say, ``Well, here's what I've learned. I've learned that we've got to pull out and pull out now, and since I have been there, I really am convinced of that.'' That has happened in this Congress multiple times actually from both sides of the aisle.

Well, Senator Obama takes it way another level. He goes to way another level, and he decides, I'm going to go to Iraq for the first time in 900 days. For more than 900 days, he has said we're going to pull the troops immediately out of there. And he's already decided what he's going to find out when he gets there. That's not exclusive new. I said I can name some people who have done that, and I think it's cynical and it's wrong. And remember when he said ``the audacity of hope''? Now, that's kind of an oxymoron. Hope is not in an active sense. Wishful thinking is what hope is. ``The audacity of hope.'' Well, what about the audacity of declaring to the world what he's going to learn when he gets there in a couple of weeks and putting it in an op-ed in the New York Times and telling us, well, I will go there and I am going to learn what's there, and then here's what I am going to do when I come back after I learn what it is I don't know. He's going to pull the troops out immediately. And he writes in his op-ed, dated the 14th of July: ``But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.''

How does he know that, Mr. Speaker? How can he know that the same factors that led him to oppose the surge, the same factors presumably that led him to oppose our operations in Iraq, still hold true? What factors? What factors has he verified today that he thinks are going to be confirmed when he gets there? And if he already has his mind made up, why waste the jet fuel? Why put those global warming greenhouse gasses up in the atmosphere and fly over to Iraq if you already know what you think? What is going to be validated by his presence there when he already invalidates his own objective judgment by writing the op-ed that tells the world what it is that he wants us to know that he has concluded after he actually goes there but tells us before?

And he says of the Iraqis that the ``leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country.''

Not so. They are investing now tens of billions of dollars. I know that they were in a situation where they had about $60 billion in revenue and they were working furiously to get it so that they could get it down and out to the people. And we are getting that revenue out to the people. I met with the mayor of Ramadi some months ago. He sounded like, let's say, the mayor of Altoona: ``I need more resources. I can't quite get the bureaucrats out of the way. I've got to build a sewer. We need a water plant. We have got to fix some streets.'' That's what it sounded like to me. And those are the streets that al Qaeda owned them less than a year before, and we went shopping in downtown Ramadi. It was the center of death for a long time there.

So the Iraqis are investing tens of billions of dollars. But if they weren't, is the punishment for not taking your tens of billions of dollars and investing it, is the punishment turning your back over to al Qaeda? What kind of a foreign policy is that?

And then we go on and he says: ``They have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.'' Well, what is that political accommodation? He does not say. And he doesn't say because he can move that ball of string in front of the kitten again. He can play Lucy with Charlie Brown and the football in the fall, set the ball, and when Charlie comes along, the Iraqis, to make their political accommodations and they get ready like Charlie Brown to kick the football, then Lucy, the junior Senator from Illinois, can say, ``Whoops. Nope, that wasn't the target. That was a different political accommodation. I'll tell you what it is if you hit it.'' Well, you're not going to hit it with this man. He already has his mind made up. No amount of accomplishments, no amount of statistics, no amount of real data on the ground, no amount of sacrifice is going to change his mind because politically he has concluded that it strengthens his hand to, let me say, invalidate the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of Americans who have either given their lives; their limbs; parts of their bodies; their health, mental and physical; their treasure; and years out of their lives. To take that fight from us, to take that fight from our children and grandchildren would all be invalidated because it would strengthen his hand politically. That's the calculus.

So it says here, and again I am reading from this New York Times op- ed dated July 14 by the junior Senator from Illinois, 147 days in the Senate and decided he wanted to be President--it says here in his op- ed: ``The good news is that Iraq's leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops.''

Well, that's an opinion on an opinion. And my opinion on that opinion is, Mr. Speaker, that the Iraqis are starting to feel their oats a little bit. Yes, we have made a lot of progress, and a very good sign of the progress is that at least politically Prime Minister Maliki needs to say, ``I want to negotiate a timetable.'' That tells me that the Iraqis are building in their confidence, and that's good news.

Two other things that have happened in the last 1\1/2\ years that didn't exist before is the Iraqi people understand we are not there for their oil and they understand we are not there to occupy, and that has helped dramatically in helping the Iraqis to make progress moving forward. But ``the good news is that Iraq's leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops,'' he could have chosen his words a little better. That sets a little wrong with me, that word ``removal.'' But what that says is we are succeeding in Iraq. And a year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years ago, the answer was did all the Iraqis want us to leave? Yes. All of the Iraqis wanted us to leave, just not anytime soon. They wanted to make sure that their country was stable. We have been training troops there for a long time, Mr. Speaker, and I don't know that the junior Senator knows that.

But in any case, the timetable for American troops coming home needs to be set upon the security levels in Iraq, not some arbitrary date. But the dates that are being proposed by the Iraqi leadership are well beyond the date that is in this op-ed that's written by the junior Senator from Illinois. So they are not on the same page. Maybe he doesn't know that because he hasn't gone there for 900 days. And when he sits down and talks to them, and I hope he does, is he going to come back and correct this? I don't think so because he already has his mind up. He has given us a report from Iraq, sent to us a couple weeks before he goes to Iraq. That's kind of being a little bit trigger happy with your op-ed, I would say.

Now here is another piece that I underlined. Obama says, ``Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis' taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition.''

Really? If he had gone to Iraq like I have and dozens and dozens of Members of Congress have and thousands upon thousands of Americans in uniform have, he might have been exposed to some of the things I have seen. For example, October 2003, Mosul, Iraq, General Petraeus commanding the 101st Airborne showed us, and this would be about 11:30 at night, he brought Iraqi troops into formation that had been training. And those Iraqi troops stood at attention. And we reviewed the Iraqi trainee troops October 2003. May, 2003, they had elections in Mosul. Liberation took place about the 22nd and 23rd in that area of March 2003. Just a little over a month later, there were elections in Mosul, Iraq, where they elected a governor, a vice governor and other officers there. That was all under the direction of General Petraeus.

And so if you go there, Mr. Speaker, and you witness those things, you understand the reality on the ground is significantly different than the reality imagined by the gentleman who penned this op-ed. And I would continue, by the way, I repeat the statement where he says, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition to Iraqi security forces providing the security in Iraq. They are the people that invented it, Mr. Speaker. It has been the President and his appointed officers who have

made sure that we had the resources to train Iraqi troops and to get Iraqi troops stood up so our troops could stand down. Do you remember that phrase? When the Iraqi troops stand up, we can stand down. That statement came out over and over again.

And I have met with Iraqi troops across that country over and over again. And sometimes they train pretty good. And sometimes they didn't perform so well. But today, we know they fight well for Prime Minister Maliki. And because of that, the day is coming where we can transition. And we've drawn the surge volume of the troops down now, and we're back to the more stable number of 100,000 to 142,000 troops. We think those numbers will be diminished some more throughout the summer.

But let it be a strategic decision, not a political decision. Politicians don't do a good job of fighting wars. I've described what we did on the floor of this Congress to pull the rug out from underneath the South Vietnamese. I just didn't tell you about the 2 or 3 million who died in the aftermath. That blood is on the hands of the people who didn't keep their promise to the South Vietnamese. And I don't want the blood on our hands for not following through on our mission that we committed ourselves to. Once you engage, you're with the troops 100 percent. You're with the mission 100 percent. You cannot separate the troops from their mission. And it doesn't work to say, I'm for the troops but I oppose their mission. It doesn't work to say, I celebrate our brave troops, but I brought a resolution to the floor, an amendment to try to cut the funding for them. I tried to cut their food, their fuel, their bullet-proof vests, M-4s and their Humvees. That is not support. And they need moral support as well as financial support, Mr. Speaker.

And under the next paragraph in his op-ed in the New York Times it says, ``It is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people.'' Really? How would he know what the will of the Iraqi people is? It helps to go there and find out. You can get somebody in this country to tell you anything you want to hear. And you can repeat it over and over again. When you go there and you see the faces of the Iraqi people and you move among their troops and among their civilians, you get an entirely different idea. You get an idea of gratitude. I have gotten written letters from them where they have profoundly thanked us for the sacrifice of our American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. We've given them a lot. We've given them our treasure. And we've given them our sons and daughters. And they're willing to step up to this freedom. We cannot squander it.

This is another comment made by Obama in this op-ed to the New York Times. It says, ``It is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people.'' And moving forward it says, ``That is why, on my first day in office, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: Ending this war.'' That is the definitive statement made by the junior Senator from Illinois: ``On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: Ending this war.''

Regardless of the circumstances on the ground, Mr. Speaker, regardless of how badly we might need to have troops there to stabilize the Iraqi defense forces, regardless of the threat, regardless of the threat across the Straits of Hormuz, Iran and their nuclear efforts and Ahmadinejad's lunatic approach to the world, denying the holocaust, declaring that he wants to annihilate Israel and annihilate the United States, and have him sitting there on one side of the Straits of Hormuz where 42.6 percent of the world's oil supply comes through and take our troops and skedaddle out of Iraq, and hand southern Iraq over to the influence of the Iranians perhaps? Where 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil is? And again, right on the other side of the Straits of Hormuz, on both sides of the Straits is where most of the oil is in Iran, on the east side of the Straits of Hormuz and Iraq on the west side of the Straits of Hormuz, in there is a mother lode of oil. Those oil fields are developed, that oil is coming out of there, and it's coming down the Straits now. And if Iran follows through on their threat to close the Straits of Hormuz, they have a stranglehold on the oil supply for the world. Not only do they have that, but they have a stranglehold on the valve that turns the economy off or on if they choose to do so. And they have threatened to close the Straits. And we have in the past put our Navy in there to keep the Straits open.

That, Mr. Speaker, is the time for the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, to declare that we should open up our Strategic Petroleum Reserves, dump that oil on the market where we have, I understand, about 2 months of supply in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and use that to drive the price down? What do we do when those reserves are empty and the oil production in the world hasn't gone up, and we haven't developed our energy supplies in the United States? What do we do then? What do we do if Ahmadinejad then closes the Straits of Hormuz after our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is empty and we have taken a dime or so off the gas price in the United States, taken some pressure off the world demand for oil because we wouldn't be quite so much in the market which would give the Chinese a better deal on oil, that would be the strategy that we're working with?

Our national security is at risk. The destiny of this Nation is at risk. And if we pull out of Iraq, if we elect an Obama for President, and he follows through on this thing that he is about to learn in a couple of weeks when he goes to Iraq and he has already concluded and he writes in the op-ed, I'm going to editorialize this part, and I will be straight about that, he writes in the op-ed, I'm going to Iraq, and I'm going to learn all this, and I'm going to come back, and these are the decisions I have already made, and I'm going to remake them when I come back. ``That is why on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: Ending this war.'' That means get out of Iraq. Pull out immediately. He said it over and over again, leave that blood and treasure there and leave the disgrace of pulling out there, and let the world declare it to be a defeat for the United States. Let al Qaeda use it as a recruiting tool, a recruiting tool for them to pick up terrorists around the world. That is what would happen, Mr. Speaker, if we pull out.

And I do think we're close to where the Iraqis can stand on their own and it is far more stable. But to just simply betray the judgment of General Petraeus before setting foot on the ground that has been liberated by the surge and the people who have given their lives, their blood and their treasure is a disgrace to do. And so I urge this body to urge some of their Presidential candidate to shift his position.

In the meantime, I intend to stand with a man who is an authentic American hero, a man who has served America for every day of his adult life, a man who sat in the Hanoi Hilton for at least 5\1/2\ years, that served there with our own great Sam Johnson in this Congress, served with the most decorated living American hero who happens to be from Sioux City, Iowa, and a man whom I call a friend, Colonel Bud Day, a Medal of Honor and 69 other medals on down. Those men stand up with John McCain for his service. And they know that that he has character. It can't be challenged. The background of John McCain is a solid background all the way through. And the background that we have, that we follow for the junior Senator for Illinois, we're having trouble finding the place that would give us encouragement that he would have the tools necessary to lead the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I want somebody that stands up for our freedom. I want somebody who has got an attitude of an east Texan serving us in the United States, in the White House. I want somebody with an attitude like President Bush has. Sometimes you have to be a lit bit ornery, a little cussed, a little belligerent and a little bit of an enigma. And that will keep our enemies off of our back and keep them guessing a little bit. But they need to know. Our enemies need to know we're committed to victory. And we're going to stick with victory. And we're not going to let up, that Iraq cannot be our Alamo. And it will not if we send a Commander in Chief that will stand for victory. I would conclude, Mr. Speaker, that America has never elected a President who was for retreat at a time of war. We will not do it again in 2008.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 25 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, July 17, 2008, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized this evening to address you here on the floor of the United States Representatives, the world's most deliberative body and the one that's supposed to be the most representative of people.

We are here tonight, a lot of Americans, yourself included and myself included, also, have heard from this group of gentlemen who have spent the last hour talking about energy. We are looking at gas prices that are $4.08, $4.10, $4.11.

We are looking at gas prices by my data that shows that the gas was $2.33 a gallon when Speaker Pelosi took the gavel here about the 3rd day in January of last year. We have watched gas go from $2.33 to $4.10 or $4.11.

That chart that I saw earlier that showed the gas prices and what they were when the Republicans took control of Congress and how we held that increase in gas prices down, but when the Speaker of the House took the position that we were going to have lower gas prices and an effective energy policy, we are still waiting. We are still wondering what that was.

I do know that there has been a lot of noise from this side of the aisle about windfall profit taxes. I do know there has been a lot of noise about looking into the speculators on the hedge funds, on the futures markets. There has been a lot of noise about alleging that oil and gas-generating producing companies, are dishonestly or deceptively making unjust profits, that Exxon has made $10 billion a quarter totaling $40 billion a year. People on your side of the aisle seem to they think that we should go back and slap an after-the-fact tax on companies that are pouring energy into this marketplace.

I remember, one of the more senior United States senators making a public statement here a couple of months ago, that 85 percent of the oil on our market actually comes from countries that are sovereign countries that have nationalized their oil industries. So the oil belongs to countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, countries where it's not private companies, but it's countries that own 85 percent of the oil that is imported into this country.

It's not the fault of Exxon, it's no fault of Chevron, it's not the fault of a lot of our good American companies that we have. It's a number of circumstances all put together, but the sovereign nations that have nationalized their oil industries, that are marketing it to us, have a lot bigger share of this. They can control and get together and do control, under OPEC, the supply of the oil. The demand is going to be in proportion to that that is necessary and in proportion to the price. Supply and demand is going to control the price of this oil.

Another component that is not discussed very much--and I don't know that it was mentioned in the previous hour--is our weak dollar. Our dollar has declined significantly in value, especially since about the 2003, 2004 era. The more the dollar declines, the more dollars it takes to buy oil from foreign countries. So if 85 percent of the oil that's available in this marketplace come from foreign countries, owned by foreign countries, and we have to send U.S. currency there in order to purchase that oil, and we get this imbalance of trade, this imbalance that is someplace in the neighborhood of $700 billion a year--not all of it oil by any means--the weak dollar contributes to the cost of our gas.

I don't want the public to lose sight that the weak dollar contributes to the high cost of all of our commodities here in this country. For example, if you do the calculation on what it would take to dial the value of our dollar back to what it was to shore up the value of the dollar to those values of 2003, 2004 era, that's about 35 percent of the purchasing power that has drifted away as the value of dollar declines.

We bring it back to that level in proportion to the commodities that we are looking at today. We would see about 35 percent come out of the price of gasoline.

Let me just say off the top of my head, my calculus would be been this, that if you have $4.10 gas and 35 percent of that is a weaker dollar, if we could shore up the value of the dollar, gas will get dialed back down to around maybe $2.65 to $2.70 in that area. I am for doing that, but in the meantime, while we are doing that, we also understand that the demand for fuel worldwide has gone up.

It stayed fairly flat here in the United States, hardly increased at all. But in China it has increased by a third, 32 percent increase in the demand for gasoline in China, for example.

It has gone up as well in India. We lose sight of the fact that the increase

in the imported gasoline for China, for this year, has gone up 2,000 percent this year if you annualize the numbers up to the last reporting date, which I think was maybe the end of May of this year. You set it up and annualize as running at a 2,000 percent increase in the amount of gas that the Chinese are importing. When they do that, that puts a lot of demand on our availability of gas to come into the United States.

We burn about 142 billions gallons of gasoline in this country. We produced last year about 9 billion gallons of ethanol to go in and supplement that overall gas consumption that we have. That has helped keep the price of gas down.

There has been a powerful argument. I should say it this way: It's an argument that has been made by powerful people, and it seems to be compelling to folks who aren't critical thinkers or who aren't willing to go back and gather some information themselves to analyze the situation. This argument is that using corn for ethanol has made food prices higher.

Well, Mr. Speaker, the world doesn't seem to have access to the balance of information. They go places like to the University of California-Berkeley or to Cornell University to get their information on ethanol. I would submit that, if you wanted to learn something about ethanol, if you wanted to learn something about corn-based ethanol, you ought to go to corn country where we actually make the stuff. We know a lot about it there. We've invested our capital in it for a number of years. We've come a long way, and we know a lot more about the cost of producing ethanol and what it takes to do that than does a scientist or a professor or someone with an agenda at the University of California- Berkeley.

It works like this: The study that was released by Berkeley and Cornell University made the statement that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it. The gentleman from Maryland has been on the floor of this Congress a number of times to make his argument in agreement with them, and I consistently disagree.

I disagree for this reason, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the calculation of Berkeley and of Cornell University goes back and calculates all of the energy it takes, not just to raise the crop of corn--first, if it takes more energy to produce the ethanol than the energy you get out of it, you would think they'd be talking about how much energy it takes to convert corn into ethanol. They are not talking about how much energy it takes to convert corn into ethanol. When they say it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it, they're taking the energy that it takes to turn corn into ethanol and the energy it takes to go to the field to raise a crop of corn that gets converted into ethanol and the energy it takes to manufacture the tractor and the combine and the planter and the disc and the cultivator if you use it and the sprayer and, I presume, the truck to haul it to town.

I read through this 62- or 63-page report that analyzed and that added up all of the components of the energy that's required to produce a gallon of ethanol. When you get to the point where they're hauling iron ore out of the mine in Hibbing, Minnesota--they didn't specifically say that, but this gets stretched out to those limits, Mr. Speaker--and when you think that your imagination has gone as far as it possibly can and when the scientists who claim that their study proves that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it, then I see in their study that they charge 4,000 calories, which represent X number of Btus, for each farmworker per day, that being, presumably, a reasonable diet to keep the farmworker with enough energy to be able to go out there and raise that crop of corn, which gets converted into energy.

Now, when they go so far as to add up the calories that the farmworker eats, I think we ought to know what kind of a study this is. When they go so far as to add up the energy that it takes to mine the ore and to sail it across Lake Superior and to turn it into cast-iron and steel, enough to convert all of the energy that it takes to paint the tractor and to haul it out to the farm and the energy it takes to put in the tank, I think you know that we're going to make those tractors anyway and that we're going to farm those fields anyway.

We've done that for a long time, and no one has gone back and charged the energy and has gotten the energy you got for the food you ate or has charged that against what it took to manufacture the tractor or the farm machine or the truck that it took to haul the grain. That is not a balanced proposal.

In arguing that it takes more energy to produce ethanol because it takes energy to produce the tractor that goes to the field and that it takes energy to feed the farmworker, if that's the logic that we're using, Mr. Speaker, then I'll submit this: The same logic needs to apply to crude oil and to turning crude oil into gasoline in the fashion that we have for decades.

It works like this: If you're going to charge the energy that it takes to make the tractor against the corn we converted into ethanol, then you also have to calculate the energy that it takes to manufacture the drill rig, to power the drill rig. You've got to charge the roughneckers on that oil rig 4,000 calories a day just like you do the farmworkers.

By the way, we're defending a lot of oil fields around the world because we have to have that oil for our national interests, and so we've got to have also all of the energy that it takes to cast the iron that is used in the anchor for the battleship and for the carrier and for the Humvees and for the bulletproof vests and for the M-16s, the F- 4s and the F-16s and for all of the components that are necessary to keep our military in play in places in the world that are a long way from home.

By the way, if it takes 4,000 calories to pay a farmworker to sit on a tractor and ride in air conditioning through the field--and we've gotten to that technology, and I'm grateful for that--we ought to be able to provide at least 4,000 calories to the marine who has to go in and root out terrorists in Fallujah.

So, if you add all of that up, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that it takes a lot more energy to convert crude oil into gasoline than it does to convert corn into ethanol. Btu for Btu. That proposal, that approach, is not a logical one. It's not a rational approach. It is a specious and facetious report that seeks to undermine the credibility of ethanol.

So here is the real number. This is Argonne National Laboratory of Chicago. We'll start like this:

You have a barrel of crude oil sitting at the gates of the refinery in Texas, and you run that crude oil in, and you convert out of that a Btu of crude oil into gasoline--one British Thermal Unit. We'll be measuring our energy in Btus here tonight, Mr. Speaker.

When you take crude oil and convert it into energy and a Btu in the form of gasoline, that 1 Btu has already consumed 1.3 Btus just in converting the crude oil into gas. It takes a lot of energy to crack gas out of crude oil and to convert it into gasoline that we can use in our vehicles.

Now, with a barrel of crude oil at the refinery in Texas, to produce 1 Btu of energy, it has already consumed more than it is. It consumes 1.3 Btus for every Btu of energy in gasoline than it produces.

If you go to, let's just say, Iowa and you set a bushel of corn at the gates of the ethanol plant in Iowa and if you convert that corn into ethanol to get 1 Btu in the form of corn-based ethanol, it takes .67 Btus of energy. These are numbers that come from Argonne Lab in Chicago.

You can boil it down to this: It takes .67 Btus of energy to get 1 Btu out when you have corn at the ethanol plant, and it comes out in the form of ethanol. It takes 1.3 Btus to get gasoline out of crude oil, to get 1 Btu of gasoline out of crude oil. So equivalent: Btu to Btu, it takes just a shade less than twice as much energy to convert crude oil into gasoline as it does to convert corn into ethanol. That's the laboratory fact, and we're getting better at it. Perhaps the honest answer today is that it's all the way up 2 to 1--twice as much energy to convert crude oil into gas as it takes to convert corn into ethanol.

So the energy component of this is the false argument for those people who side with Berkeley and with Cornell University. They cannot sustain that kind of argument in the laboratory with corn matched up against

crude oil. They can only make the argument if they add this thing up all the way to the iron ore, and that is a false comparison, but if they're going to make a false comparison, they need to make a corresponding false comparison and add up the energy that it takes to make the battleship, the carrier, the F-16, and all of that that it takes to defend the oil fields that send oil to us.

Now, with that being part of the logic, part of the argument is also that which comes out of Wall Street and out of The Wall Street Journal and out of the New York Times. It's funny. You know, the further away you get from a cornfield and the further away you get from an ethanol plant, the further away they get from the truth. Here are the things that we know in the heart of the renewable fuels country.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, I would submit to you that, as to the renewable fuels country that I represent, the western third of Iowa, 5, 6, 7 years ago, we didn't have a lot going on for a renewable fuels industry. Today in the 5th District of Iowa, in the western third of the State, when you add up the ethanol from corn and the biodiesel that comes from, let me say, animal fats and soybean oil mostly and when you add also to that the wind energy--those are all renewable energies--we produce more renewable energy than any other congressional district in America. We rank in ethanol production, in biodiesel production and in the wind generation of electricity. Those three items outstrip any other congressional district in America. So we know a little bit about renewable energy where I come from.

The concern, the argument, that comes from The Wall Street Journal and from the New York Times and from the east coast people who are as far away as you can get from the cornfields but who have no lack of self-confidence when it comes to this argument--and I'm happy to debate it with them, Mr. Speaker. In any form and at any time we can make this work, I'd happily stand up and take on all of the smartest people they can generate, but we're going to go back to facts when they debate with me.

It works like this: This corn that we've raised for years and years, this gift of the new world, actually, is hybrid corn that has been designed in the laboratories by good companies that help get us through droughts to increase the yield, having good seed corn companies that will go on record, that will say their design, their improved hybrids, will be increasing yields 3 to 4 percent per year as far out as one can predict.

When I was a kid, our corn was 80 bushel per acre. Now a pretty good crop is 200 bushel per acre. They think that we're going to see a 3 to 4 percent increase per year until corn goes to 300 bushel per acre. So think of that difference, Mr. Speaker. From the time I was a little guy, growing up, 80-bushel corn was an okay crop. 100 bushel corn was a bin buster crop. We've gone past 200 bushel today and are looking on our way to 300 bushel per acre.

That's because we're getting a lot better at the things we're doing. We've got better hybrids to work with. We're placing our fertilizer more precisely. We've got better wheat control. We've got some GMOs. We have roundup-ready corn and roundup-ready soybeans. A lot of design and engineering has gone into these crops that has increased their yield and has provided for the genetic resistance to pests and also to the resistance of certain herbicides so that we can kill the weeds, so that we can grow the crops and so that we can do so in an environmentally friendly fashion. It's better for our water. It's better for our air. It just isn't so good for bugs, and it isn't so good for weeds.

We do those things with increased corn production and with increased soybean production in our part of the country. Yet we're faced with this argument that comes out of a long ways distance from the cornfield, which is Wall Street, which says, well, food versus fuel is really the argument, that we're taking food and we're converting it to fuel, and for that reason, food prices are going up.

Well, first of all, we have for millennia--for thousands and thousands of years--since the first real farmer planted a crop--and I'll suggest that that probably was a cavewoman and not a caveman. A caveman was likely out, doing hunting and gathering. A cavewoman must have recognized that some of those seeds that got dumped outside the cave predicted what was going to grow there. So she said why don't I just save some of these seeds and plant them in the ground. Then maybe I'll be able to actually put my own crop in.

When they started to do that, that was the beginning of agriculture, and from there on out, it has always been about food and fiber. From the beginning of production agriculture or of subsistence agriculture, it has been about food and fiber. You raised the food up out of the crops, and the fiber that came from that was used for rope, for clothing, for bedding, for things of that nature. So that has gone on for thousands of years. We raised crops for food. We raised crops for fiber. Of course, one of those fiber crops would be cotton.

Yet, today, we've taken it to another level. We've got food, fiber and fuel. The three F's of agriculture today are food, fiber and fuel. Food versus fuel is not the argument they would have you believe is coming out of Wall Street, and it works like this: For the 2007 crop, during that period of time, food inflated--appreciated in cost--by 4.9 percent. Energy prices went up 18 percent. As to the 4.9 percent of that food, much of the cost of the food's going up is the energy that it takes to deliver it and to process it. Inflation comes because we know that high energy costs go into everything that we have and into every part of our economy. It takes energy to do everything. It takes energy to produce. It takes energy to deliver. It takes energy to process. So, as those costs go up, so does the cost of food go up 18 percent.

So the wizards of Wall Street say, well, food went up, so therefore, the cost of that is because, if we'd had those 3.2 billion bushels of corn into the food market, that would have been a lot of corn on somebody's plate to eat, and it would have kept the food prices down.

Well, the first thing is that's all field corn, and I don't know anybody who sits down to a plateful and loves it; although, if you catch it just right, you can eat it on the cob, and it's not so bad. After that, it's livestock feed, and yes, we process that corn into 300 different products or so. That's pretty specialized processing for some of the things. Corn oil, sweetener, things like that, and corn starch are some of the things we do. As to those forks and knives, if you put them in your coffee down in the Longworth cafeteria and they melt and go rubbery on you, I believe those are also made out of corn, they tell me, and we can do them better than that by the way. Those are some of the things we do with corn.

One of the things we don't do with corn is set an ear of field corn on one's plate and eat it. In fact, you don't make cornflakes out of it, and you don't make corn chips out of it.

Most of that corn is livestock feed. And it has a component in it that's starch, and it has a component in it that's oil and has a component in it that's protein. And the value of this corn as we break it down, it works out like this. Some of the oil has a high value to it, but poultry and hogs can't digest that higher oil product so well. Cattle seem to do okay. And yet the world has an over supply of starch, and it has a shortage of protein.

And so we take the corn, and we grind the corn up and process it into ethanol and we process the starch into ethanol, and we bring the protein back; and the protein comes back in the form of DDGs, or dried distillers grains is what that stands for, and we have wet mash in a number of different varieties and some high-protein varieties. We have a series of higher quality byproducts of ethanol production.

But to keep it simple, there is dried distillers grain. And the dried distillers grain is the protein. The starch has been converted into ethanol. Much of that starch would have passed through the animal and have been wasted had we fed it. But most of the protein is retained in the process. We feed it back to livestock.

And however pessimistic you want to be, Mr. Speaker, when you take a bushel of corn and convert it into three bushels of ethanol, or excuse me, three gallons of ethanol, that bushel of corn will have at least half of its value of

feed left over in the form of protein that goes back to livestock and the value of it is actually a little higher.

So a bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds, and you can split that into thirds. About a third of it goes off in the starches that are converted into ethanol, about a third of it goes off in the form of CO2, carbon dioxide--and a lot of that is wasted if you feed the corn anyway--and about a third of that is retained in dried distillers grain which goes back on the truck and back out to the feed lot and fed to livestock which converts it into protein that we can use, Mr. Speaker.

So if you go to an ethanol plant and stand there and watch what is happening, there will be trucks coming in that are dumping off corn. And they will come in and unload that corn; some of them will turn right back around, pull back underneath in the next bay and load themselves completely up with dried distillers grain and go out to the feed lot and dump that load off out there, and that goes out to feed cattle. We don't lose that grain in the fashion that Wall Street thinks we do.

So however you cut it, you have to add back in half, at least, and that's a conservative number, Mr. Speaker.

So here is how it works for the 2007 crop. Food prices went up 4.9 percent. Fuel prices went up 18 percent. They would have gone up more if we hadn't have put 9 billion gallons of ethanol on the market. So if the fuel prices had gone up, I believe they would have driven food prices up even higher. And to think that because we took corn off the market to make ethanol, that that deprives someone of a meal, it didn't happen. It didn't happen in a single instance in America or across the world for that matter, Mr. Speaker.

Additionally, last year, 2007, we raised more corn than ever before, 13.1 billion bushels of corn. That's a lot of corn, Mr. Speaker. And we export more corn than ever before, 2.5 billion bushels of corn. Not only do we export more than ever before, but we converted more into ethanol than ever before. We used 3.2 bushels of corn for that.

So if you have got your calculator out, and you are thinking how this works--and a lot of us can figure this in our head or do so with a pencil and a cardboard box--13.1 billion bushels of corn, minus 2.5 billion was exported, more than ever before I would remind you again, minus 3.2 billion bushels that went into ethanol production, and then but about half of that gets added back in because we didn't lose the feed value of all of that corn. So that's 1.6. Do a plus on 1.6 billion bushels of corn, that it goes back as a feed value. And now you should be at, Mr. Speaker, if you're wide awake and alert and paying attention, that you're at 9.0 billion bushels of corn available for the domestic consumption in the United States.

Now, what does that mean? Well, the answer, to put it in proportion, is that if you average the rest of the years in the decade, the average bushels that were available for domestic consumption in the United States, and that's the same math I have done, total production minus export, minus conversion to ethanol, to get you to that number the average bushels that are available for domestic consumption in the United States, that comes out to be 7.4 billion bushels. That's an average year. That's an average year in the last decade and the most representative we have, Mr. Speaker. But we had available to the domestic supply 9.0 billion bushels.

So that's 1.6 billion bushels more than we normally have for domestic supply of corn. And that says to me that high corn prices in this country aren't solely attributable to ethanol, and it says to me that it isn't really a food-versus-fuel argument. It says to me there are other factors out there such as the increase in world demand of gasoline, diesel fuel, and other hydrocarbons that come from petroleum products. It also says to me the weak dollar has made a difference, that the Chinese and their demand has gone up by 32 percent, and the Indian demand has gone up dramatically, and the Chinese import has increased 2,000 percent this year.

We also should understand that there are countries in the world that subsidize the gas purchases, China being one of them. There are multiple countries in the world that subsidize gas for people. So they're buying the value of that gas down. If they can do that, because they hold a lot of dollars maybe, maybe their currency buys a lot, whatever is their motivation, we're not subsidizing gas here in the United States. We're taxing it. We're taxing gas in the United States for a number of reasons.

But in my State, the gas tax is over 20 cents a gallon. It's been that way for a long time. The Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon. And I look at this floor and the people on it and those who hold the gavels to chair the committees, and it's astonishing to the people in my part of the country that there wouldn't be enough pressure coming from your constituents to get you to finally crack and allow us to drill to get access to places like ANWR, the Outer Continental Shelf, the BLM lands in the United States.

Why does not that pressure come from your constituents, let us just say Mr. Rangel in New York. Mr. Rangel, why don't your constituents rise up and demand cheaper gas? I ask that question. And you can tell me, but let me try to answer, and I will be happy to yield to you if you like. But I think the answer is this. Your constituents ride the subway. Your subway is mass transit. Your mass transit is subsidized by the gas tax that my constituents pay. So when they're paying $4.10 a gallon for tax, 20-some cents for state tax on that, 18.4 cents for Federal tax, 17 percent of the Federal gas tax dollar goes to subsidized mass transit which subsidizes your subway riders, those people who are riding around in the subterranean tunnels in New York City. They get a cheap ride, my constituents pay the price.

My constituents are mad. They're tired of $4.10 gas. Your constituents are riding on the backs of mine. That's why you're not hearing from them.

You can go right down here to South Capitol, Mr. Speaker, and climb on the Metro, and for $1.25 you can get a ride out to Falls Church. But 17 percent of the gas tax dollar that's paid for by my constituents and the people that don't have a subway and don't of a Metro and don't have an L and don't have a San Francisco cable car, 17 percent of that, their money, their gas tax money, goes to subsidize the cable car in San Francisco, the subway in New York, the L in Chicago, and the Metro here in Washington, D.C.

That's why you're not hearing the pressure, Mr. Rangel. I'm hearing it. I have been hearing it for a long time. I have been feeling the pressure when I write the checks. I don't have to wait for my constituents to tell me.

It's about time your constituents rose up and said, Let's solve this problem because the economy in the United States will ultimately collapse if we're going to be sending our money overseas and let them hold us hostage for the oil that they have. And yet the answer that the majority party has is don't drill now, don't drill anywhere, don't allow any of this energy to come up out from underneath our very feet.

The natural gas in this country is massive. I have many times come to the floor and said there are 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out there, much of it on the Outer Continental Shelf, much of it we've not been not able to explore, and we don't know how much is there. But known reserves. I said 406 trillion cubic feet, and I saw a chart today that took us up to 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas still with massive areas uncharted, unknown. That's just the known reserves.

Natural gas is a big chunk of the energy that we burn in America, Mr. Speaker. And here is an example of the percentage.

This is our energy production. All of the different kinds of energy that we produce and consume here in the United States, there's the natural gas component. Now this is the 365-degree pie chart that's all the Btus, Mr. Speaker, that we use. It includes electricity, gasoline, diesel fuel, coal, all of the sources of British thermal units. And of the energy we produce in America, the natural gas component is right here, 27.46 percent, a big old chunk of the energy we use.

Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania, John Peterson has come down here on this floor and repeatedly said natural gas is the mother's milk of manufacturing in America. It's the mother's milk of fertilizer. Ninety percent of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer, which is essential to grow everything, is right

here in the cost of natural gas. Yet because we refuse to develop our natural gas, prices have soared here in the United States and we've essentially lost our fertilizer industry; and they go to places like Trinidad, Tobago, where they have cheap, cheap natural gas. And that is driving the industry.

But also it allows for people like Hugo Chavez to hold us hostage. And a lot of that fertilizer comes from Russia.

But here in the United States, we've got the natural gas to do this, but the pressure on this natural gas is getting great because the Greens--and that means the ``green people'' that come up with some of these partial formulas; they can't think the whole thing through or refuse to, Mr. Speaker--but their idea is that the carbon, the greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon emissions from burning natural gas are less than they are from burning coal.

Here is our measure on coal: 32.54 percent of the energy produced in America is coal, 27.46 percent is natural gas.

So to give you a sense on how the Greens think, Mr. Speaker, it would be this: There is a coal-fired generating plant that provides the electricity for our Capitol complex here in the center of Washington D.C. Seems as though the Speaker of the House somehow has control or authority over how they manage that generating plant. I would think it would be the experts that do that, but obviously it's not. And I come to find out a month or so ago that the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from San Francisco, San Francisco attitudes and ideas and ideals, issued some kind of an order that converted the power- generating plant that was fired by coal and operated effectively and efficiently, over to natural gas under the belief that there are fewer greenhouse gasses emitted by natural gas.

Now that may be true, but natural gas is a lot more expensive to generate electricity out of than coal.

So she converted from an economic-generating system to an uneconomic- generating system, and she tapped into the supply for my fertilizer. When you use natural gas to create, to produce more generating plants, you're taking that natural gas away from fertilizer. You're taking your natural gas away from manufacturing. You have tapped in to and you have siphoned off the mother's milk for the economy in this country to convert it to producing electricity.

The State of Florida--and I'm happy to see that a good number of the Florida delegation has decided that they think a little differently about drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf today. But a couple of years ago, the report I saw was that there were 33 generating plants planned for construction in Florida and that 28 of those 33 were to be natural gas fired; natural gas fired in a State that has all of that natural gas surrounding the Peninsula but is not willing to allow us to go down and tap into that natural gas.

Some of them are changing their position because they understand the security of this country is tied up in energy and the cost of energy, and if we keep shipping our wealth out, it won't matter pretty soon. We will be unable to function as an economy and the rest of the world will catch up and sweep us up.

And so, Mr. Speaker, the natural gas here, which I think is an inappropriate use to be increasing the use of natural gas to generate electricity, instead, the Speaker converted the coal-fired plant here, which was at least economical, to a natural gas fired plant, and then insisted that the Capitol complex be carbon neutral.

And so in order to get carbon neutral, the idea is you're supposed to, if you can't get neutral on your own, then provide incentives so others can contribute. And so the order was to the management and administration of the Capitol complex here to go buy some carbon credits on the board of trade in Chicago.

Now, I've forgotten what they call these carbon credits. There's a certain trading mechanism there on the board in Chicago that will allow people to go in and buy and sell carbon credits. And so the taxpayers of the United States spent $89,000 buying up some carbon credits on the board in Chicago.

Some of those carbon credits--the number would be about $14,500--went to a coal-fired generating plant in Chillicothe, Iowa, and that coal- fired generating plant was to experiment with burning switchgrass to generate electricity, as opposed to burning coal. The idea is that, when you burn switchgrass, you use the plant to sequester the carbon, pulls the carbon dioxide out of the air, turns it into cellulose in the form of carbon. You harvest the switchgrass, haul it into the coal- fired generating plant, dump it into an incinerator, heat it up and use that heat to generate the steam that it takes to spin the turbine that generates the electricity. That's the deal with switchgrass.

Well, the $14,500 check off that board apparently, according to the news at least, went to the plant in Chillicothe, Iowa, and they had already scrapped their plan to burn switchgrass. So it didn't change anybody's behavior in the positive, but it did help a little bit I suppose minimize the pain of experimenting with that.

$14,500 of that $89,000 also went to one of the Dakotas, and it's easy to mix them up, but I'm going to say I believe it was South Dakota. In any case, it was Farmers Union, and they distributed that money to no-till farmers. And the report is that they didn't change anybody's behavior, that some of them were to going to no-till farm anyway. Some of them had already no-till farming, but it helped out a little bit on the bottom line.

Now, this idea that we can trade carbon credits and not have any way to go back and audit and be able to measure, first, whether it changed anybody's behavior or whether you rewarded somebody for behavior that they had already adopted for some other reason, now I've got neighbors that are no-till farmers. About a third of the land around me is no- tilled. I wish it were more, and those that have been no-tilling for years are good leaders, and they will sequester some carbon in the soils, and I think that's a scientific fact, Mr. Speaker.

But it's also a fact that if they change their mind on no-till, and they want to go out and open that field up and farm it in a more conventional fashion, in a very short while, a few years at the maximum, all the carbon that's been sequestered is released into the atmosphere anyway. And so what was the point in paying them to sequester the carbon if you couldn't be sure that you could retain it there?

This has gotten pretty silly in America, Mr. Speaker. It's gotten so silly that when I pick up my chain saw and go out and trim the trees, we call that harvesting sequestered carbon where I live. And when I climb on the lawn mower and go out and cut the grass, we call that harvesting sequestered carbon. And so if I'm going to harvest that sequestered carbon, I wonder if I shouldn't get a credit for it here, and I would be willing to take that credit, if the Speaker would want to send me a check for it, and I'd contribute that back to the taxpayers that paid for it.

This is a silly, silly thing going on, and I can tell you that none of this thinking would have originated in the Midwest of the United States of America. It's got to come from the left coast and sometimes it comes from the east coast, but this is the kind of thinking that you run into in places like San Francisco and Berkeley and Boston. This is this kind of myopic thinking that can't think it through, can't get to the end, can't paint the picture of what America would look like if we gave them all their way.

So I'm not thrilled to see the direction that this is going, Mr. Speaker, but before I lose track, I want to make this point real well for everyone who is paying attention.

These are the components of our energy production. I call this is the energy pie, Mr. Speaker. Natural gas, 27.46 percent; coal, 32.54 percent. This is our nuclear, nuclear energy at 11.66 percent of the overall production. I wish that were a lot higher. Here's your hydroelectric power, 3.41 percent. Now, these tiny little slivers, things that we think actually matter and one day hopefully some of them grow so that they do, geothermal, little less than a half percent, .49 percent, not much; wind, .44 percent. Got a lot of that around me, and I'm happy that we have it. It's not a very big piece of our production pie, however. Solar power, .11 percent and can't even see that

there. It's just a line. Fuel from ethanol, .76 percent. As much as we produce, 9 billion gallons of ethanol is still only three-quarters of a percent of the overall production pie chart.

Biodiesel, .09 percent, tiny little sliver. Biomass growing, 4.12 percent. Some of that biomass is growing because we're palletizing waste and because we're palletizing wood products, for example. So we have people that have biomass furnaces. Well, I don't know how good that is from a greenhouse gas standpoint, Mr. Speaker, but biomass is a larger piece than one would think it is, 4.12 percent.

Motor gasoline, this is the gasoline that's produced in the United States of America. That's 8.29 percent of the overall production chart that we have.

Diesel fuel and heating oil together is the red piece, that's 4.2 percent. Kerosene and jet fuel together, 1.57 percent. You'd think that would be a little more, too.

And then the other petroleum products, that would be things like our real heavy oils like asphalt and products like that, that's 4.86 percent, a bigger piece than you might think.

This is what we produce, Mr. Speaker, in the form of energy, and now if it were also what we consumed, that would be a good picture. But here's a picture of what we consume, and the outside circle is the piece of our energy consumption. The inside circle is our energy production, Mr. Speaker. It's set up like this so that we can take a look at this and quickly see the difference between production and consumption.

The outside picture, the energy consumption, works out to be that, of all the energy we consume, natural gas is 23.3 percent of that. Coal is 22.4 percent. You can see that some of these things like coal we produce a big chunk of what we consume, in fact probably all of it. Nuclear, we produce what we consume, but it's 8.29 percent of the overall energy consumption. Compare it to the lower chart, where our production is 11.66 percent, and shows you just almost proportionally what happens when you go from the production chart to the consumption chart.

You can go all the way on around, and rather than pound that all in, the situation is this. We're producing 8.29 percent of the gasoline. 8.29 percent is the percentage of the overall production, but of our overall consumption, gas is 17.44 percent.

Bottom line works out to be this. Energy production, Mr. Speaker, is 72.1 quadrillion Btus of energy, 72.1. Now, quadrillion, that's 15 zeros behind there. It's a big number. But in proportion to this other number, we all understand it. We're consuming 101.4 quadrillion Btus.

The energy consumption pie is bigger than the energy production pie, Mr. Speaker, and that is the issue that we're dealing with, and we need to grow every one of these components. We need more domestically produced natural gas. We need more petroleum so that we can produce more gasoline, more diesel fuel, more kerosene and jet fuel, more other petroleum products that we have, and we need to produce more coal, clean-burning coal. Coal's cheap, we have a lot of it, and nuclear, I mentioned.

The French and their electrical generation production, 78 percent is nuclear. Now, you can look across the world for all time and measure up the safest forms of energy of electrical production, and it's going to come down to nuclear is just about safer than anything else. We think that it's dangerous because of Chernobyl. We don't generate electricity with plants designed like Chernobyl. We do it the opposite. It is much, much safer in this country than it was there. Three Mile Island, turns out that it actually wasn't the kind of a situation that they had us thinking it was.

And so right now, electrical generation production on nuclear is the safest we can do. It's the most environmentally friendly that we can do, and there is no reason that we can't be in production, building more and more nuclear-generating plants. There is one that's under construction in South Carolina, and hopefully, they will be able to streamline the regulatory process.

But we've been tied up for more than a generation by people that are opposed to nuclear-generating plants. Even though they didn't have the science behind them, they still tied it up. They still filed lawsuits. They created movements, and these movements are movements that aren't based sometimes on fact but based on emotion.

And we've seen Europe do some things that we thought was pretty silly because it's tied up in emotion. One of those is to oppose genetically modified organisms, GMOs. So the corn and the beans that we produce here, the roundup ready I talked about, the beans going up and the weeds dying out, that's not a product that they want to take on over there. So their production has not kept up as ours has, but yet somehow they figured out that if they needed electricity and they need to be able to run their air conditioners and their heaters and turn on their lights and do all of those other things that electricity does, in order to do so they've had to generate their electricity with nuclear. They're ahead of us in that capacity. We need to grow the nuclear power here.

I would grow the hydroelectric power. In fact, I could find some places to store up some of that power and reservoirs that would protect some parts of Iowa from flooding in the future. And yet, we haven't built big dams in this country in a long time because environmentalists, Mr. Speaker, stand in the way. Environmentalists stand in the way of building more nuclear plants.

Environmentalists stand in the way of producing more coal-fired generating plants. Some people think we'll never build another new coal-fired generating plant because environmentalists stand in the way.

When it comes to natural gas, environmentalists stand in the way, not in the way of burning the gas but in the way of drilling for it and in the way of distributing it and laying out pipelines so we can get it collected. And you look around at kerosene jet fuel, other petroleum products, environmentalists stand in the way.

What are they willing to allow us to do? Well, take nuclear off the table, take coal off the table, take development of natural gas off the table. All these petroleum products here, they're all off the table. Motor gasoline is off the table. What's left? Biomass, and if they caught you burning wood in your furnace they would think that added too much to greenhouse gas, Mr. Speaker, so they would take your wood- burning fireplace off the table.

So what's left? Well, let's see, fuel from ethanol? Oh, no, that's food versus fuel, we can't do that. That goes off the table.

Solar, well, solar, .08 percent, maybe just maybe. It's a real thin line there. You can't even see the wedge. Maybe they'd let us put up some more solar panels. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, Mr. Speaker, if they'd let us do that.

Biodiesel, no, I know that's food versus fuel. Either soybean oil or animal fat, so somebody can eat or drink it or do something else with it.

Wind, oh, yeah, they'd let us build more wind. Of course, it takes a lot of energy to produce those generators, and maybe if we would let them use the same formula that they used to add up the energy that it takes to produce ethanol, it might turn out that it takes more energy for a wind charger than to get out of the wind.

But I don't think those folks at Berkley and Cornell have actually dug into that to figure out how much energy that is at this point. So maybe, just maybe, we can tap a little energy from wind, a little energy from solar, and it looks to me like we're pretty much out, except for maybe geothermal, but, you know, it takes a little energy to produce that, too.

So if I just take the things that are off the table out of here and add up the consumption on those that may still be on the table, we have solar at .08, we have wind at .31, so that's .39 geothermal at .35, so you end up with .74--I think that will be the number--.74 of a percent. Not quite three-quarters of 1 percent of all of the energy that we consume in America is the only that would be acceptable to the environmentalists that stand in the way. .74 percent of our energy that we consume is not objectionable to them, Mr. Speaker.

And the number probably changes a little bit down here out of our production, but the point remains, it wouldn't

change more than--you get down to about 1 percent of the max. The point remains. These are people that think that our people can get along without energy.

Now, how can that be? What kind of a world would you be looking at? I mean, are these folks that live down next to the equator maybe? I remember Jimmy Carter sitting there saying, well, this Nation isn't going to be able to cut it anymore. Our future is minimized dramatically. We aren't going to be able to have gasoline to put in our cars. And we're going to have to be willing to accept a lower quality of life and a lower standard of living. But what you need to do if you're a patriot American is to buy yourself a cardigan sweater and put that on and button it up and sit in the chair and turn your thermostat down to 60. Now, that might work in Georgia--I don't actually think it works all the time in Georgia. It will work most of the time in southern Florida--maybe even all the time in southern Florida. It doesn't work much of the time in northern Iowa or Minnesota or Montana. It doesn't work most of the time in the northern half of the United States. But it worked for Jimmy Carter, put on a sweater, turn your thermostat down to 60.

So what's the future for this country if we can't find the will to expand all of these sources of energy as opposed to making a dinky little argument about less than 1 percent of the energy production we have as if somehow that's going to solve our problem.

And we saw T. Boone Pickens come on television in the last few days and say, ``I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one problem we can't drill our way out of.'' Well, Mr. Speaker, that may be true, but this is one problem that we can't get out of without drilling either, and T. Boone Pickens needs to hear that.

Part of the solution is, develop the energy that we have, expand the size of this overall energy production pie. And let's be realistic. If you're only supporting three-quarters of 1 percent of the overall sources of energy that we have, what are you going to do with the people until you can get to the point where you can--you think you can really expand that three-quarters of 1 percent into 101.4 quadrillion Btus? Do the math on that. Do the math on that and tell me how you come back with that, you brainiacs that are believing that this country can get along without energy.

So what does energy do? It lights our homes; it heats our homes. It fuels our vehicles. It powers the cable car in San Francisco. It provides our manufacturing energy. It keeps the wheels of this economy moving. And without energy, turn out the lights, pull the keys out of the car, pull the keys out of the boat and the camper, lock up our factories, lock up our offices, go back, and you can't even light the candle because that would put greenhouse gases up into the air and then you would have to buy a carbon credit from maybe somebody that's going to burn switch grass or do no-till farming in the Dakotas somewhere, Mr. Speaker.

I'm not going to be willing to accept the idea that we can't have a comprehensive energy plan. And I'm not going to be willing to accept the idea that the people that produce that energy are somehow capitalizing on the people here in the United States. It is supply and demand. I'm not going to be willing to accept the idea that there is a lot of margin in the futures markets and that somehow the traders have driven this up and it's an inflated price. Because when you buy in the futures, every time you go long somebody has to go short. That's the way it works, Mr. Speaker.

And last week we had witnesses before the Ag Committee that testified that they thought that a pretty respectable percentage of the high cost in gasoline comes from the people that are trading in the futures market--now, I'm not one of them. And we heard from Mr. Van Hollen of Maryland who said, when asked the question, how much margin is in there? He said, Well, I don't know. I don't know how much is there, but I know we've got to squeeze it out drop by drop. And you go to his left, and there was Ms. DeLauro, who I asked if she believed in the free enterprise system. And she convinced me that we have two different concepts of what the supply and demand is and the free market system is.

And then you move to her left and you have the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) who, breathtakingly, wrote in his written testimony and repeated it in his oral testimony that supply and demand doesn't affect the price of gold. If gold is a commodity, the value of it is a speculators' commodity, so it's no longer affected by supply and demand and that we don't use it industrially. So over the weekend I looked over there at that gold dome, that's the Iowa Capitol, and it looks to me like that's an industrial use. And I looked down at my wedding ring, and maybe that's a jewelry/commercial industrial use. This gold is not coming back on the market. Supply and demand affects the price of gold as much today as it did when Adam Smith wrote about the Spanish galleons going down to Central America and hauling back those galleons loads of gold. They dumped that on the market in Europe and the price of gold plummeted because they took the price of labor out of it by actually stealing it from the Central Americans, Native Americans.

Breathtakingly argued that supply and demand doesn't affect the price of gold, and that oil is now a commodity like gold and it's not affected by supply and demand either. I simply can't argue with that way of thinking, I'll just say that supply and demand affects the price of everything. It's our free market system. If it doesn't, then it's government controlled, and then its volume will be rationed, Mr. Speaker.

And so of all the things we need to do, we need to grow the size of the energy pie, grow our production--this is our production--grow it out to the limits of our consumption, grow a little more if we can. Let's export a little energy and take some cash back. Let's shore up the dollar. Let's fix our balance of trade. Let's continue to close this deal; we've won the war in Iraq, and now let's finish the deal there. We've chased al Qaeda back through into Pakistan and Afghanistan. We're going to have to go there and mop it up, that's right. Casualties in Afghanistan have, of a matter, exceeded that of Iraq, and the troops in Afghanistan are far less than they are in Iraq. So proportionally it's more risky to serve in Afghanistan today than it is in Iraq.

Let's do all that. Let's seal the border. Let's end birthright citizenship. Let's shut off the jobs magnet. Let's get this country moving again. Let's improve the average annual productivity of our citizens, and let's improve their quality of life at the same time. And let's, Mr. Speaker, go back and anchor ourselves in those timeless values that are the pillars of American exceptionalism, they're in the Bill of Rights, they're in our history, they're in the Federalist Papers, and the central pillar is the rule of law.

We are a Nation that is the leader and the readout for western civilization. And one of our core values is we came from the Age of Reason in Greece, let's make sure we maintain our reason here. Let's make sure that we can maintain our ability to deductively reason, think our way through, and ask the American people to be critical thinkers. And let them be critical of us when they are logical, and let's respond to them with facts and logic, not political campaign rhetoric. Let's fix this energy problem and move forward together.