Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 53 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, July 16, 2008, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of the United States Congress.

I have sat here through the last hour and patiently listened to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and one of the things that comes out clearly is the tone of the message that they deliver.

I have heard this 30-Something Group now, I think I must be into about the sixth year of listening to this, and it seemed to me that at some point they would maybe get over their bitterness about President Bush winning an election in Florida twice, and all the recounts they could come up with still came up with the same result and they still carry the same resentment that the will of the people was reflected. And the bitterness that emerges in this discussion and the implications that come that challenge the motives of the President are disturbing to me, and particularly their remarks that have to do with allegations about: You put two Big Oil people in the White House, and this is what you get, is high oil prices. A lot of us that watch the policy will say we know better than that, Madam Speaker, and I know better than that for a lot of reasons.

As I look down through this, I am going to pick up the oil in just a moment, but I think where I would like to step in here first is to deal with the issue of the national debt. Now, some of the gentlemen on the other side of the aisle were clearly stating that they believe that they could have managed their way into not eliminating the national debt alone but providing for a surplus. They say: We could have paid off all the national debt if you would have just allowed us to be in charge. We would have made the right decisions.

So I listened to all that, and I tried to put myself, Madam Speaker, in a position of what it would be like for a person in a living room in someplace across the United States, or maybe someone who just pulled into the motel or the hotel and turned on their C-SPAN, turned on their television, they are surfing through there and came across C-SPAN or heard something like that, that the folks on that side of the aisle, if you would have been in charge, you would have paid off the national debt, which means if it is paid off, there must be a surplus. That is by simple, easy deduction and because the allegation is the folks that were in charge were irresponsible, supposedly.

So I thought, all right, what do I remember? What is real? What are some of the facts? And I can think in this 110th Congress, this Pelosi Congress, this Congress that is characterized by San Francisco values, Massachusetts values, and budget mismanagement, these are the things that come to mind on me. And some of them, it has been the Republican minority who has fought aggressively to protect the interests of the taxpayers. These are the things that I just wrote down off the top of my head, and it is by no means a complete list. It isn't even close:

Republicans held the line and saved the taxpayers $40 billion on the State

Children's Health Insurance Program, which I support as a State senator, which I support at 200 percent of poverty, which today is 200 percent of poverty still providing health insurance premiums for those children in families of four making in my State over $52,000 a year.

Now, we are helping those folks out some. They--most might make it on their own; in fact, I know some families that do make it on their own without tapping into the SCHIP program. But this agenda was driven off of this floor, Madam Speaker, and pushed by Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco values, at 400 percent of poverty. That bill, that SCHIP bill would have expanded this funding of health insurance premium for kids and families in my State, of families of four making over $103,000 a year.

Now, who is left to subsidize? If we are going to subsidize families that are making six figures, $103,000 a year, who is going to pay that tax? Well, presumably not anybody that is making less. We know that there were 70,000 families in America that were paying the alternative minimum tax which this Congress, this Pelosi-led Congress can't seem to get around to repealing the alternative minimum tax. But 70,000 families in America would have been paying the alternative minimum tax and been receiving a Federal subsidy for their health insurance premiums.

The whole thing of socialized medicine and the Nanny Pelosi State has come full circle, and the overlap of what subsidized for health insurance premiums for families of 200 percent of poverty would have gone to 400 percent; and families that were paying the rich man's tax, the alternative minimum tax, expands because it is not indexed for inflation. Over into that loop were 70,000 families paying the alternative minimum tax and getting help with health insurance premiums. That is bizarre.

That is what we stopped. We blocked the 400 percent of poverty that would have funded families of four making $103,000 a year with somebody else's tax dollars and created more dependency. We blocked their effort to lay the cornerstone of socialized medicine, Hillary Care, the care that I called SCHIP, the Socialized Clinton Style Hillary Care for children and their parents was blocked by a Republican majority of fiscally responsible people, and we still maintained a program at 200 percent of poverty to help out those families so their children would have health insurance. That is one thing we did, $40 billion.

The second thing we did, we fought the battle and I think in the end we have got a reasonable chance of winning the war, Barney Frank's $300 billion bailout of a $150 billion subprime problem, the idea that folks could come in and borrow up to 100 percent to buy a home that they can't make the payments on, just betting on the idea that the value of that home would appreciate and go up, maybe they could roll it into a fancier home in a few years and then refinance without any of their own equity in the home. That was going on in this country, especially in places on the Left Coast and on the East Coast. It wasn't going on nearly as much in the Midwest.

But there are people all across this country that were saving their money, that were saving up to the 20 percent down or maybe 29 percent down. They looked around, and said, well, all right, now for 10 or 15 years they put their money together and came up with $20,000 and decided, ``I want to buy a home.'' And they went out and shopped the marketplace and did the responsible thing and laid their $20,000 down and moved into a $100,000 home. In a lot of parts of the country that is a modest home; in my part of the country, that is a pretty decent home. They laid their $20,000 down and they could make their payments on the $80,000 left.

But now, the Barney Frank subprime bailout bill at $300 billion says: Now we are going to tax you, the families, the middle-income families, especially in the modest homes that put their 20 percent down on their modest home, tax those people to bail out the folks that had nothing down and moved into a $400,000 home, all to the tune of creating an increase in the deficit in this country by $300 billion. That is the bill that came off this floor. That is the bill that is over in the Senate. That is the one that I hope they can knock in the head. We don't need to do that.

And there was another one, a grab bag of ``I Want List'' off-budget for $168 billion. Those things popped in my head quickly, and I am seeing numbers of $1 trillion here and $1 trillion there roll off of the 30-Something Group. In my short little piece here, I wrote down $508 billion of irresponsible spending. Much of it Republicans have been successful in killing because it was irresponsible. That is more than one-half trillion dollars just in my memory in this short Congress, not in the full duration of 12 years in the majority, in which their grievance list goes back well beyond that.

And then, this group of people has the audacity to put out a whole series of proposals on energy because they know the American people are tired of paying high gas prices.

Now, I have sat in this Congress for these years. I started out in the 108th Congress, but I will take us back. I have some numbers here that come from the 106th, 108th, 109th Congress, and these are Congresses that were led by Republican majority and these were efforts that were brought forward that would have lowered the cost of energy in its entirety, especially the cost of gas.

These are bills that went over to the Senate from the House. Mr. Speaker, I hope you write this down and do a little research on this.

H.R. 1655, from the 106th Congress, the Department of Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Authorization Act, that passed the House and went to the Senate. That was on September 15th of 1999. Also, H.R. 3822, another energy bill, the Oil Price Reduction Act, that passed the House on March 22nd of 2000. It went to the Senate, and it died in committee.

Also, in the 108th Congress, I'll name three other bills: H.R. 3062, H.R. 4503, H.R. 4517. They all passed the House in the 108th Congress. All would have lowered energy prices. All would have provided more energy in the marketplace. All died in the Senate.

In the 109th Congress--that's the Congress ahead of this one--H.R. 6, the Energy Policy Act, passed the House on April 21, 2005. That happens to be my mother's birthday. Senate action: They removed the ANWR provision that passed out of this House. It died over there. Others that passed in that Congress are H.R. 2863 and H.R. 5429 and H.R. 4761, all energy bills, all bills that passed the House, all bills, by the memo I'm looking at, at least, that didn't make it out of the Senate, that didn't come back to the House, that didn't go to conference. They just died over there. They died over there not because of Republicans in the Senate. They died over there because of the 40 Democrats who blocked the bill, the filibuster rule that they have. As long as they're able to do that, they can be in the minority, and they can block good legislation in the Senate.

That, Mr. Speaker, is what happened in the last three Congresses ahead of this one, this 110th Congress that we are in.

I didn't mention the 107th Congress. As for the 106th, 108th and 109th Congresses, all of those Congresses passed energy legislation bills. All of them would have contributed to the supply. They would have reduced the regulation. Some of them would have provided for the siting of refineries on decommissioned military bases, and part of that legislation out of here would have allowed drilling in ANWR. Part of it would have opened up the Outer Continental Shelf to at least some degree.

We sit here in this Congress, and a question that came up more than a year ago was: What is the solution for $3 gas? I happen to have a little chart that might help illustrate this.

Now, George Bush was really put up to be the demon here, in listening to the folks who spoke ahead of me, so I thought I'd put a little piece of fact up for people to take a look at, Mr. Speaker. Here are the facts. This is just slightly dated, but I can bring it up to date. This is pretty close.

This is the time that George Bush was sworn in as President of the United States. Gas was $1.49. Oh, boy. Don't we wish we had those days today.

As I move forward, we come to the point where Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as Speaker. Gas had gone up to $2.33 a gallon. I'd be happy to go back to

those days, and so would every American if we could make the deal today to hold gas at $2.33, but look at how long it took to get to the $2.33 from the $1.49.

When Bush was sworn in as President and, yes, when the speculators in the world and when the investors in the world and when the oil companies in the world and when the sovereign wealth funds in the nations that control much of the world's energy supply saw what was happening here in this country--that the United States had lost its ability to pass legislation out of this House and send it to the Senate, let alone to a Senate that would pass it and send it to the President, who would have signed, I think, every one of these bills that I've read off here--then your energy prices shot up. $4.08 is slightly dated. It's probably $4.10 or $4.11 today. So that tells you what's actually going on here.

If you take energy off the market, if you increase regulation, if you come out and you make noise about windfall profits taxes, I can tell you what I'd do if I were sitting on the board of directors of an energy company, and Congress had said, ``I want to come in and tax you after the fact.'' I would start to look for other places to put my capital, where I could get a return that wasn't going to be punished after the fact by Congress.

So I don't think that people on the other side of the aisle here, for the most part, understand this free market system that's here. I don't think they understand supply and demand. They convinced me of that today in a hearing on the Ag Committee. It was all about trying to regulate the futures market on energy. There were six different witnesses, and I lost track, actually, of how many bills were there, but some of those bills were drafted years ago, 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, when I would have thought that, maybe, their focus on this regulation of the futures market would have come within the last 2 or 3 months rather than in the last 2 or 3 years.

They convinced me, because those Members of Congress had been working that long on the futures market, that it actually indicates supply and demand on energy in the world, and it lets the people who are watching those markets understand at least what the people who are speculating on that market think is going to be there for supply and demand. They don't have the confidence in that. They think that they need to get in there and regulate the market, regulate the market, take the futures out of the energy equation because, as the gentleman from Maryland said, there must be some margin in there somewhere, and we've got to squeeze every drop out of it. Well, they're providing a service with the futures market, and that allows people to hedge, and you've got to let them hedge because there are people who are vulnerable to the fluctuation in energy prices.

Then, on top of that, supply and demand is not part of the equation on the left side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. It's not. They convinced me of that in the hearing today. It's not or it wouldn't be proposed by the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, that we should go ahead and up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In a little bit, the gentleman from Pennsylvania will address that subject matter with a little more expertise than I bring to this floor, but it's a limited supply, and it's, therefore, a national emergency.

I can tell you that 42.6 percent of the world's export oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz. We have Iran threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and they know that that strait there is not just the valve that controls 42.6 percent of the world's export oil supply. That's the valve that shuts down the world economy. If they can control the strait, they can control the world economy. They know it. They've known it for a long time. Even Jimmy Carter knew it.

What would be the dumbest time to open up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? Well, that would be the time when we're most vulnerable and are most threatened that someone like Iran might decide they're going to try to close down the Strait of Hormuz.

That limited amount of oil is there. It can't change the market very much. The markets aren't going to change unless you have a significant change in the volume. That doesn't change the volume of oil in the market. That just dumps the reserve out and leaves us vulnerable to dumping that volume.

Now, in looking down through a list of some of these other things, they put up a chart that showed that there are 91.5 million acres leased, and there are only 23.7 million acres producing. So they're saying go ahead and drill those acres; we're fine with that. Well, all right. I'm fine with that, too, but it doesn't matter whether you're fine with it or not. Those acres are leased. The problem is those aren't producing acres. It costs millions to sink a well in most of these places. So, if you sink a well down someplace where there's not oil, you've wasted the money.

I'd say, if you're serious about this, step up and join me. Let's let the leaseholders then trade off those acres for other acres. Let them use those acres to bid with in conjunction with the dollar investment. We'll let them trade out of that 23.7 million acres or, let me say, the 91.5 million leased acres that aren't being drilled on--and I'm taking your numbers at face value. I've not checked these numbers, and I'd want to do that before I'd sign onto a bill. Take a look at this. Let them trade the acres out, and you'll find out. There's no reason why an energy company doesn't want to drill unless they don't believe there's oil there, not in this market, not in this day.

Then you know the argument ``use it or lose it.''

Well, let them use it by letting them trade those acres in for acres that are producing acres, and you'll see immediate action. They'd be happy to lose some of those acres. Open them up, and let somebody else bid on the acres that aren't being drilled. This is a prudent business decision.

Your theory, gentlemen, presupposes that there's oil in equal quantity under every acre that's leased whether it's drilled or whether it's not. Now, what kind of a myopic view of the underground do you have? Do you have any geologists over there in your caucus? I'm not really a geologist, but I have personally and physically drilled for oil, and I've dug more holes into Mother Earth than has anybody in this Congress. I've taken a little look at the stratification of that, and I at least have some understanding of what produces oil and what doesn't. It can't be everywhere by definition.

Then the position that came out over and over again is that Democrats are going to go after Big Oil. Well, Big Oil is what provides a lot of energy in this marketplace. If you cut down on the supply, you're going to raise the price some more, and you'll see this price of $4.08 go up to $5.08. Go ahead. Go after Big Oil, and see what the result is. You are not going to get oil 1 cent cheaper. That price is going to go up because you'll scare the capital out of the marketplace; you'll shut down the exploration, and you'll empower the Middle Eastern oil more because they are the sovereign wealth funds that control a significant amount of the energy. That's the mindset over here.

I suppose, if you say it over and over again, you'll begin to believe it, and maybe you actually do believe it, but you're not going to be able to get commonsense Americans to believe in an idea of going after Big Oil.

Oh, by the way, windfall profits taxes. Let's just say Exxon. I saw a piece the other day of 8.6 percent return on their capital. You want to tax windfall profits, calling an 8.6 percent return on capital a windfall profit tax? Well, if that's the case, I'll sign on with that if you'll also want to apply a windfall profits tax to every corporation in America that got a greater return than 8.6 percent. If we'd do that, we would kill the goose that laid the golden egg. We would also fix the national debt because there are a lot of companies that are going to end up getting a better return than 8.6 percent on their capital.

I spent 28 years in the construction business. Many times, I got a better return than 8.6 percent on the capital. I never felt guilty about a single bit of it because I earned it all competing in the marketplace, and that's what these companies are doing, too.

This is the one that grips Steve King, Mr. Speaker, this statement from the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan). Look at the investments in biofuels, the Democrats' support for biofuels. He says that some say it's keeping gas prices down by 50 cents. Well, I wish

that were the case. I happen to represent the number 1 biofuels congressional district in America. It's the 5th District of Iowa.

Six years ago when I came to Congress, we hardly had an industry, but Republicans passed Blender's tax credits at 51 cents a gallon. I'm the guy who introduced the legislation in my first bill in Congress that extended the Blender's credit for ethanol and that raised the small ethanol producers and the small biofuels producers' credit from 30 million gallons a year to 60 million so that we could take advantage of the economy of scale and the kind of plants that needed to be competitive.

I added biodiesel to this. It came out of the bill I introduced. It was written into another bill. I've gotten a lot of help here, and I thank everybody on both sides of the aisle for that. I sent it over to the Senate. The Senate picked it up, and it arrived at the President's desk. The first bill I introduced became law, and I thought I'm a freshman, but this is easy. Well, Mr. Peterson knows it's not that easy, and I was a little bit lucky, but it was an idea whose time was right. I just happened to know, though, about what happens with biofuels.

The 5th District of Iowa produces more, when you add it up, ethanol, biodiesel and wind energy than any other congressional district in America. We are the renewable fuels capital. We've built an industry around this. For at least the last 2 years, maybe 3, there has been over $1 billion a year in private investment capital invested in renewable energy infrastructure just in my congressional district. So I thought I'll do the math on this now.

If you can lower gas prices by 50 cents because Democrats invested in biofuels--well, they didn't do that. That was Republican leadership, but Democrats did do this: They brought the farm bill out of this floor, and it went to the President's desk. It cut the Blender's credit by 6 cents. That's what Democrats have done. So they've sent a message to the renewable fuels industry: Don't invest capital in this industry because we're going to be changing the rules on you after you get your dollars invested. That's what they think of a deal. Cut the Blender's credit by 12 percent.

Now, I'm not here to argue whether that's the right number or whether that's the wrong number. That's what happened. That was Democrat leadership that did that, but if they think that having renewable energy--and that means biofuels--on the market will cut gas prices by 50 cents, Mr. Speaker, then I went through this math, and I figured this out.

All right. Let's see. In ethanol, we produced 9 billion gallons of ethanol last year. That got blended into 150 billion gallons of overall consumption. That works out to be 6 percent of the gallons, 4.2 percent of the energy. So, with biofuels, ethanol replaced 4.2 percent of the energy consumed in gas last year. If 4.2 percent of the gas can lower the price by 50 percent as stated by Mr. Ryan from Ohio, if that can happen, then I'm here to tell you, if we open up ANWR, that will do a better job because 1 million barrels a day going into the marketplace in ANWR will replace 5.6 percent of our annual gas consumption. So, if 4.2 percent in ethanol lowers the price by 50 cents a gallon, 5.6 percent coming out of ANWR ought to take it down 60 cents or more a gallon.

And they say don't drill in ANWR.

I can take that up a little bit later, Mr. Speaker, and I have some things that I would like to say about the commodities and futures and trading markets as well, but I also recognize that the gentleman who is and remains the leader on energy in the United States, in the United States Congress, the gentleman who is down on this floor over and over and over again who is working in front of the scenes and behind the scenes, who's working strategy, who is engaging in amendments in committee, who walks this floor constantly seeking to lower energy prices for the American people, a man who leaves a legacy and hopefully gets his way at the end of the 110th Congress so there's a real marker for that legacy is the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), whom I'd be proud to yield so much time as he may consume.

I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania. I'm standing here transfixed. Much of this argument I have heard, but I seldom hear it put together in such a way, such a deliberative way that flows. And when you start talking about the future and what it looks like and the pain that we're going to feel because we waited too long, that's a good message for this Congress to hear.

And from my own perspective, I'd like to say this. Some of us are going to be able to coast along through and shift into retirement and be able to be just fine for the rest of our expected lifespan. That's not the case for millions and millions of Americans who are at the earlier stages of their life that have yet to step forward and get an education, that have yet to join up and raise a family.

And I'm thinking about my children, my grandchildren. I'm thinking about a little fellow named Joseph Dean Anderson that was born the day after the 4th of July that I'll be watching very closely as he grows up and how we shape the future for him, and the decisions that we make in this Congress and the debates that we're going to have a lot harder time winning because there's an agenda out here that we can't quite get our hands on.

And I'm always trying to figure out how can I bring some more logic to win this debate. I came into this political arena about, oh, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago, believing that if I'm right on principle, all I have to do is articulate that principle and that will bring those folks over to my side and we'll get the votes together. That was a naive thing to believe that somehow logic and principle was going to carry the day. It doesn't carry the day because people migrate towards political power.

So if you have a green coalition that's putting money into campaigns and if you have an agenda that's being driven across the Web pages, they say we'll support you and we'll come in and we'll march the streets and hang door hangers on the doorknobs and we'll make sure that you get reelected, all you have to do is if we label it green, just sit up and vote our way. That suspends logic. It suspends the logic. The logic that John Peterson has delivered out here tonight, the logic I think I've added to, is suspended is because this agenda is an agenda that goes beyond our rational understanding.

Now, I have been telling my constituents that Nancy Pelosi and the people that follow her, the people who would have voted for energy and now vote for green in the committee, in the end they really don't want cheaper gas. They want more expensive energy in America. That's what they want. That's what the agenda is, and now here is how I explain it.

First, for me, for those of us who approach this thing with the best interest of Americans in mind say this. If we can do this, this is the energy pie chart. It's taken me a little time to put this together, but what it represents is the inside circle the total BTUs produced in the United States of America. That's 72 quad-trillion BTUs. And then the outside circle is all the energy that's consumed in America. That's 101.4 quad-trillion BTUs of energy. Now, quad-trillion doesn't mean a lot to me or anybody else for that matter, but it's this.

Seventy-two percent of the energy we consume in America is produced in America. The difference, that 28, 29 percent, is what we have to import from outside the United States, and in these pie charts that are here are a number of these components that Mr. Peterson talked about so much.

Here's coal in the orange. That's the coal that we consume on the outside; the coal we produced is on the inside.

They don't quite match up because the size of our circles are different.

Then you can go down here, but look at the outside circle, the natural gas. Our overall consumption is 23.3 percent of our energy consumption is natural gas. Nuclear is up here; 8.29 percent of our energy consumption is nuclear. That needs to get bigger.

You get around to these parts that we've heard about, the biodiesel, wind, geothermal, how hydroelectric is shrinking. Here's your ethanol. And I've pushed hard for ethanol. And we've got solar power is a small little piece of this thing; bigger than what you might think in comparison to ethanol.

As you get around here, here's motor gasoline. That piece is the piece of this overall consumption pie that's getting smaller in proportion, but it is not shrinking in its overall consumption.

The solution for the United States of America is to add one piece to this pie; that's called energy conservation. John Peterson spoke to that as well. Then we need to take every single piece of this pie and we need to expand it. We need to produce more gas, more diesel fuel, more coal, more hydroelectric. And that's the hardest thing to do. And it is the cleanest and it is renewable. Wind is renewable, and we'll produce more of it, but it's not a big enough piece.

More natural gas. That is troublesome to me in particular, representing farm country where 90 percent of the feedstock that goes into producing nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas. And American companies that were producing fertilizer in the United States have moved to places like Trinidad because of the lower gas prices and had to set up their operations there. They've been driven offshore. We've essentially lost the fertilizer industry in America.

I would yield

Reclaiming my time, and thanking the gentleman for coming to the floor and delivering this good, composite message on energy, the natural gas that we know of in this country is at least 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That's our reserves. We saw the map on how to go drill them.

I would point out that there was a referendum that went up on the ballot the third day of June in Union County, South Dakota, and the question was, are you for or against building a new refinery, a $10 billion investment in southeastern South Dakota? That referendum passed by 59-41 percent. We think we're going to get a refinery built that will receive that heavy crude oil coming out of the tar sands in Alberta. It's not certain that we can get through the regulations. We think we'll get one built anyway.

And I want to add that the ANWR piece--we didn't talk about ANWR very much, I've gone up there and looked at that--the ANWR component of this is about a million barrels a day. It's identical in the topography to the North Slope. We drilled the North Slope starting in 1972 and we had oil pumping out of there in 1975. It doesn't take 10 or 20 years, as the gentleman said, to get this fuel down there. We can do it in months on the North Slope of Alaska, and we can change the market prices if we open up the situation to do that.

Now, in just concluding this, grow the size of the energy pie, add a piece for conservation, produce more Btus in all ways that we can, dramatically expand nuclear. If the French can produce 78 percent of their electricity

with nuclear, we can dramatically increase that. And nuclear should be coming online rather than natural gas to generate electricity because the mother's milk of manufacturing, the mother's milk of our economy is natural gas.

We're having difficulty breaking down the barriers of the people that believe we ought to have more expensive energy in this country instead of less. And I'm here to make the point that the reason that they support more costly energy and give lip service to windfall profits taxes and higher regulation and trying to squeeze down the futures and the commodities market, the reason they denied a global demand increase--which for the Chinese this year, their gas imports have increased 2,000 percent so far this year--they deny that because they want to see higher energy prices, not lower, because they know higher energy prices shuts down the mother's milk of our manufacturing industry in this country, it slows the economy down, it forces Americans to park their car and ride their bicycle. And now, that serves the myopic belief that the goddess of mother nature is more important than the God that created this Earth, and that somehow we can serve her by shutting off the consumption of energy, cutting down on greenhouse gases, and answering to this question of controlling our climate here in the United States of America. Meanwhile, while China and India and the rest of the developing nations are building coal fire plants faster than we can shut them down here in the United States, we can't solve this problem, if it exists, by shutting off the energy and shutting down the world's economy that's here in the United States, this 25 percent that we produce.

That's what's wrong. They want a higher energy price, they want a slower economy. They think somehow that can be paid for by the rich in America. John Peterson and Steve King know it can't be.

I yield to the gentleman.

I do not.

I believe we will be going home for the August recess having done nothing with energy.

I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania if he would support a policy like this energy pie chart that I've advocated.

More energy of all kinds. Supply and demand does affect the marketplace. If we put more Btus on the market, we will have lower price energy of all kinds. And we need to prioritize the utilization of that energy, bring the nuclear in to replace the gas, let the gas drive our economy, the natural gas drive our economy. And we can do this and it will be painful. John Peterson is exactly right.

I yield.

Commonsense solutions delivered here on this floor, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate your attention to all of this. And I imagine we have swayed you considerably as you paid attention to the arguments of the gentleman from Pennsylvania and myself.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 50 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, July 10, 2008, at 10 a.m.

I yield myself so much time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill, H.R. 2176. In unanimity and purpose and philosophical intent with the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee and, by the way, in consistency with all of the folks who voted on this bill out of the Judiciary Committee, regardless of the assertions of who had actual jurisdiction, that's where it was directed.

I'm interested in this bill for a number of reasons. First of all, when you have a reservation where they comply with regulations and go through the Indian Gaming Act and get the authority to establish a gaming facility, that's on the reservation. But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that 350 miles away is off the reservation. And I think the motive of this thing is way off the reservation.

In fact, the precedent that would be set by this bill would be a precedent, and I understand there's language in the bill that says it doesn't set a precedent. My comment is, Yeah, right. Everything we do around here sets a precedent. In fact, it sets a pattern for the rest of the reservations in the country.

We've got to say ``no'' at this point. If not, we will be back here. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee's comment is well taken. It sets a pattern that all of the reservations and the tribes in the country will look at, and they will say how can we also go off the reservation and establish a gaming facility.

For those reasons, I oppose this bill, H.R. 2176.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve.

I'm happy to yield 1 minute to the gentlelady from Michigan.

Mr. Speaker, I'd be happy to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent).

(Mr. DENT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

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

Mr. Speaker, I'm listening with great interest to this debate that we have here on this floor, and it's interesting the unique way that the Michigan delegation doesn't agree on this.

As I've listened to the presentation made by the gentleman, Mr. Dingell, and to the intensity with which he speaks, certainly, I've listened to the argument, but I'll say this: The situation with this legislation is that the

land in question becomes part of the reservation, and when it becomes part of the reservation, we all know it's going to be turned into a gaming casino. So to argue that this only settles a land claim--the courts had their opportunity to settle the land claim, both the State court of Michigan and the U.S. Federal court, and that's why we're here.

The people who are pressing this claim on the floor of this Congress didn't get the resolution that they had asked for. They weren't able to prevail in court, so now they come to Congress and say, set a precedent so that we can, essentially, confer this land title on the Native Americans. When they take that title, it comes in trust. The Governor then takes the land in trust, but as soon as it goes in trust, it says that any and all claims are hereby extinguished to that land. So we're abrogating decisions made by the Federal court here and by the State court.

I would yield briefly.

Reclaiming my time, though, did not the two tribes then join together and go back to Federal court?

I would yield to the gentleman if he could tell me why not.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman. I think that does add clarity to this debate. The option to go to the Governor and to the legislature and the option of the other things we've heard about was better than going back to court under those circumstances.

In any case, this legislation simply says that any claims now would be resolved if this legislation passes, ``any and all claims, whether based on aboriginal or recognized title, are hereby extinguished.'' That's what this legislation does.

Then it says also ``these are unique claims and shall not be considered precedent.'' We know, again, that everything that happens in this Congress sets a precedent and creates an idea and an avenue.

I'm faced with a situation that, I think, could be multiplied in its difficulty because of the actions this Congress may take today, Mr. Speaker. Perhaps I'll take that up in my closing remarks.

Mr. Speaker, at this point, I'll reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to yield 45 seconds to the gentleman from California (Mr. Issa).

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

Mr. Speaker, this is an interesting debate, and some things come to mind that I don't believe have been adequately answered. I'm going to ask the question and hope that someone answers it with the time they have left rather than asking me to yield them time.

What is the claim the two tribes have on this land and the distinction between it and all the rest of the State of Michigan? I think that's a good question.

When I look at this situation, I apply it to the district that I represent. And I have represented two reservations, two tribes, and two gaming casinos for the last 11\1/2\ years. Now I have an outside tribe that has just been created within the last generation that has come in and bought land within my district in order to set up a health care clinic, and now the bait and switch takes place and it's going to be a casino instead. They get some of their problems cleared by this bill, 2176, if it passes today because, regardless of whether the bill says it's a precedent, it's a precedent. If it's not about money, it's about money, as we heard the chairman say. Where could a tribe not establish a casino if they determine to do so? Any land that they could buy for whatever purpose, whether it was a bait and switch or whatever, this opens up the door. As the gentlewoman from Las Vegas said, we could end up with casinos everywhere.

But we need to stand on some principle, and I don't see that the land is a consistent principle that can be defended in this case, Mr. Speaker. I oppose 2176. I urge that it be defeated.

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

I rise with my colleagues this evening to pay tribute to the Scouts who were lost in that storm of June 11, 2008, and to those also who survived and set such a fine example for Scouts everywhere and for all time to follow.

The location of the tragedy is a few miles west of where I live, I suppose about 25 miles as the crow flies over our beloved Loess Hills, some of us call them the bluffs, yet a unique soil type that exists in only one other place in the world.

And in those Loess Hills is an 1,800-acre wilderness park, the Boy Scout camp, where sometimes there are as many as 8- to 900 Scouts camping. On that fateful evening of June 11, there were about 93 Scouts on the location, along with about 25 leaders.

And in this disaster, as I have been on the site the second morning after the tragedy, as well as went over it last Saturday morning to take a look at that from the air to try to make sense of it and put it in a concept where I can at least explain it, this tornado came across the Missouri riverbottom, and it ripped through a small treeline down on the flat part of the riverbottom and then over an irrigation system and flipped it over and went directly to the ranger's house, the ranger who lives into the first finger valley in the bluffs in his home with his wife and three small children.

That tornado went directly at his home, which had no basement, slab on-grade, about the same kind of architecture as the shelter house that the Boy Scouts were in, and took his house and tore it to shreds. They huddled in an interior closet and ended up underneath the rubble from their fireplace, trapped there, the ranger, his wife and the three children. And they were all trapped and laying underneath the blocks and the stones.

And the tornado then went on up the valley and just jumped over a little ridge and dropped right down on the shelter house where 40 to 50 of the Scouts had gone to for shelter.

And I want to emphasize, Mr. Speaker, that there's nothing more the Scouts could have done, no place that they could have gone that was better than where they went, with 93 of them scattered out in these finger valleys, and they were living in small pup tents that were pitched along the valley. As I came in there, many of those tents were crushed underneath the trees. If they had stayed in their tents they would not have survived.

Some of them didn't get into the shelter house and had to lay on the ground. Those that survived, the tornado miraculously sucked the air out of their lungs, but 40 to 50 went into the shelter house, Mr. Speaker. And they did the only thing they could do which is get the kind of shelter that they could.

The velocity of the wind was such that it picked up a pick-up truck that was sitting about 100 feet on the one side of the building and blasted that vehicle through the building, through the fireplace, through the chimney. And that vehicle landed about 150 feet the other side of what was left of the building, which wasn't much at all. And the Scouts that we lost were lost underneath the rubble that was knocked down by that pick-up truck that was blown through.

This lasted about 8 seconds. Scouts being always prepared, one of them punched the stopwatch on his wristwatch and timed the storm while it was there and shut the stopwatch off. Eight seconds was how long the terror lasted.

And immediately after that was over, some of the Scouts rose up from the rubble and began to help the others and triage and do as their first aid training had taught them.

Some of them ran down not quite a half a mile to the ranger's home, where they began frantically tearing the rubble off of the ranger and his three children and his wife and who were trapped underneath there and would have eventually suffocated. They pulled them all out, and they all walked away, the ranger and his family.

Some of the Scouts ran up to another location on the wilderness campsite and went into a building and got a couple of small ATVs and all the chainsaws they could get their hands on. By the time the emergency personnel arrived--that was within 7 minutes--they were sawing logs out of the way to make room for the emergency workers.

These Scouts not only had trained the day before, but 2 years and 2 months earlier, they had trained in April for a similar kind of a drill. They were surprised at 5 o'clock in the morning by the Scout leaders and the local EMT workers who had set up this training drill. They had issued the Scouts first-aid kits, light boxes or clear plastic boxes, with gauze and other type of first-aid equipment in those kits. These Scouts who had trained 2 years earlier and 1 day earlier

for a similar disaster, found themselves with the first-aid kits that they had been issued, giving first aid to their fellow Scouts and some to their Scout leaders.

As I walked that site on the Friday morning following the Wednesday afternoon, some of these first-aid kits were scattered out around the site where they had been used up helping each other. It's a powerful example of the training that the Scouts had gone through and how they used that training.

Mr. Speaker, they did everything they could have done from a training standpoint. They did everything they could have done from a reaction standpoint. They did all of the right things in the aftermath of the tornado, and I believe that this tragedy of losing the four Scouts, as sad as it is--and we pay tribute to them and their lives and we offer our prayers and our shared grief to their families and the families of all of those who feel this pain--as sad as that is, I believe that there is a silver lining to this cloud.

First, I'm confident that there will be a memorial built on that location for those four Scouts.

And I believe that there will be a day soon where the training drills of the Scouts will incorporate the things that they learned there, the things that they did there, and I believe there will be Scouts that come to this camp, this 1,800-acre wilderness camp, from all over the United States over time who will train on the very location where we lost the four Scouts.

Before I conclude, Mr. Speaker, I do want to read the list of the local volunteer organizations that I know are at least on this list-- and I'm convinced it cannot be all of them--the Little Sioux, Iowa, Volunteer Fire Department on the site quickly, along with the Monona County Emergency Management people, the Decatur Volunteer Fire Department of Decatur, Nebraska, Fort Calhoun, Nebraska Volunteer Fire Department, Monona County Sheriff's Department, Harrison County Sheriff's Department, the Iowa State Patrol, Iowa National Guard, Red Cross, Mercy Air Care, and the Little Sioux Boy Scout Ranch. They all began to arrive there within 7 minutes of the time that this tornado concluded.

I congratulate them for their courageous response, for the example that they've set, for the inspiration that they are. I hope to be there to dedicate the memorial when that day comes. I offer my prayers and sympathy to the Scouts and their families. May God continue to bless the Boy Scouts of America.

Madam Speaker, I was detained while attempting to reach the House floor to cast my vote on rollcall No. 415 on June 17, 2008. Had I been able to reach the floor before the vote was closed, I would have voted ``yea.''

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak and be recognized here on the floor, raising the issue of energy and gas costs.

I brought a poster which I will quickly show. This is where gas prices have gone, Mr. Speaker.

You know, we listen to an awful lot of criticism building up to the 2006 elections of the Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress because of high gas prices, and here is where it ended. It was at $1.49 when President Bush was sworn into office, and it went to $2.33 the day Nancy Pelosi picked up the gavel.

She is the one that said that she was going to get us cheaper gas prices. The result of that is? You can see the graph, it shoots from $2.33 up to $4.08, $4.07, won't quibble over a penny, and going on up, with no plan to do anything except drive up the energy prices.

I am one of those that will say--and we have gotten a good look at that--but I am one of those that will say that everybody in this Congress doesn't want cheaper energy prices. Some people in this Congress want higher energy prices.

I think that goes all the way up to the leadership, and I can say that because I have watched these energy bills come to the floor. Every single thing that's affected the price of energy, at least that I can recall, drove the price up, not down, shut down and blocked the drilling and the access to energy across this country, across this continent.

When I came into this Congress, I was not convinced that anybody thought that gas prices ought to be higher. Then about 6, 7 months into the beginning of this 110th Congress, this Pelosi Congress, you finally convinced me. You convinced me that you want to see a higher gas price--because it doesn't seem logical that people in my district--and they are going to wonder about the rationale of it, but I have listened to the debate too long not to say it out loud, and it's this--that there are those in this Congress in significant numbers that believe that this planet is warming, and it's our fault.

If we can raise the cost of energy, people will use less of it, including gasoline. If they use less of it and ride their bicycle more, there will be fewer greenhouse emissions, and there will be less greenhouse gas go off into the atmosphere. If there is less going into the atmosphere, somehow they are going to save the planet. Well, there are a whole lot of things wrong with that equation, the worst of them is that the countries of and China and India, the emerging industrial nations are not going to back off on coal.

They are going to burn more coal, and they are building more generating plants. Whatever we do to slow down the coal or cut down on the emissions of our greenhouse gases is going to be more than offset. You talk about carbon offsets, it's being offset in India and China a lot faster than we could possibly shut down our consumption of energy in the United States, which shuts down our economy.

The equation for people that are holding the gavels that control this policy in this Congress today is drive up the cost of energy, drive up the cost so that people will use less energy. I said when gas got to be $3, what's the solution for $3 gas? The answer, $3 gas, because the American people are going to demand that their gas be cheaper.

Now we are at $4.07 or $4.08 gas, and what's the solution for that? Well, maybe, it's $4.07 or $4.08 gas. Maybe we are going to see a $5 gas or more. Maybe we are going to see crude oil go from $139 a barrel to maybe $200 a barrel or more. The predictions are saying that.

The futures don't quite say that yet, but the speculators are heading in that direction. Why are they doing that? Because they understand there is a policy in this Congress today, as we listened to Mrs. Bachmann talk to us about this, to drive up the price of energy. The idea that we would ride our bicycles instead of drive our cars.

They can get by with it. They can get by with it because we put the hose in our tank, the nozzle in our tank. When we squeeze that nozzle we are paying 18.4 cents a gallon in gas tax. That's Federal, a lot of the States, 20 or more cents in gas tax as well so we can support our transportation in our roads. That's a user's fee. I fully support that.

The people that squeeze the nozzle to pump the gas into their tanks in my district and across this country believe that money is going to build new roads and rebuild existing roads. That's a sad thing to say, but about one-third of that money goes to that, and the balance of that goes to other causes. Some of them are extreme causes, extreme causes, like, for example, 28 percent used for environmental and archaeological compliance, 28 percent of the 18.4 cents that you put in there for gas tax per gallon is going to comply with environmentalist ideas and to look for arrowheads out there. That's 28 percent, and 17 percent goes to subsidized mass transit.

The people that are voting for those folks that hold the gavels that have this green idea that we should drive up the cost of energy, aren't paying for the cost of that energy because they are getting on the Metro down here at South Capitol and riding over to Falls Church for $1.25, subsidized by the gas tax that's paid in Mrs. Bachmann's district, my district, Mr. Gingrey's district in Georgia and across this country. My constituents don't know that because we haven't told them enough.

But if I went to them and say, hey, I want to take 17 percent of your gas tax and spend it on something else and subsidize somebody else's transportation, they would object. That's why their constituents, though, the intercity urban Members of this Congress are not held accountable for higher energy

prices because it's being subsidized by the gas fees that are paid by people in my district and across the country.

By the way it doesn't work for us. It is an awful long drive to get to the Metro or the ``L'' or to get to the subway or to get to the trolley car like they have in San Francisco. But that's all subsidized by the gas that we are paying that's tax on part of this $4.07 that's out there.

Now, what is the thinking that's going on in the leadership of this Congress? Well, I pulled out one little thing, green, think green. We had a green initiative, called a Green the Capitol initiative that was initiated by Speaker Pelosi when shortly after she was sworn into this Congress.

Her idea was that we should show them how to do cap and trade. We should trade-off some carbon credits.

So I got some information that came out of the House Administration Committee, it goes back to the Chief Administrative Officer of the House, Mr. Dan Beard, who at the direction of Speaker Pelosi spent $89,000 to purchase carbon credits. Well, why purchase the carbon credits at the direction of the Speaker? Because the Speaker wanted to be sure that we were a carbon-neutral capital complex.

To be carbon neutral they shelled out $89,000 of your tax dollars, Americans, $89,000 to purchase carbon credits. I didn't know you could actually go on the market and do that, but you can. It has been done. The market was the Chicago Climate Exchange, not the Chicago Board of Trade, not the Chicago Mercantile, it was the Chicago Climate Exchange, a place where you can go and buy futures, I presume, and buy puts on carbon credits.

So $89,000 went out to carbon credits, and here is where they went, brokered through the Chicago Climate Exchange, this report, through the House Administration Committee--just some of the money I have been able to track, not all of it--$14,500 went to the North Dakota Farmers Union. Now, I don't think they actually farm anything, but it went to the North Dakota Farmers Union.

I know they do support some folks on the other side of the aisle very aggressively, and that's fine, this is America. The money went, $14,500, to the Farmers Union then it was redistributed through there to some of the farmers in places in North Dakota.

Some of the farmers, reportedly, were already doing no-till, but to try to convince them, give them incentive to switch over from till to no-till. Now, I don't know what the acres actually are--25, 35 percent of the acres around my neighborhood, I believe, are no-till.

It's a good practice. I support it. I have got good, responsible, neighbors that do use it. I encourage it. But to pay somebody that is already doing no-till extra money from the taxpayers through the capital complex and the Chicago Climate Exchange, so they will go and do no-till, doesn't seem to me to accomplish a single thing except get rid of some money and allow some leadership in this Congress to posture themselves as being carbon neutral.

What a glorious thing to accomplish, carbon neutral. You have got to dig back down through the paperwork and get the House Administration staff to find this. I didn't find out about it until we dug into it. So $14,500 to North Dakota Farmers Union, another $14,500 went to my State. It went to a reengineered generating plant in Iowa, Chillicothe, Iowa, $14,500, so that they could be having an incentive to clean up their act a little bit and emit less carbon. Those carbon credits were available to them, and we sent them the $14,500.

The problem was they had shut down before the money got there. There wasn't anything accomplished out of that we can determine. I am open to more information, that's what I know today. But those are two pieces at $14,500 each. I haven't chased the rest of the money down, but it occurs to me we didn't accomplish a single thing with carbon emissions and the Chillicothe plant.

We didn't get there with any money in time. That plant is shut down, not functioning, I understand. Some of the North Dakota farmers were already doing no-till.

Well, what we did was we set up an exchange now so that we can brokering money and taking taxpayer dollars and send them around the country and the industry, and private sector will be doing the same thing.

The value of these credits were estimated by the Heritage Foundation that they would start out at about $13 and then you figure out how you calculate what a unit is, but $13 a unit. In about 10 years they will be up to about $130 a unit. As near as I can determine, there is no audit system. Nobody is going to go check those farmers in North Dakota and find out if they actually switch to no-till, stayed off no-till or went off to do something else. I guess it won't pay to check that power plant in Iowa because it's not actually producing any power either.

That's just one of the things that happens when you get this myopic idea that you are going to worship at the altar of green instead of produce the energy that this country needs.

I would just point out another thing here, here is another little piece to look at. Here is the overall energy pie. This is the energy that we consume in America. Look at the number, it's 101.4 quatrillion BTUs, all together, and that's all the kinds of energy that we use. That's gas, that's diesel fuel, and it goes on, there is coal, there is natural gas.

This is the big picture of all of the energy that we are consuming, 101.4 quatrillion BTUs of energy. Now, that's a lot of energy. These are the proportions. I call it the energy pie, and the sizes of the slices of the pie, or the pieces of the production--you can see that nuclear is over here, and it has got a nice piece of that. It needs to be a lot more. But I have got also the ring here that shows us the production pie.

This is the exact diameter of the size of our production. You can see that the circle for the size of the volume of our production in America is 72 percent of the size of our consumption in America.

So what Republicans propose to do is grow these sources of energy so that this middle circle gets as big as the outer circle and maybe bigger. If it does, that will mean that we are exporting energy.

I will submit that every phase, every kind of energy has a future in this country. It needs to compete economically, we need to get into it. As Mrs. Bachmann said, there is no sensible reason not to tap into the energy that sits underneath us, the Outer Continental Shelf, the North Slope of Alaska. I have gone up there.

By the way, if there is any environmental damage to take place in the North Slope of Alaska and in ANWR, we had already heard about it from the other side of the aisle. They would stand up and say here is where that bucket of crude oil spilled out on the tundra, but we have not done that. Even with 1970s technology we have did so efficiently, cleanly and safely, and, yes some little things did happen. I won't deny that.

We cleaned them up. We did so effectively and safely. Our technology is a lot better. We do directional drilling now.

If we drill ANWR, that will be the equivalent, there's 19.6 million acres. Drilling in ANWR on 2,000 acres is the equivalent of a postage stamp in the corner of a football field. It's out on a coastal plain.

The pictures that you see of the pristine alpine forest are false. There is not a single tree up there. Anybody that went to eighth grade knows, the Arctic Circle is a line north of which trees can't grow. There is not a single tree up there.

Tundra reconstitutes itself. I have seen acres of it where the Eskimos showed me, we kind of tore this up by accident. We smoothed it over and 5, 6 years later it grows back green. Looks good, I have seen it.

That environment was not damaged in the North Slope. It will not be damaged in ANWR. It's built out on ice roads. We punched the holes out. Even the most extreme environmentalist on the left side of this aisle in this Congress couldn't fly over the North Slope and point to the oil field, they wouldn't see it.

I can find it because I know what it looks like. I would like to take them up there and show them. All I saw for wildlife, there are no native caribou, by the way. I saw four musk oxen, that's it, standing there with their head down, they wouldn't know if there's an oil well next to them or not, but it's environmentally friendly.

We did it in a responsible fashion, and we have got 1 million barrels a day to bring down here. We need to open up every kind of energy, do it now, do it all the time, do it everywhere. Get it into the marketplace, get the rules out of the way, and let's not be punishing companies for producing energy. Yes, one of the slices on this pie needs to be conservation as well.

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota for yielding to me, and thanks for leading this special order.

Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a profound privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress.

I come here to the floor, and first I can't begin this discussion over the next 60 minutes without first taking up the issue of the natural disaster tragedies in Iowa. From my history and experience, I go back a ways working with the natural environment and the natural disasters we have had. I remember a tragic tornado at Belmond, I lived through the 1993 floods, and when my equipment and my livelihood was under water, I went to eastern Iowa and down to Keokuk to help out down there because it was the only thing I could do to improve the situation because mine was not in a condition where it could be helped, at least for a few days.

As I lived through those experiences and as the Katrina hurricane came up and in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, for example, I was one of the first Members of Congress to arrive down in New Orleans. I made multiple trips down there into the heart of it. I have something like 3,600 pictures taken of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath when New Orleans was full of water. I have been on the ground and in the air, and I have slept on the Red Cross cot and I looked the people in the eye who were underwater and still suffer from that tragedy. I am not without experience.

Personally, I lost a considerable amount in the floods of 1993; but also I have the experience as a Member of Congress who has gone into these disastrous areas in the world. And Hurricane Katrina being the heart and the worst of it.

And yet when I look at Iowa today, and just having come back from the location last Friday morning where I visited where our four Boy Scouts were killed by a tornado and 48 others were injured, they rose up and did everything that they could do. They did everything they could do from a training perspective, and they did everything that they could to prepare. They did everything they could to take shelter with the shelter that they had that was available. And in the aftermath of that disastrous tornado that brought about the four fatalities of the Boy Scouts, they conducted themselves with utter heroism.

I stood on the site and listened to the stories from a number of the people on the location. And think of this, Mr. Speaker, 1,800 acres in the loess hills of Iowa, a very remote wilderness Boy Scout camp location that has been used for a number of years as a training location for first aid, first responders, and survival where the Boy Scouts have been trained.

And the tragedy of this is that the Boy Scouts are generally some of the first ones to arrive to help sandbag and help prepare for a flood or a disaster. They are some of the first ones to be there and stay there and help clean up in the aftermath. They are some of the first ones to arrive in the aftermath of a tornado or another natural disaster to help clean up, and they are leaders in their own right as youth, and they are also leaders in training for their adulthood. And these were the elite of the elite. These were the stand-out Boy Scouts who were there. There were at least 93 at the location on the night of the tornado.

The shelter that they had available to them was small, round little pup tents that were pitched up the finger valleys of what we call the bluffs. It's the loess hills of Iowa. Some of the reporters called it mountains, and I think I am flattered by that. Come see the mountains in western Iowa. They are beautiful. They are about 300 feet high, but they look like mountains on the horizon.

When the storm came, the Scouts had a very short window of notice and warning. The visibility lookout across the horizon didn't exist for them because they were in the valley and the tornado that came first set down on the ranger home, and destroyed that home. There was no basement, no shelter for the wind, slab on grade with a large fireplace built into which the tornado knocked down on top of the ranger and his family. They were trapped underneath the rubble. It was three small children, wife and husband, so five of them were trapped under the rubble of cement blocks and stone that was the former fireplace that collapsed on them.

And the tornado went from there up the valley and kind of jumped around the finger a little bit and set right in on the shelter house that 40 or 50 Scouts had gone to as quickly as they could when the weather got bad. The tornado picked up a pickup truck and blasted it through the chimney and the fireplace and on through the building, and it landed on the other side. The vehicle was about 100 feet on the one side of the building which I think was south and it landed about 150 feet on the other side of the building. That knocked rubble down on top of the Scouts, and that is where the fatalities took place. And that is where most of the injured of the 48 who were injured out of the roughly 93, and that were taken off for medical care.

The Scouts came out of that rubble. Some of them went immediately to the aid of those who were hurt the worst and did the triage that their training had taught. Some ran half a mile to the ranger's house where they could hear the children screaming from underneath the rubble, and pulled that rubble and saved them from suffocation that ultimately would have taken place. The ranger and his wife and children did walk away, although a couple were severely injured. It was a very sad situation with a very heroic reaction.

Some of the Scouts then reached to help each other. Some of them went to the first aid kits that they had been issued 2 years and 2 months earlier when they were on the same location and there was a surprise drill that was called by and initiated by the Boy Scout leaders and by the EMT workers from the neighborhood. They joined together at 5 in the morning and they converged on the 1,800 acre Scout camp and simulated a disaster that very much was like the real disaster that came 2 years and 2 months later.

The Scouts had their training. They were trained to react quickly. Many of them did. Some of them ran up the hill to a storage shed where they went in and got a couple of all-terrain vehicles and chain saws, and came back down the hill and began sawing the trees out of the way so emergency vehicles could get in. Other Scouts performed first aid with the kits they had been issued 2 years and 2 months earlier. They were saving lives all across that area.

The bottom line of it, Mr. Speaker, that the Scouts and their Scoutmasters and the EMTs that converged on the area within 7 minutes, and I would submit that is within 7 minutes even though the nearest town is at least 7 miles away, they saved Lord knows how many lives. But each move they made before the tornado hit and each move that they made after that was as good as it could have been. Sometimes it's just not enough. Sometimes even though everybody does everything right, there still will be loss of life. And four Scouts were called home who will be remembered for all time, especially on that location.

I can't say enough about the job that they did, their training and the EMTs in the neighborhood, all of the emergency responders, the law enforcement personnel, the fire departments, the urban teams across the State, everyone that converged on that location began to arrive 7 minutes after the tornado hit. The Scouts were already sawing logs and timber off the pathways so emergency vehicles could go up. Within 2 hours, everyone who was injured and needed medical care was off the site and under medical care at some of the local medical facilities and hospital. Some went to Omaha, and some went to Sioux City. But the largest share went to Burgess Memorial Hospital in Ottumwa. And those that arrived there, I can just sense the tone in the voice of the medical workers there. The thing that they had trained for, one of the things they had feared and trained for all their lives had visited them on that evening last week.

They mustered through the cause and provided the best quality medical care possible and took care of the patients, the 20 patients out of the 48 that arrived at Burgess Memorial in Ottumwa, and also Mercy Hospital in Sioux City and down into Council Bluffs and Omaha. Everyone stepped up to the task. I think they can be very proud of the way that they reacted to a tragedy, Mr. Speaker.

And it is a tragedy that will be remembered in Boy Scout lore for all time. If there is a silver lining behind this cloud, the silver lining is that the training that they had, the deja vu experience that was visited upon them last week was one that had a maximum amount of training available. And one of the Scouts said, I think, the most heroic thing when he said, if this had to happen anywhere, it was a good thing that it happened here where we were trained to deal with it. That's a courageous statement, Mr. Speaker. And I can't attribute that because I don't actually know the name of the Scout, but all the Scouts out there, I think, expressed the same sentiment. And I'm proud of the work that they have done. I congratulate them. My heart, thoughts and prayers goes out to them, to their families as they grieve for the lost ones. And as they put this back together, all of us will join together in that part of this recovery from the disaster, as bad as it is. I'll certainly be supportive of constructing a memorial on the location where we lost the four Scouts.

Fortunately, the ranger and his family all came out of it in at least reasonably good health and are in the recovery mode today.

But I look across the State, Mr. Speaker, and it's a tough battle all the way across Iowa. And we've had more loss of life due to weather and natural disasters than ever in my memory. I believe that number now, through the course of this, comes to 20 lives that have been lost in the culmination of the tornados, the one especially that hit Parkersburg, the one that hit in Monona County that took the lives of the four Boy Scouts.

If you add to a number of other disasters, weather-related, that have come

across the State, and look at the State of Iowa in your mind's eye, Mr. Speaker, we're fortunate in western Iowa that we're not in worse condition than we are. The Missouri River and its tributaries, by the nature of their grade, come up fast when it rains and they go down fast. We've had some severe flooding in western Iowa, but it doesn't sustain itself over the days and weeks in the same fashion that it does in eastern Iowa.

Des Moines, central Iowa, downstream from the Saylorville Reservoir and downstream from the Raccoon River, they've had some record flooding in that area; not as bad as it was in 1993, in some locations actually worse. But for the breadth of it, not as bad it was in 1993, which was a 500-year flood event.

But over as far as one goes east in Iowa, and especially in Congressman Loebsack's district, Cedar Rapids and in the Waterloo, Cedar Falls and Iowa City area, the Cedar River especially, but for the Iowa River, the all-time high was set, I'm not certain of the year, but in this flood, this new 500-year event that came back to visit us 15 years after the last 500-year event, Mr. Speaker, set an all-time high there near Iowa City or near the Iowa River that was 3\1/2\ feet higher in its crest of the water flow elevation than ever before. 3\1/2\ feet higher, Mr. Speaker. And that eclipsed a 500-year event in order to do that.

But in Cedar Rapids it was more difficult. It was 11\1/2\ feet above the previous high water mark. 11\1/2\ feet, Mr. Speaker. That is a huge, huge amount, a wall of water that has inundated the Cedar Rapids area.

And I will say that we've been through some floods before. And we're watching as this crest has moved its way down the Mississippi River. And the Mississippi River is pushing at some all-time highs, and marginally has eclipsed those all-time highs.

But what we've learned, in 1993 we rebuilt some levees. We built some up. We tried to prepare ourselves, mitigation for future floods, and it wasn't enough, especially in the Cedar Rapids area. It wasn't enough in the Iowa City area. It wasn't enough in some of the smaller town areas and some of the other tributaries, as well as the Cedar River and the Iowa River.

But I want to compliment the Iowans in the eastern part of the State as well, because they did everything they could to get ready. And during this crest and the aftermath, I have every confidence that they have done and will do everything necessary to clean up from it and to bring the resources that are available to them to bear, to pump the water out, to let gravity feed it down, to clean up the muck and the silt, and to go into the buildings and take out the drywall, and haul out the appliances that have been flooded out and redo the flooring, redo the walls, rebuild.

In some places houses are entirely gone, washed away, Mr. Speaker, washed away and crushed into bridges where they were trapped until they could be pushed further downstream. Some people's homes just simply washed away.

We've seen this kind of tragedy across the country time and again, and I alluded earlier to my experience at Katrina. And this experience in Katrina, compared to Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, all of Iowa, tells me that the vast areas of New Orleans, some of those that are not rebuilt yet may not be rebuilt, even after we're finished rebuilding in Iowa.

But I call upon Iowans, and I have every expectation and all confidence that they'll step forward and get this work done, and they'll do it with volunteer forces. They'll do it with contract forces, and we will do it together by using the resources that are available to us in the most responsible fashion.

And we do need help, Mr. Speaker. I don't know how much this flood has cost. I know that we appropriated tens of billions of dollars to New Orleans and Katrina, and I have been one of the critics of how that money was spent in some cases, in fact, some will say in many cases, and they may well be right.

I pledge, Mr. Speaker, that I'll also be looking to Iowa and asking and making sure that the utilization of the resources that are available to Iowans to recover from this disaster are used with every bit of the frugality and responsibility, as if every dime was our own money reinvested into the future. And I will spend my time overseeing this.

I will defend the interests of the taxpayer, and I will protect the needs of Iowans to have a chance to recover from this.

The cost of these disasters are far greater than we can withstand within the State itself. To give an example, we're looking at an initial component of this of perhaps $2 billion. It will go beyond that, we think. And there's not much to quantify it. This is a guess number, Mr. Speaker.

But to put it in perspective, the Iowa budget's around $6 billion. It was 5 when I was in the Iowa Senate. It's probably above $6 billion now. And so it gives you a sense that this disaster is significantly greater than at least a third of the Iowa budget, at least a third of Iowa's budget, and perhaps well more than half of it, maybe even more than a year or two of the Iowa budget. We will have to see.

But I'm going to ask that Iowans use these resources that we provide here in Congress in the most responsible fashion, and step up and do what they do.

We don't have a problem with looters. We only have a problem with how we organize all the volunteers that show up. That's the right kind of problem to have. That's the proudest kind of problem to have.

And I'm looking forward to an opportunity to roll up my sleeves and get into the middle of this, because when you get into a situation like this, Mr. Speaker, the thing that makes me feel the best is if I can just do something, if I can put my hands on some work and just get in there and do something to help everyone else. That's what I think is the sentiment from the Iowa congressional delegation.

We stood here on the floor tonight, and Congressman Boswell asked for a moment of silence from this Congress. I appreciate the leadership on that, and I appreciate that we're all here together in it. We will stand together.

And so I thank all the support that's here, Mr. Speaker, and we will be doing our share of this work confidently. We appreciate all the thoughts and prayers and the efforts and the support that have come, that will be there.

And now, Mr. Speaker, I must transition into this issue that is a big and broad and lasting issue for the United States of America, and that's the issue that's been discussed by the previous speakers in the 30 Something group. I will give them credit. They come to this floor regularly, consistently, and have done so for years, and they've made arguments that I've consistently and regularly disagreed with for years, Mr. Speaker.

I first take issue with the gentleman from Ohio's statement that drilling for oil is a dead end.

Now, only here on the special orders, in the rather silent nights after the general session of Congress has wrapped up, can you get by with a statement that drilling for oil is a dead end. How can that be a dead end?

We drilled for oil all over the Middle East. The Hunt Brothers went to Libya and developed the oil fields there. They were nationalized by Qadaffi when he took power in Libya, however many decades ago that's been. It's been a while. Drilling for oil in the Middle East wasn't a dead end.

Drilling for oil in Venezuela hasn't been a dead end. Hugo Chavez is getting rich off the oil they've drilled for in Venezuela.

Drilling for oil in Russia hasn't been a dead end. They're exporting oil into Europe and other parts of the world, and their cash flow is looking pretty good right now.

Drilling for oil in Canada hasn't been a dead end. They've discovered a massive amount of oil supply in Northern Alberta called the tar sands or the oil sands, depending on how you want to label that, Mr. Speaker. The Canadians are happy that they've drilled for oil, and they will be soon exporting tar sands oil down to the United States.

And Union County in South Dakota, the Elk Point region just across the river from Sioux City, Iowa, passed a resolution here within the Primary Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in June, that endorsed the idea of building a new oil refinery, first one since 1975 in the United States. Who would have thought that it would be, Mr. Speaker, in South Dakota?

But in South Dakota it's most likely to be. The highest hurdle has been reached. There may well be other regulations that have to be circumvented or resolved. But in the end, it's most likely now there will be a new refinery at Elk Point, South Dakota; a new refinery with billions of dollars invested in it that will have a pipeline coming down from Northern Alberta with the tar sands oil in it, oil sands oil. They will be refining that crude oil into gas, diesel fuel, engine oil and all the other products that come out of that refinery, setting up pipelines and distributing that oil across the country.

Drilling for oil wasn't a dead end and is not a dead end in Canada. And, in fact, if you'd asked the people in States like Texas, Oklahoma, California, Long Beach area, for example, Pennsylvania, drilling for oil was not a dead end in Pennsylvania whatever year that was when it was discovered some time I think previous to the first half of the 19th century.

And drilling for oil in the north slope, Mr. Speaker, was not a dead end. We went up there in 1970 to drill for oil and build a pipeline from the north slope of Alaska down to the Port Valdez. The right-of- way was 600 miles from Fairbanks north. And the environmentalists went in with a court injunction and blocked the development of the oil fields and the pipeline on the north slope of Alaska. That happened in 1970. But, in 1972, they had made their way through the quagmire of the environmentalist lawsuits, resolved all of that, opened up the oil fields in the north slope of Alaska and the pipeline, built the pipeline and opened the oil fields. And by 1975, we're pumping oil down to the Port Valdez.

Now, today, we're hearing: It's a dead end to drill for oil in ANWR, a dead end to drill for oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, a dead end to drill for oil on the non-national park public lands of the United States of America. Drilling for oil, Mr. Speaker, is a dead end.

Where are you going to get your gas from? I didn't hear you advocate that you want to come to Iowa and buy up all the ethanol that we're producing, so I don't know what you're going to put in your gas tanks, gentlemen. Your cars have to run on something unless, of course, it's your proposal that you're going to park them. And I can understand why you'd want to do that if you represent an inner city urban area that has access to publicly funded and subsidized mass transit.

In fact, when I look at the 18.4 cents a gallon that is a Federal gas tax that each of us pay when we fill up our tanks, we stick the nozzle in and we squeeze the handle, and when a gallon runs out we know we're paying 18.4 cents in Federal tax money on gas.

And a lot of us spend 20 or more cents to the State as well for our gas tax. We're willing to do that because it's a user fee, Mr. Speaker, and we're willing to do that because the consumers believe that 100 percent of that money goes to build and maintain our roads. Users fees, drive on a road, you wear it out. You need a new road, you've got to build a new one. You need to rebuild the roads that you're driving on because the surfaces wear down and the grade undermines, and you need to reshoulder and you need to reshape and you need to upgrade. 18.4 Federal cents per gallon goes to that. 20-some State cents in many States go to do that.

But the consumers aren't thinking that 17 percent of that Federal tax dollar goes to subsidize the mass transit of the constituents of the people that come down here on this floor and say: Drilling for oil is a dead end. We don't need any more gas in this marketplace, at least we don't need any more American-produced gas in this marketplace. No, uh- uh. Somehow there is a solution by demagoguing the oil companies.

Well, did they think, Mr. Speaker, that if 15 percent of the gas that's consumed in the United States, the gas that's delivered in the world--put it that way--comes from private companies like Exxon, Chevron, Texaco, and the balance of that comes from nations that own the oil industry, nationalized oil industry, and so what point is it in not demonizing the countries that are part of the OPEC, the oil cartel, but demonizing the private companies that are putting more and more product on the marketplace, helping to keep the price of gas down?

What sense does it make, Mr. Speaker, for the Speaker of the House and other leadership and committee Chairs to argue that we should bring windfall profits taxes against the oil-producing companies when their return on investment is less than 10 percent, down towards 8 percent?

Why is it, if Exxon is returning 8 percent on their capital investment, why would we want to say to them, that of all of the trillions or, excuse me, all of the billions of dollars that you have invested, you ought not be able to make 10 billion a quarter? With your capital investment being what it is, what is an inappropriate return on investment?

Would you want to bring all of the companies down here? How about just the Fortune 500 companies that got a greater return on the investment, Mr. Speaker, than Exxon in particular. Chevron is another. Why don't we bring a bill under that same logic, the logic of the Speaker from San Francisco, that we should put a windfall profit tax on any Fortune 500 company that makes more than 8 percent return on their investment of their capital. Now, that would be a consistent logic. It would be illogical, but it would be consistent with the logic of the Speaker.

It's not the case. These oil companies are helping us keep our prices down. I don't know if they're gouging or not. But if you think they are, get in the business and produce some energy.

But let's point our finger over at the countries that have nationalized the oil. Khadafi in Libya has nationalized the oil on the Hunt brothers. They're setting prices. They're together. They're a cartel. And by the way, you cannot legislate against that. You have got to find competition that competes directly against it.

Mr. Speaker, I don't know where to go in the world with the global demand on energy the way it is that we can line up with a country or two or five or ten and say, Why don't you just sell all of your oil to the United States? This is a global market. This is a global marketplace that has driven the oil price up to $139 a barrel and the price of gas up to $4.08 a gallon, average regular retail in America, $4.08.

Mr. Speaker, I made the statement some time back a year or more ago, So what is the solution for $3 gas? And my answer was, Well, $3 gas. Surely if gas is $3, the people that are blocking the development of energy here in the United States are going to get out of the way and join with those of us that believe that energy should be cheaper, not higher.

But what do they do? Mr. Speaker, they come to the floor and they make statements like, Drilling for oil is a dead-end. Now who in America would buy a line like that? ``Drilling for oil is a dead-end.'' Drilling for oil has produced all of the gas that we're burning in America. It's produced all of the gas that's being burned globally. It's produced all of the diesel fuel that's being burned in the United States and globally, and it's producing all the hydraulic oil and all of the other hydrocarbons that are out there into the marketplace.

Drilling for oil is not a dead-end. Drilling for oil is what launched the industrial revolution, lifted us into this modern era, and allows us to travel globally and do business and see the world. It's an entirely different place than it was when we were sitting on the back of a horse or walking behind the tail of one, Mr. Speaker.

And by the way, the Earth was a very dirty place back then. Let's just say 108 years ago at the turn of the previous century back when it was horses doing this instead of the internal combustion engine, you know, things fall out from underneath the tail of a horse and they pollute the street. And they walked in the mud, and the garbage got dumped out of the windows, and we didn't know a lot about medicine or water quality or air quality. We burned a lot of coal, and we burned a lot of wood, and the air wasn't very clean, and the water wasn't very clean. And we didn't have very much for sewers, if they existed at all. We didn't have a lot for modern health care.

We lived in the squalor of animals and people walking through their own waste and refuse. And somehow, they thought the Earth was in the balance back in those days, Mr. Speaker. And I will submit that the Earth is much closer to being in the balance today. The technology has moved us forward,

the internal combustion engine and the development of oil supplies globally and cheap oil and cheap gas and diesel fuel globally has lifted us out of that mucky quagmire of animal and human waste stirred up in the streets of America and around the world, put us up on paving and moves us across the highway at 75 miles an hour in some of the States on the interstate and allows us to get in a jet plane, and the Speaker herself to fly from Washington nonstop all the way over to her digs over there in San Francisco any weekend she chooses, every weekend she chooses because what? Because companies like Exxon, Chevron, American companies went out there and drilled for oil and explored for it in the United States, offshore in the United States, offshore around the world, places in deep water. They developed technology, and they brought this oil to the market.

And if we say to them a deal is not a deal, we want to go after your profits because we think the number's big, even though it's a smaller percentage of the return on the investment, if I'm on that board of directors, I have to think maybe we should not be investing the capital of our stockholders and more and more energy and more and more oil because the Congress will take our profits away from us. A deal is not a deal with this leadership, Mr. Speaker. And I would expect oil companies, if this persists, to invest some of their capital some place out of the reach of the deal changers, those that don't keep their word that are leading some of the issues here in this Congress.

I also would take us to an issue that has popped up in the news in the last today and in previous days about an effort on the part of some of the Democrat Members of Congress that believe that we should nationalize the oil industry in the United States of America.

I mentioned earlier that Khadafi nationalized the oil industry in Libya. He took over the oil fields that were delivered by the Hunt brothers and others. He took over the facilities they had developed and confiscated their capital. And that is also what happened in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez took over.

Well, there's some fellow travelers here in the United States. Congress, Mr. Speaker, fellow travelers with the people that have nationalized the privately owned oil industries developed within their countries, fellow travelers that agree and believe in that. And not necessarily submitting who the traveler is, I will just say this: That gentlelady from California, Ms. Waters, advocated that we should nationalize our oil industry.

Now, she is not a lightweight in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. I know her well. I have served on the Judiciary Committee with her for 5\1/2\ years. Here is what she said. She said this at a subcommittee hearing with the oil industry present, and to them she said, This liberal will be all about socializing, would be about basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.

Mr. Speaker, an allegation and announcement of a position to nationalize the oil companies in the United States. Take them over by the United States government? That is not just socializing them, as Ms. Waters said, that is--that's Communism, that's Marxism, that's confiscation of real property in the United States of America that's protected by the United States Constitution.

And, not to be outdone, Mr. Hinchey made the statement in a similar period of time that he would be for nationalizing the refineries in the United States.

Now, I would like to think that we're a long, long ways from being so desperate that we can't drill for oil as Mr. Ryan says. He says it's a dead-end. Drilling for oil is a dead-end, Mr. Ryan. But if there's any oil coming out of those wells--and I would yield to anybody that wanted to challenge my statement--if there's any oil coming out of those wells, then this Congress, according to Ms. Waters and Mr. Hinchey and who knows how many others, would want to nationalize those oil wells, those oil fields, that real property that's held by the shareholders, the retirement funds, the pension funds of the workers and the union people in the United States, nationalize that, and the government's going to run it? How good? As good as we run Social Security? As good as we run health care? As good as we run the welfare program here in the United States? Confiscate real property? Kick aside the Constitution?

Maybe if you're not enthusiastic enough about that as a Member of the other side of the aisle, you might want to go with Mr. Hinchey and let the oil companies own their oil wells but nationalize the refineries.

Mr. Speaker, that is a chilling message that does affect our markets and does not make energy cheaper. It makes it more expensive. Nationalize our oil industry, Ms. Waters, Mr. Hinchey, and who knows how many others.

The statements made by my predecessors here in the special orders about drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf towards Cuba. I listened to those statements as they were made, and I actually wrote down, What is your point. What is your point in bringing up the issue as to whether the Chinese are or aren't drilling offshore and does anybody have any information about whether there is an agreement?

We know that the Chinese have their industry and their technology in China. I, Mr. Speaker, have seen it. I have seen the capital investment. I have seen the development. I do not know if there is a signed agreement, a handshake with Castro, or if there is activity down there. I haven't gone down there to look. I haven't flown over the area. In fact, I would be a little bit concerned about doing so because it might well bring out some opposition.

But my question is, What is your point? Are they, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Altmire, the balance of you that have been standing here on the floor making these statements about drilling for oil is a dead-end, I guess then I can take it that you make your criticism about maybe China's not drilling offshore in Cuba. Maybe they are. I don't think we know. But are you for or are you against drilling the Outer Continental Shelf? Whether or not the Chinese are drilling there may not be material. But I believe that we ought to be there.

We ought to go halfway to Cuba, and we ought to punch in a wall of wells all the way along there, if there's any oil there, we ought to punch those wells in. We ought to get the oil. We ought to take the natural gas. And we ought to drill our way back coming back towards Florida.

And it makes no sense to set aside the Outer Continental Shelf towards any of these States and even say to the states, Well, it's your resource. Let us know if you want to drill there and maybe Congress will react towards that or the President will and someone will come and punch a hole in there and bring some gas or oil up below the ocean's floor.

When Ronald Reagan claimed 200 miles out in the Outer Continental Shelf, he claimed that for the United States of America, Mr. Speaker. He didn't claim it for Florida or California or Louisiana or Virginia or New York or Massachusetts or Maine. He claimed it for the United States of America. Three miles offshore? That's State ground. That's fine. I will concede that point. But from 190 from--3 miles to 200 miles, 197 miles, that's all resources of the American people.

We have to defend those shores with our military. We have to guard our ports. We're doing that federally. The States do not have a claim to the resources offshore. And if they object outside of three miles, I'm wondering what their objection will be. But I bet it will not be to seeing $2 gas again. I bet it won't be to maybe seeing $1.70 gas again or maybe even less.

So maybe, Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of solutions. There are a lot of solutions that are there. I agree that this should not be--I agree with Mr. Altmire this should not be a game of ``gotcha,'' but I fear it is a game of ``gotcha'' because I sit here and listen to this, and for the 5\1/2\ years that I have been here, it's been a constant mantra of running against George Bush.

I just left the President where he's giving a speech uptown, Mr. Speaker, and he will be retired January 20 of this upcoming year. I stand with the President on these energy issues. I stand with the President on the Middle Eastern issues. And at some point, the 30- Something group, the Democrats, the liberals, the progressives, the socialists, the Marxists, and the Communists are all going to have to figure out that George Bush is not running

for reelection. He actually said tonight that he will be retiring and going back to Crawford, Texas. Maybe watching the Rangers on TV. And I salute him for his service to America.

But you're going to have to find a different person to demonize, 30- Something group, and you are going to run against the new agenda that's coming.

And you're standing here on this floor tonight defending an untenable position, an untenable position that says drilling for oil is a dead- end. How can that be? Drilling for oil has opened up our economy, our industry, and has opened up the world to a modern era.

So, Mr. Speaker, I bring some things to the floor here that are quite interesting, I think. And this being the first demonstrable chart, take you back to 2001, January. President Bush was sworn in to office. Gas was $1.49, Mr. Speaker. And as you can see the increase in gas prices throughout this period of time from 2001, the 6 years until 2007. Now, this was not adjusted for inflation, I would add. This is just dollars. So if you adjust this for inflation, this curve is going to look flatter than it is.

But if you see, this is a very flat curve, adjusted for inflation flatter yet. On the day that the gavel was passed in this 110th Congress to Nancy Pelosi, gas had gone from, by then, from $1.49 in the Bush administration to $2.33.

That was about when Speaker Pelosi said she's going to do something about gas prices, and I think she meant it actually because every bill that came to the floor of this Congress made energy more scarce, and you have to believe the law of supply and demand.

And so as each bill that came to the floor of Congress made the regulations more stiff, made it more difficult to go out and explore for more oil, discouraged the investors from research and development and oil exploration, piece by piece by piece, plus the threats, of course, and the tax increases that are flowing along the way and Chairman Rangel's position that he never met a tax cut that he didn't want to kill--and to extend any of the Bush tax cuts, which were the salvation of our economy beginning May 28, 2003, was abhorrent to Mr. Rangel. He didn't quite say so in his first interview or his second or his third, but after the reporters put together his answers and non- answers, throughout out a whole series of interviews across the media circle, the investors in America came to the conclusion that there would be no tax cut preserved at the end of the Rangel tenure.

And when that happened, you can see that conclusion. If you look at industrial investment, you can see that that investment tailed off sometime about mid-February right over here shortly after Nancy Pelosi took the gavel behind me, Mr. Speaker. That industrial investment tailed off because the cost of capital went up. The cost of capital went up because the investors could see that there were going to be tax increases that were triggered in and kicked in along the way.

That has initiated a decline in this economy that's been significant. The decline in the economy, it started with less industrial investment, was followed by the sub-prime loan problem, was followed by the lack of consumer confidence, and by the way, coupled with a weaker dollar, a weaker dollar that has driven up also the cost of this energy. But here we are, gas is $2.33 when Nancy Pelosi took the gavel, right where you're sitting, Mr. Speaker, and today average retail regular gas prices in America, $4.08.

This short little period of time from 2007 until 2008, let's just say 17 months, maybe 18 months, gas has gone from $2.33 to $4.08. What do we get? What do we get but promises, and we get rhetoric on the floor that says drilling for oil is a dead-end. Well, I don't think it's a dead-end, and I don't think it's the whole solution, but I think we should drill ANWR. I believe we ought to drill the Outer Continental Shelf. I believe we should drill the non-national park public lands in America, and we ought to open up every logical place we can and put more energy on the marketplace.

There's no reason to save it underneath the crust of this earth when you are paying this kind of price, because we're transferring our wealth to the Middle East. We're transferring our wealth to companies that are not our friends. We transfer that wealth. They turn it into military power, they turn it into economic power, they turn it into political power, and they buy people off to become our enemies. They buy countries off to become our enemies. Our geopolitical influence is diminishing as our treasure is exported to foreign countries. That's just the oil I'm speaking of, Mr. Speaker.

We also have a deficit of trade that runs about a minus $717 billion a year right now. That deficit has flattened out a little bit, but it still has a transfer of our treasure to other countries where we owe them debt, and this cannot go on in perpetuity. But the Pelosi energy plan is, well, let's take the $2.33 gas--she promised she was going to take the prices down--let's get it up to $4.08 and then send somebody to the floor like Mr. Ryan who says drilling for oil is a dead-end.

Nancy Pelosi, ask your constituents to believe that. Mine are not going to be so easily persuaded.

Now, drilling in ANWR, what does it look like? Here's a map, Mr. Speaker, of the United States of America. A lot of us have seen this map because it shows how big Alaska actually is. And I say this to needle my Texas friends. If we split Alaska in half, Texas would be the third largest State. Well, you can see by this map that comes close at least, if not true.

This little area up here in the northeast corner of Alaska, that's ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And if you look a little further up here, this is the region that's in yellow that is the coastal plain that's in question.

Over here along this area about in there is Dead Horse. That's mile post zero of the Alaska pipeline. It's up there very near the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic Ocean runs right along here, Mr. Speaker, and the Dead Horse access, mile post zero, and then the pipeline runs across Alaska like this. I think it's here, maybe here. There, the oil goes onto tankers and is floated on down and around to refineries on the west coast of California and points beyond.

To deal with an issue that I continually am asked about, and it's been alleged on this floor that the allegation that this oil from the north slope of Alaska is shipped to Japan. Not true. It was true back in about 1985 for a short period of time because the economics worked out better that way, Mr. Speaker. Hasn't been true since then. Hasn't been true for at least 23 years.

This oil that comes out of the north slope of Alaska, pipeline down here and tankered on down, goes to the United States of America. In any case, that's what would happen with this oil that would be developed here on the north slope of Alaska.

Now, if you've seen an advertisement that says that we shouldn't drill in ANWR because it is a pristine, alpine forest, or they're showing you a picture of fine, evergreen trees and tell you let's not disturb the native area up there because it's pristine wilderness, I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that this area in question, the north slope and east of the north slope, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is right on the Arctic Ocean.

I take us all back to something we all should have learned in eighth grade; that is, the Arctic Circle, which runs around here somewhere in Alaska, the Arctic Circle is the line, by definition, north of which trees can't grow. So why would we buy a negative commercial that tells us that we shouldn't be drilling in a pristine alpine forest? We can't go back to our eighth grade training and understand that this is an arctic coastal plain.

On its warmest days, with 24 hours of sunlight, it melts down towards the permafrost a foot to 18 inches. It has some tundra there. Tundra, by the way, can be reconstituted. We aren't going to tear it up. We would do this all on ice roads over the top. The ice melts and everything goes back to the natural way. But if a machine falls off of an ice road into the muck a foot to 18 inches down to the permafrost, gets pulled back out, can smooth that all over, the seed is there. In 5 to 6 years, the tundra is grown back. I've seen it, Mr. Speaker. It's not a belief that's not founded. It is one that I have observed.

I've also heard the testimony of the Native Americans that live up there that want to drill. Drill ANWR. Drill ANWR. Get the oil in the pipeline,

bring it down here, and bring it around to the refineries. This is not a pristine wilderness that can't be replaced, but it's not one that's going to be disturbed either.

This is a coastal, frozen tundra about 9 months out of the year or more that has a regular topography that's flat. It's got a few little potholes and sink holes in it. A little bit of green grass grows out of that tundra in the summertime. This works get done when it's all frozen.

There isn't even a native caribou herd there, Mr. Speaker. There is in the north slope. By the way, that herd was 7,000 in 1970, and it's over 28,000 head today because we did this work up in this area in an environmentally friendly fashion. And if it had not been done in an environmentally friendly fashion, if there had been a desecration of the environment, if there had been a significant spill, if there had been disrespect towards wildlife or loss of wildlife, I have every confidence that the people on this side of the aisle would have been here with their posters and their pictures, and they would have embellished it to no end because I don't believe that you believe that we should lower energy prices.

You've finally convinced me after 18 months, a year-and-a-half of this 110th Pelosi Congress, that you want to see energy prices go up, not down, but you believe that if you can drive gas prices up from $2.33 a gallon to $4.08 a gallon to $5 a gallon to $6 a gallon, maybe all the way up to where it is in Europe today at $10 a gallon, the poor people will have to stop burning gas first. But a lot of people will stop burning gas or at least burn less of it, and they will get on their bicycles or walk or they will get on the mass transit that's subsidized by the people that are buying the gas, and there will be less combustion in the internal combustion engine, and there will be less emissions out the exhaust pipe. And less emissions out the exhaust pipe in your myopic mind saves the earth, saves the planet from what you believe is an impending global warming holocaust.

That's your motive. You would shut down, slow down dramatically, and ultimately shut down the economy of the United States of America, the very well-being of our people. The wealth that's created and regenerated here, that provides all of our creature comforts and our technology and our medicine and our creativity and our art and our sciences, that would all be diminished, all be shut down. You'd hand that all over to the Chinese and to India and to other developing nations and let them develop the industry. We would sit here and curl up among ourselves and spend our $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10 for gas, ride our bicycles and sit around and say, isn't it wonderful now. Drilling for oil was a dead-end, but we didn't drill. We didn't go into ANWR. We've got an awful lot of oil up there, enough oil up there to produce at least a million barrels a day for a good, long time. We save that all back and handed our economy over to who? Handed it over to the Chinese, handed it over to India, handed it over to developing nations.

Mr. Speaker, a logical thinking nation cannot come to that conclusion, and I am quite concerned that we're not here building together a comprehensive energy plan and driving it with the leadership of the people who have been elected for our judgment and who have access to more information than anybody in the country collectively. We're not putting a plan together. We're reacting. We're scooting ahead of the hottest criticism there is, trying to hang on to some congressional seats but still move us off to the left and hand this country over to the people that believe in green, the people that are extreme environmentalists.

I'll point out, also, Mr. Speaker, I've spent my life in soil conservation. I've built more miles of terrace than anybody in the United States Congress. I've done more waterways. I've protected more soil than anybody in Congress, and I've also planted an awful lot of trees and many of which I'll never get to sit in the shade of. I believe in soil conservation, water conservation, and quality. It's my life. I've demonstrated it. I believe in protecting this environment.

But I do not believe in disarming our economy. I do not believe that this equation that's being pushed forward here on global warming is one that will sustain it. I'm particularly suspicious when one of the scientists that back in 1970 signed on and was a leading advocate that there was going to be an ice age that was just around the corner, an impending ice age, at least one of those scientists that was a leading thinker, giving us the scare about a glacier coming down to wipe out our corn fields is now on the global warming side.

I think history will only tell, and we can't affect this climate enough to make it worthwhile for us to unilaterally disarm our economy when the Chinese and the Indians are building more and more generating plants, burning more coal, polluting more air. We can't put a dent in it, Mr. Speaker. But some of the things that we can do, we can look at this problem, what we have, from a more comprehensive perspective.

This, Mr. Speaker, is our energy production chart of the United States of America. Now, we need to be talking about all of the sources of energy that we have. And if you look around the chart, you can see that this is gasoline here in this robin egg blue color; diesel fuel, here; kerosene and jet fuel down here in the white; other petroleum products which might be asphalt and heavy oils and engine oil, those kind of things right here; and then natural gas, a lot of natural gas in yellow. Coal, Mr. Shimkus loves that coal, and I support him and clean burning coal. Let's put that on the market. We've got a lot of it.

Here's our nuclear. 11.66 percent of the energy. This is all the energy consumed in the United States. Actually, all the energy produced in the United States. 11.66 of it's nuclear. Even though we haven't built a nuclear plant since 1975, still, of all the energy, 11.66 percent of it is nuclear.

Here's our hydroelectric. We haven't done much of that either, 3.41 percent for water going down the rivers. We're using that to spin generators. And I think that's a green energy. It's renewable energy. It doesn't get categorized as such.

Here's your geothermal, a little bit; wind, a little bit, half a percent. Here's solar, tenth of a percent. Here's ethanol, three- quarters of a percent, and we're producing a lot of it, 9 billion gallons of it last year, but it's three-quarters of 1 percent of all the energy that is produced in America.

Biodiesel; one one-hundredth of a percent. Biomass; some of that's wood burn, 4 percent.

So you see, Mr. Speaker, here is a chart of the energy that we're producing in America. And now, the number down here, 72.1 quadrillion Btus. Just remember the 72.1 because that's really what's operative, Mr. Speaker. And now, that's what we produce.

Here's what we consume. This chart, Mr. Speaker, is the Energy Consumption chart for the United States for 2007. You see roughly similar proportions of the energy sources that we have. You'll see that motor gasoline is a larger percentage of the overall energy consumption chart; 17.44 percent of the gas consumed; and down on this chart, it's 8.29 percent of our production. So we're importing a lot more gas than we're burning. If you go to the diesel fuel, that number is 8.84 percent of the energy consumed as diesel fuel, we're producing only 4 percent overall.

So if you look at this chart, you will see that the diameter of this chart represents the amount of Btus that we are consuming in America. That's 101.4 quadrillion Btus. Just remember, we're producing 72.1 quadrillion Btus, we're consuming 101.4 quadrillion Btus. So just round that off into we're producing 72 percent of the energy that we're consuming.

And now here's another little chart that shows you, Mr. Speaker. And this is the Energy Production chart set on top of the Energy Consumption chart. So you can kind of wind this up and see our natural gas, the size of the natural gas production on the smaller circle versus the natural gas consumption on the larger circle. We can turn this over to nuclear and see what percentage of our production is nuclear versus the percent of our consumption that's nuclear. Turn this around and you can kind of see.

But the main thing that this illustrates is the smaller circle is proportional, Mr. Speaker, to the amount of energy we're producing. The larger circle is proportional to the energy we're

consuming. And so I will submit that each of these pieces of the pie--I will just turn this over so the coal lines up for Mr. Shimkus--each of these pieces of the pie needs to grow out to the limits of the diameter of this circle so that together we're producing as much energy, or more, than we're consuming. And then we can engage in this and change the size of these pieces so that we can prioritize the use of our energy.

And I would submit that this natural gas product that's here, the yellow, let's produce a lot more of it. Let's use less to generate electricity; let's use more to produce fertilizer and use it in industry where we produce plastics, et cetera.

But this is where the picture is for the solution. We need more coal, more natural gas. We need more other petroleum products. We need more diesel fuel, more motor gasoline, more biomass, solar, ethanol, biodiesel, wind, geothermal, et cetera.

Mr. Speaker, might I request how much time I have remaining?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That's just enough time to demonstrate what corn is.

Mr. Speaker, this may be a first on the floor of the United States Congress. In this Ziploc bag is corn. Now, there's a little bit of a misconception out there. There's an argument that we shouldn't turn this into ethanol because people will say, well, that's food. Well, I have chewed on this corn, but we grind it up and feed it to livestock. This isn't human food as we know it. We do convert some of it to syrups and 299 other products, value add. But what happens is we'll bring a bushel of this corn into an ethanol plant, we'll run it through that plant. A third of the volume that you see here will be converted into ethanol. About the same amount of it is wasted when you feed it to livestock anyway, it just isn't usable, so that turns into CO2. And that's a waste product right now with ethanol.

The other third of it turns into this; this is a fine product called dried distiller's grain. This is actually high-protein, dried distiller's grain, Mr. Speaker. This gets fed back to livestock. So I'll come down at another time and I'll demonstrate what you do with a bushel of corn. It produces three gallons of ethanol. Half of the feed value in that, at least, goes back to the livestock in the form of dried distiller's grain that I have in this hand. And this food-versus- fuel argument does not hold up right now; it may for the '08 crop, it doesn't for '07.

We've produced more corn than ever before in 2007; that was 13.1 billion bushels. We exported more corn than ever before; that was 2.5 billion bushels. We converted more corn into ethanol than ever before; that was 3.2 billion bushels. And 1.6 billion of that went back to livestock in the form of feed, so you add that back in. And the amount of corn that was available for domestic consumption was 9.0 billion bushels of corn from the 2007 crop. That's more than ever before, Mr. Speaker. And the average amount of corn available for domestic consumption for the other years in the decade was 7.4 billion bushels.

So there was 1.6 billion more bushels available for domestic consumption, the prices somewhat higher than they ever were before; part of it is a weak dollar, part of it is global demand; part of it is we exported more meat than ever before. And our economy has been rolling and booming.

We have to figure out how to come to grips with this. Ethanol isn't the only answer, drilling is not the only answer, but $4.08 gas surely is not the answer, Mr. Speaker. And anybody that thinks that drilling for oil is a dead end I think has a dead idea. And the American people are going to stand up and say, Drill ANWR, drill the Outer Continental Shelf, drill the non-national park public lands. Let's have all the energy and all these categories that we have. Let's drive down these prices. Let's boom our economy. And let's get on with where we need to go as a country.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention this evening.

Mr. Speaker, I was detained while attempting to reach the House floor to cast my vote on rollcall 401 earlier this afternoon. Had I been able to reach the floor before the vote was closed, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate greatly the privilege to address you tonight on floor of the United States Congress, and as I listen to my colleagues talk about the energy situation that we have here in America, it's quite interesting to me that my colleagues would say well, we can't drill in ANWR because in 10 years we are going to still have some other energy issue.

Are they looking for the silver bullet, I wonder? Do they insist that we can't do anything with regard to energy? We can sit here and deal with $4 gas? Unless we can fix $4 gas and make it $1 gas, we shouldn't do anything? I wonder what is the problem with the realistic approach to this that seems to be a barrier for my colleagues from the other side of the aisle?

We know this, that there is a little over 10 billion barrels of oil in U.S. reserves, and we know that the United States Department of Energy produced a number about three days ago that showed there is about 10.4 billion barrels of oil in ANWR. If we open up ANWR, we will essentially and virtually double the oil reserve supplies for the United States of America if we tap into ANWR.

Now, what kind of thinking person would say I would rather pay $4 for gas, or $5 for gas, or $6 or more dollars for gas before I would tap into 10.4 billion barrels of oil in a neighborhood up there that I would remind you, and I would remind the body, that in 1970, we were scheduled to go up to Alaska and drill for oil in the North Slope. I remember that very clearly, 1970.

The idea was, we will build a pipeline from the North Slope, Mile Post Zero up there at Dead Horse access on the Arctic Ocean, and that pipeline will run from there all the way down there through the Port of Valdez in Alaska where they will then tanker that oil down to refineries along the coast of California and other points. That was 1970.

The same philosophical environmentalists that are blocking drilling in ANWR today, the ones that took the floor just a few moments ago that said--where we shared--we dare not drill in ANWR because it's not going to solve all our problems are the ones that brought the lawsuit that brought the drilling that blocked the North Slope of Alaska in 1970.

In those days, there was a long and intense court battle that finally got the environmental extremists out of the way. In 1972, they said, all right, there isn't any logical or rational or legal reason why you can't drill the North Slope of Alaska.

So we went up and we started to punch holes in the North Slope of Alaska in 1972. In 1972 we started building a pipeline from the Arctic Ocean all the way down to the Port of Valdez. I don't actually know how far that is, but I know that there was a right-of-way for alongside the pipeline that went from Fairbanks 600 miles north. It's more miles than that from Dead Horse access on the Arctic Ocean on down to the Port of Valdez.

Even though the environmentalists in court blocked drilling in ANWR for that period of time for 2 years, even though we look back on that-- well first, at the time, I thought how can the environmentalists be so effective as to shut down access to the American energy supply for two full years without a logical, rational or legal argument?

Well they did so, and now I look back on that, and I think how in the world did we resolve issue in two short years by going to court between 1970 and will 1972 to clear the environmental extremists out of the way and go in and drill in ANWR where all these extremists ideas were that if we punch our drill in the North Slope, if we punch holes in the North Slope, there will be oil flooding all over the permafrost, the tundra will be destroyed. They will be driving bulldozers through the tundra, and you can never put that environment back again.

It's a careful balance that Mother Nature has, and the caribou will all drown in crude oil. There won't be any wolves left, and it will just be a terrible economic or terrible environmental catastrophe. That was what they predicted in 1970.

In 1972 we started building the pipeline and building the right-of- way and drilling the wells on the North Slope of Alaska, identical in the environmental component that's there, to ANWR today. In 3 years we built the pipeline, we built the right-of-way road along the pipeline. We punched the wells in. We got the wells up and got them running. We hooked them in and began to transfer that crude oil down through that long pipeline down to Valdez and into other parts of the United States where it was refined. That got accomplished in 3 years.

And now, Mr. Speaker, the very people that sit over on this side of the aisle tonight that have blocked the drilling on the North Slope back 30-some years ago, and are blocking the drilling in ANWR today say, well, gee in 10 years, we still will have a problem with enough oil for the United States of America, and you will not solve this problem, the whole problem. You will not solve it in perpetuity so, therefore, you ought not do anything in Alaska to fix it.

What kind of a Nation would be foolish enough to set aside half of its crude oil reserves when gas is 4 bucks because of some myopic idea that you should not punch a hole down through the permafrost when you have proven 38 years ago--I should actually say 36 years ago--that we could drill wells through the permafrost, we could drill them on the North Slope of Alaska.

We could transfer that oil out of there into the terminal, start it in at Mile Post Zero in the Alaska pipeline, that 51-inch diameter line that runs from there on down to Valdez and pump all that crude oil, and we have done since 1972, 36 years.

If there was an environmental problem, I guarantee you that people on this side of the aisle lament anything that will lower the price of energy, would have told us that somebody spilled a gallon of crude oil someplace up there near the Arctic Circle. But have we heard them say anything about a single gallon? No, we have not.

I know it does happen. Occasionally, there will be a leak in the pipeline, a little rust hole, leak or something. They will go in and swab up the oil off the ice, weld the hole shut, patch the pipeline in and everything goes on.

But if there was a serious environmental problem, these would be the first people that would let us know. I am telling you, they don't have an argument. If you have one, stand up. I will recognize you. But, of course you won't, because you don't have an argument.

But you say to the American people, it's people like Louie Gohmert that wants to see $4 gas--no--Louie wants to punch a hole down there and suck this oil up out of the ground and lower the price of energy.

I would be real proud to recognize Mr. Louie Gohmert for as much time as he would consume.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, and I appreciate his perspective.

I will point out that there are three branches of government, there is the executive, the legislative and the judicial branch of government.

I really only know of one person in the history of this country that has felt a compulsion to legislate, found himself on the bench as a judge, and decided that the constitutionally appropriate thing to do was to walk away from that judgeship and run for the United States Congress and come here to legislate. That's Congressman Louie Gohmert from east Texas.

I am proud to call him a friend and serve on the Judiciary Committee with him. I appreciate something that he brings to the table, a unique personality that's never been matched in the United States Congress and also the judgment of a judge that makes him a good listener and an analyst of the law and one who thinks deeply into the long-term ramifications of the decisions that we make. I look often to the prudence of the gentleman from Texas, and I appreciate him coming to the floor and offering his remarks for the energy situation here in the United States.

I said some year or 2 or 3 years ago that what is the solution for $2 gas? That's $3 gas. What's the solution for $3 gas? That's $4 gas.

Well, we are truly here at $4 gas, and that sounded like an outrageous kind of a number to put out back at that time. The reason I said that was as gas gets higher, we are willing to do more things to provide energy for the people in this country.

But when I sit here, and I think of the votes we have put up here on this floor, and I think of the decisions that have been made--and about 3 years ago, there was a bill on floor of the House of Representatives that said let's drill ANWR. I can remember there was a letter that was produced by Republicans that had 10 or 12 signatures on it that said we will join with all the Democrats, and we are going to block all drilling in ANWR.

We are not going to let that happen because of some idea about when the North Slope was opened up for drilling, there was some kind of an implicit promise that we wouldn't tap into the rest of the oil up there in that part of the world. That doesn't make any sense to me, I cannot rationalize that.

But I remember that letter that had 10 or 12 signatures on it, and the 10 or 12 Republicans that said ``no'' was enough to join with all the Democrats that said ``no.'' Had we done that, we would have more than a million barrels of oil a day coming down here into the United States to be poured into this marketplace, which would make a significant difference in the cost of energy in the United States of America.

But the 10 or 12 Republicans that were on the wrong side joined with all of the Democrats on the wrong side, and we didn't drill ANWR. And the rationale was pretty weak. I have had people say you want to tap into 2,000 acres in ANWR, what does that mean.

Well, there are 19.6 million acres in ANWR. And 2,000 acres out of that

would be the equivalent of a little postage stamp stuck in the corner of a football field. That is 2,000 acres in 19.6 million acres of ANWR.

And so if that is the part that is going to be a footprint to develop half of the oil reserves in the United States of America, and they are asking me this question, how much is an acre, Mr. King? So I say well, it is 208 feet by 208 feet, that is 43,580 square feet. That is, let me see, oh, about a football field. So it is about 2,000 football fields on 19.6 million acres. That is the equivalent of a postage stamp in the corner of a football field. That is all it is.

On top of that, we get access to these oil fields by ice roads on top of the frozen tundra, and then sinking wells on a work-over pad by which we do directional drilling. We pull a lot of that oil out into one single collection, and collect it in the collection tubes that go into the terminal at milepost zero, Dead Horse Access. That is what it is all about.

Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, if you flew over that at 5,000 feet, a football field, you are looking for a postage stamp that is the same color as the grass, could you see that from 5,000 feet? Could you see that postage stamp from a thousand feet or 500 feet? Could you see it if you walked around on the football field looking for that postage stamp? I will submit not.

I will submit further that I can take the most extreme environmentalist on this side of the aisle, and I could put him in a Black Hawk helicopter and fly him around the North Slope today where we have developed oil fields, and I could ask them, tell me when we are over the oil field. Tell me what you see that violates your sense of intrusion upon this pristine environment that nobody goes to see. I challenge that not one of you environmentalists could point down out of the window of that Black Hawk and say, There is an oil well, there is a oil rig, there is a oil field. Oh, it violates my sense of what Mother Nature is all about. Not one, Mr. Speaker, because when you look over the oil fields of the North Slope, there is not a single derrick down there. Not one structure sticking up in the air 230 or 240 feet that is set to drill for oil.

There is not, as I could find, not a single pump jack pumping that oil out of the ground looking like an oil field, which doesn't offend my sensibilities, by the way, but maybe offends some of you over there. And let me know why that is the case, and I will yield to you. But no, you don't see any of that. And the reason why is because the wells are underground. The wells are drilled. They don't have pump jacks sitting above the ground, they have submersible pumps way down in the casing at the level of the oil.

The collector tubes don't even show where they are, and I don't know if they lay on the ground or if they are slightly subterranean, but they collect the oil that goes into the tanks at the terminal at Dead Horse Access, milepost zero, on the Alaska pipeline. And there it gathers it together and it sends it down that 51-inch pipeline down to the Port Valdez.

Now I cannot understand why a people that is dependent upon energy, a people whose economy is run by energy, a people who sit on billions of barrels of oil, would somehow draw some kind of a moral position that even though no one goes up to the North Slope, and if they went up there they wouldn't know what they are looking at, and if they saw it they wouldn't be offended by it, and it would be environmentally friendly, all of those things, but somehow we have some kind of a Mother Nature religious aversion into tapping into American energy. Why is that, Mr. Speaker?

When the 110th Congress convened, I did not know, I really thought there was a sense of conscious and goodwill and a way that we could move forward with the American economy and the American people. I could not at that time have believed that the core of the Democrat Caucus in this Congress sincerely believed that energy costs should go up no matter what it takes, shut down the drilling in ANWR, shut down the drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, don't let any drilling happen in the non-national park public lands in America, don't do any of that because by blocking all of that, we are blocking the delivery of energy to the economy of this dynamic, robust free country that we have. Why? What rationale, can there be.

Well, first of all they hate capitalism. They don't want to see prosperity, and they want to see energy cost more. I am convinced that this regal Pelosi Congress wants to see energy cost more.

What is it that the regal Pelosi Congress likes better than $2 gas, $3 gas. What do they like better than $3 gas, $4 gas. You've got it. You should be happier now, and I know you will happier yet when it is $5 gas. This is the drill-nothing Congress. This is the develop no energy Congress. This is a drive the energy prices up Congress. This is the Congress that is punishing the American economy. They know that an economy requires energy, and the more expensive it is the less economic activity that we will have and the more it will slow down. When it slows down, we will burn less energy. When we burn less energy, there will be less greenhouse gases that go into the atmosphere.

And then, and this requires an article of faith, the leap is if we assume less energy, there will be less greenhouse gases and then there will be less global warming.

Now there are two reasons why that is a bad idea. First of all, 95 percent of the greenhouse gases are created by nature. The other part is the 5 percent of the greenhouse gases that are created by man cannot be 100 percent controlled by man. Reasons for that are the Chinese and the Indian economies are growing. They are going to burn more coal and release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and they are going to create more greenhouse gases, and they don't care. They don't care because their people are hungry and they need economic development. They are not dying because the planet is 1 degree too hot, they are dying because the planet is short of calories and protein for them that keeps them alive, and it is short of health care. So they know what their priorities are.

Here we are running this myopic agenda that we are going to make energy more expensive and we are going to see $5 gasoline and $6 gas, and people will park their cars and grandmothers in Iowa are going to ride their bicycles 10 miles to town through a blizzard. I mean, they are not going to do that. We know they are not. But the people in San Francisco and New York and Boston don't know that. But I'm here to tell you all, that's the case. They are not going to park their cars and ride their bicycles to town in January in Iowa. It is not going to save the planet. It will keep grandmother home. She will not be living this life to the fullest that she could. Millions of Americans will not be living this life to the fullest that they could.

And when you bring your myopic, Goddess of Gaia faith-based approach, and I mean this from a nature environmentalist extremist perspective to this economy, you drive up the cost of energy and you slow down the activity of our economy and impoverish the people of America and you think you are going to save the planet and it is all worth it.

Here is what it is. It is not worth it in the first place. And the second place is you are not going to save the planet. And you are not going to do that because the science doesn't support you in that. And if it did support you in the idea that if we shut down America's emissions of greenhouse gases, we don't affect the Indian and the Chinese and the other growing economies' emissions of greenhouse gases, and so we are here in the United States shouting out into a thunderstorm trying to solve a problem.

It won't work, it can't work, it is not rational. There is no scientific base that upholds it. And on top of that, there is not the sociology that says human nature will support the kind of approach that you bring to this. Drive up the cost of energy and slow the emissions of greenhouse gases, and if you do that, the planet will what, is it going to cool? No, it isn't going to cool. It might not increase in its temperature quite so much, but we can't prove it and we don't have a model that says so. In fact, our models say we can only affect 5 percent of the greenhouse gases if all humanity joins together, and we are a small percentage of the emissions of the entire planet. And even if we controlled them all, the Indians and Chinese are going to increase their emissions of CO2 and greenhouse gases.

So why go through this exercise to unilaterally disarm the economy of the United States so we can't compete around the globe economically with free trade, militarily, culturally, and politically. What is it about America that you don't like over on this side of the aisle? Why is it the blame-America-first crowd is carrying the agenda in this United States Congress?

Why is it that the constituents of Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas and all of the way out to the left coast and all of the way to the right coast, why are they paying $4 for gas with this driven-up price of energy, and why have you blocked the drilling in our non-national park public lands, and why have you blocked the drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf where we know there are 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out there, coupled with the oil that naturally goes with it that we can't tap into to drive down the cost of fertilizer, to drive down the cost of energy, to lower the cost of BTUs, to add to the overall supply of energy in the United States of America? Why can't we do that?

It is because you have a religious belief and it is kind of like the laws of your nature and the laws of your God say that we should cut down on greenhouse gases because of this belief that, and say religious belief, and I have strong religious beliefs. But sometimes that religious belief is defined as something that you say you believe in that you have no scientific basis for.

If you believe in this global warming God, and you cannot stand up and defend a scientific basis for a belief in a global warming God, then it is a religious belief. It is a religious belief that is unfounded. It is one that is unfounded on science and one that can't be proven.

We have watched this planet. Yes, it is a little warmer than it was 20 years ago. But if you look at the data, it might be cooler than it was 2 years ago. We had a long winter, we had a late spring. Most of my constituents thought global warming would be a good thing.

And by the way, the beginnings of this global warming debate began here in Washington in August years ago when not many of the office buildings and the ones they had the hearings in were not air conditioned and we had a Ph.D. come out here from Iowa who testified that global warming was an impending disaster, and the Members of Congress were sitting in a hearing room with temperatures approaching 100 degrees and humidity approaching 100 degrees, and as the sweat dripped off them, it was not hard to convince them global warming was a problem. We have one of those scientists who advocated it was an impending ice age in 1970.

He cited his scientific ability to predict to us that we should figure out a way to gird our loins and get ready for the next ice age. That was 1970. So some of us girded our loins, and some of us just went to work, and we went on and realized that God runs this planet, not man. In his time he will let us know and we will do what we need to adapt. And in 1970 the impending ice age didn't come. The idea that it was going to be here went.

And so here we are in 2008. And guess what, Mr. Speaker, that scientist that was a part of the Time magazine prediction that we had an impending ice age is today a scientist that says you can't avoid it, we have an impending global warming period of time, and it is going to happen and here is what you need to do, shut down your economy and greenhouse gas emissions, don't produce energy, and somehow or another we will help avoid, dodge this bullet which is the idea that the Earth could be a couple of degrees warmer. Some of the ice could melt and the sea level could go up a couple of a tenths of a foot or so.

Mr. Speaker, when I asked the USGS people what is sea level, well, they have an elevation that they pegged by satellite, but they couldn't really peg sea level because it goes up and down. It is awful hard to catch. The tides go in and out. Wind stacks water. And if you go to New Orleans, and I asked them what is going up and what is going down here, and what is settling and what is swelling up, they don't know. They don't know what the elevations are in New Orleans, Mr. Speaker, and yet we have scientists telling us that sea level is going to rise by a certain amount and that is going to start to swamp the coast land areas, but we don't know what sea level is.

So we do have an energy situation in America, and the energy situation is this: $4 gas; $4 gas. And the people in my district are buying gas. And they are paying the price, and they are paying 18.4 cents a gallon Federal, and they are paying more than that for State gas tax. They look and they expect that all of that money is going to go to road construction and road maintenance to make sure that they have a good transportation route. That's why they pay that gas tax.

So you are at 42-point-something cents a gallon in my State, but I can tell you for sure 18.4 cents of that is Federal gas tax dollars, my constituents believe, Mr. Speaker, that we are converting all of those dollars in that gas tax into road construction and road maintenance, making sure that they have a good transportation route.

Users fees, drive on the road, pay the tax. All right. We're good with that. We're user people, and we like user fees, and we know it takes money to run the government. There's nothing more appropriate than a user fee, a per gallon gas tax.

The problem, Mr. Speaker, is that most of the money that my constituents, and, in fact, all constituents in America, the Americans that buy the gas and pay the gas tax, most of the money that they spend does not go towards road construction or road maintenance. No, Mr. Speaker, it gets diverted off on these other things, like, for example, 3 percent of that 18.4 cents goes to trails, to build bike trails. So apparently we don't have bicycles riding down the highway.

Now I kind of like it that the bikes are out there riding doing their thing. But I'm not so sure that's that a good idea to tax the people that drive cars so the folks that ride bikes have a place to ride them.

Second thing is, it takes 28 percent of that 18.4 cents of gas tax, 28 percent to meet the environmental and the archaeological requirements in order to build new roads and maintain the ones we have: 28 percent.

And, Mr. Speaker, it takes another 17 percent to subsidize the mass transit in the United States. And so, right there, Mr. Speaker, is the answer to the question that I've asked many times, and that is, how is it that the constituents of Speaker Pelosi, of the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Charlie Rangel, of the chairman of the Finance Committee, Mr. Barney Frank, how is it that their constituents let them off the hook? Aren't they angry that they're driving up the cost of gas? Don't they get mad when they have to pay $4 for gas?

How is it that somebody in San Francisco or New York or Boston or Washington, DC, for that matter, can have the patience to spend $4 for gas and not hold their Congressman or their Congresswoman accountable if they're the ones that are pushing up the price?

Well, now, here's a piece of the answer, Mr. Speaker, and that's this. Of the 18.4 cents of Federal gas tax dollars, 17 percent of that goes into mass transit funding. Seventeen percent. That means that if you pull into the gas station in Iowa, and you squeeze the nozzle and you pump a gallon of gas into your car, and that's all you can afford, you only have 4 bucks. You're going to pay 18.4 cents in tax for Federal, 20 some percent State. Of the 18.4 cents in gas tax that you pay, 17 percent of that money goes to fund the mass transit.

So, if you're riding the cable car in San Francisco, you get a cheap ticket because it's funded by the folks in my district and across America that are buying gas.

And if you jump on the El in Chicago you get a cheap ticket because it's funded by the folks in my district and across America that are buying gas.

If you jump on the subway in Charlie Rangel's district in New York and you ride it, you get a cheap ticket because that's subsidized by the people all across America that are buying gas.

And if you go into Barney Frank's district and you jump on, I don't know what they call it, the subway, the Big Dig, the major multibillion-dollar boondoggle and you buy a ticket to ride along on that thing, you get a cheap ticket because it's subsidized by

the folks all across America that are paying 4 bucks for gas.

And, Mr. Speaker, if you go out here outside this Capitol building and you walk a little block over and a block down and you get into the Metro on South Capitol, and you ride over to Falls Church, Virginia, that's going to cost you about a buck and a quarter, and that buck and a quarter is a cheap ticket that's subsidized by all the folks across America that are paying 4 bucks for gas.

The constituents of those Members of Congress that are driving up the cost of energy, the regal Speaker Pelosi, the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel, the Chairman of the Finance Committee, Mr. Frank, all of them, their constituents are riding to work, going into town, riding around on mass transit that is 17 percent of the Federal gas tax dollar, that's subsidized by the people that are buying gas.

Why aren't they angry? They don't care, Mr. Speaker. They don't care because they got a buck and a quarter from South Capitol to Falls Church. They've got a cheap ticket, a cheap ticket that's subsidized by the people that are paying for expensive gas. And that's why they're not feeling the pressure.

But I can tell you, even though my constituents are utterly polite and respectful about all this, I can feel the pressure because I'm one of them. It cost me $41.42 to fill up my tank the other day at $3.85 a gallon.

So here, Mr. Speaker, is the solution. This, Mr. Speaker, is the energy pie chart. Now, this might seem like it's very simple, and actually it is, although, to approach this concept seems to be a little complicated.

Energy production in the United States of America, for 2007, well, I'll take the position, Mr. Speaker, that it's about all the energy. It's all interrelated, whether it's nuclear or hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, motor gasoline, diesel, other petroleum, natural gas, coal, whatever it might be, if all of the energy in the United States is interrelated, and if you raise the cost of one form of energy, it's going to affect the cost of the other kinds of energy. And consequently, and correspondingly, if you drive the price down of one kind of energy, you'll lower the price of all kinds of energy because it's all interrelated.

So I've taken the trouble to build this chart. And I can't tell you how difficult it actually was. It should have been a simple no-brainer. It's not. But here's the energy pie chart. We produced 72.1 quadrillion Btus of energy in the United States last year. That's 72 followed by, I think, 15 zeros. Three, six, 9, 12, 15. 72 quadrillion Btus. It's more important, I think, to think of it in terms of the proportionality of it.

This is all the energy that we produced in America. Now, the percentages are on here. 27 percent was natural gas, 32\1/2\ percent was coal, nuclear was almost 12 percent, hydroelectric 3.4, other versions, geothermal, wind, solar, fuel ethanol is a little smaller, a lot smaller than you would think. It's three-quarters of a percent of the overall production in America. Biodiesel, one one-hundredth of a percent. Biomass, 4 percent. That could be the people burning wood and the methane, et cetera, that comes out of there. Gas was only 8.29 percent of our overall production.

The list goes on. You can see it here, Mr. Speaker. Now, that's energy production.

What I've done is, Mr. Speaker, taken this pie chart of the energy pie, I'll call it, and I cut this out so that I could put it on top of the energy production, or the energy consumption in America, so you can see how this works in just a moment.

All right. This, Mr. Speaker, is the energy consumption chart in America. And the outside circle, and I'll kind of line them up here a little bit; the outside circle is the energy that we consumed. Actually, I think I might be able to do it this way.

This is all, Mr. Speaker, the energy that we consumed in America last year. Energy consumption, United States, 2007, 101.4 quadrillion Btus. Number down here, 101, comma and the equivalent of 15 zeros out.

Now, we're dealing with 72 quadrillion there, 101 there. So let's just think, Mr. Speaker, in terms of we produced 72 percent of the energy that we consumed in 2007. And this is a picture of the consumption, this round spot here is a picture of the production. This circle is smaller than this circle. That's kind of like Energy 101, probably the first time that that idea has arrived on the floor the Congress, Mr. Speaker.

And so you look at the percentages of the overall consumption, and you see natural gas is 23 percent, and we produce 27\1/2\ percent of all the natural gas that we consume, but it's 23 percent of the overall Btu picture here.

Coal, 22 percent, nuclear, 8.29 percent, hydroelectric, 2.4, smaller pieces of energy here, including ethanol, biodiesel, wind, .31 percent. Not very much. We're working on this.

By the way, I do represent the number 1 renewable energy producing congressional district in America, and so we're not without knowledge on this subject matter.

Gas, 17.44 percent of the overall Btu consumption in America. And here in the red we have the diesel fuel and heating oil at 8.84 percent, kerosene jet fuel here, 3.3 percent and other kinds of petroleum, asphalt and that kind of thing, almost 10 percent.

So, what do we need to do, Mr. Speaker?

Well, here's a way to approach this thing from my view. The small circle is energy production. The big circle is energy consumption. And so you don't have to be a Harvard M.B.A. or, let me say, a rocket surgeon, to be able to calculate this, Mr. Speaker. The inside circle, which is energy production, needs to grow to the size of the outside circle, which is energy consumption.

Yes, we could maybe add another piece to this energy production pie called energy conservation that will help us grow the size of this inner circle to get it to be the size of the outer circle. But however we do this, we're producing about a little more than 72 percent of the energy that we're consuming. And so we can stand here on the floor of Congress, until all Hades freezes over and talk about this piece of energy and that piece of energy, and somebody's wrong because they want to drill ANWR and somebody else is wrong because they don't want to drill the Outer Continental Shelf; somebody else is wrong because they think ethanol is a good idea, or biodiesel's a good idea, or they could even make the ridiculous argument that somebody's wrong because they think that we ought to dramatically expand our nuclear.

And, Mr. Speaker, we should dramatically expand our nuclear production of electricity. That is the single most effective thing we can do, cut down on the emissions of greenhouse gases, and replace the consumption of other energies and allow those other energies to be used for other purposes. We can produce a lot of energy with nuclear.

But in the end, it's this. I'll go right around the circle. Natural gas, drill the Outer Continental Shelf, drill the non national park public lands, open up the natural gas production in America, the place where we have enough natural gas to heat every home in America for the next 150 years. Get the slice of the pie in production as big as the slice of the pie in consumption on natural gas.

We go over here to coal. Why in the world can't we produce and burn more coal to add to the overall size of the energy pie? Yes, we can. And we should do that, and we should do that until it's no longer cost effective as competing against these other signs, other components of energy.

Nuclear. I talked about the nuclear. Here's the overall percentage of our energy production in nuclear, which happens to be 11.66 percent. But it needs to be a bigger piece of our energy consumption, and we can broaden that out.

You can see how these pieces of the pie come out to the edge of the circle and they get wider. We do that with ethanol, we do it with biodiesel, we do it with wind, we do it with biomass.

We can produce more gasoline, Mr. Speaker, and we can produce more diesel fuel and more jet fuel and we can produce more natural gas. There is no component in this energy pie that we cannot produce more of. And if we grow the size of the energy production pie to meet or exceed the size of the energy consumption pie, we have then solved the problem of energy dependence on Middle Eastern oil, on foreign energy.

Mr. Speaker, we can do this. We should do this. We must do this. And any idea that says that we should strike off of our list of options any component, and you will hear almost every source of energy vetoed and opposed by Members of the other side of the aisle. Some will stand up and say, no more nuclear. We will not do any more nuclear plants.

Some will say, can't drill in ANWR because 36, 38 years ago, somebody said, well, we're not going to ever drill ANWR. That's our deal.

And somebody else will say we can't drill the Outer Continental Shelf because people sit on the beach in Florida will figure out that there must be a drill rig out there 199 miles away.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you, I talked to three children in Lineville today. They're down on the border with Missouri and Iowa.

And if they stand with their back to Missouri and they look north, it's 200 miles to the Minnesota border. And for them to say, I can't have a drill rig up there on the Minnesota line because it offends my idea of sightseeing with my back to Missouri 200 miles from there is as ridiculous as the people on the beach in Florida saying you can't have a drill rig 200 miles offshore.

No, Mr. Speaker. There is a reason, and more like an excuse. And my father taught me a little bit about that. He said there's a difference between reasons and excuses. There are all kinds of excuses for not developing energy. I can't find a single reason, Mr. Speaker.

Unless you like $4 gas, unless you like $5 gas, and unless you like expensive energy, expensive energy shuts down our economy. You shut down our economy, it uses less energy; if it uses less energy, it emits less greenhouse gas; if you emits less greenhouse gas, somehow or another in this fantasyland world where you're out there in Pa-la-la- losi land, you're going to save the planet if you shut down the economy is the only rationale that's there. It's weak and it's unfounded, Mr. Speaker; and we've got to open this energy for the American people.

And with that, I thank you for your indulgence.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, Specialist Kendall Frederick was a 21-year-old U.S. Army soldier serving in Iraq who dreamed of becoming an American citizen. He was born in Trinidad and came to this country when he was 15 years old. Specialist Frederick joined ROTC while in high school--and I would point out there are increasing numbers of high schools that have denied ROTC presence on their campus. Not the case for Specialist Frederick and we are thankful.

He joined the Army after he graduated. On October 19, 2005, he was tragically killed by a roadside bomb while traveling in a convoy to a base. He was granted U.S. citizenship posthumously, but he never knew he was an American citizen. Tragically, the very reason that he was in that convoy that day was to get fingerprinted in order to achieve his dream.

We know that Kendell Frederick wanted to be an American citizen but bureaucracy stood in his way. He had been trying to become an American citizen for over a year, Mr. Speaker, having started the process while he was in training.

His mother and his sergeant in Iraq tried to help him, but they didn't know the rules. His efforts to become a citizen were thwarted by bureaucratic misinformation and other obstacles.

While he was fighting for our country in Iraq, he was told that he had to have his fingerprints retaken in Maryland. When his mother called 1-800-IMMIGRATION, it's a USCIS unit, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services hotline for immigration assistance, and tried to explain that he was fighting in a war and was, I should say, tied up at the time, as John McCain might say, he could not come home to Baltimore to be fingerprinted so she was told that there was nothing they could do.

This is wrong and this is intolerable that our soldiers are unable to get correct information, Mr. Speaker. They should be given every possible assistance in applying for citizenship.

Last year, the House passed H.R. 2884 which provides that a soldier who submits a naturalization application within 24 months of enlistment can have that application processed using the fingerprints that were taken at the time of his enlistment. I supported that bill then which was designed to and does honor Specialist Frederick and all of our lawful permanent resident servicemembers.

Today we're considering S. 2516 which is a bill the Senate passed that makes a few technical changes to H.R. 2884. I urge my colleagues to support this bill. It has taken us some time to get this resolved. I trust it will be resolved today in this House, Mr. Speaker, and done so with great gratitude from this Congress and the United States people to Specialist Kendell Frederick and to all of those who have given their lives and parts of their lives and some their limbs for the freedom of this great country.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, the investor visa program is designed to attract entrepreneurial talent and capital to the United States and to create American jobs. Under this program, permanent resident visas are available each year to aliens who establish a new business in the United States and invest between $500,000 and $1 million in the business and eventually create at least 10 full-time jobs for American workers.

Once the Department of Homeland Security approves an alien business plan, the alien receives conditional permanent residence status. Two years later, the Department of Homeland Security determines whether the above requirements have, in fact, been met. If they have, the alien receives permanent residence.

To further encourage economic development, back in 1993, Congress created a temporary pilot program that set aside 3,000 investor visas each year for aliens who invested at least $500,000 in designated regional centers.

A regional center is any economic unit, public or private, which is involved with the promotion of economic growth, including increased export sales or improved regional productivity or job creation or increased domestic or capital investment.

Further, a regional center shall have jurisdiction over a limited geographical area which shall be described in the proposal and consistent with the purpose of concentrating pooled investment in defined economic zones.

The establishment of a regional center may be based on jobs that will be created, directly or indirectly, as a result of such capital investments and the other positive economic effects such capital investments will have.

I should acknowledge, Mr. Speaker, that one of the operating pilot projects is the Iowa New Farm Family Project, under which host communities are inviting farm families to establish modern dairy farms in Iowa.

And according to Iowa State University, which is our resident authority on the subject matter, ``The project has the potential to enrich Iowa communities with young families who establish value-added agricultural businesses . . . and foster healthy economic development . . . The . . . project,'' which is the Iowa New Farm Family Project, Mr. Speaker, ``creates opportunities to increase the population of rural communities, support agriculture, expand value-added agriculture, and maintain Iowa's existing dairy processing industry.'' That's as described by Iowa State University, the Iowa New Farm Family Project.

I want to point out that it has been successful, and it's not just agriculture. It can be urban, too, depending on the region and the zone as it's defined. It has been quite helpful to us in Iowa, and I am grateful for the initiatives that have been taken by Members of this House, Members of the Senate who have not just reached out in support of this legislation but reached out to individuals and helped pave the way through the bureaucratic nightmare to get investors to come into the United States and establish themselves here, where often they will find their economic opportunities have been dried up because of, let's say, capital exchange or regulation.

It happens to be the case with our dutch dairy families that come in, that the regulations have gotten so heavy in The Netherlands that they want to continue their skill, their family tradition.

I note that the individual that stood at this particular microphone ahead of me was the gentleman from California who has a dairy tradition in his family, and you look back through generations. This establishes a generational linkage, Mr. Speaker, that I'm very grateful for, and it comes at a particularly good time, especially in the Midwest where we are a center for renewable energy.

Some 6 or 7 years ago, we had almost no industry to produce ethanol, and yet it began back in about 1978 and it began in my neighborhood in my region. And as the first gallon of ethanol was pumped, it became part of an alternative fuel that had been initiated in the late 1970s, came to fruition about 6 or 7 years ago, and since the time I've come to Congress, it has built such an

industry in my region that we now, the Fifth District of Iowa, are the number one renewable energy producing congressional district in America out of all 435.

Because we have the ethanol industry in Iowa, it has been very helpful to our dairy farmers because a byproduct of corn ethanol is the dried distiller strain, or the mash if it comes in a wet form. And the dairy farms have been able to utilize this, as well as anyone has, and it's added value to all of our feed. It's added value to our rough feed, and it's provided a high quality feed which makes it more attractive for our dairy producers to move into the region.

So, the pressure that we're under today with $4 gas, and, by the way, I just happened to check a receipt here, and I paid $141 for a tank of gas, $141.52 on Saturday, Mr. Speaker. That's enough money to put into a gas tank, and that was at $3.85. The folks on the west coast that are over $4 a gallon feel this.

But what we've done is created a renewable energy industry in the Midwest to help take on some of that burden of providing energy for America. And when we do that, and as of the 2007 crop it hasn't really brought forward the food versus fuel argument. We have produced more corn than ever before, exported more corn than ever before, and still left more corn for domestic consumption than ever before, and we have produced over 9 billion gallons of ethanol. And the byproduct of that 9 billion, you get about a third of the weight of corn out into ethanol. You get a third of the weight of corn that goes into feed for these dairy cows, for example, and about a third of it goes off in CO2. That's the simple breakdown, which I'll go into more detail with perhaps a Special Order that I can get into the details, Mr. Speaker.

But I want to point out that we need these dairy farmers in Iowa. The energy situation is actually a plus because $4 gas holds up the price of corn and holds up the price for ethanol and helps make these systems work, and they're feeding the byproduct in a fashion that's producing more milk in the Midwest. We are still today a net importer of milk in a rural State like Iowa. So we can use some more.

But the regional center program expires in September. The bill will extend the program an additional 5 years. I think this is a very valuable program, and I support the passage of this bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on the point made by the gentlelady from California about this is, of course, not by any means a complete solution to the immigration circumstances, but we agree on some of these points, and on this point of attracting investors to the United States who will invest in businesses that create jobs and create wealth, more importantly create wealth. Without the creation of wealth, there's no money to pay the wages. Companies have to make money. It takes capital of course and it takes labor, it takes ideas, it takes energy, it takes a free market environment and a low regulatory environment. The United States looks better than some of these other countries in the world.

This sends the right message here today that this Congress is interested in opening up and laying out the welcome mat, at least in this specific case, where we ask investors to come into the United States under this EB-5 program.

Then I would add that there are other interests that we at least philosophically agree on, and one of those is highly skilled immigrants coming into the United States and those that are highly educated. When we can do the calculation on what kind of return we get from someone who comes into the United States as a legal immigrant to work here, to invest here, to start and run a business here, and we can see what they will do from a prosperity perspective, what their contribution will be to the economy and to the society, there are many records that help support that.

What we do see, though, Mr. Speaker, is that between 89 and 93 percent of the legal immigration in America isn't based upon merit like this program is.

Most of it is based on familial connections, who are you related to, as opposed to what can you do for the United States of America?

And I have said for years, we need an immigration policy that's designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well- being of the United States of America. Every Nation has to have an immigration policy that is for them. And we held a hearing a year or two ago about the point system that some of the countries have established. Canada has one established; the United kingdom is implementing a point system; New Zealand has one; and I believe Australia is looking at one. Those countries come to mind, where they give certain points for certain categories that demonstrate how a person can contribute to society.

For example, higher education is one category that offers significant merit. The next one is job skills; so that's earning capacity. Another one is language skills, which says how easily they will be able to assimilate in a society. It's not a barrier not having the language, but it's easier to assimilate, of course, if you are fluent in the language of the host country.

And another component is youth. If we bring people in here that are 65 years old, that qualify right away for Social Security and Medicare, of course they're not going to be contributing to our economy. And so I plugged myself into the Canadian equation and found out--I don't think the welcome mat is open for me in Canada because I'm a little over the hill, Mr. Speaker.

Youth is a big, important thing because, if you come in at age 22 with a college education, you can contribute to the economy for, let's just say, 43 years before you retire. So youth is an important criteria, as is education, as is job skills, as are language skills. These things are all things that a wise country should reach out for and craft an immigration policy that will enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America, where 89-93 percent of our legal immigrants are not measured that way; about seven to 11 percent are measured that way.

This is a measure on merit. It is strictly a capital investment, and then meeting the other criteria about establishing the jobs in the business. But I fully support it. It is a bipartisan effort. And it is something that we agree on the theme and the philosophy. I wanted to point out that I believe that we need to set a hard cap on our overall immigration, and then start to shift within those visa allotments so that we get a higher percentage of merit coming in legally into the United States. And of course control the border, stop the bleeding there; none of this matters unless we can do that, Mr. Speaker.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I join my colleagues in strong support of H.R. 5938, the Former Vice President Protection Act of 2008.

The Secret Service must be authorized by law or the President to provide protection. Federal law provides Secret Service protection to sitting Presidents and Vice Presidents, former Presidents, their spouses and children, visiting heads of state, Presidential candidates, and other dignitaries. However, the statute does not include former Vice Presidents.

For the past 30 years, it has been common practice for former Vice Presidents to receive protection on a temporary basis via a joint resolution of Congress or Presidential memorandum. This temporary protection typically continues for 6 months after the Vice President leaves office. When necessary, Congress or the President has extended this protection for an additional 6 months.

H.R. 5938, the Former Vice President Protection Act, makes this routine

practice a permanent authority of the Secret Service. H.R. 5938 amends title 18 to provide statutory protection of former Vice Presidents, their spouses and their children under the age of 16 for the initial 6 months after leaving office. The bill also provides the Secret Service with the authority to reevaluate the need for continued protection in 6-month increments.

The permanent authority granted by H.R. 5938 will improve the Secret Service's ability to prepare for the protection of Vice Presidents after they leave office. Preparation for such security takes time and can often overlap administrations. Permanent authority will allow for the development of long-term protection plans.

The upcoming change of administrations, not to mention the current threat level, makes permanent statutory authority for the Secret Service to provide such protections even more timely.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, the Congressional Review Act provides Congress with a vital tool to oversee how agencies exercise their legislative authority Congress delegates to them.

The act has a great deal of promise, but unfortunately is used too little. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have worked long, hard, and in a bipartisan fashion to help identify ways in which we can prompt its better use. Today, we begin the process of improving the act with one of those measures. H.R. 5593 streamlines the act's processing requirements, lightening the burden on the House Parliamentarian's office.

This is a measure first proposed in the 106th Congress by our much loved, revered, and respected former chairman, the late Henry Hyde. It had bipartisan support then as it does today, Mr. Speaker.

I applaud the House's consideration of this bill, and I hope that its swift enactment is but the first of key improvements we can make so that the act is both more efficient and more effective.

I urge its adoption.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this resolution honoring Bo Diddley, the great guitar player and rock and roll musician.

He was born Ellas Otha Bates, but he came to be known by the nickname Bo Diddley. It came to be an ironic nickname indeed, and refers to ``nothing at all,'' as in, ``he ain't bo diddly,'' or in my neighborhood, ``you don't know bo diddly.''

Well, far from becoming nothing at all, Bo Diddley started playing in Chicago's South Side and rose to become one of the greatest rock and roll musicians of all time. His song ``Bo Diddley'' became a number one rhythm and blues hit as far back as 1955. Through songs such as ``Who Do You Love,'' he established the now famous Bo Diddley beat, a rumba like sound that mimics the sounds made by street musicians who would pat beats to songs by slapping their arms, legs, chest and cheeks.

Bo Diddley headlined above the Rolling Stones. He appeared with the Clash and the Grateful Dead and wrote many crossover hits that appealed to music lovers everywhere. And he was one of the first major male musicians to include a woman in his band.

He was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. In 1996, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, and in 1998 from the Grammy

Awards. Rolling Stone magazine listed him at Number 20 on their list of the Greatest Artists of All Time.

When Bo Diddley passed away on June 2 at the age of 79, he was surrounded by his friends and family, who sang the gospel song ``Walk Around Heaven.''

Mr. Speaker, I never knew Bo Diddley, but I know he touched my life and that of all of us. Walk around heaven, indeed, Bo Diddley.

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