Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress, as always, and I appreciate this privilege. There are a series of subjects that come to mind that I think it is important for you to consider and for the Members and for those onlookers that are here to consider as well.

One of those issues has been front and center in my mind and in my legislative career as we watch these presidential debates that go on on both sides of the aisle, from the Democrat and the Republican side, and as we watch the caucus and primary season flow across the country, and as America waits with bated breath to see how this emerges, as far as who will be the nominees on either side for the Democrats and the Republicans.

A series of issues that come to mind that stand out to me that I would ask you, Mr. Speaker, to consider as you and as others take a look at where they might come down on their particular choice of nominees and the things that are important here in the United States of America, and I would submit this approach, and that is that there are a whole series of issues that are important to us and we talk about them and we debate them constantly. But we often overlook the necessity to prioritize those issues.

I will say there are roughly about 10 big issues out there that get discussed on the parts of Republicans and Democrats as we turn the focus of America towards who will be the next leader of the free world, the next commander-in-chief of the strongest nation in the world, the unchallenged superpower in the world.

Those issues include items such as Social Security reform and health care reform and tax reform, fiscal responsibility. The social programs, education for example, would be another one. How strong should our military be? How do we fight our enemies globally. How to do we get to the point where we can declare one day in this global war on terror against Islamic jihadists? And how do we secure our borders and how do we reestablish the, I will call it the sanctity of this Nation, the sovereignty of America? How do we reestablish that? How do we reestablish the rule of law in this country when we have watched the rule of law and the enforcement of our laws decline over the last 20 years, a little bit more than 20 years, I will say since the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed and defined as amnesty?

What about the appointments that will be made to the Supreme Court but by the next president of the United States? As most of the pundits have analyzed, it looks like it will be perhaps two appointments to the Supreme Court that will come up in the next term. Those two appointments that are anticipated will change the balance in the court and perhaps have more impact on the destiny of America, and I will say will be the legacy of the next President. There will be big questions such as will Rowe versus Wade be overturned? Will the States be then in a position where they can determine their policy on protecting innocent, unborn human life?

The issue of marriage is coming forward here in this Nation. It is under assault across this country. It happens to be a bellwether issue within the State of Iowa. Judge Robert Hansen overturned Iowa's Defense of Marriage Act. In that decision, he just unilaterally erased the will of the Iowa people and replaced it with his own. That case is going before the Supreme Court. That will be determined.

If the decision of Judge Hansen is upheld, Iowa then becomes the Mecca for same-sex marriage, because there is not a residency requirement, which means then that weekend packages from Las Vegas or San Francisco traveling to Iowa for same sex couples to get married, and then they will go back to their home States to file suit.

These are big issues, Mr. Speaker, the issue of innocent human life, the issue of marriage, the institution, which goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, and it is transcended and that sacrament of marriage has been preserved since before original sin and it survived the great flood, but it is under assault now from judicial activists. Those, life and marriage, will likely be determined by the next two appointments to the Supreme Court.

And will we have a President that understands that the Constitution means what it says and it means what it was understood to mean, the text of the Constitution means what it was understood to mean when it was ratified by our forebearers, and that each amendment means what it was understood to mean when it was ratified? It is not a living, breathing document, not a changing document, but a document that is a guarantee to the people here in the United States. The next President will make those decisions.

Of all the issues that I have laid out here, including our border security and our national security, which many times are wrapped up into one, and the refurbishment of the rule of law, which I believe is the central pillar of American exceptionalism, all of that is up for grabs in the presidential race that is being played out across America State By State. The world watches. The world watches because it affects them, because we will be electing the next leader in the free world.

Of all of these issues that I have laid out, Mr. Speaker, I would ask you to put those issues down into two different columns. I would label those two columns. On the one side I would label it the column called quality of life issues.

The quality of life issues are those issues that probably don't turn the destiny of America. They will change our quality of life and raise our standard of living perhaps and give us a little better security, but if we get them wrong, we can go back and try them again.

One of those issues that I would put in the quality of life side of thing would be the health care issue. That is about all they talk about over on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, except for change, change, change, change, and that may be what is in your pocket, Mr. Speaker. But when you don't say what you would change to, you are just going to change from what we are to something else under the presumption that doing something different, even if it is wrong, is better than what we are doing now, isn't good enough for the American people.

The American people are going to want to know what you would change from and what you would change to, what you would make different and why and what is the rationale. That will be a requirement moving into the general election. It may not be a requirement in the primary election, that change.

But the issues in the two categories, the one category which is quality of life issues, and I put health care in there. We can do some things with health care, and I think we should. And if we get some of those wrong, we can back up and we can try again and try to get it right. In fact, we have been doing that for some time, and I expect we will do that for some time. Health care belongs in the quality of life side, not in the destiny side, because it probably doesn't change the destiny of America, but it something that has to do with our quality of life. It is important.

It is important like Social Security reform is also important, Mr. Speaker. And we are here now with a bankrupt Social Security program. It has been a couple of years since I have checked the numbers, but the Social Security trust fund, the last time I checked it was $1.74 trillion. That is how much money this Congress owes the trust fund.

The trust fund is in little bonds in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in filing cabinets. I have a copy of one. It says $3.54 billion on this little piece of paper. It is an IOU from the government written to the government. But we haven't prepared to pay the Social Security liability that accrues starting as we go into the red, the deficit spending in 2016 or 2017, and then by 2042, all of the surplus is spent and now we are digging ourselves an even deeper hole.

But it happens to us in 2016 and 2017, because already the Social Security trust fund couldn't be trusted. That money has all been spent, and we have simply written ourselves an IOU and we have decided to take the paper out of this pocket, write ourselves an IOU of $1.74 trillion and take it and put it over in this pocket, because there is nothing in this trust fund.

It is important that we address the reform of Social Security, but if we don't do it this year or next year or 4 years from now, it gets harder and harder, but it probably doesn't change the destiny of America. So I put that over also in the quality of life side along with health care.

Then we come to tax reform. I am listening as my colleagues debate this around in committee and on the floor, Mr. Speaker, about what we will do about this impending recession. Well, the first question is, are we in a recession? And I can't quite hear somebody say yes, we are.

Most of the time we don't know we are in one until we look back and realize that we were, Mr. Speaker. So I am not going to submit that we are in a recession today. I would submit though that we are constantly on our way into one. We are either on our way to a boom or on our way to a bust or some minimized version of either.

So, yes, we are likely, since we have had this long, long period of unprecedented growth here in America, chances are we are going to have to make some corrections. And this economy is not an economy, and no free market economy has ever been, the kind where you just simply said we are going to grow this economy out, let's just say 3.5 percent a year, and we will lay the ruler on the graph, lift it up to a 3.5 percent growth and strike ourselves a line out there and say we are going to be on target every single day. It doesn't work that way, Mr. Speaker.

The way it works is that you have little periods of growth and little periods of decline, and as the graph ratchets its way up, if you look at it in more of an illuminated perspective, it looks more like a sawtooth, where it goes up and down and up and down. But all the while while that is happening, our gross domestic product is increasing, people are earning more money, our capital base is growing, and this economy that now sits here, as it has in the past year, the dollar went out past historical limits a whole series of numbers of times, it has grown exponentially from where it was 20 years ago. We have that much more assets to work with, an economy that is growing.

But if this category of our economic growth and our tax reform, if we get it wrong, we can back up and try again. We have been backing up and trying it again for over 200 years here in America.

So I will submit that tax reform also belongs over here in the category of quality of life issues, issues that are important to us, issues that have to do with whether we will be in a boom or whether we will be in a decline, and how much prosperity might be there and how we provide a tax program that takes the burden off of sectors of the economy so that they can earn, save and invest and expect a return off their investment. But I don't think the tax reform issue is a destiny issue. I think it is a quality of life issue.

While I am on that subject, Mr. Speaker, I want to address this issue that is before this Congress about whether there is going to be some kind of a check, a payout to everybody to stimulate the economy. Will we send somebody a rebate on their taxes and give everybody $200 of walking around money so they can go out in the streets and buy some Gucci bags and go to the massage parlor, like what happened with some checks that went to the southern part of the United States not that long ago? Is that a way to get us out of that economy?

When I think about that, I back up to 1992, Mr. Speaker, when Bill Clinton was elected President. He came into this city, was inaugurated in January of 1993, and immediately he said to this Congress, I need a $30 billion economic incentive plan, because the recession that had been kind of illustrated and probably was part of the imagination of the political campaign, I will argue it didn't really exist, but in order to get rid of it, he had to have this creation of this recession, President Clinton needed an economic incentive plan.

So he asked this Congress to appropriate $30 billion to go into make- work projects, make-work projects that we might see today as AmeriCorps. In fact, I think it actually came out of that inspiration. But the idea was to borrow $30 billion and put it into the hands of Americans and have that money be spent out into the streets of America, and then now this recession that he thought we were in would be solved because money would be spent into the economy and stimulate the economy.

Well, the $30 billion economic incentive package that was requested by President Clinton in the first month of his first term in office in 1993, was debated in this Congress from $30 billion down to $17 billion, and finally they concluded that $17 billion wasn't enough to make any kind of a difference and they just kind of dropped it.

Well, now we are up to about, one request I have heard was $300 billion to put into the hands of people, borrowed money so it could be spent to stimulate the economy. Other arguments are that we should cut corporate income tax and capital gains and a few other things, and I do support those changes.

But what needs to happen, Mr. Speaker, is the Bush tax cuts need it to be made permanent. The two tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 saved us from I believe a severe recession and perhaps a depression because there was enough vision in the eyes and in the mind of President Bush that we were under assault from a lot of ways. One was al Qaeda. The financial center had been attacked, and the things that had been designed to drive us down needed to be stimulated back the other way.

So we did those tax cuts in 2001. We did them in 2003. And this economy has boomed. Sometime last April, this government collected more money in a single day than had ever been collected before, stimulated by tax cuts.

And today we are hanging in the balance. The whole series of tax cuts winds down in 2010 and disappear and expire because they were set up to sunset, and politically that was the way that they were sold. And, of course, if those tax cuts sunset, they become tax increases; and those tax increases will be tax increases on capital gains, there will be a personal and corporate income tax. There will be tax increases on the estate tax, the death tax. And all of those things are in the way they prevent people from planning, they take away their confidence in this economy. And when you take away confidence in an economy, the result is people don't invest, they don't expand, they don't create jobs. And if you are not creating jobs and if you are not able to increase wages and benefits, then the money that is in people's pockets diminishes and they spend less money and this economy collapses eventually.

Extending the Bush tax cuts and making them permanent would be the single most effective thing we could do to cause this economy to turn around the other way and head back up again for another long period of economic growth. The single most important thing this Congress has a chance to do, and I believe that as history looks back on this time they will say, you had your chance, this was it. And I submit, Mr. Speaker, we should take that chance.

But back to this subject at hand of these quality of life issues. Tax reform is quality of life, because the dynamics in the economy are tied to it. Health

care is quality of life, because the very care that we get that gives us this robust health that we have enjoyed comes from the policies we put in place there and the incentives we put in place, and a lot of it is getting the regulations out of the way. And reforming Social Security is another quality of life issue. Those issues over on that side, quality of life, let's weigh them for the importance that they are.

But the decision that we are making in this Presidential race isn't a decision necessarily about what the quality of life will be for the Americans that live in the next 4 years, the first 4 years of the next term, or the next 8 years for that matter. This decision is far more important than our quality of life that will take place between 2009 and perhaps as late as 2017.

No, Mr. Speaker, the decision the American people need to make is a destiny decision. We need to be making a decision in this country about who will be the best leader in the free world that moves us forward, that lays the foundation down on the tracks so that the next generations will have that foundation to build on so that they can achieve the American Dream and they can aspire to leaving the world a better place than it was when they came, as we have had that responsibility handed to us from our fathers and our forefathers.

But I want to make an argument here, Mr. Speaker, about how important this is, in a sense of this country that we are that is America.

First of all, the Founders came here to the United States of America and they had a vision. That vision first was that our rights come from God. They don't come from humanity. They are not endowed upon us by a king or a foreign prince and potentate. They are not endowed upon us by a dictator. Our rights come directly from God. And they come directly to the people. And then the people hand that responsibility over to government to govern them, but always under the will of the people and always with the rights that are guaranteed to the people. And if this foundation of this great Nation, those values that we hold dear are diminished, if they are eroded, if we don't build upon that foundation, the next generation doesn't have a good foundation to build upon.

The culture that is created from the Constitution and from our religious values and our values of family and faith and freedom and free market economy and property rights, if this culture that is the culture of the United States of America that has within it the vitality of millions of immigrants that came here legally, that have injected their vitality into this overall American culture with an appreciation for the host country that is here and an obligation that they happily provide, which is to give back to this country, the country that so gladly welcomed them.

This vitality that is this Nation, this vitality of this culture is what raises up the leaders of today. And the culture of a generation ago was the culture that raised up the leaders of a generation ago, and so on, and so it goes as you look back through the history of America all the way back to before the Revolutionary War. So each generation is built upon the previous generation, and the leaders of each generation are produced and raised up by the culture, by the values of the current time.

And today, the values of the United States of America in their aggregate raise up the leaders that come in here to serve in this United States Congress. The culture of every 435 districts produces the leader that represents each of the 435 districts; and the cultures in the States produces the Senators, two for each of the 50 States that go to serve in the United States Senate. And the values of the congressional districts and the values of the States are the values that, at least presumably, are embodied within the people who are elected to come and serve in this United States Congress, Mr. Speaker.

The culture raises up the leaders, and the leaders reflect the values of their time and their place. And then the decisions that are made by the leaders, and I will take this to the decisions made by the President of the United States, lay the foundation and alter the culture and shift the values and set the principles that shift the culture for the next generation. And if we shift this culture now, the next generation will react to it, will reflect the new values of the new culture that has been changed by the decisions made by the leaders today.

That is why it is so important that we turn our focus to the destiny issues and begin to ask the question, who will best lead this country? Who will best lay the foundation for the decisions that will be made that will affect the formation and the shaping of the values of America which are our culture? Who will make those decisions?

And as I look forward into this, I will argue that those are the destiny decisions, Mr. Speaker, those issues that change the destiny of America. And when the destiny of America is changed, it shifts the culture, and the foundation of the culture will be the foundation that our entire culture grows from, that young people learn about.

Now, this menu of life that I had when I was a young boy in the early 1950s in Iowa, Mr. Speaker, was not quite such a varied menu of life as our young people growing up in America have today. I had a very, very bright black and white list on what was right and what was wrong, and what I could do and what I couldn't do. And it covered a whole gamut of things between telling the truth and working industriously and helping my fellow man and having a strong, faithful Christian background, and having a duty to my father and my mother and later on my wife and my children, and knowing that I needed to teach them in these same values so that they would go out and go to work every day and they would carry the values of our faith and our family and our freedom.

A lot more freedom has been injected into this society, a lot of it through the 1960s, and not just sexual freedom but freedom that has to do with illegal drugs and freedom for a lifestyle that is far more permissive than the lifestyle that was permitted in the environment that I grew up in, Mr. Speaker. Those are cultural changes. Our music reflects it, our literature reflects it, our movies reflect it, and our television reflect the shifts and the differences in our culture, and they reflect the differences in our values.

For example, could one imagine that there would be sitcoms and serial programs on TV that have to do with same-sex marriage or same-sex relationships even 10 years ago, let alone 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And I would say maybe 10 years ago, not much earlier than that could one have conceived of such a thing. That is how far this society has been moved quickly, much of it by the courts, much of it by the liberal media in the movie industry and the television entertainment industry. But the permissiveness is different than the society that I grew up in, and our values have changed.

Now, I am not one of the people who sits over on that side of the aisle and believe that change itself is a goal. I am one who thinks that we should be rooted in our values; we should identify the central pillar and all of the other pieces of the foundation of American exceptionalism, and we should refurbish those pillars of American exceptionalism and we should diminish those things that undermine those pillars of exceptionalism. But the permissiveness that has grown has changed our culture. And because of that, it is reflected here on the floor of Congress, and in such a way that I can go to St. Peter's Square and go to communion with more than one Member of Congress, and then next week come back here and on the floor hear one of those Members of Congress who walked to communion with the new Pope Benedict XVI, a very pro-life faith that we have, and have that Member that went to communion come to the floor and argue that there should be a constitutional right to partial-birth abortion. What a twist and a shape in our civilization and our society.

What that says about the foundation of our culture, that is something that has got to be shifted back, Mr. Speaker. It has got to be shifted back, and it needs to be changed at the Supreme Court level and all the Federal courts all the way down.

When we have law schools in America that teach the Constitution from case law and not from the text of the Constitution; if they presume that the students that come there read the Constitution and understand it, I don't know where they think they got the education. But when they teach that

the case law controls and the text of the Constitution does not control, that is something that has got to have a dramatic shift if we are to have any guarantee. And when I realized that, and I know that we have three or four members, maybe even more, of the Supreme Court that think that the Constitution is this living, breathing document that is there for them to manipulate at their will, and when I think of the prospect of one or two or more justices in the Supreme Court potentially being nominated by a liberal President and confirmed by a United States Senate that believe that the Constitution can mean what a judge wants it to mean, especially if it is an activist decision because of a judge that might conclude a result rather than the text, I think that is wrong, Mr. Speaker, and I think it puts our constitutional guarantees at risk.

We have an issue before the Supreme Court that was just heard the other day on the second amendment, and there was an amicus brief that was offered apparently before the Court and by the White House that the second amendment is an individual constitutional right, but it could be regulated by political subdivisions, by cities or counties or States. And I could argue that if you are going to guarantee my second amendment rights but tell political subdivisions that they don't have to respect that constitutional right, that it is no right at all. And we need judges that understand that. We need appointments to the Supreme Court that understand that this Constitution means what it says, and we need Federal judges appointed all the way down the line with that philosophy.

I dream of the day that, for example, when Justice Roberts went before the United States Senate and he spoke about his beliefs in the Constitution and his understanding of case law, he went through that confirmation. And when he handled that in an exceptional fashion, it was extraordinarily impressive and absolutely worthy of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I thought I detected a tone that was more constitutional in Justice Alito's confirmation hearings, when I recall him speaking more openly about the Constitution meaning what it says, and having less deference to case law and more deference to the text of this Constitution. And I dream of the day that, in order to get confirmed to the Supreme Court or perhaps confirmed at any Federal court level, Mr. Speaker, that an appointee would have to profess belief and conviction in the text of the Constitution rather than the deference to case law that may have been manipulated by liberal judges that have come before them.

Those appointments to the Supreme Court, if we are successful in confirming those judges that believe the Constitution means what it says and that it is not a living, breathing document, if we get appointments and confirmation of those kind of judges, at some point the law schools will have to start teaching the Constitution for what it says, not for what some piece of case law might say about that Constitution. And I think we should be able to drill back to the Constitution and always anchor it in the text of the Constitution. If we get appointments to the Supreme Court that do so, we can transform the guarantees that we have, and we can change the dynamics within all the law schools in America, and we can change the understanding here in the House of Representatives, and we can change the understanding of the Constitution in the United States Senate, and we can go back to those fundamental guarantees. Because after all, Mr. Speaker, if the Constitution doesn't mean what it says it means, if it is there, something that only a judge can determine is in the emanations and the penumbras of the Constitution itself, if that is all it is, then what guarantees do we have at all? Is the Constitution then some archaic document? Or is it a tool to be deployed by activist judges only for them to decide when they will amend the Constitution? Or is it a guarantee to the people of the United States as it was designed to be?

I would submit that if the Constitution were offered to the American people to be ratified with a little caveat there that, well, the judges will be able to rewrite or define it whenever they see fit, it would have never been ratified by the several States and would not be the document that has held together this free country that we are.

Destiny issues, Mr. Speaker. The appointments to the Supreme Court, the next one or two or perhaps more appointments to the Supreme Court, will redirect the destiny of America.

We either go into the abyss of judicial activism, the judicial activism that found a right to privacy that didn't exist, a right to abortion that didn't exist, and a Roe v. Wade decision that was poorly reasoned and an unjust mandate on the American people that has taken us down this path where next week will mark the 35th year of Roe v. Wade. We have already marked the 50 millionth innocent little unborn baby that has been aborted and not given a chance at life.

The solutions to our problems are in the generations that will come after us, and 50 million have been denied this opportunity to breathe this free air in America, creating a sin against this Nation and a hole in our heart and a vacuum that is filled by tens of millions of illegal immigrants that have come across our border. And we can't talk about that openly, Mr. Speaker, because it becomes a reactionary thing.

But we should put the whole formula together. The quality of life issues pale in comparison to the destiny issues, and the destiny of America is wrapped up in Roe v. Wade. Next week when we mark that 35th year, 50 million babies aborted before they had an opportunity to breathe free air and contribute to this society and have been denied the right to life.

Marriage is being attacked from all sides, mostly within the courts because they understand that they cannot win these cases to the legislatures across America, and they can't take their case to the United States Congress.

But it changes the destiny of a country if you destroy marriage. Some will say why am I worried about two people of the same sex getting married and moving next door to me; it doesn't affect my life. It may not affect my life if that were my neighborhood either. And I don't know that I would take a personal objection to that.

But I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that people step back and take a broader look and think about how the culture gets shifted and changed, and think about the menu of life that little kids would have in a society where we would see a court impose same-sex marriage on America. If you can make the argument in court that two men ought to be able to get married and access all the benefits that are saved right now, preserved, protected and promoted for a man and woman joined together in holy matrimony because the State has an interest in promoting marriage because that is a crucible through which we pour all of our values. But if we open that up to a man and a man or a woman and a woman, what standard do we draw the line upon next? What standard do we say it can't be two men and a woman or two women and a man, or three women, or a brother and a sister and a mother? Where do we draw the line?

I recall some testimony before a hearing in the Judiciary Committee a couple of years ago, the now chairman of the Finance Committee said, Well, it would be two consenting adults. Two consenting adults doesn't satisfy a standard here in America. Two consenting adults could be twin brothers, a brother and a sister, a mother and a daughter, a mother and a son, a father and a daughter. Those things would all be rejected and objected to by society's norms today.

But is this about breaking down society's norms? Is it about breaking down our values? Is that really the agenda over here on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker? I will submit it is. The agenda is change, change, change. Change sells at every one of those Presidential rallies across the country because that is the mission of that side of the aisle. Change for what purpose?

I will submit that if I had a magic wand and an infinitely long list, and I could say that Speaker Pelosi and the people whom she works with and those philosophically aligned with her, you can make me a list of all the things on your wish list, and I will assume here in fantasy land that I have a magic wand and I can grant every wish.

So here we are in the middle of January, and you can spend all year long putting that wish list together, Madam Speaker. When it comes midnight, all of the things that you want to change, the full breadth of the imagination of your wish list and all of your ideological colleagues, put that list together and submit the list, and when the ball drops in Times Square to turn us into the new year 2009, at the stroke of midnight, with the help of the magic wand, could grant every wish on the wish list, I would argue that should that happen, and the deal would need to be you get your wish, but now you have to be quiet for the rest of your life. You fill out your wish list, and now you are going to have to be satisfied and live with the results of your request, and maybe even the consequences of your request, but just the results.

If that happened and the wish list were achieved at midnight, December 31, 2008, at the stroke of midnight on the new year of 2009, and the deal was no more complaints, you have to be happy you have finally gotten everything you wanted, now and forever, or even for a decade or a generation, that team that put the list together would stay up the rest of the night not celebrating but looking to see what it was that they forgot to change. What they wanted to tear down of society's values today or what they forgot to change for tomorrow.

There is no anchor. There is no philosophical anchor. There is no philosophical core because the core changes. For me and for my colleagues, we have a philosophical core, Mr. Speaker. This core is rooted in our constitutional values and the values that are laid out by our Founding Fathers and the rights that come from God and the values that are taught through the family that is joined together in holy matrimony. And the ethics of faith and worship and freedom and hard work and the obligation to leave this world a better place than it was when we came, that achievement of the American Dream, that laying out a culture that raises up the leaders for the next generation that will lay a new foundation on top of the old one so that the next generation can build on that and achieve the American Dream, all of that is wrapped up in the value system of the people that I go to conference with, the constituents that come out day after day after day to talk to me, to talk to nearly a multitude of Presidential candidates that went across Iowa for the past year or more.

These values matter. These destiny issues matter. The next two appointments to the Supreme Court matter, and those will be the appointments that will uphold all of our constitutional rights. They will uphold our second amendment rights, for example. And our rights to freedom of speech and religion and assembly. And they will understand the 10th amendment; the responsibility that the power is not designated for the Federal Government, are reserved for the States and the people, respectively. That devolution of power down to the States, that idea called federalism, the States' rights idea need to be preserved and promoted by the next President of the United States. We need to understand basic fundamental principles.

But the destiny of America is going to be tied to our ability to be able to produce leaders that make decisions today that lay the foundation, that shapes the culture that tomorrow raises up tomorrow's leaders who will then lay the next layer on top of that foundation.

And if we get it wrong, if we get a flaw, if we get a rotten piece in the foundation and we have to build upon that, we can't go back and take that section back and reform and reshape and repour it. The destiny issues we are stuck with. They are our decisions and we have to live with them, and that's why it is important.

So as I have spoken about Roe v. Wade and life and marriage and appointments to the Supreme Court and emphasize how important that is and how essential that we have a President who makes those appointments, and when he closes the door of the Oval Office after all of the lobbyists have come and gone and after all of the political supporters and advisor and the chief of staff and all of the people that advise the President, when they are all done weighing in and the door closes on the Oval Office, I want a leader in that office that I know shares my core values, Mr. Speaker. I want a leader in that office that I don't have to wonder about whether he is swayed by someone's special interest or whether he is swayed by some temporary benefit or some trade or some deal or some bargain or something other than the best interests in the long-term good for the United States of America as grounded in our core values and understanding the very principles that this Nation was founded upon and the necessity to adhere to those core principles and move forward and build another layer of a sound foundation.

That's what I want in a leader, Mr. Speaker. And those will be appointments to the Supreme Court that will shape the foundation of our culture and our destiny.

But another component of this, an essential core component of this, as I mentioned earlier, of all of the pillars of American exceptionalism, the pillars of faith and family and freedom and the Declaration and the Constitution and the free-market economy and property rights and the devolution of power from the Federal Government down to the States and the States' rights as separated within the 10th amendment, all of those issues are pillars of American exceptionalism.

And another pillar would be the vitality that comes with legal immigration. We have had the privilege in this country of having, for the most part of our history, a smart immigration policy that attracted people to come into the United States that had a dream. And many of them sold themselves into indentured servitude for perhaps 7 years just to get a boat ride from London to Baltimore, for example, and went to work and worked off their passage because they knew that they could become free and they could then go to work here and build a dream and raise a family.

I look back at my ancestors and what they have done, and most, if not all of them, have participated in that dream. But from every donor culture in civilization, we got the vitality of that culture and civilization.

The people who didn't have a dream, didn't find a way to get on a boat and come to the United States, they sat back where they were. They were content to live within that society and environment that didn't provide the opportunities that were here because they didn't want to take the risk or they didn't have the energy or just didn't share the dream. And I don't say that, Mr. Speaker, to diminish anyone who didn't come to the United States. I say that to identify that we skimmed the vitality off the top of every donor civilization that sent people here across the world. And they came here with an extra vigor and energy and dream, and we found a way to bring them together and assimilate them into a common culture, this greater overall American culture. And when they got tied together, they latched onto that opportunity and got in the harness and went to work. We found a vitality here that had never been created in any society or civilization anywhere in the world. That is often a missed component of American exceptionalism is the vitality that comes from the donor civilizations that sent legal immigrants here to the United States. That is a vitality that I want to preserve and promote and protect.

Another one of the reasons that we have been able to be a successful Nation, because we are a Nation not of men but a Nation of laws, of all of the pillars of American exceptionalism that I have mentioned, the central pillar of American exceptionalism, Mr. Speaker, is the rule of law. If we do not protect and preserve the rule of law, you can only then go back to what kind of political influence you have: who do you have favor with, who can you get to do you a favor, who can you get to set aside a law, and who will be immune to the law.

In this country, justice has always been equal for everyone regardless of their economic or their social status or their ethnicity or their national origin. If you are a member of the human race, you get the same version of justice in America and the same opportunity in America as anybody else. And it has not been about equality of results; it has been about equality of opportunity. Those protected civil rights that are identified in title VII of the Civil

Rights Act are there, and they need to be protected so everyone has an equal opportunity.

And the rule of law gives us that guarantee that we can work within that environment and that rule of law will protect our property rights and let us build, earn, saving and invest. But if we become a society and a civilization that has disregarded the rule of law and perhaps created contempt for the rule of law, I believe that central pillar of American exceptionalism would have been removed from our society or diminished or eroded to the point that it no longer has the credibility that it has, let me say that it had, 20 years ago.

I believe that pillar called the rule of law needs to be refurbished and restrengthened because it is essential for America to continue to be an exceptional Nation. For us to continue to be a leader in the free world, the leader in the free world, we simply must preserve and protect and refurbish the rule of law.

So as I look to the 1986 amnesty bill that was signed by Ronald Reagan, defined as amnesty, and if you lay the components of that bill down alongside the components of either one of the two Senate versions of the comprehensive immigration reform bill, the McCain-Kennedy bill, that's probably the one that most often defines it, the components of those bills, when you do a side-by-side comparison match up almost identically. The 1986 amnesty bill, the McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration reform bill match up side by side, piece by piece almost all the way down.

President Reagan called it amnesty. I remember the debate in New Hampshire the other night where it was alleged that anybody that says that anyone who supports comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate, or that anyone who calls comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate amnesty is a liar. That came out in the debate.

Mr. Speaker, that offends me, because I know what amnesty is and the American people know what amnesty is. And either of the two versions that were presented in the United States Senate last year was amnesty. And I don't know how anyone can argue otherwise, except to go back to the President's speech in about January 6 of 2004; that was the first aggressive effort to roll out comprehensive immigration reform. That speech attempted to redefine amnesty, and there's been an attempt on the part of the administration and the open borders crowd to redefine amnesty for the last 4 years.

You just can't trump Noah Webster, Mr. Speaker. People in America know what amnesty is. And if you wanted comprehensive immigration reform, which I'll call comprehensive amnesty, then you should have just stepped up to it and said, yes, we're for amnesty, and we're going to define for you what amnesty is, too, and we're going to also argue that we have to grant amnesty, or otherwise we can't accomplish the goals that we'd like to see with immigration reform.

If they would have made that argument, Mr. Speaker, and I don't make that argument, but if they had, their argument would have had a lot more credibility. But instead, the proponents of comprehensive immigration reform sought to redefine the term amnesty, and they got bogged down in trying to tell the American people that the word we understood to mean amnesty meant something different.

They argued that, well, it's not amnesty if somebody has to pay a fine. It's not amnesty if you make people learn English. It's not amnesty if you require them to pay their back taxes or pay their bills or be an honest citizen and not get locked up and be convicted of a felony.

Mr. Speaker, they argue that if you required all of those things, it wasn't amnesty. And so of all of those things that I've mentioned, those are required of people that would come here legally to become an American citizen, including pay the fee in order to be naturalized.

By the time you add up the dollars that are required to come into the United States legally and achieve a lawful permanent resident status and the fees for a green card, and the fees to be naturalized as a citizen, you're pretty close to the dollar figure that they first proposed would be necessary in order, if you're here illegally, to buy your way into legality. It's lawful permanent residence, a green card, naturalization, citizenship of the United States for sale for paying a fee that they called a fine that they said that they are going to absolve the issue of amnesty.

Now, the American people understand this, that when you commit a crime in America, there's a penalty for that that's listed in the penal code, whether it's a Federal law or whether it's a State law. And the penalty that's listed needs to be the one that's applied to the perpetrator upon conviction.

You can't go rob a bank and be looking at life in prison for robbing a bank, and after you rob the bank, they come along and change the law and say, well, now the penalty is only going to be a year in prison rather than life in prison. If you did that for a whole class of people, that would be amnesty. If you said to the bank robbers, you're going to have to pay a fine now instead of being locked up in prison for 10 or 20 years or life, and you did that to a whole class of people, that's amnesty.

The distinction for amnesty generally comes into, are you going to waive the penalty or reduce the penalty for a class of people for a crime they've already committed under a different penalty clause, a different penalty phase? If you do that, you're granting amnesty, Mr. Speaker.

And what is amnesty? I've defined this many times. It's many times in the Congressional Record. It's gone through the House Judiciary Committee. To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. Pardon and reward. Pretty simple concept.

If people are here in the United States illegally, and the Senate gets their way, well, they actually voted it down over there, so some in the Senate who at least were aggressive enough to advance this got their way, then they would have pardoned the immigration lawbreakers en masse, by the tens of millions.

While I'm on that subject, you know, we've been saying here in this Congress for at least 5 years, there are 12 million illegals in America. Twelve million. It's interesting to me that last year we stopped 1,188,000 illegal border crossers on the southern border; that's the Border Patrol doing their job. And most of them self- deported, volunteered to go back to their home country. Most of them went across the line to the south to their home country; about two- thirds of them did. So we've stopped 1,188,000.

And according to testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the Border Patrol says they stop a fourth to a third of those who try. So that means, and you do the math, about 4 million tried to go across the southern border. Most of them made it. Two out of every three, or three out of every four made it. You kind of do the math on that, 4 million border crossing attempts, and that works out to be about 11,000 a night trying to get across our southern border, most of them making it, the significant majority of them making it across the border, 11,000.

Now, what does that mean? Four million in a year. 11,000 a night, Mr. Speaker. To put that in context, I just ask the question, how large was Santa Ana's army? And go back and read the historical reports. Most of them will fall between five and 6,000 was the size of Santa Ana's army.

So every single night, coming across our southern border, on average, and I say night, not day, because most happens at night, the equivalent of twice the size of Santa Ana's army, 11,000 come pouring into the United States illegally, accumulating at a rate a lot faster than not just 12 million 5 years ago, but a number that I believe today significantly exceeds 20 million illegals in the United States of America, putting pressure on our social services, putting pressure on our health care, putting pressure on our schools, putting pressure on our infrastructure, our utilities, our roads, our streets, our sewers, our lights.

We're building infrastructure to accommodate for people that if ICE got there first wouldn't be there to put pressure on our infrastructure. And under the guise of what? The idea that the argument made by the open borders crowd, by the comprehensive amnesty people, and that would include

everybody on the Democrat ticket and some of the folks on the Republican ticket for President, Mr. Speaker, advocating that we need to legalize tens of millions of people here. And I guess you can eliminate law breaking if you just eliminate the laws.

They argue that this economy can't prosper if we don't have massive amounts of cheap labor, and that if they all went home tomorrow this economy would collapse.

Mr. Speaker, I'm here to put this into perspective for the American people. You have to think of this United States of America as one big company. 300 million people here. And of those 300 million people, we have a work force of about 142 million. And out of that work force, about 6.9 million of them are illegals working in our economy, 6.9 million of the 142 million.

If you do the math, you're going to come down to around 4.7 percent of the work force is illegal. And of that 4.7 percent, since they're lower skilled people, on average, they're doing only 2.2 percent of the work.

So, if you're managing a factory and say you're a good manager and you show up at 7:30 in the morning and your employees clock in at 8 o'clock and the production lines have to start and you run from 8 till 5 and you work 8 hours and you kick product out the door and you load it on trucks and it has to go every day in an 8-hour shift, you have to produce the gross domestic product of that company.

Well, this Nation has to do the same thing equivalently. So, at 7:30 in the morning, if you, as a manager of a company, discovered that 2.2 percent of your work force, remember, that's the percentage of the work that's being done, not the percentage of the work force; but if 2.2 percent of your work force wasn't going to show up, it would take about 5 minutes to type out a memo that would go to all the departments in your company that would say, we're going to have to make up for a loss of 2.2 percent of our production today and every day until we can hire enough people to replace those 2.2 percent that didn't show up.

And my memo would say this. Your coffee break in the morning isn't going to be 15 minutes today; it's going to be 9\1/2\ minutes. And your coffee break this afternoon isn't going to be 15 minutes, it's going to be 9\1/2\ minutes because we have to pick up 2.2 percent of the production if you're going to go home at 5 o'clock.

Now, I made that management decision today because you might have plans, but we can decide to work till 11 minutes after 5 every day and you can get your full coffee break morning and afternoon. But 2.2 percent of the work, if all the work in America was done in an 8-hour day, amounts to 11 minutes out of an 8-hour day. That's the impact of the illegal labor in our work force here in America.

And the rest of it's just distribution, Mr. Speaker. The rest of it's recruitment lines and it's training and it's education and it's letting the market work; letting companies that need labor go out there and do the recruitment, do the training.

It's never been easy. And I've been an employer most all of my life. I met payroll for over 28 years, 1,400 some consecutive weeks. And I can remember recruiting in the high schools and around and making sure that I had a good program out there so that we could hire good people. I didn't always make the best decision. But we were able to put together a good, reliable work force because that was part of our operation.

Today the argument is, well, no, we don't have people lined up for these jobs, and so, therefore, that proves we need to open the borders some more. Well, of course they're not lined up for the jobs. Of course they aren't; not if you're not going to pay them the wages that it takes so that people can take care of their families and pay their way in this society.

Supply and demand. And we're watching the middle class in America collapse because of a flood of cheap labor coming in on the low side of the economic spectrum to provide cheap labor in the factories for the elitists in America who are increasingly moving into gated communities and sending their children to Ivy League schools and believing that their descendants will all be able to live in the upper crust and have cheap labor to take care of their yards and their mansions and the labor in their factories, while the blue collar person in America, the one who, of the 16 or 17 percent of Americans who are high school dropouts, the American citizens that decide that education isn't in their future, but would like to go work in the local factory, punch the time clock and go in there and do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, that dream that was achievable 20 years ago, that dream that would allow them, the blue collar people, lower educated people with a good work ethic to be able to punch the clock and do a day's work for a day's pay and buy a modest house and raise their family and go fishing and go to the ball game and do those things and be part of this society, that dream is almost gone, Mr. Speaker, because those jobs have been flooded and diminished by low skilled labor pouring into America. Labor is a commodity like corn and beans or gold or oil. And the value of it will be determined by supply and demand in the marketplace. And when you flood lower skilled jobs with low skilled people, you're going to see wages go down. They've, in fact, gone down in some of the categories. And unemployment in America has gone up within the categories of the lowest skill. There's direct evidence in this economy that the flood of cheap labor is holding wages down.

Twenty years ago, people that worked in the packing plant in my neighborhood were making about the same amount as a teacher. Today, they're making about half as much as a teacher is making, and they can't make it any longer. And so society pays the burden of health insurance and that burden on the schools on our infrastructure, while the companies get a discount on their labor.

We need to think this thing through, Mr. Speaker, and we need to hold the Presidential candidates, whether they're Democrats or Republicans accountable. We need to ask them, please define amnesty. Accept my definition; to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. Pardon and reward. Accept that definition, take the oath not to promote amnesty, to veto any bill that might come before their desk that is amnesty. Let's have a little tighter labor supply in America. Let's re-establish the sovereignty of the United States of America by building the fence and end birthright citizenship, and apply our laws in the workplace to shut off the jobs magnet.

Let's let attrition kick in and let people make a decision to go back to their home country. They got here on their own; they can go home on their own.

We have got to build a country for America. We have to have an immigration policy that's designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of this country, and we need to export our values to other countries so they can build on the same dream. If we do that, not only would this Nation be a greater Nation but this planet and the people on it will be better off, and we will have achieved the American dream.

We will have not just left this Nation a better place for the people that come behind us; we'll have left this world a better place for the people that come behind us.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, January 17, 2008, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking the Ranking Member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the gentlewoman from Florida, Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, for her support and help in getting this important measure to the House floor for a vote.

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to address the House today to discuss the importance and relevance of Christmas, the Christian holiday celebrating the birth of our savior Jesus Christ.

As this resolution notes, there are approximately 225 million Christians in the United States, making Christianity the religion of over three-fourths of the American population. Beyond that, there are approximately 2 billion Christians throughout the world, making Christianity the largest religion in the world and the religion of about one-third of the world population.

And yet, Mr. Speaker, in recent decades there have been some who have undertaken efforts to diminish the significance of this great religion, and these efforts are no more apparent than during this time of Christmas.

It is not hard to look out over this great country of ours and find those who, for one reason or another, have engaged in a highly- politicized and highly-publicized crusade to rid the public square of any reference to the religious underpinnings of the Christmas holiday. These are individuals who have subscribed to a radical interpretation of our Constitution's free exercise and establishment clauses and have sought to impose their secular views and beliefs on the nation as a whole.

In many respects, it is this ongoing effort to bring about the secularization of Christmas--and all of our everyday lives for that matter--that motivated me to bring this resolution before the House today.

Regardless of how others may define it, Mr. Speaker, Christmas is a religious holiday. It is the day on which Christians--those who identify themselves as believers in the salvation from sin offered to them through the death and resurrection of their savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and who, out of gratitude for the gift of salvation, commit themselves to living their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Bible--celebrate the birth of their savior. For Christians, the birth of Jesus is cause for great celebration. As the Son of God, Jesus was sent to earth, by our Heavenly Father, to become a human being, live a sinless life, be crucified on a cross for our sins, and rise from the dead three days later. The purpose of this, as you well know, Mr. Speaker, was to save sinners from eternal death--the price to be paid for their sin.

And so, Mr. Speaker, the birth of Christ, as celebrated by Christians on Christmas is a truly important and significant day because it is celebrated as a recognition of God's redemption, mercy and Grace.

The importance of Christmas, however, does not end with the tenets of Christianity. Because Christmas is one of the most important holidays on the Christian calendar, I believe that its annual passage should serve as an opportunity for all Americans, Christian or not, religious or not, to recognize the important role played by Christianity in the formation of our nation and in the founding of our civilization.

It is no coincidence, Mr. Speaker, that courthouses throughout this country proudly display the Ten Commandments. It is no accident that, in this very chamber, it is the face of Moses, the human author of those divinely dictated commandments, that looks down upon you, keeping close watch on all that transpires in this chamber. Mr. Speaker the framework of our laws and the fabric of our society is heavily dependent upon the maxims of Christianity, and I believe that as we Christians begin our annual celebration of the birth of our savior, the one from whom Christianity derives its name, it is wholly appropriate for us, as a nation and as members of this House, to take the time to acknowledge the contributions that the Christian religion has made to our country and our way of life.

Mr. Speaker, I think we all can agree that virtually any American, whether Christian,

atheist, agnostic, or otherwise, when confronted with the fact that he has in some way wronged his neighbor, will rightly respond in one universal way--knock on his door, confess to him, repent, and ask for forgiveness. The neighbor would then forgive them as Christ has taught us. True and simple as this may seem, it is important to ask why we as Americans naturally react in such a way. The answer of course is that in this ``conditioned behavior'' we see very clearly the positive effect that Christianity has had on the development of our country and culture.

There are few places in the United States--if any--that you can visit where the laws ``do not steal'' and ``do not murder'' do not apply. Likewise, there are few households in this great country in which moral character is developed in young children without the invocation of the ninth and tenth amendments regarding lying and coveting that which belongs to others.

Mr. Speaker, we as Americans live in a moral society and in a country that is governed by moral laws. While many of these laws obviously cannot be found in any explicit sense within the pages of the Holy Bible, when we survey the content of that book--the document that outlines how it is the Christians are to live their lives here on earth--we do find much in the way of foundational principles that has come to guide not just the development of our laws, but also the foundation of our nation.

It was from the Bible and the example of Jesus that Pilgrims first established government on this continent, from which the Founders outlined the political thought that shaped our nation, and by which Congress first intended to educate our children. Furthermore, as the scholar David Barton and others have tirelessly pointed out, it was from the Bible that early American leaders derived concepts like private ownership, the free-enterprise system, an industrious work ethic, and workfare rather than welfare. As a result, the life and teachings of Jesus Christ have permeated every aspect of life in America. He has shaped our culture and transformed every great leader to rise from our population. As a testament to this, each of our American Presidents has acknowledged God's hand on this Christian nation that is the United States. If there never had been a Jesus Christ, there would never have been an America.

In an address to the nation President Truman once said that, ``In love, which is the very essence of the message of the Prince of Peace, the world would find a solution for all its ills. I do not believe there is one problem in this country or in the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. The poets' dream, the lesson of priest and patriarch and the prophets' vision of a new heaven and a new earth, all are summed up in the message delivered in the Judean hills beside the Sea of Galilee. Would that the world would accept that message in this time of its greatest need!''

He went on to say that, ``This is a solemn hour. In the stillness of the Eve of the Nativity when the hopes of mankind hang on the peace that was offered to the world nineteen centuries ago, it is but natural, while we survey our destiny, that we give thought also to our past--to some of the things which have gone into the making of our Nation.''

In 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said of Christmas, ``it is well for all humanity to remind itself that while this is in its name a Christian celebration, it is participated in reverently and happily by hundreds of millions of people who are members of other religions, or belong actively to no church at all. The reason is not far to seek. It is because the spirit of unselfish service personified by the life and the teachings of Christ makes appeal to the inner conscience and hope of every man and every woman in every part of the earth.''

President Eisenhower called the nation to reflect during his remarks at the lighting of the Nation's Christmas Tree on December, 15th 1967 when he said, ``In a few days we shall all celebrate the birth of His Holiness on earth. We shall recreate in our minds, once more, the ancient coming of that Spirit who remains alive for millions in our time. We shall acknowledge the Kingdom of a Child in a world of men.''

He went on to say, ``That Child--we should remember--grew into manhood Himself, preached and moved men in many walks of life, and died in agony. But His death--so the Christian faith tells us--was not the end. For Him, and for millions of men and women ever since, it marked a time of triumph--when the spirit of life triumphed over death. So--if this Christmas season in a time of war is to have real meaning to us, it must celebrate more than the birth of a Baby.''

During his Radio Address to the Nation on Christmas Eve, 1983 President Reagan pointed out that ``It's been said that all the kings who ever reigned, that all the parliaments that ever sat have not done as much to advance the cause of peace on Earth and good will to men as the man from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth.''

As the words of these great men--these revered and honored presidents of the United States of America have clearly demonstrated, it is not a stretch to say that the precepts and principles of Jesus have so completely permeated the culture of this nation that even an American atheist would be hard pressed to separate his worldview from the impact of the first Christmas.

Though we are not all Christians, Mr. Speaker, we are all Americans. By virtue of that simple fact, I will again reiterate my belief that it is not only appropriate but, more importantly, is necessary during this special time of year to remember not only the birth of Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, but also to recognize the important impact that the Christian faith has had on the foundation and development of our society, our nation, and our civilization.

Madam Speaker, initially in the time that you have recognized me for, I would like today to announce to the House that had I been present for the vote on H.R. 6, the energy bill which passed this floor 314-100, I would have voted ``yes'' on that bill.

Madam Speaker, today the House passed H.R. 6 by a vote of 314-100. This legislation contained a large increase in the Renewable Fuel Standard that will greatly benefit to the western Iowa ethanol producers that I represent.

While previous versions of H.R. 6 also contained an increased RFS, they also contained a large tax increase placed on the backs the oil and gas industry. I opposed the previous versions of H.R. 6 for this reason. I oppose tax increases, and I especially oppose tax increases when they will hurt consumers like the Iowa farmers I represent.

Madam Speaker, I am on record as stating that we need more Btu's of energy in America that are produced in America. We need more ethanol, biodiesel, wind, solar, clean coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and geothermal.

America has the ability to produce the Btu's, Congress just needs to remove the restraints so that industry can produce these Btu's. We need to allow the American energy industry to expand the size of the energy pie.

Every once in a while in each Member's congressional career, there come times when things happen that are beyond our control. At the time the vote occurred, I was detained by a prior engagement. Madam Speaker, I believe in the future of bio-fuels. I think this bill did some good things for them. However, this bill also contained some provisions that I do not agree with.

H.R. 6 contained Davis-Bacon provisions. This labor law is the product of Jim Crow laws and needs to be abolished. I may be the only Member of Congress, I know of no others, who has earned Davis-Bacon wages and paid Davis-Bacon wages, and I have lived underneath that for over 30 years, 28 years writing paychecks, over 14 consecutive months meeting payroll. I know what this does. I can tell you the history of it also goes back to an Iowan, an Iowan President, Herbert Hoover.

This is the last remaining Jim Crow law on the books that I know of. It was designed to keep blacks out of the construction trade in New York. Davis-Bacon is prevailing wage by definition, union scale in practice. There is no other way to analyze this. Union scale is what gets produced when the Department of Labor produces the proposed prevailing wage.

As an earth moving contractor, I know first hand how Davis-Bacon prevented my Small Business from competing in the market place. Small businesses are discouraged from bidding on Davis-Bacon public projects because of the complex and archaic rules. The inflated wage requirements and significant redtape burdens of Davis-Bacon shut small employers out of the Federal construction market.

The Davis-Bacon wage mandate also inflates the price tag for public, construction projects--costing you your hard earned taxpayer dollars.

There was over a billion dollars invested in renewable energy in my district last year. There will be over a billion dollars invested this year. All this was done without Davis-Bacon. If Congress is going to impose Davis-Bacon wage scales on rail improvement and carbon sequestration it will burn up at least 20 percent of the capital that can be used.

Regardless of my feelings about Davis-Bacon, I would have voted ``yes'' for this bill. I would ask that the record reflect this.

Paula Steiner

Madam Speaker, for the balance of the time that you recognized me, I am motivated to come to the floor and say some words about my retiring legislative director, Paula Steiner. In the time that I came here to Congress, elected in 2002 and sworn in on this floor in January of 2003, Paula has done the job inside our legislative shop for those 5 years persistently, relentlessly and reliably and with significant insight.

I regret that she has to move on for family reasons and those obligations, and when I see the family that has surrounded her, I am really gratified because it is far more important that the family see the best of their mother than that I get the most use out of their mother.

But what I do want to say is that as I travel up and down the district in western Iowa, the western third of Iowa, the 32 counties that are the Fifth Congressional District that stretch from Minnesota to Missouri, and I meet the local officials and the people that are involved in and that are engaged in policy, as this news of Paula turning her focus on her family is, as it trickles through the district, they come up to me one by one and say, I am really going to miss Paula. The Siouxland Chamber's emissary on Friday said, we are really going to miss Paula. The Voice of Glenwood in Mills County said, we are really going to miss Paula.

That is what I came here to say, Madam Speaker: we are going to miss Paula. And this Hill is populated with good, hardworking, loyal people that keep our congressional offices functioning and rolling on a day- by-day basis. And sometimes when you go along outside the Cannon Building or the Rayburn Building or the Longworth Building, you will see late at night the lights are on. Sometimes it is because the maintenance people walked in, emptied the trash and left them on. Sometimes it is because dedicated people that keep our jobs going, keep our operations and our trains running on time are up there burning that candle at both ends so we can step down here and represent our district and represent our people.

The people in the Fifth District of Iowa are better represented than they would have been if I hadn't had the privilege of having Paula Steiner working for me, and I know that her family is going to be very well taken care of if they receive half of the kind of work and labor of love that Paula has demonstrated, and I want to add to that the measure of loyalty. And into this Congressional Record I choose not to go down through a series of the anecdotes except to say that it is clear that loyalty is an essential component to a congressional office. It is absolutely there with Paula.

My district says goodbye, thank you very much. I say, Paula, you are part of the extended family. Keep stopping in like you always will. Thank you very much and God bless you.

Mr. Speaker, I oppose the provisions in this conference report, unilaterally added by the Senate, that provide immigration benefits to certain Iraqi refugees. As Ranking Member of the House ``Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law,'' these provisions should have been discussed in their proper place, the House Judiciary Committee. However, I along with Ranking Member Smith, were basically excluded from negotiations. There is no bipartisan support for these provisions in the House Judiciary Committee.

This bill grants special immigrant visas each year for the next 5 years to 5,000 Iraqi nationals and their families. The State Department has estimated that for every Iraqi national granted a visa, they will bring over at least four family members. Therefore, the number of special immigrant visas granted under this bill will reach 25,000 per year, or 125,000 total after 5 years.

Mr. Speaker, 125,000 Iraqis that support the United States would be a tremendous asset to

Iraq and the United States in the Middle East. These Iraqis should remain in their home country to rebuild it and encourage the spread of liberty. If we remove every Iraqi that is supportive of the U.S. from Iraq, terrorists will have the upper hand. Iraq and the United States need these patriotic Iraqis to remain in Iraq and rebuild.

While I sympathize with the Iraqi nationals who have been victims of this War on Terror, conditions within the country are improving. I encourage the Iraqis to stay and fight for their homeland and freedom alongside American troops. That's how we win this War on Terror.

For these reasons I oppose the provisions in the Conference Report to H.R. 1585 that provide U.S. immigration benefits to certain Iraqi refugees, and I urge my colleagues to do the same. Vote ``no'' on the Rule.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Nebraska for yielding. I stand here also with a heavy heart in joining with my colleagues from the west side of the Missouri River, and as we often stand together on policy and on issues that matter to the country and matter to our region, today we stand together in expressing our sympathies to the families of all of those involved in this tragic shooting.

As we move towards the Christmas season and the anticipation that brought people together in the Von Maur store, it's tragic that that was what was interrupted in such a brutal way, by such an act of insanity. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all the families of all involved; the families of the victims of those who were killed, the families of those who were wounded, those who were wounded, obviously, and also to the family of the shooter who committed that act of insanity, who must be going through an even more heightened sense of agony today and yesterday, and throughout, and perhaps the rest of their lives, an added measure of agony to those who have already suffered the incomprehensible loss of such a tragic incident.

I lost a constituent and had one wounded, and it has reached into the lives of the families on the Iowa side of the river. It is also true for each of the three Members of the Nebraska delegation, having lost at least one person that they represented here in Congress. We know that all families are affected.

And so we ask to stand here together and we will remember you all in our prayers throughout our holiday time, throughout this Christmas season. We will stand together for the rule of law, we will stand together for sanity. We are going to look to try to find a way to reach out, and perhaps, just perhaps there will be some key, some knowledge gained from this tragedy that we can better use to protect and maybe prevent future tragedies.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor and privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress again. As many of the Members move forward to go home for the weekend and spend time with their families and their constituents and get in touch with the issues of the day, I delayed my transportation, so I have an opportunity to address you and, in the process, address the American people.

It occurs to me that there is subject after subject that doesn't quite emerge here on the floor of this Congress for an open topic of debate, and there are central issues around which we should be shaping policy, that policy that affects and directs the destiny of our country.

Some would say that the bill that passed here off the floor, the energy bill, will solve our energy problems and move our destiny in the right direction. I am a skeptic of that, Mr. Speaker. I don't come to address that so much.

But I believe this, that as a people we must be bound together. There is something unique about being an American. It is something unique, that it is different than coming from another nation in the world. We brought together all people from all cultures and all civilizations and assimilated them into this society to produce a common culture, a form of cultural continuity that binds us together as Americans.

As I listen and engage in debate, and as I read and study history and watch the reactions of people around me and think what it must have been like 50 years ago, when I wasn't quite paying attention in this country, or 100 years ago, when I wasn't around, or 200 years ago obviously, as America was shaped, what is it that is unique about us? What has given us our vitality? What has bound us together so that we can work together as one people?

There are a number of common denominators. We live in the same geographical area, we share a common history and we adhere to the rule of law. English common law flowed across the Atlantic Ocean and was established here in this continent, actually not too far down the coastline down at Jamestown in 1607 in Virginia. Four hundred years ago English common law arrived here in the United States.

But another thing that has taken place that is a common denominator, that has bound us together, that has been a powerful force for our society, for the American interests, and a powerful force throughout all humanity, is to have a common language.

Now, one can just take the globe at about any time, and let's just say going backwards across history, generation by generation, recognizing that national boundaries have shifted over time. They shift because of political transformations within the countries and they shift because of wars.

You can take this back to the city-state era before we actually had nation-states, and identify that the boundaries around the city-states and the boundaries around the nation-states from 300 years ago and earlier were often boundaries that were drawn by lines of language.

Languages grew up in colloquial regions, and because people communicated with each other verbally, languages evolved. And because people didn't travel in those days the way they travel today, then the languages that evolved in certain locales got more and more distinct and more difficult for the neighbors to understand.

Of course, we track language through, and because of commonalities in language, we also track the migrations and histories of people. But a common language has defined the boundaries of nation-states throughout history.

In France, they speak French; in England, they speak English; in Spain, they speak Spanish; in Portugal, they speak Portuguese; in China they speak Chinese; in Russia, they speak Russian. Why is that? I never hear anybody talk about that. But the reason for that is because common languages, the languages have defined the boundaries of nations, of nation-states.

Why does a nation-state have a boundary that is defined by its languages? It is because they are a common people. Whether they are Italians or Spaniards or French, they are a common people that are bound together by a common language. They have a common cause. They have a common sense of history. They work together. They communicate with each other. They do business together with far less suspicion because they can communicate quickly and effectively and efficiently with a common language.

There are things that come through languages that cannot be written into print, into the Congressional Record, for example. There is voice inflections. There are pauses that are parts of communication. There are certain kinds of pronunciations that change the meaning of a sentence. You can write a sentence out in English, and if you change the meaning of the word ``read'' and ``read,'' it spells the same but it means something different. There are all kinds of pronunciations and voice inflections throughout all languages that change the meaning of the communications of that language.

Because of all the nuances that come from the languages and because of the difficulty in understanding very many different languages, we tend to bind ourselves together, pulled around a common sense of purpose, which is a common language.

The strength of America is also common with the strength of many of the other nations, the nations that I mentioned. We have had a common language, too. The common language here in the United States has been English. It has been English since the beginning of the settlement in this continent. Yes, there have been challenges to it. We know there was a challenge from the German language. If I remember correctly, it was Benjamin Franklin who said that if we weren't careful, that the Germans would assimilate the English speakers before they were assimilated into the English-speaking culture.

But we know that didn't happen. We know that the English language prevailed. And we know that there have been significantly sized enclaves in America that persisted in hanging on to a language other than English, but

eventually, historically, they have assimilated into all speaking this common language called English.

Well, if one were going to shape and develop and devise a nation- state that had the very best prospect of succeeding and prospering, one of those essential components, and perhaps the most essential component, would be that the people of a nation-state speak a common language.

We have understood that in this country since the beginning of the establishment of the United States of America. In fact, Noah Webster I think understood it I think as well as anyone in the history of our country.

When we think about the history of Noah Webster, the author of the original American English dictionary, as he traveled around through the 13 original colonies of his time and he entered into region after region, he noticed that sometimes he couldn't understand what they were saying. They were all speaking English, most of them were speaking English, but they had chosen to use certain terms in a different way. They had adopted definitions on to other words. They had changed their pronunciations of words. And as he watched this and as he traveled and listened, he began to realize that the colloquial regions in the United States were forming and shaping their own unique languages. Even though they were rooted in English for the most part, he didn't believe it would be very long, another generation or two, and the American people would be no longer speaking the same language; that other languages were evolving from the English language that arrived here, and that eventually some regions in the United States wouldn't be able to communicate with their neighbors.

And Noah Webster believed, and I think correctly, that that would have brought about divisions within the United States, and we would eventually not be a unified country because of our inability to communicate with each other. And even though there is always a way to facilitate communication, even though we can do sign language and we can write notes and we can get an interpreter and exchange communications, and we do that, of course, in this country every day in our international trade constantly, that is not the same as having an instantaneous form of communication where everyone understands everybody and we have that ability to exchange ideas and measure the voice inflection and the pronunciation so that the communication of the message is clear.

Noah Webster understood that. So he set about writing the American English dictionary for that purpose, to be able to provide a common use of language, to provide a common language for the United States, an official language for the United States.

It was Noah Webster's dream that in the Constitution of the United States there would be a constitutional amendment that would establish English as the official language of the United States of America. He didn't see his dream realized, partly because he helped solve the problem by drafting and writing his American English dictionary. He did so for the express purpose of providing a common language, a utilization of the English language that would be universal from Maine to Florida, all the way up and down the coast of the 13 original colonies, because he understood that if people persisted in different pronunciations for the same word and different definitional use of the same word, that eventually the communications would break down among us as a people and we would be pitted eventually against each other. We would begin to see our neighbors as someone other than our friend and our neighbor and our countryman because we couldn't easily communicate with him.

So he wrote the American English dictionary, established a common language in the United States, and to some extent solved the problem, and it was not necessary in those years to pass a constitutional amendment to establish English as the official language of the United States.

That is the history of Noah Webster and that is the contribution that he gave to this country. And I think that he established that principle of a common language of English and protected it and preserved it. And if we never had Webster, if we had not had someone who had the vision to establish a common language for our country, we may not have held together throughout those years. We may not have actually gotten through the Civil War and bonded ourselves back together again. We might not have fought side by side in the Spanish-American War or World War I or World War II. We might not be the world's only unchallenged superpower today, if we hadn't had the wisdom of the early settlers in the United States, if we hadn't had the wisdom of the Founders, if we hadn't had the wisdom of a Noah Webster to establish English as a common language here in the United States of America.

Now, I want to make the point that in those years there were other languages that could have been just as successful. English was the language that was the language of our original settlers here in the largest number. It could have been German, it could have been French, it could have been Spanish. You can make a case for that throughout history.

But whatever that case is, it is English today. And English happens to be also the global language of commerce. It is the language we do business in in the world. It is the language that we negotiate politically in. At the roundtable in Brussels, at the European Union, when we sit around that roundtable and negotiate with all of those member nations, now I can't actually keep track, it was 15 when I was there last, I think it has gone to 25. But the language of negotiations in Europe around the roundtable at Brussels in the European Union is English. The representatives there, the French speak English, the Spanish speak English, the Portuguese speak English, because there needs to be a common language of communication. What will it be?

What will the documents be printed in? Do they get printed in 300- some languages that we commonly talk of as being the utilized number of languages in the globe? Or can it be printed in one? Well, if you have a common language, one is it. There is only one definition, there is only one understanding, and there is no misunderstanding, at least substantially less misunderstanding, excuse me.

So if a common language, an official language, a language of communications at the European Union in Brussels is English, and if the international language of business and commerce is English, and it is, and the international language of air traffic controllers that commands all airplanes that are flying and being controlled by air traffic controllers in America is English, and it is, and if the language of the maritime industry, the language that tells ships how to avoid running into each other in the fog is English, and English is the common language of the United States of America, and it gives us a competitive advantage with the rest of the world that does not speak English as fluently when it comes to business, and if it is the language we use when we negotiate in our trade relationships with other countries and the language we use when we negotiate our political disagreements and arrive at our agreements is English, then there is no case that I can think of to be made for the official language of the United States being anything else other than English.

And, Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor tonight to promote a piece of legislation, H.R. 997, the English Language Unity Act, and it establishes English as the official language of the United States of America.

I have just made the case that we didn't need to do that in the early 1800s or the early 1900s, because the people of this country understood the utility of having a common language, English, and because many of the people who came here as legal immigrants adopted themselves to and adapted themselves to and assimilated themselves into an English- speaking culture.

One of the examples would be my grandmother, who arrived here from Germany on March 26, 1894, and she walked through the Great Hall at Ellis Island. She came on the ship New York. Her name is on the manifest. And as she traveled across the United States, having made a commitment to this country, she got married to my grandfather. But my father was raised in a German-speaking home. And when he went to kindergarten on his first

day, which is interesting, a German term ``kindergarten,'' and it is kindergarten all over America even though it is a German term, but he came back from his first day. He went to kindergarten speaking German, he came back from his first day and said hello to his mother in German. And as my grandmother was working in the kitchen and welcomed him home from his first day of school, she turned to him when he had greeted him in German and said to my father, Speaking German in this household is for you from now on verboten. I came here to become an American and I need to learn English. And you shall go to school and learn English and bring it home and teach it to me. And from that moment forward, my father was forbidden from speaking German in his household because his job was to learn English, to embrace America, to embrace this host Nation, and to teach English to his mother, which he did pretty well.

He never taught her I don't think to get rid of her accent, but she certainly spoke English well enough that I never saw within her an inability to communicate. I always understood her when she told me what to do. But that tone, that acceptance of the host country, America, and the need to honor that by learning the language of the country that received the immigrants, English. And in turn, this country has rewarded people who have learned the English language and assimilated themselves into this culture, because they are rewarded through the chain of commerce, the job opportunities that are there.

And, yes, I know, I run into people that are entrepreneurs that didn't learn English and they did well marketing their goods and doing business. And they said, why did I learn English? I will say they could have done better than they did. A good person with English language skills in this country has an advantage over a good person without English language skills in this country. It is true in every culture and every civilization, if you speak the common language of the country that you are in, then you have an advantage when it comes to business, you have an advantage when it comes to education. In fact it is very, very difficult if not impossible to understand the history and the culture of America without understanding the language of this country. I don't know how that could be done without understanding the language of this country to understand it thoroughly. So I believe we need to establish English as the official language of the United States.

This is not a unique concept to the rest of the world, Mr. Speaker. In fact, it is unique that we do not have an official language here in the United States.

I sat down a few years ago and got down a world almanac. And if you turn to the page where the flags are, there is a flag for each of the countries in the world. And I sat next to me the ``World Book Encyclopedia,'' this is pre-digital era; now I would look it up on the Internet. But as I turned the pages through the ``World Book Encyclopedia,'' I looked up every country in the world, every country that had a flag registered in the ``World Almanac.'' And there in the ``World Book Encyclopedia,'' in the first paragraph of the description of the countries it will show ``official language.'' I looked up the official language of every country in the world, and there was an official language, at least one, some have several, but at least one official language on record in the ``World Book Encyclopedia'' for every nation on this planet except the United States of America.

So when we talk about establishing an official language here, English, the official language of the United States, and I hear people cry out that somehow that is a major inconvenience to people who come here speaking other languages and that we don't need an official language, that kind of argument defies the logic of the rest of the world. The logic of the rest of the world understands that there has to be official documents, there have to be official proceedings. There has to be an agreement on what language means. And if we will accept any language into our official activities here in the Federal Government, then we are forever litigating the differences between the interpretations of those languages.

For example, let's just say that we had two people that came together and signed a contract, and one of them wanted that contract in Vietnamese and the other wanted the contract in Korean. And so they agreed verbally, even though they didn't communicate with each other because of a lack of the common language skill, that they would have a contract each in Korean and Vietnamese. And they each then signed the contract. The one provider who signed the contract was, let's say, the owner who was going to pay to have their house remodeled, they have a misunderstanding. And the contractor who adheres to the Korean language says: I have a disagreement; you've not upheld your end of this contract. And the owner, who might have this contract that he understands in Vietnamese, says: You have not held up your end of the contract.

How do we litigate something like that within the courts of the United States of America when there is a disagreement on the interpretation between two languages that are not common languages in the United States but official languages of the countries where they came from? Can we be litigating those kind of disagreements? Or can we simply say, a contract with the Federal Government is an official document; it shall be in English. If you choose to interpret that into another language for the purposes of the utility of your needs, that is fine with us, but we aren't going to litigate the difference in the courts of America because of people who refuse to use the official language of the United States, which needs to be established as English. That is one explanation.

Another explanation of this, of that need, would be, as I sat down with one of the ambassadors to the United States from Israel just a few years ago, he explained to the group, and if I remember correctly, it was the Policy Committee that was hosting the ambassador, that Israel had established Hebrew as the official language of Israel in 1954. Mr. Speaker, I would remind you that Israel was established as a nation in 1948, and just 6 years after they became a nation, certainly they had war, they had turmoil, they were at great risk, but they were shaping and laying the foundations for a nation that was going to have enemies surrounding them in all directions.

A very precarious spot for a nation to be in, the most important things needed to be focused upon, and the very best and most effective foundations for a nation needed to be laid, and yet just 6 years after they were established as a country they established Hebrew as the official language of Israel.

And I asked the ambassador, Why did you do this? Why did you establish an official language, and why did you choose Hebrew? And he said, We saw the success in the United States of assimilation from people all over the world coming into the United States and being accepted as Americans. We recognized that we were bringing refugees from all over the world, mostly Jews, to come live in Israel, reaching out to them; and they spoke languages from dozens of different countries and we didn't have a common language in Israel. We needed a language that bound us all together and identified us as Israelis and so we chose Hebrew.

And I asked again, but why Hebrew? Hebrew had been the language that was used primarily and almost exclusively in prayer for the last 2,000 years. The Israelis resurrected basically a dead language as far as street communication, business communication, commerce was concerned, and they brought Hebrew back up again and established it as the official language of their country and taught the Hebrew language to all Israelis. And today, as someone immigrates into Israel, they go to an assimilation center, I will call it; they have a different name which I don't recall, where they are taught in 6 months to learn the Hebrew language and to go out and function and perform within the broader society of Israel. So Israelis that learned Hebrew have that unique identifying quality. They can walk up to any other Israeli, speak to each other in Hebrew, and they will be bound together in the nation of Israel by that common language.

And just as an aside, Mr. Speaker, those who come to Israel who come from countries where they may be illiterate in their native language, the Israelis then teach them to be literate in the written and spoken word of their native language, and then transition

them into Hebrew, teaching them the written and the spoken language of Hebrew. That is about an 18-month process rather than the 6-month process of those who are literate in their own language who come into Israel and are taught Hebrew.

They make this work. This is not a language that is known very much throughout the world. They resurrected a language that wasn't utilized, but they identified that a common language would bind people together in the nation state and that would help them work together and help them struggle together and help them fight together to defend themselves from their enemies from without. And one of the powerful, unifying forces they recognized was a common language.

And, here in this country, we remain the only country in the world that doesn't have an official language. We say English is our common language, but we have forces out here seeking to subdivide us, and we have billions of dollars that flow out of this Congress that go into the hands of people who are promoting division in America and not unity in America. The message that many immigrants get when they arrive here in this country is, if you learn English, and this message is clearly given as part of the debate here on the floor, if you learn English, you give up your own culture. That is the message that we hear.

Not true. In my neighborhood, I look around my neighborhood and certain communities that were ethnic enclaves when they were settled, German, Danish, Irish, Swedish, to name a few in my neighborhood, but the people that came here speaking a foreign language have adapted into English, and hardly any of them speak another language other than English that live there. But you could not convince them that they have given up their culture. You can't convince a German that their culture has changed dramatically because they have adhered to a common language here.

Now, I think utilization of other languages and language skills are a good thing, and I encourage young people to study foreign languages. I use that in the analysis of culture and use that in trade and use that in foreign travel and use that to help open up our negotiations and discussions and reduce the friction and the conflict from nation to nation. Those are all good things. But a common language within a country binds it together, and accepting English as our official language means that the people who do so are tied more to a common sense of history, more to a common cause.

As I listened to testimony that came before the small business community sometime back, we had a witness that came in who was second in command to Elaine Chao, the Department of Labor, and she testified that they had difficulty in finding enough workers who could go into a factory and be taught how to run the punch press or the lathe or common manufacturing equipment, not because they lacked the education and not because they lacked the intellectual ability, the brain power, so to speak, Mr. Speaker. No, because they lacked the language skills. They didn't understand enough English, so they couldn't be taught how to run a punch press or a lathe. They couldn't work in that environment because of the lack of language skills.

And so I listened to that testimony and I said to the witness, I can understand why you would have that difficulty with first-generation immigrants. But can you tell me, do you encounter second-generation immigrants, people who were born in the United States of America, born into an English-speaking country, that haven't learned to speak English? Are they part of this problem? Do you run across those incidents? And into the Congressional Record she answered me, Yes, we do. We run into second-generation immigrants, native-born Americans that don't learn enough English to work in that factory. In fact, we have third-generation Americans that haven't learned enough English to go to work in these factories. And they are not included in the opportunities that are provided by the jobs in these regions because, if they haven't learned the language enough to work in the factory by three generations, now how do we convince the rest of the public and how am I to be convinced that they have assimilated into society, that they adhere to the American Dream, that they salute the flag and know the Pledge and say the Pledge?

How do we know that they would put on the uniform of this country and defend America? What would indicate to us that they have embraced this host Nation? If the grandchildren of the immigrants who move here don't learn English, what does that tell us about our society? Have we failed them? Have they failed us? I would submit, Mr. Speaker, it is some of each. They have failed to embrace this country and we have failed to set up a system that brings them in and welcomes them into our society and gives them the skills that allow them to be successful and feel they are part of this great Nation and part of this citizenship of being an American that is such a blessing.

Another argument that argues compellingly for an official language here in the United States goes back to 245 B.C. That is before Christ, for those of you who are getting the modern-day education. So 245 B.C., the first emperor of China, and they have tried to teach me how to say that in Chinese. I have never learned, but it is Qin Shi Huangdi. So Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China, pronounced correctly by the Chinese, not by me, had a vision. He recognized that there were 300-some provinces in China, separate regional areas. Certainly there were that many different colloquial languages that were in China.

As he traveled around that part of the world that we see today as China, he recognized that they had a common culture. The Chinese people, as we know them today, wear similar clothing and have similar work habits. They had had similar religions across the spectrum to some degree, and yet they didn't speak a common language and so they couldn't communicate with each other, which means that they didn't trade and travel. And when enemies came from without, they were not able to organize themselves to defend themselves from within because they didn't have the communication skills and ability to speak a common language.

So the first emperor of China looked about and decided I am going to establish a common language for China. He hired a group of scribes, scholars of the day, and said go to work and write a common language. I want all of the Chinese people to be able to communicate in the same language.

The scribes sat down and drafted this language, and the language that was created by the scribes under the first emperor of China is a language that has about 5,000 commonly used characters, about 50,000 out at the limits of the expanse of the varieties of the characters, picture words is how they have put that together, and I can't begin to understand it, but I can tell you that the common language that was created, especially the written language of the Chinese, has bound them together. They recognize the writing and they can read script that comes from any corner of the country.

So 245 B.C. is about the era that this began, and the first emperor of China's vision was to unite the Chinese people for the next 10,000 years. For the next 10,000 years. What a dream. We are about a fourth of the way through that and there is no sign that the Chinese people are going to be ununited or disunited. And yes, they have different versions of the Chinese language that they do speak on the continent. Cantonese and Mandarin come to mind, but the written language is the same. And the literate Chinese can read and write it. And it has to be hard to put those pictures together on a Chinese keyboard today, but they do it. And they are bound together as one people.

And the vision of the first emperor of China was that he saw some other commonalities that he wanted to establish. Also, there were sections of the Great Wall of China that were not connected, and so the invaders from without could go around the wall and come in. The first emperor of China connected the sections of the walls of China so it became one Great Wall instead of disconnected sections of the wall.

And he established the terra-cotta guards. He also recognized the widths of the ox carts weren't the same and so the ruts would put stress on the wheels and you might break a wheel. He standardized the axle spacing of the ox carts so they could travel and do commerce. He had a vision, a standardization.

Imagine a train, an engine and a set of cars of a train that has a different width of track. When you reach another set of track, you have to off-load your cargo and put it on a car that will travel on that different width.

What would it be like if every State in the Union had a different width for the railcars? It would debilitate rail travel, so we standardize it. We have one gauge of track that takes you anywhere in the United States of America.

We have had one language that takes you anywhere in the United States of America, until such time as the multiculturalists cut loose here in the last 20 to 30 years and began to try to convince people, don't assimilate into this culture, just simply hang onto the culture you brought with you and dig yourself in in an ethnic enclave and raise two and three and maybe even a fourth generation of people whose hope lies within the enclave and not with the Nation outside the enclave.

It doesn't make sense, Mr. Speaker, for us not to have an official language here in the United States because an official language provides a motivation and an incentive for all regions of the country to adapt themselves to an official language.

If they do that, then they will be teaching English within the enclaves in America, the places where I can't go to communicate with anybody anymore. And why do I, in the heartland of America, need to walk into a bank or convenience store and get out my card at an ATM, and I stick my card in there and the first question it asks me is: What language do you want to communicate in? I have to read all of that. If I read it from the bottom to the top, it will burn up to 7 or 8 seconds until I get to the top. Then I push the English button and wait for the transaction to light up the screen. If you push the button wrong, you have to start guessing again to back out of it.

Because we provide multiple languages on street signs or multiple languages on ATMs and multiple languages on directions, it doesn't help people have an incentive to learn English.

Mr. Speaker, it works like this. If I pull up to a stop sign in Kuwait and in Arabic it says ``stop'' and in English it says ``stop,'' my eyes go to the language that I understand. No matter how hard I try to memorize what ``stop'' looks like in Arabic, I am never going to learn Arabic because it is always there enabling me to take the English way out, the easy way out, the part that I know.

And if we provide ATMs in foreign languages, I don't have a law that bans that. That is a free commerce idea. Please do what you want to do, bankers. If I have a choice, I will go to the ATM that gives it to me only in English because I don't want the confusion. But that is a free market plan. I don't disagree with that, but I am making the point that multiple language availability does nothing but enable people to continue living in the enclave and not assimilate and learn the language.

So official documents and proceedings here in the United States need to be in English. I ask the States to establish and pass the same kind of policy. And there are nearly 30 States that do have English as the official language. Iowa is one of them. I did spend 6 years establishing English as the official language of the State of Iowa. That requires that all official documents and official proceedings be in English. And it has commonsense exceptions like justice. You wouldn't lock up a criminal if they didn't understand the charges against them. We would provide health care to people regardless of whether they understood the language or not.

We do provide driver's license tests in at least six different languages. I disagree with that. I do believe that should not be an exception. But regardless, that is the policy that is out there. A number approaching and maybe actually meeting 30 States have English as the official language in one form or another to pull people together, to bind us together, not to divide us apart.

And the effort to divide constantly comes from this side of the aisle and it pits Americans against Americans. But we understand that the official language is inclusive not exclusive. Every nation in the world has an official language except the United States because it understands the unifying power of a common language.

The polls support this. You can look at polls that show from 82 percent of Americans support English as the official language on up to 88 percent of Americans support English as the official language.

English is a common form of communications currency in this country and in business and in air traffic control and in politics and in maritime industry throughout the world. We need to establish it here because holding that principle together sends the message to people who come here that this Congress, this Nation, the majority of the States from within, expect you to learn English.

They come here expecting to learn English. None of us go to a foreign country and seek to impose our language on the government of a foreign country. If I walk into a service in France, I will have to be doing business with them in French. They don't feel compelled to pay for my interpreter or to print road signs in languages in France other than French.

But one might take a look up to Quebec, a province in Canada, to give some instruction on what happens when a society is split apart by competing languages. Cultures follow down the line of language. When you speak a common language, it pulls your culture together. When you can't communicate with each other, it divides the culture.

So the French speakers in Quebec have been insistent that they continue speaking French. When you go into Quebec in those regions, the street signs are in French. There have been two votes in my memory, and one of them I believe was about a decade ago, where Quebec voted on whether to secede from the rest of Canada. And thinking about that, it was the Quebecois who had the decision to make. It wasn't put out for the rest of Canada, just the Quebecois. They came within less than 1 percentage point of separating Quebec from the rest of Canada. Had they done that, they would have effectively separated Canada into three separate geographical regions. Everything west of Quebec to the Pacific Ocean would have been a region, Quebec itself a separate region, and the maritime provinces on the east side a separate region. The English- speaking components of Canada would have been the east and west, and in the heart would have been Quebec, the French-speaking province. They came within less than 1 percentage point of seceding Quebec from the rest of Canada. And why? Because they insisted upon not speaking a common language of the nation that they were part of, Canada.

If you ask anybody in Canada that lived through that era and asked them if English had been the official language of Canada from its beginning, had been the language of educational instruction and science and technology and business in all of Canada, the remnants of the French language would have persisted and it would have existed within the culture and been part of the conversational language going on in Quebec, but it wouldn't have been a political divider. The wedge that came down between the Canadians was a wedge driven exactly along the lines of language because the lines of language define the lines of culture, and it separated people politically and pitted them against each other.

If they only communicated in a common language, all French or all English, there never would have been a vote that came up before the Canadian people, and the risk of that nation being fractured apart would never have been faced by the voters. There is always a movement by Quebec separatists, but it seems to have been tamped down recently. But language is the fault line. If you want to erase fault lines in nations, you need a common language for the nation.

So I will make the point, there has never been a successful multilingual nation in the history of the world. The Soviet Union would be a very good example of this. The Soviet Union was put together and cobbled together by force, by military force, by economic leverage. We looked at all of the different regions of the Soviet bloc, and I grew up living with that and doing the air raid drills at the same time, watching the Soviet Union and the distinctions between Russia and the balance of the Soviet satellite states.

If you look at those satellite states today after the wall came down on November 9, 1989, we saw freedom echoed across Eastern Europe all of the way to the Pacific Ocean, losing some of that today, it appears, in Russia. But the Nations that spun themselves off were nations that were distinct by language. The languages in the Baltic states re-established some of their languages as their official language. They were trying to impose Russian on them, and the Baltic states rejected that to some degree.

They've gone back and re-established their native languages as their official language. It binds them together as a people. Polish binds the Poles together. Bulgarian, well, that's another subject. But if we go down into a place like Kurdistan, they speak a distinct language. The languages again are the defined borders of the nation states that emerged when they broke away from the Soviet bloc after the wall came down in 1989. This is a simple concept to understand in history. If you watch the map change, of the world, watch it change historically, and as that map changes, ask yourselves, what are these lines? Are they lines of language? Generally, they are. The lines of language generally match the lines of culture. And if we can speak a common language, it binds us together as a common people.

And so H.R. 997, English is the official language, is a piece of legislation that establishes English as the official language of the United States of America. It requires that all official activities and documents of the government be in English, and provides commonsense exceptions so that we can continue to do business in this country without confusion, without lack of communication, and still, at the same time, we make those exceptions so that no one is disenfranchised that is in this country, at least legally, and has a legal access to some of those benefits.

I think about another form of history, or another experience in history that has to do with the Spaniards as they arrived in the New World and down into the Central American region. And if you remember, as the conquistadores moved their way northward, they went on into the areas of southern Arizona, as we know it today, the Pueblo Indian area. And there you had the Zunis, the Hopis and the Anasazi Native Americans that were in that region. They come to mind as I look back upon the history because, as the Spaniards invaded into that territory and as they came into the communities, the settlements, the Indian villages, it was easy for them to take on one village and raid that village and destroy the opposition within the village and enslave the balance of the Native Americans that were not killed in the invasion and the occupation of the villages.

And the Spanish conquistadores could go, in the 1500s, they could go from village to village. And even though those neighborhoods were common in culture, the Native Americans in that region wore similar clothing, ate similar foods, had similar habits and practices and similar work habits, they didn't speak a common language because they lived in enclaves. They hadn't traveled and traded. Because they didn't interchange their cultures, because they didn't have a common language, the Spanish were able to divide and conquer the Native Americans in that region in southern Arizona in the 1500s, the Zunis, the Hopis, and the Anasazis, and perhaps others.

But as the Native Americans were enslaved by the Spaniards, they were taken into the missions and there they were converted to Christianity and they were taught Spanish. They imposed the Spanish language on the Native Americans in the southern parts of Arizona.

And guess what happened, Mr. Speaker? The Native Americans, the Zunis, the Hopis and the Anasazis, they figured out that now they had a lingua franca, they had a common language, the common language being Spanish which was taught to them and imposed upon them within the missions in the southern part of the United States; and because now they had a common language they could bind together, maybe they came together, and they threw the Spanish out. For decades they kept the Spanish out of that region and they defended their own neighborhood and their own country because they had learned something from being occupied, and that was they learned a common language. Even though it wasn't their native language, it was the language of their conquerors, they adopted and adapted to the Spanish language and used that common language, that common form of communication as currency, a lingua franca, to throw out their oppressors and their invaders and live free for decades and some will say perhaps as long as 200 years before the Spanish were able to impose their will again on the Native Americans of that region.

That's a piece of history that's hard to find. It's hard to find a place to read. It's hard to find something to study on it. It's a component that I think is quite interesting and instructive.

A common language binds us together. It lets us communicate for a common cause. It's going to move this Nation forward and make us more successful than we have been in the past. It preserves our culture, our history, our heritage. It gives us a common experience. It ties us to our history, and it lets an American go from corner to corner, from Maine to California and from Washington to Florida, and pick up a newspaper or walk into a store or a church or a park or a school or anywhere and be able to communicate in a common form of communications currency, at least with government. And if government uses the common form, the incentive will be there for others to use that common form.

It doesn't discourage learning other languages. I encourage that we learn other languages in order to communicate with other countries. But to be a foreigner, to be a stranger in your homeland, to go to a region of America that 50 years ago was an English-speaking region and today, where people do not speak English, within the United States of America, tells me that we haven't done the job of assimilation. We haven't found the formula to promote this inclusiveness that's necessary to bind us together with the common form of communications currency.

And so the bill establishes English as the official language. It's very simple. It says, official language of the United States. The Federal Government shall have an affirmative obligation to preserve and enhance the role of English as the official language of the Federal Government. And the official functions of government are to be conducted in English. Official functions of the Government of the United States shall be in English. And then the practical exceptions that I mentioned earlier, Mr. Speaker, are exceptions for the teaching of languages, any requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, any actions, documents or policies necessary for national security, for international relations, trade, tourism or commerce, all excepted within the bill. It has exceptions of language requirements for documents that protect the public health and safety of the United States, or any documents that facilitate the activities of the census.

We need to be able to count people here. And any actions that protect the rights of victims of crimes or their defendants, the legal portion of this, and then any use of terms or art or phrases from languages other than English, and certainly, that would include the geographical regions like Iowa; that's a Native American name.

And so we also have a requirement here in the United States that if you're to be naturalized as an American citizen, you have an obligation, an affirmative obligation to demonstrate proficiency in both written and the spoken English language. And as I watch some of the naturalization ceremonies that we have, and I speak at a number of them, and I watch the reactions of those being naturalized, if I tell a joke in a speech in that environment, Mr. Speaker, those that get the joke laugh. And those that don't understand the language do not. It tells me that we really don't have a very high standard in requiring proficiency in English in order to be naturalized as an American citizen.

That is the law, Mr. Speaker. And the law is written with a vision in mind that we need to be bound together as one people. So I am here to endorse H.R. 997, English as the official language. It will bind us together as one people. It will give us a common form of communications currency. It

will make us a stronger and better Nation and a stronger and better people for generations to come.

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

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the privilege to be recognized and address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Each time I come to the floor to address you and speak into the Record, I am very well aware that there are people in my district, Iowans and Americans, who are tuned in for one reason or another, who are shaping their ideas and their values as they listen to us here in the people's House, this great deliberative and this great debate body which has 435 Members, representing 300 million of us, each of

us representing roughly 660,000 constituents. We are called upon by the Constitution and the rights that are passed from God through the Declaration and the Constitution, we are called upon to step up to those responsibilities. We are elected to represent the people in our districts with the priorities of what is good for America. First God, then country, then State, and then district.

I know, Mr. Speaker, there are Members of this body who view their job as simply reflecting the political will of their constituents. In other words, take a poll, wet the finger, see which way the wind is blowing, put down a vote, and determine that your longevity here in this Congress somehow puts together this vast mosaic which turns out to be a beautiful painting. I, Mr. Speaker, do not believe that.

I believe we are charged with the responsibility of leadership. We are elected for our judgment. We owe our best effort and best judgment to our constituents, and part of that best effort and best judgment is to listen to them and receive their input, but exchange the information that we gather here and across the country.

We are full-time paying attention to the issues that affect this Nation. We have access to more information than most of our constituents do. We have a responsibility to process that information, give our opinion back to our constituents, exchange our ideas and reach a conclusion on how best to conduct ourselves on our public statements which affect public policy, on our votes and on our activities, on the bills that we sponsor and cosponsor and author, and the positions that we take in committee and here on the floor. All of that comes with a great profound responsibility of serving people here in the United States Congress.

I came here this evening to address one of those profound responsibilities, and maybe a little bit outside of the realm of an official duty of a Member of Congress, but certainly implied within our duty and responsibility, and that is that all of us in this Chamber are involved in a constant conversation with each other, with our constituents, with our associates, with the press, on how we select the next leader in the free world because, Mr. Speaker, the nomination process here in America will determine generally two nominees, one Democrat and one Republican, and perhaps an Independent, that will be on the ballot in November. One of them will be the next leader of the free world. One of them will be the Commander in Chief of the Armed Services of the only unchallenged superpower on the globe, and with that comes a series of profound responsibilities.

So how then do we in these positions of leadership, how do we take this job, and I am going to say seriously, to make this evaluation? How do we come to the conclusion on whom we support and might consider endorsing for President of the United States?

I, Mr. Speaker, have the great privilege to represent a district in Iowa, one of five Congressional districts, where we are the first in the Nation contest. Iowans will, in the caucus on January 3, make the first recommendation to the rest of the Nation and the individuals that Iowans believe would make the next President of the United States, both Democrats and Republicans.

We have had that responsibility of the first in the Nation caucus for several decades now. I believe it was Jimmy Carter that first identified the leverage and the opportunity to come to Iowa in the first in the nation caucus and engage in that process and emerge victorious and go on to New Hampshire and South Carolina and beyond and be successful in the process of nomination and be successful in the process of being elected as President.

Jimmy Carter identified that opportunity in Iowa, and since that time we have had Presidential candidates constantly in Iowa over the last year and a half in particular. But this process is an open process whereby it is the first time in my memory that both the Democrats and the Republicans neither has an incumbent President that will be up for renomination for a second term or a Vice President who might have been picked or anointed by a sitting President. It is wide open. It is wide open for Democrats and Republicans. We have known that for 3 years, perhaps, maybe a little more than 3 years.

So we have seen candidates come through Iowa, and I am sure the people in New Hampshire have as well, and the South Carolinians as well, and this has been going on for a year and a half. Now it is coming down to the crunch time. Iowans will be making their decision on whom they will support in the caucus within the next 30 days, 29 days, perhaps.

There are a lot of Iowans who have not yet made up their mind. I am here to say I understand why. The January 3 contest will bring 100,000 Republicans out who will go to homes across the State. Some will be sitting in living rooms and gymnasiums where they pull the caucus together for an entire county. Some will go to schools or other public buildings, but many will go to the homes. They will go to the homes of Iowans and sit in the living room. Sometimes they will not all fit in one room and they will flow into other rooms, but they will go through the process, Republicans and Democrats, declaring themselves. Democrats openly declare themselves for Presidential candidate. Republicans put up a vote on a piece of paper, and they can maybe vote for a Presidential candidate in a caucus and not be identified as a supporter for a particular candidate. Generally, we listen to each other speak with such focus we know how people vote whether it is a secret vote or whether it is the way it is in a small neighborhood contest.

But before I get into that, I want to get into how important it is that we have a process of nomination that includes a contest like an Iowa caucus, an opportunity for individuals, to caucus-goers, registered voters, and they will all be registered voters who have a voice in our caucuses, regular people, heartland people, regular Americans from all walks of life, it is so important we have a process that allows the supporters of the candidates to get to know the Presidential candidates.

We are in this modern cyber era where information goes with the click of a mouse and you can transfer capital around the world in a nanosecond. In that period of time, we can also transmit visual images and radio commercials and print text in the blogosphere. Anyone who has an e-mail distribution list can listen to a Presidential candidate in a living room in Davenport, Iowa, write that little quote down and pump it into their BlackBerry and send it off to 10,000 people on their e- mail distribution list. We have those kinds of folks who do that.

These Presidential candidates are being evaluated day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, by people who take their privilege to weigh in on this nomination process very seriously.

We have developed over the generations astute people who are engaged in politics. But I don't want to say that Iowans are the only ones that have that ability because we don't. Obviously that ability exists in every State in significant numbers. But I do want to say that if no State has a first in the Nation caucus process, if every State, for example, if we went to Super Tuesday on the 5th of February, if everybody held the primary contest at the same time, the polls opened at 7 in the morning and closed at 9 at night, we would all go in as a Nation, 300 million of us, those who voted in the primary, and we cast a ballot for our selection for nominee, if we did that, we would nominate the Democrat candidate and the Republican candidate who had the deepest pockets, most ability to raise money and the most ability to buy ads and put their chosen persona out before the American people to convince them that on Super Tuesday, February 5, they should go to the polls and vote for them. Not a personal contest, but a media image, money raising contest is what we would have. We will have that media image, money raising contest on Super Tuesday on February 5 and those dates beyond that other States have their primaries, and some have a caucus or convention.

But this first in the Nation caucus is different. You simply cannot earn votes by running media. You simply can't run television ads and radio ads and print and mailer and do robocalls and be able to get people to be inspired to get up on a cold January night and go on out into their neighborhood's living room or the school gymnasium and declare for a candidate for President. It takes more than that.

If people are going to invest hours of their time, because it isn't just write the name of a Presidential candidate on a piece of paper and turn it in. It also includes the initial offering of the planks for the State party platform and the election of precinct captains and the election of the delegates that go to the county conventions. These nights are full of political debate and exchange of ideas.

There are people who will go to the caucuses who have not made up their mind who they will support for President, but they will listen to the speeches, whether Republicans or Democrats.

So what is this caucus process and why is it unique? It is unique because it requires organization. It requires the candidate to build an organization within the State, to identify workers within the counties and people that will go forth and profess the validity of their candidate as the best President that we could ask for in this era as President of the United States.

This statewide conversation that goes on continually is a conversation one on one, person to person. It goes on in the coffee shop and it goes on in schools and churches and over talk radio constantly. It goes on over the telephone lines from neighbor to neighbor and business conversation to business conversation. People seeking to influence others to support their candidate and others that are ambivalent, and some that will lay out the principles that they require a candidate to stand for, but may not be behind the personality of the individuals.

And there are components of this statewide conversation that have to do with anecdotes about each of the Presidential candidates, how they conducted themselves in private. Maybe they went to a barbecue someplace in Iowa County and when nobody was looking, they got up and cleaned off the table and helped out. Or maybe they got mad at a staff aide and cut loose and yelled at them behind the curtain and the stage when they thought nobody was listening. And maybe they walked off with some young kids when intense conversations were going on about policy and sat down over by the lake and had a conversation about God and country with young impressionable children that won't be voting for that candidate. They might be leaders of this country at a future time. They might have invested in young people instead of likely caucus- goers.

All of these little anecdotes get added up and transferred along and retold, and they become part of the personality, part of the evaluation of each of the Presidential candidates.

This is a statewide conversation through e-mail, by telephone, in print media, word of mouth, things that are said and unsaid. Most good, some negative. But in the end, Iowans will come to a measure of a consensus and they will support different candidates, obviously. But they will make a recommendation. Some candidates will be weeded out and some candidates will be advanced. But there will be two tickets punched in New Hampshire, no more than three, maybe only one.

But to win the Iowa caucus says you have met the standards. You have held up under the bright light of public scrutiny and you have done that for more than a year, and you have not been found wanting in your character or your policy. Your faith will be measured. Your work ethic will be measured. The tempo of your work, the people who are gathered around as paid staff and volunteers, all of them become part of a team, and the personalities of each of those players makes a difference in the evaluations process. If we do not have such a process, then again it becomes just a media campaign, just a media contest.

I would take you back, Mr. Speaker, to reflect upon the 2004 caucus when, at this stage before the caucus, a month before the caucus, the national news media had Howard Dean as the nominee for President for the Democrat Party, because Howard Dean had built an organization, he had raised a ton of money, he had an Internet presence there that was unique and hadn't been matched at the time. The polls were showing that Howard Dean was way ahead and that his next closest competitor was not likely to be able to overcome him or overtake him. And yet 3 weeks before the caucus, at least 2 weeks, in that period of time, 2 to 3 weeks before the caucus, we knew that Howard Dean was not going to win the Iowa caucus. He might have won the nomination elsewhere, but we knew he wasn't going to win the Iowa caucus. We could tell on the streets of Iowa. People were starting to walk away from and back away from Howard Dean.

Mr. Speaker, I don't come here to speak ill of the individual. He set a new standard and certainly made a name for himself in the State and across America. And many, many Iowans had the opportunity to meet Howard Dean. But I think that the conclusion that they drew and the reason that they didn't show up in the Democrat caucus where you have to stand up and say, I'm for Howard Dean, all of us that are for him, come gather around here, we'll count our bodies and that will be the number of people that showed up to support him. If there is an insufficient number, then we won't be able to report support for Howard from this caucus. That's the system and the rules that they have. And, truthfully, they did not show up to support Howard Dean. That was not because of the scream. The scream was a result of folks not showing up to support him, Mr. Speaker. I believe that Iowans came to the conclusion that Howard Dean, of all the things he had to offer, did not have the temperament to be President of the United States. I think that was the bottom line conclusion. And as Iowans walked away from Howard Dean, John Kerry then won Iowa and went on to win the nomination. His prospects were pretty dim at this point and 4 years ago, but we know how history launched John Kerry forward and how Howard Dean went forward to let out the scream that was the scream of frustration that, of all the good things he had done as he was on the inside track and he was turning on towards victory and it collapsed, because in the end we're making a measurement on real people, evaluating their work ethic, their faith, their character, their personalities, how they interact with people. That's something that only happens there and only happens in Iowa. It happens, I think, in New Hampshire also to some degree, but it is a different process. It is a primary process, not a caucus process. So it changes the dynamic in New Hampshire. And then beyond it becomes more and more of a media and less and less of an organizational effort.

But to have this unique process, this first-in-the-Nation caucus process so that Presidential candidates are meeting people face-to- face, eye-to-eye. Some might call it a relic of the old days, but I will tell you that I believe, Mr. Speaker, that it is the foundation of one of the great things about America that those of us who have the privilege to represent the people, whether it is in the White House or in the Congress or in the statehouse or through our courthouses or city hall, we face the people, we answer their questions, we let them evaluate the things we believe in and we let them evaluate our work ethic and our value system, and then they make the decision. It is up to the people.

So I am a great fan of this caucus process. I will do all I can to protect and preserve it, because I do not want to see an America that is simply a paid media nomination and a paid media campaign that insulates Presidential candidates from the people and perhaps launches somebody off to be President who might not meet that test if they had to look you or me in the eye. That is what the caucus does.

On the Republican side of this in the Iowa caucus, Mr. Speaker, we are evaluating a lot of different components, and we have watched the polls sort some of this through. We have some very good people there that stand solid on the issues. Some people with whom I stand alongside on the floor of the House of Representatives, if I put down a wish list of the Presidential candidates, where they stand on each of the issues and a little box to check, we have some people from this House running for President to check all my boxes. They check every piece that I would want to have in a Presidential candidate. And partly due to the media and partly due to the selection process, some of them don't have a lot of traction right now, and it's too bad. They deserve more of our respect. And some of them have stepped forward with a solid agenda on the issues.

I want to at this point, Mr. Speaker, compliment my friend Tom Tancredo for making immigration the issue of the day. When I first met him, I already knew him, I thought, because of the hours that he had spent on this floor speaking into this microphone, Mr. Speaker, about the importance of border control, about the importance of preserving our national sovereignty by controlling our borders and who comes in the United States and who does not, protecting the security of the American people from the terrorists from without. Tom Tancredo has done that job to the extent where, in the debate the other night, they spent 30 minutes or more, all of the Presidential candidates, debating on who would be the toughest on immigration and who would be the most like Tom Tancredo. I call that a victory for Tom Tancredo.

I think he has implanted the issue that burns the most passionately within him, the immigration reform, border control, workplace enforcement, ending anchor babies, the automatic citizenship that comes with babies of illegal immigrants who are born here on American soil. All of those components that he has worked so hard for all of these years, many of which I stood on this very floor and debated with him and supported with him, and he has come forward to support me on the agenda that I brought forward. I want to compliment Tom Tancredo, because they all were there, standing there seeking to out-Tom Tancredo, Tom Tancredo. And to some extent that is what happens in a Presidential campaign when the issue that is the most important to you is adopted by the rest of the candidates.

Now, it doesn't mean they didn't have some opinions on it. It doesn't mean that immigration wasn't important to them. But what I have seen happen is that they understood that Tom Tancredo was right, and they wanted to make sure that they had a plank in their platform that reflected the view that he brings to the immigration issue, and generally it is a no amnesty pledge.

I believe all the Presidential candidates have taken the pledge to be opposed to amnesty. Mr. Speaker, amnesty is and it needs to be defined, and I have done so here many times, to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crimes.

The reason that definition is that way is because those who come into the United States across the border illegally are criminals. They are guilty of the criminal misdemeanor of illegal entry into the United States. And those who overstay their visas are unlawfully present here in the United States, and they are generally guilty of a civil misdemeanor of overstaying their visa. But most of them, and I will say those who are unlawfully present and many of those who are lawfully present and it is not lawful for them to work here, still falsify documents, still present themselves to be somebody they are not in order to get a job, in order to do some type of business here to gain the benefits of this society. Most of those who cross the border are criminals because they violated a criminal misdemeanor, and most of those who overstayed their visas have also violated or committed some crime, generally document fraud, identity fraud in order to achieve access to our benefits or jobs here in the United States.

So this is a group of people who stood up and said they do not deserve amnesty. We do not want to reward immigration lawbreakers. So whether they jumped the border illegally or overstayed their visa, they are lawbreakers. And they should not be rewarded, because if we do, we will get more of them, not less. And to grant a pardon to immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. What was their objective? Well, to be in the United States for one thing, obviously, because that is the definition of what they have done is found themselves unlawfully present in the United States. So if that is their objective to be in the United States, if we grant them an amnesty that lets them stay in the United States, that's amnesty. We have rewarded them with the objective of their crimes. Or, if they are here and they are working here unlawfully and we jigger the books so that we give them an opportunity to continue working here but we legalize it, we have granted them amnesty because we pardoned them for their crime and we give them their objective, which is a job. Or, if they just want to live here and utilize the social benefits of this great welfare state that we have, that also could be the objective of their crime. Or, if we let them stay here in the United States and they actually are part of that smaller percentage who do have ill will towards Americans or who are criminals or those who do smuggle drugs, those who are part of the criminal element, if they would be allowed to stay here as well, we don't know who the criminals are and who aren't. And the idea that if we would just legalize them, they would all come forward, good guys and bad, and they all sign up and we give them a United States identification document, and then we would know where they are and what they are doing is just a false premise, Mr. Speaker.

The standard is Presidential candidates on the Republican side need to oppose amnesty. Presidential candidates on the Democrat side, I think we know, they have been fairly consistently for amnesty if I read their statements correctly, and I believe I do. If I am incorrect on that, I would hope that one or all of the Democrats would step forward and sign off on the ``no amnesty'' pledge. I am happy to put the amnesty definition in print. And, if you are listening, to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crimes.

Well, Presidential candidates on the Republican side have all sworn off on amnesty. We just don't agree quite on what amnesty is all the way down the line. And that brings me some concern.

But that is one of the foundational issues that has been debated here, and I wanted to in the Record thank Tom Tancredo for making sure that it is part of this dialogue in the presidential race on the Republican and on the Democrat side of the aisle. And, Tom, you have won this debate. Now we have to figure out how to implement the policy, but you have won this debate.

So that is the definition of amnesty. That is what has taken place here and across Iowa and New Hampshire and down into South Carolina and beyond.

I want to point out also that this Presidential contest does start in Iowa January 3, the first-in-the-Nation caucus then. Immediately, within a couple of days, on the 5th of January, it goes to a convention in Wyoming. And I am glad for them being involved early in the process. It's not very much focused on what happens in Wyoming, but shortly after that the following Tuesday, January 8, just 5 days after the Iowa caucus, is the New Hampshire primary. And we all know that is the first-in-the-Nation primary, and it is significant not so much in the numbers of delegates that will be achieved there but in the message that it sends to the rest of the country. From the 8th of January until 7 days later on the 15th of January, that is when the primary is in Michigan, and then on the 19th we have the primary in South Carolina which will take us to the fifth process. And in Nevada on the same day there is a caucus.

And so the early five contests that we have, Iowa on the 3rd of January, Wyoming on the 5th, New Hampshire on the 8th, Michigan on the 15th, and Nevada and South Carolina on the 19th of January, those early races, six States actually, but the major contests will be Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina. Those will set the stage for the Florida, Alabama, Alaska primary on the 29th.

As this moves forward, the momentum that comes from a victory in Iowa transcends, at least launches a candidate on the road to New Hampshire, asks the people in New Hampshire: Take another look. If you were looking at this a different way, take another look and see. There was a reason Iowans made the decision that they did. Do you agree with them or do you not agree with them? And I don't want to stir up any contrarian attitude on the part of the New Hampshirites. I have great relationships with the people and I would love to be up there with your primary. I really would. But this process; it is a process of momentum, it is a process of selection. And as Iowans measure the character of the Presidential candidates and as they go to the caucus on the night of the 3rd of

January, that message will be heard around the country and around the world. And those who have not then made a decision on who they support will be taking another look. Some who have made a decision might be reassessing.

So I would ask this. Let's evaluate their character, their work ethic, their personalities, how they handle themselves in a time of stress or a time of relaxation. Let's do that. But I like to look at this as a matter of principle, and I would ask that these Presidential candidates be those who carry with them the convictions on a series of issues that I think are important to the future of America. And this, Mr. Speaker, is the point for which I come to this floor.

The issues that I believe this Nation's future pivots on, the most important issues, among them are life, marriage, the war on terror, illegal immigration, tax reform, second amendment, health care, and national sovereignty.

Of that list of issues that I have laid out here, Mr. Speaker, I will start with life, and that is innocent unborn human life. In particular, life from its natural beginnings, which is from fertilization/ conception until natural death. The human life is sacred in all of its forms. It begins and ends as I have described. Do the Presidential candidates understand that and believe that? Or, I would ask them if they did not, then to them I would say, when did your life begin?

Mine began at conception. When did your life begin?

Madam Speaker, I believe that every American that's going to have an opinion on policy needs to ask themselves that very question. When did your life begin? Mine, I believe, began at that moment of conception. I believe that's when I was blessed with a soul, and I have a destiny like all of us, and we're all created in God's image and we have a duty. And from whom much is given, much is required. And so the issue of life is an essential component, and I will say the most important issue in this race or any race because that tells us the quality and the character and the integrity and the faith, the core faith of the Presidential candidates, how they view this subject.

The second issue is marriage. And Madam Speaker, marriage is an institution that I believe is a sacrament. It's a blessing that's given to us from God. Adam and Eve were joined together before original sin. Marriage is as old as man and woman itself. It's a blessing too that came from God, and marriage has survived original sin and marriage has survived the great flood, and marriage has been with us for thousands of years, and it's been defined as the same thing throughout, a man and a woman joined together in holy matrimony. That's marriage, according to our faith. It's marriage according to our civil law in this country. It's marriage according to the Defense of Marriage Act at the Federal level. It's marriage according to the Defense of Marriage acts in all States except Massachusetts, if I have that chart correct, and it's between a man and a woman. And it's protected in the Constitutions of 27 States in America. We don't have a difficulty understanding what marriage is. It's between a man and a woman. And yet we have activists in the country that are using our courts to try to redefine marriage.

I would submit that if you believe differently than me, come to this Congress and make your case. If you believe differently than the law, different than the 27 Constitutions in America, different than the Defense Marriage Act here in the Federal statute, then take your case to the States and make your argument there and lobby for the representatives and the State senators to redefine marriage if that is your wish, if that is your will, if that is your conviction. That is how it's done in this country. But when we hand over decisions to the courts when we know that we don't have the support of the people, then the people who hire the attorneys to take these suits to the courts are asking for an activist judge that will overturn the will of the people, will overturn the Constitution and overturn the State law or the Federal law, as the case may be, that's when we get strife, that's when we get stress in this country. That's when we get domestic conflict in America is when the judges make the laws. But when the people's voice is heard, we accept that as the will of the people and we move on.

If you believe differently than me, I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I believe Iowa must pass a constitutional amendment now to fix a wrong that was committed, I believe, by an activist judge. I think we have to do that to preserve this oldest institution between people, this institution of marriage that goes back to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve, before original sin and before the great flood, and has survived all of that time. And now, here in this era, I am to believe that we're enlightened and we can look at this differently, that all of human experience, all of human history, and the Constitution and the law and our faith can all be set aside because we have modern-day people who want something different. And they would upset all of that for what? For their wish, for their will, when there are provisions that can be made within current law to make sure that people have the things in life that are necessary to respect their rights.

So life is essential. And it's a human life. Marriage is essential for a Presidential candidate to understand and to defend it because the President sets the moral standard for America, and the words that are uttered by a President either raise the standards or lower the standards. They shift the focus. And that's why marriage is so important that we have Presidential candidates that understand this.

The next issue that I mentioned is the war on terror. And we know that here in this city we were attacked on September 11, 2001. We've been conducting this global war on terror since that time, and particularly with operations within Iraq and Afghanistan. And who would have dreamed that on that day, September 11, we didn't think we'd get through the afternoon without being attacked again, let alone all of these 6 years and 3 months since that period of time. No one would have believed that this Nation would have been without a terrorist attack on its soil, a significant terrorist attack on this soil, at least a successful one. But that has been the case because this President has carried this issue to the enemy. The global war against these terrorists must be pursued. We cannot cut and run. We cannot decide to pull our troops back to the horizon. We can't wake up tomorrow morning and decide the horizon is Okinawa. We have a responsibility to defend this country in this global war on terror. And I believe, Madam Speaker, that at least the Republican candidates and probably the Democrat candidates will defend this Nation in this global war on terror, some more aggressively, some with more insight, some with a vision towards a final victory, some reluctantly because they don't really believe that this is a war that we're fighting. Some kind of think on the other side that we just need to understand why they hate us and maybe we can take away the reasons for the hate. But we have to fight this war on terror, and our Republican candidates all will, to one degree or another, a little bit of difference in methodology, but they'll fight this war on terror.

I mentioned the illegal immigration and how important that is. It changes our destiny, Madam Speaker.

And then the next component of this is tax reform. Now, there are people here in this Congress that believe that through money management, through tax management, regulation management, access to tax revenue and handing that money out, that we can engineer this entire society, that we can socially engineer in America with a tax policy, that if we just set our tax structure right, we can grow the businesses that need to grow and shrink the businesses we'd like to shrink and reward the people that need to be rewarded and punish the people that need to be punished. Some people think that through tax policy you can do all of those things. I am not among them, Madam Speaker. I believe that tax policy should be for the purposes of raising revenue, for the legitimate functions of government, for the constitutionally legitimate function of government and nothing else; that we should not have a thought about if we reward this behavior and punish this behavior

with our tax structure, that will maneuver this country into a direction that we like better.

We should have a tax structure that's fair, that makes everyone a taxpayer, that rewards earning, savings and investment and work and sweat equity. We need to have a kind of a tax policy that takes the tax off of all productivity in America and puts it on consumption. If we do that, and I would remind you, Madam Speaker, that the Federal Government has the first lien on all productivity in America. If you're going to produce in this country, if you punch the time clock at 8:00 on Monday morning, or if you go collect the interest on your passbook savings account, or if you sell the farm and you take the capital gains and you roll it over and you invest it into a factory with a production line and higher workers, wherever there's production, wherever there is a return on an investment, the Federal Government has the first lien. And Ronald Reagan said what we tax, we get less of. And so we hear with our tax policy, tax everything that produces and nothing that consumes. Well, little of what is consumed. And tax reform is a big issue. It's important. And I'll get back to that perhaps a little bit later, Madam Speaker.

One of the other issues that I mentioned that we want to make sure we can evaluate Presidential candidates in is the second amendment. Our gun rights, and if we look back in our Constitution under the second amendment, clearly, that we are guaranteed an individual right to keep and own firearms. A well-regulated militia being necessary to a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That's the second amendment, Madam Speaker.

There's a case before the United States Supreme Court that will come up perhaps in March of next year, and we will get the first decision of the Supreme Court on that question, I believe, in 70 years. But we need a President that will defend that right to keep and bear arms.

And I would remind the body, Madam Speaker, that the right to keep and bear arms is not a right for self-defense specifically. It wasn't written for that reason. It isn't necessarily a right to go out and target shoot or to hunt. Those things that I've mentioned, self- defense, hunting, target shooting, collecting firearms, all of those things are fringe benefits to the real reason for the second amendment. The real reason we have a right to keep and bear arms is because our forefathers feared tyranny, and they understood that a well-armed populace would not capitulate to a military state, that a dictator could not emerge and herd the people like sheep at the point of a bayonet if the people themselves had guns. That's the philosophy that's behind the second amendment. And you'll notice in the last 200-and-some years, we haven't had a single tyrant emerge as a leader here in America. Some would disagree with me, but I'm sure that they're wrong in any analysis. And one of those reasons is because of the restraint that's in place because the people in America hold guns within their possessions, within their homes. And that is a silent deterrent against the emergence of tyranny. And while that's going on, we're deterring tyranny, and we're protecting our homes and we get to enjoy target shooting and hunting and collecting.

And by the way, if you go over to the Smithsonian, Madam Speaker, you can walk through the collection of firearms that are there and track the history of America, as the history of America is written within the firearms that have defended the balance of our freedoms, and without that defense, the ability to defend our freedoms, none of the rest of this holds together. So the second amendment becomes an essential evaluation and how it's defended by a Presidential candidate.

And health care is an issue that we are constantly churning and it will be an issue in the next Presidential race. It is today in the caucus and in the primary, both among Democrats and Republicans, how would these Presidential candidates deal with health care. And it is \1/7\ of our economy that is consumed in health care, Madam Speaker. That's a significant percentage. And I'll come back to that perhaps in a moment.

But I wanted to mention the last issue, which is our national sovereignty. And this national sovereignty issue is one that we give away if we don't control our borders. If we simply have 2,000 miles on the southern border and 4,000 miles on the northern border and open seashores on the Atlantic and on the Pacific, and people that want to come to America come, and those that want to go certainly are always free to leave, Madam Speaker, that is no sign of sovereignty. No nation that doesn't protect its borders will long be a nation. And if we do not protect our borders, if people flow back and forth at will, if they carry goods and contraband back and forth across the border at will, we are no longer a sovereign nation. We're just a location where people do business and trade, whether it's legitimate or illegitimate. This national sovereignty has an essential component, and it must be part of our decision-making process as we evaluate the Presidential candidates.

And so, Madam Speaker, as we come to this, I began to ask these questions. How do I sort these issues? And what stands out as the essential components of this decision-making process? And I'll read through this list again. Life, marriage, the war on terror, illegal immigration, tax reform, the second amendment, health care, protecting our national sovereignty. How do these top Presidential candidates on the Republican side, how do they shake out when I evaluate where they stand on these issues and what are the most important?

Well, as I look across this list, and having served in this Congress now for 5 years, I come to the conclusion that the next President, whether he's a Democrat or Republican, will defend access to health care in America. I don't think that there are any Americans that are in danger of losing their access to health care under any policy that's advocated by a Republican or a Democrat. It might come in a different form from the Democrat side of the aisle. It would be universal socialized medicine. That's clearly in the debate platform and there's no one over there that disagrees. They're all talking about how they would provide socialized medicine, not whether.

That's not a disagreement. On the Republican side, there is discussion about this, and I don't know Republican candidates that support socialized medicine. Some have varying degrees on how they would approach this, but all would ensure that all Americans have access to health care.

So I don't think health care becomes the deciding issue by which I should throw my support behind an individual Presidential candidate. It's important. We'll debate it, we'll protect it, we'll preserve it, and hopefully we'll make it better. And I bring some ideas to this Congress that I hope can get implemented, along with many of my colleagues. I had a meeting this morning, as a matter of fact. So I will set health care off on the side and I will say it's not in jeopardy. I think that all Presidential candidates will preserve and protect access to health care.

Then I look at the war on terror and also come to the same conclusion that, on the Republican side at least, all Presidential candidates will continue to conduct this war on terror. We understand who our enemy is far better today than we did 6 years and 3 months ago and we will understand our enemy better a year from now. And the next President of the United States will understand this enemy better than we did 4 years ago, and certainly 8 years ago.

But I believe that this Congress supports this global war on terror. It's a battle. You brought 40 resolutions against us, but the American people are going to continue to defeat this enemy that is seeking to kill us. I believe the next Republican will do the same. And I think it's a matter of debate and degrees; whether Rudy Giuliani would have the most insight and be the most aggressive or whether John McCain would have the most insight and be the most aggressive. There are strong convictions on the part of Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee, would all stand up to this foe, would all work to defeat our enemies, would all narrow the laser beam down on Osama bin Laden and on al Qaeda. And I think all would work to promote our American values overseas so that the people over there understand that we want to help them rid

themselves of the habitat that breeds that kind of terror. I think that happens.

So I think I can put health care over on the side and say it's not at risk in this nomination. Americans are going to be okay. We can debate this in Congress on how we want to move forward with it, but let's set it off on the side because we're going to be all right with it. Let's set the global war on terror off on the side because I believe that all Presidential candidates will fight that.

And as I take these issues on down then, the second amendment is another one. It's important. It's essential. We need to protect our right to keep and bear arms, and yet this Congress will protect our second amendment rights. The courts, I believe we will discover in March, or if the decision comes down the following June, that they will have protected our second amendment rights and written for a long time a definitive word on the meaning and the understanding of the second amendment to be consistent with our historical readings and understanding and the text of the Constitution. I think that happens. And I think, even with an unfriendly President on the second amendment, I think that this Congress in the end protects our second amendment rights. So as much as I believe in the second amendment, I think I can set that over on this side with the war on terror and with health care, those three in that category, that we can protect and defend this another way.

But what does it take a President to do? What will the next President do that will turn the destiny of the United States the most profoundly for the good, or miss that opportunity by taking a wrong turn and never being able to get back to the interstate again? And I believe the next President will make probably two appointments to the Supreme Court, maybe more, and these will be significant appointments to the Court.

I think it's imperative that we elect a President who understands that the nominees to the Supreme Court must be originalists, they must be textualists, they must be the kind of jurists who read the Constitution and understand that the Constitution means what it says, means the text that's in the Constitution. They must be the kind of judiciary that look at the Constitution and understand that we need to evaluate it within the original understanding of the Constitution because, without that, without originalism, without textualists, without the original intent of the Constitution as the foundational criterion for determining the constitutionality of current law, without that, the Constitution is no guarantee at all, except a guarantee to the justices to be able to manipulate their decisions to move this society in the direction they choose, as if they were legislators.

The last people that should be amending our Constitution, whether literally amending it or de facto amending the Constitution by their decisions, are the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. The next President has to understand that. And he cannot ask the question of the potential nominees for the Court, are you pro-life or are you pro- choice? Are you pro-marriage or are you pro gay marriage? They can't ask that question because that would interfere with the confirmation process. It would interfere with the decision-making process. And, in fact, I don't ask those questions of the judges myself because I know they have to make a decision on the case that's before them. We would be asking them to make a decision on a case that hasn't been written or presented to them, perhaps.

But they need to be the kind of justices that have profound and reverent respect for this Constitution, for its meaning, for its guarantee. Because in it is the guarantee of our rights and our freedom like none other on the face of this Earth. And we cannot have a justice, or five of the nine, that decide they want to social engineer by the decisions that they make.

This next President must understand this, must have advisers that will probe into the potential nominees, and must come down with nominations of the kind of quality that we see in Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, two stellar appointments to the Supreme Court made by President Bush. If we can continue down that line, we will eventually see the justices in the lower courts start to respect the text of the Constitution, too. And then, in my perfect world, they will start to teach the Constitution in con law in law school instead of teaching off the case law. I know some of you do. Many do not. And that is essential.

So the issues for the next President to understand and promote and embody are the appointments to the Supreme Court being essential, that they be originalists, within the vein of Roberts and Alito. I want those decisions to come down on the Constitution, not on their will or their whim of what the policy should be; not in some legal contortionist approach to try to arrive at a conclusion that fits their social liberalism. I want a justice that can maybe come to a conclusion that, even though they disagree with the policy that unfolds, the Constitution says so, they must follow it. That becomes the most important thing. And life and marriage do hang in the balance on that, but those decisions will be made off the Constitution in my future world, not off the whim of the policy because we wish it so.

So as I look down through this list, life and marriage, wrapped up in the original understanding of the Constitution, that being, I think, the most important, and then the issue of our national sovereignty wrapped up within the immigration issue, who will defend our borders? Who is strong and who is silent? And as I evaluate the Presidential candidates, there are some who have clearly supported our amnesty policy. And the Senator from Arizona has a policy such that has his name on it, or at least did have, the McCain-Kennedy. And some of that has changed, but the debate is the same and the policy is the same. It is amnesty. He served America honorably for every day of his adult life, and I have profound respect for Senator McCain. He and I disagree on the amnesty issue and on the border. And I think that our national sovereignty and the destiny of America is turned if we don't uphold the rule of law.

I'm concerned about the mayor of a sanctuary city, Rudy Giuliani, who has essentially presided over a city that the ``broken windows'' policy is wonderful. It set a standard and cleaned up a city, but it did not preserve and protect the rule of law when it came to immigration. This Nation cannot be sustained if we don't uphold the central pillar of American exceptionalism, the rule of law. Those things weigh heavy in my head and on my heart and on my instincts when it comes to the evaluation process.

It weighs heavy on me that the State of Arkansas, to some degree, has become a sanctuary State because of the promotion there of the DREAM Act. Now, it has a nice name, but what it is is scholarships for illegals to go to college. And also opposition there for a ban on tax dollars going to welfare to illegals. People that are unlawfully present in the United States, the question needs to be asked and answered to each of these Presidential candidates, and I would implore you, you have this opportunity in places like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, ask these Presidential candidates, what would you do with the people here in the United States who are unlawfully here, whether they came across illegally on the border or overstayed their visa, how would you deal with them? Would you send them home, or wouldn't you, if they had broken no other laws? And if the answer is, well, we can make some other accommodation, or I would send them to college under a scholarship program, or I would grant them a path to citizenship, all of those things are amnesty.

If we don't have the will to send people home when we encounter them on the streets of America through our local law enforcement, for example, if we don't have the will to send them home, then we cannot have an immigration policy that is established here by the people in America. Our immigration policy will be driven by people in foreign countries that, some who drive here, some who take a boat here, some who fly here, but they come to America and do what they want to do, and then we have Presidential candidates out there that would adjust our national policy to accommodate their wish, their will, their whim against the wishes of the American people, against the rule of law. I think that weighs heavily when we make decisions on

who we support for President, weighs heavily if they have supported amnesty, and weighs heavily if they've advocated policies like sanctuary cities, if they've presided over sanctuary cities. It weighs heavily if protecting that central pillar of American exceptionalism, rule of law, has been sacrificed to a whim because of a heart taking over where the head needs to rule. We need to have tough love or we will be sacrificing the rule of law. And I am quite concerned that we have a series of Presidential candidates that won't hold their ground on that issue because holding their ground on the immigration issue holds our ground on the sovereignty issue.

Now, if they would make the right appointments to the Supreme Court, that's going to be, to some degree, a redeeming characteristic, but in the end, the right appointments to the Supreme Court and the sacrifice of our national sovereignty and the importation of every willing traveler changes forever the face of America. We have a unique American character, a unique American spirit. We have a vitality here, much of which comes from having skimmed the cream of the crop off the donor civilizations through the process of a legal immigration policy, and we have such a massive illegal policy that we can no longer have a debate in this Congress on a legal immigration policy. We need a President to lead us out of that, not a President that leads us into that mess even further.

To think of the idea of another 4 or 8 years of hypercompassionate conservatism that would grant a DREAM Act scholarship to people who are here illegally, or grant paths to citizenship to reward people who are unlawfully present here in the United States, that would not uphold the rule of law, undermines our sovereignty, what America do we have left?

If we have a court that would preserve life and marriage, but we don't have a national sovereignty that's protected because the heart of a presidential candidate ruled over their head, then we sacrifice our sovereignty and our destiny.

So, Mr. Speaker, I submit this: Look through the list of the issues that matter, life, marriage, the war on terror, illegal immigration, tax reform, the second amendment, health care, and our national sovereignty. Look at those issues that we can put over to the side and say, we can protect them and promote them here from Congress and we think all the Presidential candidates will stand behind them, and those would be the war on terror, the tax reform issue, which probably doesn't change our destiny right now, but we can put that off on the side because I just think that it's not a destiny changer at this moment. The second amendment we will protect here in this Congress. It's important, but we'll protect it. Health care is important, but we'll protect it. It's not constitutional, by the way, for those of you who are wondering. But what it comes down to is life, marriage and our national sovereignty as viewed through whether we will protect our borders.

Ask yourselves: Do these Presidential candidates understand these issues? What is their focus on life and marriage? What confidence do you have in their judicial appointments all the way down the line? But ask yourselves, where are they in the end? Are they for or against amnesty? Do they stand up for amnesty, as I have defined it, or do they redefine it for their own purpose because their heart leads their head?

I hope you make some sound decisions and make a solid recommendation to America. I thank you for your attention tonight, Madam Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, again I thank you for recognizing me to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives; that never is an event for me that goes without profound appreciation for the privilege to stand here in this place that so many have stood in and engaged in this great deliberative body that we have.

I appreciate this opportunity that we have with technology that's available today to address you at the close of business, in fact, at the close of the week, and to be confident that the messages that flow forth from the floor of this Chamber echo not just in your ears, Mr. Speaker, but across this country.

And I would submit that, in this Nation that we have today, we have a greater opportunity to have a more representative form of our constitutional Republic than we had, perhaps, when the Founders established this country and drafted our declaration and used that foundation to draft our Constitution. At that time, the communications were limited to word of mouth and letters and newspapers that couldn't be produced at anywhere near the rate that we can produce communications today.

Today, we are real-time communications globally. And when we speak in this Chamber or do a press conference and talk to a radio or television station, or when any of the leaders do across the country, that echoes sometimes around the world. If the President holds a press conference, it echoes around the world.

And here we have that opportunity to speak to and address the issues of our day in a fashion that we can be confident that the American people, those that are interested in the subject matter that we raise, are having this conversation amongst themselves as well. And it takes place with cell phones and e-mail and Web pages and telephone calls and across the coffee table and at work and at school and at play and at ball games and at church, the aspects of our lives where we interchange with our ideas.

And we need to remember, as Members of Congress, that we come here to stand for and stand up for and represent the principles that have made this a great Nation, and that our debate needs to be a debate always with the idea in mind of what's the best policy for the United States of America, not necessarily what's the best politics for any individual Member of this Congress. And we have great appreciation and respect for this national conversation that takes place.

I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that the best example that I can think of in my time here in this Congress has been the national conversation that we've had on immigration. And of course we've had our debates that have gone on here for some years, and they have gotten very intense here on the floor of the House of Representatives, but the pivotal moment actually came over in the Senate several times this year, but late May is the one that stands out in my mind.

And as the discussion took place, the Wall Street Journal would write one thing and the New York Times would sometimes mirror that, and the Washington Times would have a different opinion and the National Review would have a different opinion. And as these opinions were merging, Americans were reading those articles. They were listening to the news stories on CNN, Fox News and the other major networks. And as these subjects came up and this discussion of what we're going to do, as Congressman Poe spoke about the need to secure our border and enforce our immigration laws, that debate was taking place on our airwaves, on talk radio, in the print media, on television. It was taking place here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and it was taking place in those workplaces and all the way across the spectrum of American life.

And what we were having was a national conversation, a national conversation that often turned into an intense debate and sometimes a shouting match from one American to another. But as that went on, we tested our ideas. And as we raised up issues that we said were facts, and those facts were raised up with an opportunity for those who disagreed to challenge those facts, maybe present their own, Americans came to a consensus conclusion. And when it came to the consensus conclusion, that was when the crucible of the comprehensive immigration bill was before the United States Senate.

As it came before the United States Senate, the American people, having had a national conversation throughout all that media that I talked about, person-to-person, face-to-face decided we do not want an amnesty plan. We don't want a comprehensive immigration plan. I call it often a comprehensive amnesty plan. We want to make sure that we defend the rule of law, and whatever we do with legal immigration needs to be predicated upon the requirement that we establish the rule of law and that those who might be beneficiaries of a change in immigration law would be those people who have not violated our laws.

That was the principle that caused the American people to weigh in, that was the principle that shut down the switchboards in the United States Senate, that is the principle that has gotten their attention over there a couple of times since then, and it is this national conversation where we are able

to reach out and listen to and understand and benefit from the wisdom of the American people.

Our judgment is endorsed by the virtue that we have been elected to represent our constituents. But we need to use our most sound judgment. We also need to listen to our constituents and listen to this national conversation and make a decision on what is good for this country, the State that we are from and the district that we represent, and most likely we are better off if we go through it in that order.

Well, that issue, Mr. Speaker, has several times come to a conclusion in the Senate and they haven't had the votes to move that comprehensive immigration reform plan that I called comprehensive amnesty. I bring that up to illustrate how a national conversation brings us to a consensus. Sometimes we haven't reached a consensus here on this floor, and that is when you will see the divisive votes, the contested votes, and sometimes we do reach a consensus, and that is when the board is all green up here behind us, or almost all green when there are a few dissenters. That is generally the policy that is the best policy to follow. Meanwhile, some of us will stand on principle; some of us will be unwilling to move because we have taken our stand.

Well, I am watching also a dynamic here in America, Mr. Speaker, and this dynamic is such that the division of the American people looks to me like occasionally it's brought out because of legislation that is introduced and brought to the floor of this House. Now, when a baby is born anywhere in the world, they have kind of an equal chance of coming up on one side or the other of this philosophy, when they ask the question, Is your glass half full or is your glass half empty? In some places, teenagers start to answer that question for themselves. If they believe their glass is half empty, chances are they are going to look over at someone else whose glass has more in it and point to them and say, But if they hadn't gone ahead to fill their glass, mine would have filled automatically.

That is the class-envy side, that is the ``poor me'' side, that is the side that thinks that this economy and the privileges and the rights of being an American citizen are a zero sum game and that somehow there are only so many benefits to spread around so you always have to take from those that ``have'' and give it to the ``have-nots.'' It's kind of the Robin Hood theory of how they approach the tax policy or the benefits policy.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that here on the floor of the House today we had one of those issues. This issue was the tax relief, the alternative minimum tax patch, this patch that was brought by Chairman Rangel. The oddest thing, the oddest thing that I have seen is that, first of all, the alternative minimum tax is the tax that was brought in decades ago to make sure that those who were the wealthiest among us paid a little more than their fair share; and because it was an index for inflation, more and more people earned a little more and picked up through the inflation factor a higher income and found that they had crept into the alternative minimum tax bracket. Common, ordinary, middle-income, slightly upper-middle-income Americans ending up paying the alternative minimum tax.

The irony is that we have an SCHIP bill out here someplace waiting to come back and land again here on the floor of the House, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. That is the program that taxes American taxpayers to subsidize health insurance benefits for mostly children, but not exclusively children, in America, and the policy that was passed off the floor of the House of Representatives advanced by Speaker Pelosi and most, if not all, Democrats was that 400 percent of poverty that we would subsidize out of the taxpayers' dollars, up to 400 percent of poverty the health insurance premiums for children in this country, most of whom had health insurance and all of whom had access to health care.

Well, the irony of that 400 percent of poverty piece was that there were 70,000 families in America that would be receiving the SCHIP benefit because they didn't have enough money presumably to pay the health insurance premiums for their children, but they had 70,000 families that were so wealthy that they would pay the alternative minimum tax.

I find it utterly ironic that here on this floor, within the same month, within the short compressed period of time, that might be days, certainly won't be longer than weeks, which is that to subsidize health insurance premiums for families making 400 percent of poverty, which, in my district would be, even at 300 percent of poverty, at $77,625, or very close to that. At least it's over $77,000. At 400 percent of poverty, it's over $103,000. We would subsidize health insurance premiums for those kids whose parents have plenty of money to pay the premium in order to crowd them off the private insurance roles and put them onto a government-funded taxpayer roll; and at the same time we would do that, 70,000 families would be the families that would also have to pay the alternative minimum tax.

If you want to look at the spectrum across which you have to go to close the gap on socialism, one can argue we are only helping the poor amongst us. So it's not socialism until everybody fits into the same category and we provide socialized medicine, socialized health care. Look at some of this things that have happened in Great Britain, nationalized utilities, for example. Those kind of things that would make Karl Marx happy, if you start from the poor and work your way up to the rich. I would argue that those that were paying the alternative minimum tax would, by definition, not be the poor among us. That is the reason for the alternative minimum tax, to tax the more wealthy among us.

But if they didn't have enough money to pay for the health insurance premiums for their children, is it because the alternative minimum tax took too big a bite out of their paycheck? Presumably so.

So we have to subsidize the health insurance premiums of those families that are paying the alternative minimum tax, the tax on the rich, because by the time we get done taxing them, they don't have enough money to buy the health insurance for their kids. That closes the gap on socialism, Mr. Speaker. I don't know that there is an argument left that this Congress hasn't advanced this to the point where there's a majority of votes in this Congress that would take us all the way, all the way to please the Marxist philosophy of ``from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.''

Let me quote one who was not known as a conservative, but a President from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who said, ``I believe that people that work should live better than those that don't.'' It's interesting that a person of my persuasion would remember Jimmy Carter saying something like that. I remember it because he was in Iowa campaigning for the Presidency a generation ago, and I believed him. I don't know what he has done to demonstrate his belief in that statement. But, Mr. Speaker, I want to state in the Record I believe that those that work should live better than those that don't. If we take from those that work and give to those who don't, we need to take care of those people that can't help themselves, we need to take care of them to a minimum standard; but we don't need to raise them up to a level to those that work the hardest or most productive, not because it isn't a nice, fine and shining ideal that makes us feel good and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but because we destroy the motivation of the most productive people among us.

The key to America's success has been that you could pull yourself up by your bootstraps; that you could grow up in a poor family and have access to a good education, whether it's public or private, a good education, and in this country, if you want to go to college and have the ability, you can go to college and you can ply your trade and you can go from the soup line, all the way up to be a CEO on a Fortune 500 company. If you don't like that path, you can start your own business, be an entrepreneur and create your own Fortune 500 company. You can go from sweeping the floor to owning the floor. That is America.

But if we take away the incentive, if we reward the people who don't produce equivalent to those who do produce extraordinarily, then we have killed the goose that lays the golden

egg, we have destroyed the motivation, and the people that would be superachievers will either stop being superachievers and sit back and go golfing or fishing the rest of their lives, or they will go to a country that does reward their kind of excellence and their kind of performance.

So I believe, Mr. Speaker, that we need to always preserve a climate that is good for entrepreneurs, always preserve a climate that is low in taxation, low in regulation, that has faith in the good of humanity and recognizes that Americans are the most giving people in the world, that we donate a greater share of our income and we contribute a greater share in however you want to measure it, by percentage or by dollars, to other countries in foreign aid. We send more missionaries throughout the world and we follow them with our dollars and support them with our dollars because we care about humanity and we want to export our values to those corners of the world so they can have the opportunity to excel and live the kind of life that we have had the privilege to live here.

But to destroy this, to pass a piece of legislation in the alternative minimum tax, it does another thing that is unique, Mr. Speaker. What it does is it pays for a tax cut with a tax increase. That is something new and unique to the debate and the dialog here on the floor. I have the data here that shows that there are $82.5 billion in permanent tax increases that are incorporated into this alternative minimum tax, AMT, patch, and temporary relief turns into $82.5 billion in new tax increases, Mr. Speaker. It has a marriage penalty that is included in it as well.

This bill that passed off of this floor today is inconsistent with American values and undermines American values. It rewards people with the wrong incentives and it misses the opportunity for the right incentive. In fact, we should repeal the alternative minimum tax. We should do so on the spot, without regard to recovering any of that revenue because it's not revenue that was calculated to be part of our revenue stream today. It's an additional tax, a tax recalculated on a tax.

I have gone through that. I have gone through that process of getting that surprise years ago when I was actually a struggling business, trying to make a go of it; and because my income jumped from a meager existence in a couple of years to a pretty reasonable existence the following year, I got hit with the alternative minimum tax and that is when it was brought to my attention, and it was clear out of the intention of this Congress to do that on the alternative minimum tax.

We need to get rid of the AMT, we don't need to just patch it, and we surely don't need to put a permanent tax increase of $82.5 billion on the books and then say somehow that we are solving the problem. When you pay for a temporary tax cut with a permanent tax increase, that is not a tax cut, that is a stealth tax increase. I said it out loud. It's no longer stealth.

That is something that divides Americans. Why are we pitting Americans against Americans here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker? Shouldn't we be about unifying Americans, shouldn't we be about pulling ourselves together, finding ways that we can reach an agreement and setting up a policy and tax in particular that rewards people that work, gives them an opportunity? The philosophy that flows from the Speaker's gavel on down on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, is a philosophy of class envy, meanwhile, all the while, while the deep- pocket people that fund it are elitists.

So as I watch this unfold, it's an effort I think that divides us and doesn't unite us. I want a tax policy that pulls us together. You can listen to some of the philosophers in the early years of America's existence, and Alexander Tyler comes to mind. Some of the quotes that have been attributed to de Toqueville come to mind. But the idea that when Americans figure out that they can vote themselves benefits from the public Treasury, on that day our constitutional Republic ceases to exist.

You see reports that will show, this is some years ago, I haven't had it refreshed in the last few years, only 44 percent of Americans pay taxes and the rest may or may not file a tax return but aren't actually paying taxes. The number that I have in my memory is 44 percent of Americans don't pay taxes. That is some years ago. As that number grows, and it's surely larger today than it was then when I first read that quote, as that number grows and gets to that point, the tipping point across the other side of that great divide of 50 percent is when a majority of Americans realize I am not paying these taxes; why do I care about my taxes, I am on the benefit side.

Now, if 51 percent of Americans are on the benefit side and they're collecting more in taxes than they're paying, then it's to their interest to lobby and pressure and leverage their Member of Congress to increase the benefits out of the pockets of somebody else. That's the transfer payment.

And so we get down to this point where this constitutional republic gets closer to being a pure democracy. And a pure democracy is best described as, you will remember the Greek city-states where all eligible males of age could go and vote and that was their definition, and each vote counted the same, so that was as close as we've seen in history to a pure democracy.

But a democracy by definition, Mr. Speaker, and I'll give this definition, is the equivalent of two wolves and a sheep taking a vote on what's for dinner. You know what's going to happen. The sheep is going to be for dinner. So just having the majority doesn't make it right. That's why we have the Bill of Rights. That's why we have protections for people that are guaranteed in the Constitution, because if it were a pure democracy, it would have been easy to set up a pure democracy. The Founders saw that. They studied the Greek city-states. I recall going to the National Archives and walking through a display where they had the pottery from the Greek era, from, say, 2,500, 3,000 years ago, and how they actually would banish a demagogue from the Greek city-state because he was so effective in selling the things that he believed in that the people got all swept up in the demagoguery-- that's where the term comes from--and they would vote something that was perhaps irrational but they believed that they were in the momentum and they would cast the votes and the city-state would go the wrong direction. When they recognized what the demagogue had done to sell them the bad package, then they had the black ball system, whereby each one who could vote in the city-state could walk by with a white marble and a black marble, one piece of pottery, one vessel, was to vote in and the other one was to discard. And if a demagogue, one that was labeled to be a demagogue received three of those black balls, then he was banished from the Greek city-state for 7 years. They did that to protect themselves from those skilled orators that could move the populace. When they saw that, that's the thumbnail sketch of the studies of the Greek city-states in the pure democracy, our Founders concluded they wanted a constitutional republic, not a democracy. That's why we have this constitutional representative republic today.

But in order to get the republic established in the Constitution, they had to write in the protection of the rights, the Bill of Rights. Those rights are there to be constitutionally protected, because the Founders knew that two wolves and a sheep taking a vote on what's for dinner wasn't going to yield a nation that could subsist very long. Well, if our constitutional republic, our representative form of government, has now devolved down to the point where it is more a democracy and it is less a constitutional republic and if Members of this Congress don't see their job as a duty to stand up for those principles and those rights and have a long-term vision on what's good for America, but if they simply vote their constituents and come what may with any kind of long-term plan or based upon any principles, or if they can come here to the floor and vote for something that they know to be unconstitutional because that's what their constituents want, Mr. Speaker, I will submit this republic will not very long last.

As I see what's happening with the alternative minimum tax and we are taking from those that produce to spread those dollars across others who are, I think, pretty well taken care of at the time, we've taken away the incentive to produce and we've reduced this down into a pile of spoils in the

middle, the general fund, that's being squabbled over by an ever divergent group of minority classes that are lining themselves up to demand more from the taxpayers of America.

It has only been just a little over 40 years since John F. Kennedy said, ask not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country and here we are squabbling over how we're going to run a tax increase for $82.5 billion, permanent, in order to say we did something about the alternative minimum tax right within this same period of time that we're dealing with an SCHIP program and having passed off of this a 400 percent of poverty benefit, negotiated it down thankfully out of the Senate to 300 percent of poverty, that's still way too much, that is irresponsible and again pits Americans against Americans and the depth of the debate that the other side can go on SCHIP is, it's for the kids.

Well, that's nice that it is for the kids. We're all for the kids. So what's your other point? I'd like to hear it. Is it more than for the kids? Yes, it's for the politics, Mr. Speaker, as well as the kids. And those who believe that they should lay the cornerstone of socialized medicine and see to it that children in America are all covered by the taxpayer's dollar rather than the responsibility of the parents and with the help of, in most cases, their employers.

If this becomes a responsibility and entitlement for the taxpayers to fund health insurance for kids, then pretty soon there's no distinction between a health insurance subsidy out of the taxpayers and just simply funding the health care for children. The distinction blurs and at some point there's no distinction, then, between Medicaid, which provides for those kids in poor families and adults, and providing health care for all kids in America. If you pay their insurance premium, you're paying their health care.

This majority on the Speaker Pelosi side of the aisle wants to pay for almost all, if not all, of the health insurance premiums for the kids in America. And if you do that, you know that there will not be private health insurance any longer in this country, and you know that eventually there will not be, either, insurance plans. It will just simply be government-funded health care for all kids in America.

Bill Clinton knew that. He knew that when he stood on this floor on September 22, 1993, and addressed a joint session of Congress and laid out his strategy and health care plan. And if you'll remember from that address that he gave to the Nation--it was essentially unprecedented, a joint session of Congress to speak about health care--from that address to the Nation, he convened the Hillary Hearings and those meetings, some of them in public, some of them in private. And that was another case, Mr. Speaker, where the American people started to pay attention. They didn't get to see everything that went on. A lot of it was behind closed doors and a lot of the staff work that went on was certainly behind closed doors. We still can't get that information. It's still locked up in the Archives and we're still waiting for President Clinton to issue a letter request to release that information so we can evaluate what went on behind the scenes.

But the American people knew this. They did not want socialized health care in America. They understood what happened in places like Great Britain and Canada and they want to have a private system that will allow individuals to make some of their own and they should be able to make all of their own health care decisions. And so the American people rose up even then and rejected the plan that came out that has become known as Hillary-care. That's another example of a national conversation, Mr. Speaker, that went on at that time not with the benefit of very much e-mail, not with the benefit of the Internet in an effective way but with the benefit of television and radio and print media and telephones and conversations that were going on at church, at play, at work and across this country. The American people came to a consensus and said, we don't want Hillary-care, rejected it, and so preserved a measure of the private care that we have today. Another example of how a national conversation comes together.

We are engaged in this right now, Mr. Speaker. The alternative minimum tax is not a fix, all in the same environment as the SCHIP debate which is designed to lay the cornerstone of socialized medicine, bring people over to the dependency side of this and whenever we make people more dependent, they become less self-reliant by definition and when that happens, we lose the vitality of the American people. We need to understand why we have this vitality. The vitality of the American people comes from a number of things. I call them the pillars of American exceptionalism. Some of this vitality is because we have an excellent educational system in this country. Perhaps I'll return to that a little bit later, Mr. Speaker.

But I would point out, also, that we have a culture here, a culture where we raise our children to study hard, to work hard, to save, to invest, to be creative, to be risk takers, to be entrepreneurs. All of that fits within the umbrella definition of working to achieve the American Dream. Each of us has a different definition of what that American Dream means to us. My sons have a different view than I had. I have a different view than my father had. But that's something in our culture that we raise our children to. And I will define this American Dream this way: to leave this country and this world a better place than when you found it. To always build, build, build, work to improve, grow this economy, improve the infrastructure, build the systems here that give our children more opportunity than we had. And every generation of Americans have had that opportunity that's been greater than the opportunity that their parents had, which was better than the opportunity that their grandparents had and so on back to the beginnings of the Founders. That's the American Dream, to create and build a country that's better than it was.

So this vitality that we have, it's tied into our Judeo-Christian values, it's tied to western civilization, it's tied to free enterprise capitalism and property rights, not just the property rights to own your house but the right to invent a widget or a gadget and take it to the patent office and get it patented, to protect your copyrights, to protect your trademarks and those things. Solid currency, property rights, constitutional rights, a tradition of free enterprise capitalism, all of that ties together to make this the best place in the world to do business and the best place in the world to raise your children. And when we pass policies that diminish that, that would punish people for producing and then reward people for not producing, yes, it's good to take care of the kids but those kids don't need that help when their parents are making $103,000 a year. And they probably don't need that help if their parents are making $77,000 a year. And they may be doing just fine if their parents are making $51,625 a year. They're not coming to me saying, I can't make it on only $51,000 a year.

But we would push them off their private health insurance, we would crowd them out and we would say to their parents, Don't work so hard because we're going to tax you if you produce too much.

So I submit, Mr. Speaker, we need to get to a tax policy that recognizes the merits and the uniqueness of American exceptionalism, a tax policy that recognizes that when 51 percent of Americans are no longer paying taxes but they're voting for the people that will give them benefits out of the public Treasury, maybe on that day our constitutional republic will cease to exist.

But maybe we've passed that point now and maybe there's a way to get back. So I'll submit here's a way to get back. Let's pass the FairTax. Let's take a look and understand this. Ronald Reagan once said that what you tax, you get less of. He also said what you subsidize you get more of. So if we subsidize dependency, we're going to have more dependency. But if we tax production, we're going to have less production.

And this might be a revelation to some people on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, but the Federal Government has the first lien on all productivity in America. If you walk into your factory and punch the clock at 8 o'clock next Monday morning, as soon as you punch that time card in there, Uncle Sam's hand goes out and he's standing there waiting to get his

due. He taxes your work, your labor, your productivity from the first second of the first day of the week and he will tax it until such time as he gets his due. Then he puts it in his pocket and you can go off and go to work for the State, then for the county, then perhaps for the city, and some time pretty late in the week you get to make a little bit of money to feed your kids.

The first lien on all productivity in America is Uncle Sam, hand out, you punch the time card. Maybe you put that savings that you have that's left out of what he doesn't tax and you put that in a bank account or invest it maybe in the stock market, maybe in a mutual fund. Well, there's the interest. There's the dividends. Guess what. Uncle Sam's hand is out for that, too. Maybe you invest in a business. You decide you're going to manufacture automobiles or widgets or computers, or sometimes we say in my part of the district, layovers to catch muddlers. If you do that, Uncle Sam is there to tax the profit on it and he'll tax the labor that goes into it.

We have a real misunderstanding here when we decide we're going to tax corporations or businesses that provide goods and services, because something that we know, Mr. Speaker, is that business, and particularly corporations--let me put those both together without drawing a distinction between them--businesses and corporations do not pay taxes. They have to pass those taxes along to people. Consumers pay taxes.

But the government has a first lien on all productivity. So we tax that productivity, whether it is capital gains, if you buy a farm for $1,000 an acre and sell it for $2,000 an acre, Uncle Sam wants to tax that thousand dollars profit. And if you sell some stock shares and you paid $5,000 and they had a good earnings and you collect $10,000 for them, Uncle Sam wants to tax the difference, the $5,000 in profit.

And he wants to tax your passbook savings account, and does. And he has a first lien on your Social Security income, on your pension income, earnings, savings, investment dividends, capital gains. He taxes everything that is indexed to productivity in America. A first lien on all productivity in America. And why?

Don't we understand here in this Congress that what you tax you get less of. Why wouldn't we consider the idea of taking the tax off of all productivity in America and put it on consumption? I won't say that we have too much consumption, because that keeps the economic wheels turning; but we have too little savings and investment. If we tax consumption, we will get more savings and more investment and we will have more capital and we will be better positioned to take care of our own retirement and our own health care through our working years and perhaps on through retirement.

If we do this idea of totally reforming our Tax Code and shifting it over to a fair tax, a national sales tax, a consumption tax on all goods and services in America, why would we not do that? That would be the fairest way. I am reluctant to use the word ``fair'' because anybody who has raised two or more children knows there is no such thing as ``fair.'' You will begin to understand that fairness is in the perception of the one who utters the word.

Going to the fair tax, the national sales tax, H.R. 25 does this: it untaxes the poor and it makes everybody in America a taxpayer at the same time. It preserves our constitutional Republic because every little kid growing up in America, when they buy their baseball cards or Barbie Doll clothes, they will have to put a couple of dimes up for Uncle Sam.

If you wonder how this works within the mind-set of young people, I will tell you a story of a young little man, Michael Dicks. And he can be very proud of his father. He was 8 years old when I heard this story so I suspect he is 9 or 10 right now.

He had saved money to buy some Skittles. He went into the store with his money, 89 cents. That was the price. He got the candy Skittles off the shelf and put them on the counter. And the lady rang it up and said, 96 cents.

He said 96 cents? But I only have 89 cents. They are 89 cents. It says on the box.

Yes, but you have to pay the tax, so that is 96 cents.

The tax? And he turned to his father and said, Dad, I have to pay tax on Skittles?

Mr. Speaker, yes, this young man, Michael Dicks, learned he had to pay tax on Skittles because that is the sales tax in Iowa because we do tax candy and not other types of food. So he understood it costs money to fund the government. The 7 cents that got added on was a 7-cent lesson that rang up in the mind of Michael Dicks who now knows you have to fund the government. He learned at the age of 8. He will probably remember for a lifetime.

I don't know the balance of the story, but the next time he reaches in his pocket to buy something, he will know he has to pay the tax. That factors into his transaction on whether he will spend the money.

I will submit, Mr. Speaker, if every little kid growing up in America has to reach into their pocket for a couple of dimes for Uncle Sam, if they have to dig the 7 cents out for the tax, if they turn to their father and say, Dad, I have to pay tax on Skittles, these young men and women will grow up understanding that government is expensive and they will put less demands on government, and they will put less demands on their Members of Congress, less demand on their Governors and State Representatives and State Senators and less demand on their county and city governments, and they will be more personally self-reliant and they will be more generous in their contributions to society because they understand it is not somebody else paying the tax, it is they that are paying the tax. They have to dig in their pocket to pay the tax.

And those billions of transactions laid across millions of kids growing up eventually percolates into this Congress where we will have people who come down to this floor and understand that government is not the solution to everything. It is not the be all, end all. It is not the place to fight out class envy battles. It is the place to ask for more personal responsibility. It is the place to show spending restraint. We need some restraint on spending.

It is not a place to grow and blow this budget, to create more of a dependency class. It is not a place to say we want to take some funds here that seem to be anonymous coming out of somebody else and spread them across somebody out here that we claim has a need for the purpose of moving us closer to socialism, and it does, Mr. Speaker.

No, this is the kind of country that is great and was made great by individuals who took personal responsibility, who were creative entrepreneurs, who were wonderful mothers and fathers who understood the dream of our Founders and this gift that God has given this country, that is reflected through the work that our Founders did in the Declaration and the Constitution.

Mr. Speaker, we are going backwards in this 110th Congress. We are creating more dependency, not less. SCHIP is one, and the alternative minimum tax is another.

While all of this is going on, we passed several pieces of energy legislation that takes us in the wrong direction again, that makes us more dependent, not less.

There has not been a piece of energy legislation that has come across the floor of this Congress that did anything except increase the cost of energy, that made energy more scarce, that made the cost of a Btu higher than it was before.

I have listened to all of the debates and the arguments, and nobody really stood up over there and said I think it is a good idea to increase the cost of gasoline or heating oil for the homes.

But what they really say is a convoluted argument that gets this goal. As I listen between the lines, I have become convinced that there are significant Members on that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, that really do want to see energy prices higher, energy prices higher, more cost per Btu. Why? Because they believe if energy is higher in cost, people will use less of it. They will park their car and ride their bicycle. And meanwhile, some of the people who are advocating such a thing are living in mansions with large carbon footprints, way beyond anything I could make in my meager life here.

So the idea of more expensive energy, you need to come clean on that. If you

believe in that, stand up and say so. I believe you believe in that.

So as energy gets more expensive, we are going the wrong way. The right way to go with energy is to grow the size of the energy pie. There are X number of Btus on the market. If you think of that in a pie chart, coal, nuclear, solar, gas, and diesel fuel. And then we look into some that I like even better, ethanol, biodiesel and wind, those renewable energies that get attached to solar, and I think hydroelectric should be considered a renewable energy as well because it is very environmentally friendly and we could make more of it if we could get there politically.

If you add up all of those pieces of the pie and envision them as slices of the overall pie, and there is another slice, and that is energy conservation. But we don't need a pie this big, we need a pie this big. We need to add to the Btus on the market, the overall energy, and change the overall proportion so it is a larger slice for ethanol, a larger slice for biodiesel, a larger slice for wind, and where we can make a cash flow, a larger slice for solar. And clean-burning coal technology has a home here that we have to be supportive of for a long time to come.

All of those things add more Btus to the market. When you do that, the laws of supply and demand, and maybe some people on that side of the aisle believe they have repealed since they have taken over the gavels in this Congress, I will submit it is always supply and demand in the end.

Unless you can repeal the law of supply and demand, we will see the Btus get cheaper. The overall cost of our energy per unit of energy will get cheaper if we put more of it on the market.

So we increase the volume of energy we are producing, we put it on the market and that will slow the increase in the cost. And if we do it effectively enough, it will reduce the cost of our energy.

I will submit this, Mr. Speaker, we need more gas. We need more diesel fuel. We need to drill in ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf. We need to work some kind of transactions so we have access to the developing oil fields in the world. The Chinese are doing that in an effective fashion. They have built a pipeline from Kazakhstan into China. The Chinese are in the Western Hemisphere drilling for oil that we won't go get. While we prohibit drilling offshore in places off the Outer Continental Shelf within the 200-mile range. Some say with Chinese assistance, they are drilling closer to America than we can drill to America. I haven't verified that, but I intend to verify that particular thing.

So we need to grow the size of the energy pie. If we do that, the cost will be cheaper, not greater. It will take down some of the prices of our energy. Energy is interrelated. The cost of gasoline is related to the cost of diesel fuel, is related to the cost of ethanol to biodiesel, to the overall cost of natural gas to the propane component that is there. And the more energy we can put on the market, the better off we are. And the more we can increase the conservation, the less demand there is for that energy.

We need to have a coherent energy policy in this Congress, not one that is haphazard or one that has a subliminal wish over here that is unspoken that we should increase the cost of energy because then we will have less people driving cars and more people riding bicycles. That takes us back to pre-Garden of Eden standards of technology, and I reject that.

And I will raise the issue, to rebut Cornell University and the University of California Berkley who have rolled out a study that argues that ethanol consumes more energy than it creates. That is simply not a fact, Mr. Speaker.

I wouldn't know why anyone would go to a place like Cornell or University of California Berkley to get their ethanol facts. Come to Iowa. We are the number one ethanol production State in the Union. The United States of America has surpassed Brazil in ethanol production some 2\1/2\ years ago. People think you should go to Brazil to pick up on their technology. I wasn't all that impressed with what I saw there. But we can be impressed with what we developed in the corn belt. And it is not just Iowa. Minnesota took a good lead, and it is flowing into States like Nebraska and Illinois.

We have state-of-the-art technology, and we are improving on it yet that brings us a significant amount of efficiency in converting corn to ethanol. There will be a limit to the number of gallons we can produce. But it works like this. Cornell and UC Berkley took a position that it took substantially more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol out of a bushel of corn than you got out of the gallon of ethanol.

Mr. Speaker, it is important that we understand that energy needs to be in the kind of composition that we can utilize it. And so if we have gasoline that is liquid and we can put it into our tank and drive down the road, we can utilize it.

If we have coal in the ground and it is 100 feet below the surface, it is not easy to utilize. But we mine it. Sometimes we mine it and sometimes we open pit it. We do harvest that coal. Then we convert the coal. We run it through a grinder and run it through a series of plates that pulverize the coal and inject it into a fire to turn it heat so we can turn the heat into steam and the live steam then is converted into kinetic energy which spins the generator that sends the electricity down the wires that goes into the electric motor. That is a long way from coal underground in Wyoming to spinning an electric motor in some place like Georgia. By the way, that coal from Wyoming does get to Georgia to do just what I said.

But that is converting an energy source into a usable form. The usable form turns out to be the electricity way on the other end of that process. And look how far gasoline has to travel to get into the tank. You have to drill a hole and get down into that crude oil. You have to pump out that crude oil and send it to the refinery and crack that gas out of that crude oil into a form that you can get it up to the gas station and into the pump, through the nozzle so you can get it into your tank so you can burn the gas to turn it into energy to drive your car down the road.

We do the same thing with ethanol. So this energy that's required to convert ethanol, there are several ways to measure it but it comes to this. It takes energy to get a barrel of crude oil to the refinery, let's say in Texas, and it takes energy to get a bushel of corn to the gates of the ethanol plant in Iowa. But once you set that barrel of crude oil down at the refinery or that bushel of corn down at the ethanol plant, now it takes energy to get it out.

People say that it takes more to get the energy out of ethanol than you get out of it. Mr. Speaker, I'm here to quote into the Record the real numbers, and it works out to be something like this. There's something about 110,000 Btus of energy in a gallon of gasoline, and there's something like 76,100 Btus of energy in a gallon of ethanol. It's about a .7 factor. There's less energy in a gallon of ethanol than there is a gallon of gasoline. We know that. We factor that in.

But if you think of a gallon of gasoline or gallon of ethanol, of each containing 100,000 Btus, that's kind of in the ballpark of the energy you get out of a gallon, and if you compare the Btus straight up, then to get 100,000 Btus out of a barrel of crude oil, one of those $96 barrel of crude oil, if you factor the energy it takes to convert the crude oil to 100,000 Btus of energy, it will take 130,000 Btus to convert that crude oil to get 100,000 Btus of energy. It takes 130,000 Btus to get 100,000 Btus out of a barrel of crude oil in the form of gasoline. More energy required to crack it out and turn it into gas than you get in the gas itself.

But on the other side, at the gate of the ethanol plant, if you have a bushel of corn, the energy required to convert that corn into 100,000 Btus of ethanol, roughly a gallon equivalent but matched up exactly to the gasoline, is 67,000 Btus of energy to get the corn into 100,000 Btus of energy in ethanol.

So those numbers work out this way. Two jugs here, one with ethanol in it, one with gas in it, each with 100,000 Btus of energy. The gas jug took 130,000 Btus to produce that. The ethanol took 67,000 Btus to convert that to 100,000 Btus of energy. So it's roughly twice as much energy to turn crude oil into a gasoline equivalent yield result as it is to turn corn into ethanol. That's the fact. That's the facts that places like Cornell and University of California

Berkeley don't seem to understand so well, Mr. Speaker.

I want to make sure that went into the Congressional Record, but overall is this, we need to grow the size of the energy pie. We need to drill in ANWR because that's our oil, and there's no better place it could be. We need to go to the Outer Continental Shelf and drill the Outer Continental Shelf where we have 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And that natural gas, by the way, is 90 percent of the feedstock that's required, 90 percent of the overall cost to produce nitrogen, which is the fertilizer foundation for the food we eat. We should not be dependent upon the Venezuelans or the Russians for their fertilizer that would essentially slow down or potentially control the food in the world.

We should pass a fair tax so that we can take our tax off of all production and put it on consumption. And we should not do class envy things like a temporary patch for this alternative minimum tax that turns it into a permanent tax increase of $82.5 billion. We should not pay for temporary tax cuts with permanent tax increases.

We should not be subsidizing health insurance for kids and families that are making $103,000 a year or more. We should be rewarding those that work better than those that don't so we can maintain this vitality of American exceptionalism.

And we should be downright grateful that we have had in the past, but not today, a logical immigration policy that was designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America and reached out across the world, and from every country, from every civilization, we received the cream of the crop. The people that came here had to overcome burdens and hurdles and difficulties to get here. That meant they had to have a dream. They had to have a dream that sometimes they sold themselves into servitude to come here and maybe for 7 years they worked to pay off their passage into the United States.

I have a great-great-grandfather, multiple greats back, that did that and landed in Baltimore as an indentured servant. But the people that had a dream found a way to come here, and those that sorted themselves out from their societies, and maybe it was for religious freedom and maybe it was for economic freedom, and hopefully it was for both, they came here and established a culture that's a Judeo-Christian Western civilization culture that recognizes that this is a great country that protects individuals' rights.

And we have, because we've skimmed the cream off of the Nations in the world and brought their vitality here and because we have the rights that are identified in the Bill of Rights and in our Constitution, because we have a Judeo-Christian Western civilization, Protestant work ethic culture that the Catholics have done a great job of jumping on board with and a number of other denominations as well, we have this vitality here that makes us the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world.

And it's our duty, Mr. Speaker, to preserve and protect and promote that great blessing that we have inherited here. That's our duty on the floor of this Congress. That's what should come to the floor as the policy unfolds, not class envy but lifting each of us up and keeping faith with God and with our Founders.

I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for the privilege to address you and the floor of the House.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I thank the gentlewoman for her presentation of H.R. 1119.

The Military Order of the Purple Heart of the United States of America was founded in 1932. And as the gentlewoman stated, it goes back to George Washington. It's rich in our heritage, and it's precious in our reference to those who have bled for this Nation and for the freedom of the people here in the United States of America. It was recognized by the Veterans Administration and represents ``veterans in the presentation of claims before the . . . administration,'' this is the Military Order of the Purple Heart, and also ``its service officers are active in veterans hospitals.'' The organization was federally chartered in 1958.

Active members of the Military Order of the Purple Heart must be persons of good moral character who have received the Purple Heart for wounds received as a member of the U.S. Armed Forces or for those of any country during military combat against an armed enemy of the United States.

The Military Order of the Purple Heart is a sterling organization that provides services to those brave Americans who were wounded defending our country. The order also seeks to promote ``patriotic allegiance to the United States, fidelity to the Constitution and laws of the United States, and the security of civil liberty and the permanence of free institutions.'' And that's all out of their mission. Its goals are ``educational, fraternal, historical, and patriotic, perpetuating the principles of liberty and justice which have created the United States.'' In short, Mr. Speaker, the Military Order of the Purple Heart upholds many of the pillars of American exceptionalism.

Parents or lineal descendants of persons eligible to be active members can be associate members of the order. The order has requested that its charter be

amended so that siblings and spouses of members can also become associate members.

I am pleased that H.R. 1119, the Purple Heart Family Equity Act of 2007, as amended by the Judiciary Committee, provides that spouses and siblings of persons eligible to be active members of the Military Order of the Purple Heart can become associate members.

If I just look at the bill for the sake of clarity, Mr. Speaker, the current law is parents and lineal descendants. This strikes parents and lineal descendants and replaces it with the parents, spouse, and lineal descendants. This is something that has been agreed to and promoted by the members of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, by Republicans and Democrats in the Judiciary Committee. I do not recall opposition to this. I believe one could say that it is clearly without opposition, perhaps unanimous on the Judiciary Committee.

I urge adoption of H.R. 1119.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, Specialist Kendell Frederick was a 21-year-old U.S. Army soldier serving in Iraq. He 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 he joined the Army after he graduated.

I want to make the point about how important ROTC is in the recruitment of our military personnel and having that available at the high school and also at the college level. And I reflect, as mention was made in the previous debate about the Purple Heart and George Washington, the historians that I talk to point out to me that George Washington most likely received his commission to command the Continental Army outside the gates of Harvard near the commons. And it's interesting also that the ROTC recruiters aren't allowed on that campus. But they were allowed on the campus that recruited Specialist Kendell Frederick.

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

He had been trying to become an American citizen for over a year, 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.

Although 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, a USCIS, that is, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, hotline for immigration assistance and tried to explain that he was fighting in the war and could not come home to Baltimore to be fingerprinted, she was told that there was nothing that they could do. Not a very good answer from a government that has people who put their lives on the line for our freedom.

This is wrong, Mr. Speaker. And it is intolerable that our soldiers are unable to get correct information, particularly with regard to the citizenship that they fight to defend. They should be given every possible assistance in applying for citizenship.

H.R. 2884 provides that a soldier who submits a naturalization application

within 24 months of enlistment can have that application process using the fingerprints that were taken at the time of enlistment. This is a very simple, very commonsense solution, and it's too bad that Congress has to take action on this to get this kind of a thing done, but it is dealt with the kind of compassion for patriotism that I think reflects the Members of this Congress, both sides of the aisle, and the people of this country.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to support H.R. 2884 to honor Specialist Frederick and all of our permanent resident servicemembers who seek citizenship.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker I yield myself such time as I may consume just for a brief conclusion for this.

I want to thank my colleagues for their work on this. I thank the gentleman for coming to the floor to speak up and speak on behalf of Kendell Frederick and the memory and the legacy that he leaves here for us in this country; one of many who stepped forward to defend this country; one of, tragically, too many who lost their lives. And his life has contributed in a number of ways, one of them being the freedom that he helped to protect and the safety and security of the American people, and another, always this legacy of this bureaucratic snafu that will, I pray, forever be straightened out by this bill, the Kendell Frederick bill.

So I urge adoption of this bill, and I thank my colleagues.

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

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 2262, the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2007.

H.R. 2262 will put new royalty rates on production from hardrock mining. For the other side, of course, royalty rates is a fun, new catchword meaning taxes. But, unlike the coal and petroleum industry who are taxed on production of product, H.R. 2262 will place the tax on the amount of material extracted. For example, if ``Joe Voter Mining'' moves 1 cubic yard of rock weighing in the neighborhood of 800 pounds to retrieve \1/10\th or 1 ounce of gold, Joe would not be taxed on the gold recovered, but on the amount of rock moved. By raising taxes like this, the bill will cripple American production.

Since the 110th Congress convened, the Pelosi-led majority has been talking about the need for ``renewable'' energy.

The energy bills, that were rammed through the House and put large tax increases on the oil and natural gas industries placed a large emphasis on renewable energy; wind and solar. So why would this bill punish renewable energy?

Now, western Iowa does not have a hardrock mining industry. Thankfully for our farmers, we don't have much hardrock in western Iowa. But what we do have is large-scale production of renewable energy. The Fifth District of Iowa is the leader in production of BTU's of renewable energy: ethanol, biodiesel, and wind. However, this bill will put a cramp on further production of renewable energy. I want to let my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in on a little secret, those ethanol and biodiesel plants require steel and copper. Those wind chargers that produce clean, renewable electricity from the air sit on large steel columns. The electricity that is produced by wind chargers and solar panels is transported via copper wires.

Mr. Chairman, steel and copper come from the ground. So I want to try and figure out the Democrat logic. They are going to tax the raw resources that are used by the renewable industry to make a product the Democrats want to see more of? That doesn't sound like sound logic to me. I would just hope that what my Democrat colleagues realize is that which you tax, you get less of. If they want less renewable energy, then taxing the resources used in its production is a sure way to make that happen.

Mr. Chairman, today, oil is over $90 a barrel and natural gas is over $8 per million cubic feet because of Democrat energy policies. And in an absurd response, the Democrats aim to crush the renewable industry by raising the rates on the materials the renewable energy industry is built on. I urge my colleagues to oppose H.R. 2262, the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2007.

Mr. Speaker, it's a privilege to be recognized to address you and the House of Representatives and the people of the country who listen in on these types of discussions.

As I listened in on the gentlelady's remarks on the global war on terror, particularly in Iraq, and I hear the words ``war of choice,'' I actually expect that the historians will write it differently. And you can never write history from a contemporary perspective. That has to be done a generation or so down the line so you can see how things actually unfold.

When I look back at the time when this country was attacked, we've been attacked any number of times for the 18 previous years; but September 11, 2001, is a date that we will always remember. And as the President made his decisions, as he rose up and really took on a leadership mantle here, he was the Commander in Chief, but he stepped up to leadership on that day and on the days subsequent to September 11, and he had to make some tough decisions. One of them was to engage in combat in Afghanistan.

He ordered troops within a little more than 30 days into battle. And everyone said you can't be successful in Afghanistan; no one in history has been successful in Afghanistan. And, in fact, history is replete with the examples of the outside military operations that have gone into Afghanistan and failed. I can't tell you from this point, Mr. Speaker, whether history will write that Afghanistan is a resounding success, but the contemporary analysis at this point is that it is a resounding success.

As I listen to the gentlelady talk about a war of choice, I would submit that the President had no choice. He had no choice. We had been attacked. Remember, all the planes were grounded. We didn't know if there were more in the air, if they were coming to more places. The one that went to the ground in Pennsylvania may well have been targeted to the White House or this very Capitol Building that we are in.

And all the intelligence in the world concurred on one thing, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in significant quantities. And the gentlelady that would submit otherwise would have been one of the first to raise an objection if the President would have ordered troops into battle in Iraq without proper protection from chemical weapons, for example. No one believed otherwise, not Hillary Clinton, not the United Nations, not the Israelis, not the French, not the Russians, not the CIA, and not George Tenet.

So to take us back through this, there was a time and a moment in history where decisions had to be made within that context, within the context of what did we know at the time, what did we believe at the time, and what were the consequences and what were the alternatives.

Now, the alternative that the President had to be considering, and I don't believe that he has ever spoken about this publicly, and I'm not implying that he has spoken to me about it privately, but the alternative that the President had to consider was, if I do not take action, then what? What will be the response of the American people if we are attacked again and I sit on my hands, like happened in the aftermath of the attack on the USS Cole or the U.S. embassies in Africa or the circumstances within Mogadishu when we retreated and gave up that piece of ground and sent a message to the terrorists that we didn't have the resolve? What would have been the consequence?

What if the United States had been attacked again, not on September 11, 2001, but maybe September 11, 2003, and we hadn't taken action? What if those resources had come out of, and, in fact, some of the resources were coming out of Iraq that were targeted against us, what if America had lives that had been lost in significant numbers? What then would the gentlelady say? What then would the critics to the President say?

They would say he didn't take action when he should have. They would say he should have gone into Iraq. But he had to deal with the information he knew when he knew it. And the decision that was made, as historians will evaluate, I believe, will be that the President didn't really have a choice. And this Congress endorsed that decision with a vote here on the floor of Congress in the House of Representatives and in the Senate that was the authorization to use military force.

So we need to stand behind our decisions here as well as stand behind the Commander in Chief. And I would submit that the advocacy for an immediate pullout of Iraq, that's actually a tired, threadbare argument today. It's been a threadbare argument for a long time, but it was illuminated pretty well when General Petraeus came to this Congress in those days, September 12, 13 or 14 of September, when he delivered his report to the House of Representatives and the following day delivered his report to the United States Senate.

And, Mr. Speaker, as we saw the things that transpired in Iraq at the beginning of the surge, and I recall being there last Thanksgiving and trying to go into al Anbar province, trying to get into places like Ramadi and Fallujah, and I couldn't go because it was too dangerous, the stability was not there, the marines had written off Anbar province. The map was colored all red. The map of the tribal zones that actually are the local government in Iraq was colored all red, red being the color that denotes al Qaeda; al Qaeda being in control of and having the dominant influence in those tribal zones in Anbar province. So I couldn't go into Anbar, couldn't go to Fallujah, couldn't go to Ramadi, couldn't go to a number of those other communities.

That was last Thanksgiving. However, the last part of July this year I did go. I went into Ramadi and walked the streets of Ramadi. That's where they had the 5K run here I think just yesterday or maybe the day before. Hundreds and hundreds, in fact, thousands of people in the street out there doing a recreational 5K run, something that you would only see people running in Iraq if they're running from an explosion or a bullet or towards where that bullet or explosion detonated. But today, there is recreational running going on over there in a place like Ramadi, where it has been the center of death. And those tribal zones in al Anbar province that were all colored red now on the map are all colored green, supportive of U.S. coalition and Iraqi defense forces.

And I would point out that the liberation, the freeing, the driving of al Qaeda out of Ramadi was done with 85 percent Iraqi defense forces, 15 percent U.S. coalition forces. The Iraqis are more than fighting side by side. They're leading in this battle in many of the places over there in Iraq. And you have seen, also, American casualties down to the lowest levels we've had in over a year. And you're seeing Iraqi civilian casualties down to a level that is less than half of what it was a year ago.

Now, none of these are good circumstances for permanent conditions, but this is a good direction and a good trend. And the agreement that was reached in Anbar province where the sheiks came around on our side and said we're going to throw our lot with you, we're going to drive out al Qaeda, what they really said was, We want to kill al Qaeda with you. It wasn't some politically correct statement like, We would like to join with you to try to improve the stability or security here in our region. They said, We want to kill al Qaeda with you.

And they actually have a reconciliation plan. Some of those young men over there have been taking money from al Qaeda and setting roadside bombs, detonating roadside bombs or attacking Americans, U.S. coalition troops or Iraqis. They've been paid for; they've been mercenaries for al Qaeda. And some of them are there because they philosophically think it's the right thing to do, too. But the reconciliation plan is this, if you have attacked our side and you want to come forward and make a confession, if you're not standing there with blood on your hands and we can work this thing out, then you make a public declaration as a former al Qaeda supporter that you're going to support the Iraqi defense force, the Government of Iraq, U.S. coalition forces, and fight on our side.

If you make that pledge, and by the way, it is a public pledge and your name goes up on a bulletin board, then they take you back in. So it is possible to switch sides. It is possible to come over. And many are coming over to our side. You have to be wondering, Mr. Speaker, then, what are the consequences for one who doesn't keep their word to fight against al Qaeda, to stand on the side of the Iraqi people, the side of U.S. Coalition Forces? I asked that question over there in the briefing. They answered, the penalty is death. They are serious. This is serious business. This is life and death for thousands of people. It is also life and death for a number of nations.

That is a crucible in the world right now where if this place is allowed to melt down, if we pulled out of there, as the gentlewoman recommended, did a pullout of this conflict that is going on, then you look at the void that would be created. Nature abhors a vacuum. Power abhors a vacuum. The struggle there has been a power struggle. Yes, there are different competing philosophies that have lined up in different political spheres. At one time I could list you off about seven different power centers within Iraq that are competing for power. But we don't. We have the Shias and the Sunnis. We have the Badr brigades, and we have Moqtada al-Sadr's JAM brigade, and some that are just plain criminals. And you have the former Baathists, and again the Shias and Sunnis of different stripes, the different allegiances that come out of all of that, they were all competing for power. That is sorting itself out now.

As this power struggle works its way through, as the sheiks line up and decide they are going to cast their lot with the Iraqi nation, the Iraqi Government and the Iraqi people, as well as the U.S. coalition forces, they lined this up. They have done this same kind of thing in Taji in the north. They have done this in the south in Baghdad, and made their agreements where the map of that country today is far more green with very little red in it where al Qaeda has an influence. Some of those places where they have an influence is there because they just simply, the influence is there because al Qaeda has been driven out of some of the other regions and they had to go somewhere, didn't leave the country.

There is reason for optimism. And there always should be cautious optimism when it comes to war. But the other side has reason for pessimism. They have reason to believe that they have been driven out of al-Anbar province. And they have been driven out of many areas of Iraq. The country is safer today than it was a year ago. Much of the country isn't as dangerous as we are lead to believe that it is. I listened to the gentleman from California, Mr. Hunter's remarks earlier about some State Department personnel who decided they don't want to go to Iraq because it is too dangerous. Yes, there is danger there, but our military is facing that every day. And they are re-upping in greater numbers than ever imagined. That is why we can keep our recruitment up, because they believe in the mission.

As Duncan Hunter said, when you go to Bethesda or Walter Reed or Landstuhl in Germany and visit our brave wounded there, those that have maybe lost a limb, those that are in a long recovery process, those that may have had a pretty large chunk of shrapnel taken out of them, they want to get back with their unit. They want to finish their mission. Some have gone back with a prosthetic in place of a limb. That is real, true courage and patriotism. These are the people that say, I am a volunteer. I volunteered for this branch of the military at this time. I volunteered for this mission or at least I knew there was a high likelihood I would be deployed to this mission. I want to complete my mission because it is important. It is important for the freedom and the safety of the American people. It is important for freedom in the world. It is important for the dynamics that are taking place in that part of the world today where they realize that if the Iranians are allowed to continue their proxy war against the United States and flow their power over into Iraq, that would fill in the vacuum if we would do as the gentlewoman recommended and immediately pull out. The Iranians would sit astraddle of 42.6 percent of the world's export oil supply. That is not just the valve on the oil; that is the valve on the world's economy. They could control our economy by deciding what comes in and out of the Straits of Hormuz.

We understand that. That was an issue back in 1979 when the U.S. fleet was making sure the straits were kept open. So I want to emphasize that this direction of this battlefield of Iraq, which is a battlefield in the global war on terror, is going in a good direction. If we were to turn our back on all that sacrifice today, I don't know how I would look in the eye of the family members who have lost a son or a daughter over there who tell me, It is different now. The soil in Iraq is sanctified by the blood of my son; that being a son of a gentleman from California whose first name is John, whose last name I have forgotten. He said, You can't pull out now. That soil is sanctified by his blood.

I will stand with them. They are volunteers. The President had to make a decision. He made that decision. This Congress made the same decision, and we ought to have the courage of our convictions and stick by our decision instead of seeking to undermine that effort.

So, Mr. Speaker, I think that addresses the issue of the previous speaker. I have a couple other subject matters that I wanted to bring up here in the time that I have. One of them is that this Congress is busily overspending again. It has been a constant for a long time. There is something endemic within the electoral process that there are people that believe they need to purchase votes with taxpayer dollars. So they want the programs for their district.

Well, I think the measure of these programs should be measured on a higher standard than what they do for political gain. I think when you look at the earmark system that is here and the larger dollars that go to people that have the seniority, they are on the Appropriations Committee, Republicans or Democrats, you can chart that out and see where the money goes. It goes to the people that are sitting in a position here to broker it into their districts. Now, I have argued many times that there isn't a single constituent in their district that deserves any more representation than the constituents in my district. We each represent 600-some thousand people. I am not quite ready to go the path that we distribute earmarks equally to all population bases in the country. I think they need to be evaluated. I think they need to have sunlight on them. I think the American people have to have an opportunity to look at the spending that goes on in this Congress and evaluate it on a line item by line item basis.

When I first came to the Congress 5 years ago, one of the first big bills to come to me to make a decision on was the 3,600-page omnibus spending bill. I don't know how tall 3,600 pages are, but I imagine it is up there pretty high. We tried to get that information to find out what was in it because we naively thought we were going to analyze the information that was in that bill and the spending that was in that 3,600-page omnibus spending bill. So it finally became available to download it off the Internet. And we began downloading it off, I imagine it was a secure connection over in my office over here in Longworth. As we downloaded it a page at a time, the 3,600th page, the last page became available 20 minutes before the bill was brought up for a final vote on the floor of this Congress. Twenty minutes to evaluate 3,600 pages. Now, that is a daunting task, Mr. Speaker. In fact, it is an impossibility. If I had one person assigned to each page that had a degree in law that could analyze it, I still couldn't get this sorted through and get the response back in 20 minutes. I know there were others who had a head start on this ahead of me. Sometimes you have to take that leap of faith. But the functionality of 20 minutes to analyze a piece of legislation is not the way to do business. And that 20 minutes to analyze what is in it, think, Mr. Speaker, how difficult it is to go through 3,600 pages and find out what is not in it. A far more difficult thing.

Yet, here we in this Congress have worked for a long time to grant the President a line item veto. So the

President can look at 3,600 pages of appropriations that is hundreds of billions of dollars and go down through that with his ink pen and mark a line through there and say, I don't like this one, I don't like this one, I don't like this one. Now, I think it is appropriate for a President to have that power. The court doesn't necessarily agree with that. I do. And yet to put that responsibility on the President and not demand it for this Congress I think is ducking a duty and responsibility that we have as Members of Congress.

Who in the public, Mr. Speaker, would believe that Congress is just simply powerless to bring up line item votes on the appropriations that we spend in here that, who would understand the fact that the rules were set up in such a way that we don't vote up or down each line item in there. We don't vote up or down each earmark that is in the legislation. We package that up and push it along and essentially vote on it en bloc. Yes, I know those appropriations bills come to the floor under an open rule, at least they generally start under an open rule. But if you turn around once and blink twice, there is a unanimous consent agreement, and then it gets packaged up and it goes under a unanimous consent rule that prohibits the Members from bringing amendments to the legislation that is in front of us, let alone to a line item strike. So, I believe that we should be accountable and responsible for every line in every piece of legislation, whether it is policy or whether it is appropriations.

But on the appropriations, this Congress should have its own line item veto. With that in mind, I have dug through the rules, I have looked at the statutes, and I can figure a way that we can, in very simple language, that we can have a line item veto that is imposed upon this Congress so we have to accept the responsibility that we are charged with constitutionally.

It works like this. It is pretty simple. It is once every quarter, once every 3 months, under an open rule, there would be a bill allowed in order on the floor, a shell bill, if you will, Mr. Speaker, that was under an open rule that would allow any Member to come to the floor and offer an amendment to strike out spending. This is spending that would have already arrived at the President's desk, gotten his signature on it, but spending that hadn't yet been spent. So the appropriations that are in the chute, so to speak, that hadn't been turned out into the expense arena would be the appropriations that we would have a shot at, once a quarter, once every 3 months.

So let's just play this through the mind's eye, Mr. Speaker. Let's say it is the first day of the quarter and the leaders, neither one of them come to the floor to offer the bill that would be the line item cut act bill, which, by the way, that is the name of my bill, the Cut Act, the cut unnecessary tab bill, and any Member can stand up and say, Mr. Speaker, I have a bill at the desk, and it is in order under the rule. And then the result would be Members would come pouring to the floor with their amendments. One of them would be the bridge to nowhere. One of them would probably be the cowgirl hall of fame, and I get off into some of these things that I don't want to say into the Congressional Record, but they are there. They are line items we have appropriated, some of the earmarks we have appropriated that are downright embarrassing. And those line items would be brought to this floor one bill at a time, or maybe in packages, and we can vote them up or down. We can have a recorded vote on every single line item in an appropriations bill. We could have a recorded vote on every earmark. That would mean that every Member of Congress would be responsible for everything that is in the legislation. We can no longer go home and say, I know I voted for that silly thing but I had to because I needed to have this piece of appropriations that was essential to your district. That money that is going to be spent in your backyard was in the same bill, so I had to vote for the cowgirl's hall of fame or a bridge to nowhere.

Now, this structure of these rules doesn't allow for responsible appropriation. The Cut Act provides for responsible appropriations and it reaches out to the cyberspace modern technological world that we have, because it reaches out and recognizes that we have bloggers out there. We have people that now have instant Internet access to the legislation that we pass, the appropriation bills that we have. I trust the American people to be drilling down into these line items and bringing out those line items that are overspending, that are outrageously blowing the budget, and be able to make an issue of them, carry those issues to us. And we can write them in the form of amendments and bring them to the floor once a quarter and do an act of the Cut Act so we can strike those line items out and be responsible for every single line item in the budget.

I think that does a lot more for the responsibility of this Congress, a lot more to control out-of-control spending. I think it does a lot more for us to step up to our constitutional duties and all the discussions that we have had about how we might define earmarks, because everybody has a different definition of earmarks. But when you put it out here on the floor for a vote, it is ``yes'' or it is ``no.'' It is a green light or it is a red light, Mr. Speaker. And there is no equivocating on it, unless you want to vote ``present,'' which doesn't work so well in an appropriation bill.

I have introduced the CUT Act. The bill number is H. Res. 776, the Cut the Unnecessary Tab resolution. It's something that has, at least right now, the support of, in the beginning, 33 Members of Congress. There will be more. I trust they are going to stand up. We are going to ask at some point the Speaker to endorse the kind of a program that will make every Member of Congress responsible for every single line item in the entire appropriations process.

By the way, as I look at this appropriations process, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that we have got to move this system along. Yes, we have passed some appropriation bills here in the House, and we have moved that along pretty well. They are stuck over in the Senate. As I heard from the President last week, there hasn't been a time in history that Congress has delayed so long in getting the appropriations bills to the President's desk. Not one appropriations bill has yet arrived at the President's desk for this fiscal year.

This Congress gaveled in, as I recall, the third day of January 2007. Not one bill has made it from the House, through the Senate, back through conference committee for final passage, and to the White House, to the President's desk for signature. Not one. Not one appropriations bill. There have been a number of others that have.

This puts us in a situation where there is an impending train wreck. This impending train wreck is this: the longer it goes, the closer we get to running out of funds to keep this government running, the closer it comes to the day we will see another 3,600-page omnibus spending bill stacked up in the Senate, stacked up and brought over here and dropped on our desk, well, sent to us by Internet, and be asked to vote again up or down on something we can't measure the contents of.

Again, the political games begin, because that 3,600-page bill that I saw the last time, and it may be bigger or smaller than that, is like a great big accordion. It can have anything in it. Sometimes the staff in the middle of the night puts language in the bill that no Member directed. It's just there. They are just confident that the Member they work for thinks it's a good idea. We don't have a way of knowing.

It comes to the floor; we get a few minutes to debate it, not very many minutes to evaluate it. Even if we did, there's not time to debate all the components of a piece of legislation like that. That is why we have a subcommittee process, the full committee process, the floor debate. That is why we have a bicameral legislature, so it can go over to the Senate and they can do the same thing, the subcommittee, the full committee, the committee, the floor action, and then bring it together in a conference committee. While all this is going on, the public is supposed to be looking at this. We need to ask you for your help out there in America so you can point your fingers back at us.

Mr. Speaker, I point this out because there are 300 million people in America, and it's a huge budget, and the

budget approaches $3 trillion. It's more than the people that we have here in Congress can drag our fine-tooth comb through and do as good a job as we can do when we elicit the help of the American people.

So that is where I want to go with this. I want to pass the CUT Act, I want to pass H. Res. 776, I want to see a bill, a shell bill come to the floor of the House of Representatives, and then I want to see the Members come down with their amendments and say, I don't like this spending. This is outrageous. We don't need it. I want to put it up for a stand-alone vote, ask for a recorded vote on it.

After awhile, we will have a list of those egregious line items, earmarks and then just plain overspending that aren't earmarks that can be gleaned out of the bill. We will be responsible for everything. That is the kind of Congress we need to have, that is the kind of Congress we need to become, that is the kind of Congress that was envisioned by our Founders, the kind of Congress I believe we were, and the kind of Congress I believe we need to be again. That, Mr. Speaker, is my statement tonight on fiscal responsibility.

There's another piece of subject matter that I wanted to take up before the body and that is this renewable energy issue, the energy issue altogether, and I should broaden this picture out. We have worked the last few years to try to provide more refineries. We have tried to drill offshore in the Outer Continental Shelf where there are 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Ninety percent of the cost of fertilizer is the natural gas that is feedstock for the nitrogen; 90 percent of the cost. Yet we make it harder instead of easier for natural gas to become available here in the United States. It comes off the market, not on the market.

We are watching the liquefied natural gas plants being built in places like Venezuela so they can ship their natural gas to us across the Caribbean, here in the United States, sailing right over the top of huge natural gas reserves that we are not able to drill into. We are watching the liquefied natural gas come across from the Middle East with the same kind of a thing.

There are tremendous reserves offshore in the United States, and it's very difficult to find a place to drill that doesn't have some kind of a regulation that prohibits it. That is the struggle that has gone on in this Congress for a number of years, drilling the Outer Continental Shelf. I believe we ought to drill there for natural gas, and I believe we should drill there for crude oil as well. Those are our resources.

Some will say, Well, wouldn't you want to conserve those resources? Why would we use them all up? One thing is that as the cost goes up, the exploration and the cost to bring this to the market becomes more viable economically. So oil that might have been out of reach, gas that might have been out of reach for the dollars one can get out of it is not out of reach today. We are always discovering more and more.

Additionally, even if it were a zero sum game, even if there was a limited number of oil and gas underneath the territory of the United States, even if that were limited, we also believe that we will get to the point where we replace these energy sources, and we are moving in that direction.

So we should keep this Nation as competitive as possible. That means use the resources that we have and reduce and get to that day when we can end dependency on Middle Eastern oil. That means drilling ANWAR, drilling the Outer Continental Shelf. That sounds probably, Mr. Speaker, that I am just for drilling. The real answer is this: it's a lot bigger picture and a lot more difficult a puzzle. The answer is we have so many BTUs out there today in the market. Let's say this is the energy pie. The answer is we have to grow the size of the energy pie. Not this many overall BTUs in the market for all kinds of energy, but this many. When you think about the energy pie, the size of the slices can be defined with so much for gas, so much for diesel out of crude oil, so much for propane, so much for natural gas, and this all adds to the overall BTUs. Some of it is nuclear, some of it is hydroelectric, some is solar, some is wind, some is coal. You add up all these pieces of this energy pie.

There's another slice of that pie that is also a component of the overall 360-degree pie and that's the conservation component. We need all of those components to solve the problem in this country, this problem of economic energy. Energy affects everything we have, everything we are. If you buy a cup of coffee, it takes so much fuel to get that coffee harvested, transported here to the United States, processed, delivered, marketed. You can put a little gas in the car to go to the store and drive back home. There's an energy component to everything we buy. Therefore, when costs of energy are high, it also raises the cost of everything that we have.

For our Nation to be competitive, we need economic goods and services. They need to be competitive with the rest of the world. We can do that if our energy prices are low and they are comparatively low and competitively low. I submit we grow the size of the energy pie and we put more BTUs on the market, we provide more of our own crude oil that we can drill for in places like ANWAR and in places offshore, like the Outer Continental Shelf.

Then, in addition to that, we open up more of our ethanol production, more of our biodiesel production, the corn-based ethanol, the cellulosic ethanol, the biodiesel that comes from soybeans and other kinds of plant oil and animal fats. We put that altogether. And expansion of the wind generation of electricity is also significant. The more BTUs we put on the market, the more supply there is. And we know this is supply and demand. Being a function of supply and demand, it will either drive down the price of overall energy, or it will slow the growth in the increase in the overall energy.

I expect that there is going to be some other discussion about the availability of crude oil and ethanol, and I will submit that there are some components here that are important facts for the public to understand, Mr. Speaker.

As I look at the reports that have come out of places like Cornell and UC Berkeley, and you see numbers down there that say that it takes something like seven times the energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get out of it in BTUs, we have had some people that are scientists that seem to be on some kind of endowment to try to undermine the efficiency of the ethanol argument. I have been in the middle of this ethanol debate for a long, long time; and I would suggest it goes back 25 or maybe 30 years. I would argue that if there is a BTU deficit, it would have collapsed on its own by now.

But there are numbers out there that are not based on science. They are simply numbers that are produced by people that oppose renewable fuels ethanol. This is the kind of data that has been in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times of late. I don't know what their motive is, but the arguments look to me like they are contrived arguments. Here are some facts that I just had delivered to me, and it works out like this:

A gallon of ethanol is 76,100 BTUs, and a gallon of E-10 is 111,836 BTUs. The gallons of diesel fuel and biodiesel are comparable. But if you are going to get one BTU out of ethanol, it takes .67 BTUs to produce it. If you are going to get one BTU out of crude oil for gasoline, it takes 1.3 BTUs to produce it. So in these numbers, it takes more energy to crack the equivalent BTUs of a gallon of gasoline out of a barrel of crude oil once it arrives at the refinery than it does to produce the same BTUs in ethanol once the bushel of corn arrives at the ethanol plant.

The numbers that have been produced otherwise by the folks in places like Berkeley, I was on Iowa State's campus here some months ago and talking to an undergraduate student who began to quote those numbers from Berkeley to me. She is going to school at Iowa State.

I said, Why did you go to Berkeley to get your data on ethanol? She said, That was the report I read. That is the one I studied. I said, You are right here at Iowa State University. We are the number one State producing ethanol in America. The data you are looking for is right here under your nose. Is anyone teaching you critical thinking here on this campus?

Apparently not.

So another piece is the 2006 LDP and CCP, the countercyclical payments, for corn were $6.8 billion. That will be the

other argument, that the dollars that go into the farm program and the dollars that go into the ethanol subsidy are this huge cost to taxpayers. That is the Wall Street Journal's position.

If you look at the real numbers, if you accept the idea that we have a farm program and it has been here since FDR, and I don't know if I would have voted for that if I had been here since FDR, but it is here, and if it has been here this long, it is unlikely it is going to go anywhere.

So if we accept the idea that there is a farm program, and we look at how the countercyclical payments and the loan deficiency payments actually function, in that if you have high markets there is less demand for subsidy, in fact, it has taken out all the demand for those subsidies because we have had high demand for those grains. And this is just using the corn calculation, not the increase in our commodities that have been there in record prices for soybeans and for wheat and some of the other commodities that have been increased in their value because there has been more demand for corn acres and because now we have more corn acres and we raised the largest corn crop we have ever had, 13.3 billion bushels of corn.

Those payments, though, for 2006 were $6.8 billion. Then the blenders credit is a component that we put in place so we could attract the capital to build the infrastructure in order to be able to produce the gallons of ethanol that we can use to blend our ethanol into our gasoline, at a 10 percent blend, for those folks that don't see that every day.

The blenders credit is 51 cents a gallon. When you calculate that across the gallons that were sold this year, that comes to about $3 billion. When you do the math on that, the $6.8 billion in subsidies and the $3 billion in blenders credit, we have gone from $6.8 billion in subsidies on the loan deficiency payment and the countercyclical payment down to zero. That is $6.8 in savings. We spent $3 billion on the blenders credit so that we put an incentive in place to build the ethanol production facilities. That is a net savings of $3.8 billion just in the last year.

Now, I will admit that number doesn't extrapolate back across 2005 as well as it does 2006 or 2004 or 2003 or on back, but we are building an infrastructure and investing in that infrastructure; and we are building a capability to replace Middle Eastern oil, to some degree, with ethanol.

I carry this equation out, 13.3 billion bushels of corn this year, we will easily be at 15 billion bushels of corn. Our target was by 2012, we will make it before then. This year tells us we will make it before then.

With 15 billion bushels of corn and if we only used a third of that corn to produce ethanol at 3 gallons a bushel, and we are right at that threshold, 2.9-something, so that is producing 15 billion gallons of ethanol. And we are burning today about 142 billion gallons of gasoline.

You can see we get to the point where we reach the 10 percent blend across this country. Actually, we are up to that threshold in a lot of places today, but we can't distribute well enough to be able to distribute the ethanol that we are producing within a 10 percent limit. We need to increase the limit. But 10 percent of the gasoline is about what we can produce with the corn that we can produce in this country. That is why the push to go to cellulosic.

I can submit here we can reach the 15 billion bushels. With a third of that, we can produce 15 billion gallons of ethanol. With that, we can replace approximately 10 percent of the gasoline we are currently burning in this country. We can go up with that, but if we open this up with cellulosic, as came out in the President's State of the Union address, I believe the most recent one, then we can arrive at a substantial portion of this energy pie that is renewable fuels ethanol.

And we add to that the biodiesel that comes from our soybeans and the animal fats and oil from other plants, and we have taken a segment, this energy pie, and a slice of that, and we set aside and say this will be renewable fuels ethanol, this will be renewable fuels biodiesel, and some more energy will be wind. And we build a lot of infrastructure for that. Wind energy works well. From my yard where I live in rural Kiron, I can step outside the hedgerow and look out to the horizon and I can see 17 wind chargers from my yard. They are surreal and they are environmentally friendly. Yes, it takes a tax credit, but we are building infrastructure to replace some of our energy production with renewables such as wind.

Another point raised is that producing ethanol takes too much water. Whatever the number was in the most recent publication, whether the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, it was a number that took my breath away. The order of magnitude of its, let me say, lack of indexing into my experience, we build a lot of ethanol plants in my district.

There may have been a day or there may be a day this fall when the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa is the number one in ethanol production for congressional districts in America. We are number one in biodiesel production. We rank in the top, at least in the top four, in wind generation of electricity. And I am very confident that the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa is the number one renewable energy district in America.

I believe I will be able to put the numbers together to demonstrate that we will be the first congressional district to power all of the energy needs for every home in the district all on renewables. I think we are there now. I just don't have the numbers quite together to say that definitively. But I think we are there now.

But the consumption of water to produce the ethanol, that number was outrageous in multiples of hundreds of gallons. So I went back to our people who are actually producing the ethanol, the ones who have to get the Department of Natural Resources' permit and meet the EPA standards and know how many gallons they are discharging and how much water they are pumping out of their wells in the ground to utilize production of ethanol.

Their numbers come out to be this: To produce a gallon of ethanol takes 2.8 gallons of water. To produce a gallon of gasoline out of a barrel of crude oil, and of course there is more than one gallon that comes out of there, but per gallon is 8 gallons of water.

So if you want to measure against the consumption of water to produce gasoline from crude oil compared to the number of gallons of water to produce ethanol out of corn, then you are looking at 8 gallons of water to 1 gallon of gasoline compared to 2.8 gallons of water to 1 gallon of ethanol.

By the way, we are reusing water. We are using gray water from the sanitaries out of some of our communities. And in particular, there is a new plant coming online at Shenandoah, Iowa, Green Plains, that will be using gray water from that community. We are conserving water, and it takes less water than it takes to produce the gasoline.

So even though there are arguments up and down on this, but the 51 percent blender's credit is the incentive to attract private investment capital. If we should lose even one penny of that blender's credit, what we will lose are millions and probably billions of dollars of private capital that is currently attracted into the production of ethanol, the building of ethanol production facilities.

When capital is no longer attracted, the momentum of this industry would be stalled and we would be sitting here with ethanol plants out in the plains within the heart of the corn belt, but not built out to the limits of the corn belt.

We would be sitting here also with biodiesel plants in the heart of the soybean belt but not out to the limits of the soybean belt, and we would have given up on renewable energies as even a partial substitute for Middle Eastern oil.

When I give you the math and lay out these costs in this fashion, I am not calculating in the cost of the military that it takes to be able to do what we can to provide some stability in the Middle East. But I will remind you, Mr. Speaker, that if the instability we have seen in places like Afghanistan were found in places like Saudi Arabia, you would see not the highest price for crude oil like we see today at $96 a barrel, the highest price we have ever seen, you would see it perhaps double

from there. You would see it north of $150 a barrel if the instability we have seen in places like Afghanistan, if there was that kind of instability in Saudi Arabia.

Because there is a kind of stability, because that supply hasn't been severely threatened, that is why we have taken an interest in that part of the world.

I will submit to every extent we can find an economic way to bring BTUs on the market that are our sources of energy, we should do that. Yes, there has to be a return on capital investment, and it needs to be reasonable and offset the interest. And to get things started and develop a technology, sometimes we have to have a blender's credit of 51 cents. Sometimes we have to have a 54-cent tariff on Brazilian ethanol coming into the United States.

They would like to have us loan them about $8 billion so they can double their ethanol production in Brazil and take off that 54-cent tariff so they can produce ethanol in Brazil and ship it here in the United States, but we would find ourselves dependent on Brazilian ethanol production when we have the crops, we have the climate, the know-how and the distribution system to do that here.

So the facts go back to, and I just would reiterate, this ethanol production and biodiesel production has saved the taxpayers billions of dollars in the last year. We were spending $6.8 billion on crop subsidies on the farm program that goes back to FDR in the 1930s. That number for the LDPs and the counter-cyclical payments has gone essentially, I will say virtually, in the language used today, to zero. And the cost of the 51-cent blender's credit has been about $3 billion. That is a $3.8 billion savings off the farm bill because we have a renewable fuels program here.

And to the extent that we are moving towards a 10 percent blend across the Nation with our ethanol, and we will be to that functional, that is 10 percent less that is coming out of the Middle East. That frees up that much more of our freedoms to make these decisions.

The assault on renewable energy that is coming from some of those business places, I would like to see them answer some of these points that I have made. I don't believe that their positions are grounded with the information that comes from the folks that are actually producing the ethanol.

And there have been significant discussions about how quickly one gets a return on investment off ethanol plants. I will say there have been some very good returns that have taken place in the last 2, 3, 4 years. But that cash flow doesn't project out like that any more, Mr. Speaker. Even though we have seen some return on investments that one could measure in just a few short years, most calculate out to be longer than that, and it is harder to attract the capital, not easier, even though oil is at $96 and gas has gone over $3. The dynamics of this and the economics of this change significantly.

So I strongly support the blender's credit. I support keeping the tariff in place on Brazilian ethanol. I believe we need to build the infrastructure here in the United States and kick the ethanol production up to maxing out on the corn crop that we have and developing the enzymes and the technologies so we can produce ethanol out of the cellulosic. That will be a far more difficult task than producing the ethanol, because to handle grain, we have the infrastructure. We have the combines and the drying systems, the wagons and the trucks so we can take that grain out of the field and deliver it and store it and do so efficiently. Not so easily with the cellulosic.

We don't yet know what kind of crop is going to be the most efficient, how we might harvest, how we might store it or how we might transport it. But most of that cellulosic is in a form, whether it is corn or whether it is hay or whether it is switchgrass, sunflower stalks, whatever it is, there is a lot of air in cellulose which means it is large volumes and low tonnage. And low tonnage means there is a lot of freight involved in trying to get that product to a processing location. That would tell me we would have, if the cellulosic develops as it is envisioned, we will have more plants located in closer areas than you will see with ethanol because we won't be able to afford to truck that cellulosic as far as we can the corn or the soybean oil that goes into the biodiesel.

We will get there on energy, Mr. Speaker, but I want to reiterate, I believe we need to grow the size of the energy pie. We need to take that overall 360-degree picture of all of components of our energy, the ethanol and biodiesel and wind and nuclear and hydroelectric and clean- burning coal and all of the other components that we have, gasoline, propane, natural gas, solar, each one of those has a certain percentage of the overall.

Then another slice of that pie is energy conservation. That is insulation. That is high-mileage vehicles. All of these things need to be brought forward, and we can get where we need to go with energy. We cannot do that if this Congress is determined to raise the cost of energy.

And I will submit that any piece of legislation that has been brought to the floor of this Congress in the 2007 calendar year has all raised the cost of energy, not driven the cost of energy down. It has made the circumstances less stable, not more stable. It has made the investors step back and say, ``I don't think I want to invest'' rather than ``I can't wait to get invested in this because I believe I can get a return on my profit.''

Mr. Speaker, let's face it, free enterprise capitalism has done more for the well-being of humanity than all of the missionaries who went to Africa. God bless them for going, and we need more missionaries to go to Africa. We need them to go everywhere. We need missionaries in this country. But free enterprise capitalism has provided the infrastructure. It has built the Golden Gate Bridge. It has built the interstates. It has built the military industrial complex. And it has developed our educational system. It has developed our pharmaceuticals and our medical services in this country and in many places around the world.

And if you point to something that is an improvement of the quality of life, I will point to a profit motive in there that has developed the ideas, the creativity, the inventions, that have brought about this improved standard of living that we have.

And if we think that because a company has made some money because they have invested capital and provided good inventions and infrastructure, they need a return on that investment. And for this Congress to decide somebody made some money and then they want to come back and do a windfall profits tax after the fact, one of those retroactive deals, one of those things that says, well, I really didn't mean it to, let's just say Exxon, for example, Chevron for another one, the leases that were reneged here off in the gulf coast when no one was going to be there holding the oil company's hands if they drilled dry holes.

I never heard Nancy Pelosi say, well, some company got a dry hole that cost a few million dollars; I think we ought to take some of that load off of them and send them a check from the taxpayers. They don't believe in that, but they believe in taking some of that money away when it's duly earned.

The risk capital that's out there is what drives the lower cost of energy that we have today that we wouldn't have if it weren't for that.

So we need to set up an honest business structure; and when we have leaseholdings, we need to sign those leases and say that's it, we've cut our deal. If you make 10 times the money we thought you were going to make, you also made 10 times the money your competition thought you were going to make or they would have bid against you and taken that over and raised the price.

I've spent my life in the contracting business, not much of it drilling oil, and not any oil came out of the hole I did get involved in. But I've bid a lot of projects as low bidder, and I recall having the owners come to me and say, you're making money on this job. Happens more than once, Mr. Speaker, but not once has anybody come to me and said, I see you're losing your shirt on this job, can we give you a little more money that will help you out? Never happens, but that's the philosophy that comes from that side of the aisle.

We see somebody making a little bit of money, let's take it away. Well, if I'm on the board of directors of a company that has Congress changing the

deal, I'm going to take some of that capital, and I'm going to invest it in another kind of a business where Congress isn't as likely to change the deal.

So when you raise the taxation after the fact and you change the leases and force them to be renegotiated, there will be less exploration dollars going in, which means we'll find less gas and less oil. There will be less on the market, and supply and demand still works in this country. If you have a little bit and a lot of people want it, it will be a high price; and a whole lot of something that not many people want, it'll be a low price. That's the case we have today with the energy prices.

This still is a global market, too. This $96 oil is out there, and that's the price, not because we set it at that. That's what competition sets the price of oil at. We need more of it on the market. We need more drilling. We need more transportation.

By the way, we need to build those pipelines down from Alberta where they have the tar sands. We have good neighbors to the north with more oil than they know what to do with up there, and they're happy to sell it to us. I'm happy to pipeline it down here and refine it in the United States and refine it up in the neighborhood where I live and distribute that to the rest of the country. That will hold the prices down, Mr. Speaker.

So the points that I came to this floor to make are two big ones. One is producing a gallon of BTUs out of ethanol, out of the equivalent to a gallon of gas, takes less energy than it does to crack a gallon of gas out of a barrel of crude oil. Let's just say that we set a barrel of crude oil up at the refinery in Texas and put your $96 price on that, by the way. That's what this barrel is worth in the open market, and you set a bushel of corn outside the ethanol plant in, let me say, Marcus, Iowa.

And what's it going to cost to get me a gallon's worth of BTUs? Let me see, a gallon of gasoline is 108,500 BTUs. What's it going to take to get 108,500 BTUs out of this barrel of crude oil, and how many BTUs is that? 1.3 times the amount you get out of it. Thirty percent more BTUs to crack it out than you get out of that gallon of gas, and it takes .67 for every BTU to take that gallon of ethanol that's going to be produced out of that bushel of corn that's sitting outside the plant at Marcus, Iowa.

So when you look at the difference, it can be argued that, yes, it takes energy to turn corn into ethanol, but it can't be argued that it doesn't take energy to turn crude oil into gasoline. And the facts come down to it takes less energy to produce the ethanol BTU equivalent than it does to produce the gasoline BTU equivalent, side by side, bushel of corn sitting at the gate of the ethanol plant in Little Sioux Corn Processors outside of Marcus, Iowa, versus the refinery down in Texas.

And what it really comes back to is we have to have energy put together and a kind of form that we can use it. We have to be able to transport it, we have to be able to handle it, we have to be able to convert it into heat or kinetic energy. And you can do that with a liquid. Ethanol is a liquid. Gasoline is a liquid. You can do it with a gas.

And I will submit that we have found a way to be able to produce billions of gallons of ethanol, and those numbers are going up; and if they ever level off and stop because this Congress made a turn against the renewable fuels industry, that would be a tragedy for our environment. It would be a tragedy for our economy, and it would cost the United States taxpayers if they were going to continue with the current deal that they have, with the farmers and the producers here in the United States, the numbers that I've given you, the $6.8 billion last year versus the zero dollars this year, compared to $3 billion in subsidy. Net savings on the two is $3.8 billion.

And with that, Mr. Speaker, thanks for recognizing me. I appreciate this privilege and honor.

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

Mr. Speaker, I support S. 2106, the Procedural Fairness for September 11 Victims Act of 2007.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress created an operational alternative compensation program for victims killed or injured during the attacks.

This statute mandates that liability for all claims resulting from the 9/11 attacks is limited to an amount no greater than the limits of liability coverage maintained by the air carriers involved.

The statute further provides that compensation may only be obtained pursuant to a Federal cause of action brought in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where a consolidated action is already pending.

Representatives of several passengers, ground victims and others are suing airline companies, airport security firms, airport authorities, and other defendants. The litigation focuses on events in New York; Washington, DC; Boston Logan Airport; and other areas around the country.

In most civil litigation brought in Federal court, rule 45, mentioned by my colleague from New York, of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure limits the service of trial subpoenas to nonparty witnesses to the district and State where the case was filed ``or at any place without the district that is within 100 miles of the place of trial.'' This limitation precludes the issuance of some subpoenas in the 9/11 litigation.

However, rule 45 also states, Mr. Speaker, that service may take place elsewhere pursuant to another Federal statute. For example, Congress allows for nationwide service under the False Claims Act, under the Veterans Benefits Act, and under the Civil RICO statute.

If this nationwide service feature is not extended to the 9/11 victims compensation law, a number of important witnesses will not be able to testify in person during the litigation.

There are alternatives to S. 2106, such as conducting pretrial, nonparty depositions around the country or videoconferencing, but they might prove costly. They're more likely to deny the jury the benefit of live, firsthand testimony.

Mr. Speaker, the bill applies equally to plaintiffs and defendants. The legislation promotes justice that is based on Federal precedent in other areas of law.

On this subject matter in this particular case, I agree with my colleague. This is a piece of legislation that did pass out of the full Judiciary Committee by voice vote, without any discernible opposition, something that brings us together here in this Congress, and I urge adoption.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself so much time as I may consume. I just conclude with some of the time that I yield to myself, and I will do so briefly. Sometimes we put a lot of words into our dialogue here, and I just wanted to put it into the simple words.

This bill says a subpoena may be served at any place in the United States with regard to this Act. Very simple. It's something that I do believe provides a better opportunity for justice and equity for those who are involved in a cause of action on this 9/11 victims compensation, and so I urge adoption of this bill.

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

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

And having been a speaker in waiting, I had the privilege to listen to some of the Blue Dogs talk about their budgetary priorities. And I also listened to the reflection of the individual from Iowa, whose cows I represent down there in my territory. And we are good neighbors and we've worked together over the last 5 years that I have been in this Congress.

There always are two sides to an issue, and a number of the statements that were made here I absolutely agree with. I would submit, though, that there is a distinction between us, and that is, I want a balanced budget. I worked for a balanced budget. I called for a balanced budget upon my arrival in this Congress 5 years ago. I've sought to produce those numbers and get that language out on the floor.

My Blue Dog friends also call for a balanced budget, but they're willing to raise the taxes. And they have offered several budgets to this Congress that would have raised taxes in order to balance this budget.

I would submit that we need to balance the budget a different way. We need to do it by controlling spending. And we can do a better job of controlling discretionary spending, but in there is not the answer, not the complete answer to the things that we need to do.

The tax cuts that came from the Bush administration immediately following September 11, 2001, and the next wave of tax cuts that we did in 2003 have stimulated this economy, and they have probably kept us from a recession and maybe even a depression. So, Mr. Speaker, I would submit this: I would take your reflection back to that period of time that was in the end of the Clinton administration, during the campaign of the Bush-Gore campaign in the year 1999 and 2000 and the beginning of the Bush administration. We had this growing, booming economy, and it coupled with serious spending cuts that were brought forth on the floor of this Congress by Republican leadership, the new Republican leadership that arrived here, elected in 1994, sworn in here in the first week of January of 1995, and came in and said, we're

going to do these 10 things, and we're going to work towards a balanced budget. And they actually didn't know that they could accomplish that. But as they brought the spending restraint and the cuts and the efforts to eliminate entire departments, unsuccessful, I might add, Mr. Speaker, that constrained this growth in spending. And by the way, they didn't have any inhibitions about cutting down and limiting the spending that President Clinton wanted to do at the time. They had political opposition, so points were being scored on both sides. And while that was going on, we were holding this budget down. In fact, the government went into shutdown. And there was a time when I thought that the leadership in this Congress should not have blinked. But in the end, regardless of who got the blame, this Congress, had it not had the majority that was here, and I would point out to the Speaker that that was a Republican majority, we would not have had a balanced budget in the 1990s. You would not have seen John Kasich with a T-shirt that said ``back in the black'' with the line of our spending cut down and where we were going into solvency.

But we got into solvency. And I don't get the credit for that, I wasn't here at the time. This Congress got into solvency because it had solid, conservative leadership. And then, as the administration changed from the Clinton administration, which has been lauded here tonight, I believe, to the Bush administration, at the same time we had a dot-com bubble in our economy, there was a growth on Wall Street that capital was being attracted to the information age, that type of industry. And there was a belief that because technology had taken the microchip to the level where we could store and transfer energy more effectively and more efficiently than ever before, there were billions of dollars speculated in dot-com companies on the idea that, with all this technology, we are transitioning from the industrial age into the information age.

And as we go into the information age, Mr. Speaker, the capital that was attracted to those businesses was capital that simply was placed upon the speculation that, because we could transfer and store information more efficiently than ever before, somehow these companies that were formed for that purpose would be able to all make a profit. But the bubble, when it burst, it was the realization that this information, just because we could store it and transfer it more effectively than ever before, didn't necessarily transfer into profit. It couldn't be translated directly into profit because the information storage and transferability that came with the information age, that actually caused the information age, that ability was predicated upon how that information could provide a good or a service more efficiently, or to the extent that that information could be used for recreational purposes.

Now, we understand the good or the service being provided more efficiently. Look at the things that we can do with tracking inventory, for example, or dispatching trucks on the roads of America with the satellite transponders, to be able to sit there at a software screen, if you're dispatching trucks in a nationwide or continentwide trucking company, and be able to see on that screen a little dot where every truck is, be able to click on that and find out when that truck got its last rest, how much rest the driver had, what the maintenance is on the truck, what the cargo is, what the delivery time is, how many miles are left, and be able to have that software package give you a warning on when a load might be late. And we went from keeping significant inventories in our warehouses in America to just-in-time delivery, partly because we could do a more effective job of dispatching trucks.

That's just one of the things that came with the information age, and that's efficiencies that came into this because of being able to store and transfer and calculate more efficiently than ever before. But, a miscalculation that was made by Wall Street was a miscalculation that, because we could store and transfer and calculate more effectively, that it all translated into profit. It did not.

And so the speculators on Wall Street and into the private companies, whether they were publicly traded or whether they were privately traded companies, the speculation part of that was the dot-com bubble. And it burst. And it burst kind of slowly, not like a balloon pop, but kind of a slow letting out of the air. And as that bubble collapsed, that transitioned across the end of the Clinton administration into the beginnings of the Bush administration. And while that was going on, we had corruption that emerged within major companies, within major corporations within the United States. And we know who some of them are, Enron, for example.

And so, as this corruption was corrected and as we saw legislation being passed in this Congress and signed by the President, there was also downward pressure on our stock market because they didn't know how much regulation they were going to get from this Congress, under the pen of the President, what was going to happen. So, how would this Congress react?

Well, as that debate went on, as we began to clean up the corruption that emerged, and thankfully that did happen to a large degree, that went on top of the slow letting out of the air, I call it the bursting of the dot-com bubble, those two pressures downward came downward on our economy. Well, we know that our tax collections are also predicated upon how strong our economy is. And if we have growth, we will have more taxes; if we have a decline, we will have fewer taxes. With the dot-com bubble bursting and the corporation corruption that was being addressed, both suppressed our economy and the tax revenues declined.

While this was going on and as the President was getting his feel of coming into the Oval Office and beginning to become the newly sworn President of the United States, January until September, in September of that same year that the President was sworn in, while he is dealing with the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the corporation corruption, and while this Congress is as well, we had the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, on the Pentagon, and a plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. That was a direct attack on our national defense center and a direct attack on our financial centers.

And so, Mr. Speaker, all of these things came descending down upon this Nation, focused like a laser beam on the responsibilities of the President of the United States. And the President responded by calling for tax cuts in a wave that came pretty closely after the September 11th attacks. While we were ramping up our defense, while we were ramping up homeland security, while we were setting up the TSA, and today we walk through the airports and there are billions that have been spent for the security just to board airplanes, and you add that to the cost of the expansion of our military, the cost that came because we went, appropriately, into Afghanistan and then in the following year and a half we went then on into Iraq, all of these things were pressures on this economy. And all of them worked against a balanced budget that, the last number I saw it looked like we were going to come in about $158 billion in the red, $158 billion, and one could speculate as to whether that is a hard number, whether it might go up or whether it might go down as a percentage of our overall budget, tells me if we would have had hard-nosed fiscal discipline even on the discretionary spending just in the time that I have been here in 5 years, we would have reached a balanced budget. We would have gotten there just by having spending discipline, not the discipline that says I want to increase spending because I think I see these needs, and if I'm going to do that, then I want to increase taxes. That's the approach that comes, and, admittedly, the Blue Dogs have more discipline than a lot of the folks on their side of the aisle, but they don't have as much spending discipline as I have. I would pull this thing right on down and I would set it out and say, we can get to a balanced budget by having discipline and discretionary spending.

But, Mr. Speaker, that is not really the answer either. That is a constant fight, and it is a diminishing effort to slow down and eventually reduce discretionary spending to balance the budget because the more we do that, it is working in the right direction because it slows growth in government and it holds more personal responsibility and so less spending creates less

dependency. Those are all good things, Mr. Speaker.

But the other side of this is that while we are talking about discretionary spending, the huge elephants in the room, one might speak, or should I say the gorilla in the room, I hesitate to say the donkey in the room, but those huge gorillas in the room are this: Medicare; Social Security; to a lesser extent Medicaid; the entitlements; and then, of course, the growing interest, which we heard about from the Blue Dogs, the growing cost of maintaining the interest. But Medicare and Social Security are the two big ones.

As the President stepped out from his second inaugural address that took place in January right out here in the west portico of the Capitol Building in January 2005 and talked about the position we were in as a Nation and we were poised to hopefully end the war in Iraq and move forward with our economy; the two rounds of tax cuts that we had done had succeeded in rebounding this economy and got us back into a growth mode again, and today we are sitting on 49 consecutive months of growth. Astonishing.

There are astonishing measures of the economic growth in this country. But the President stepped out from that west portico and invested his political capital in addressing the Social Security entitlement, a huge burden that is coming at us. As I listen to the Blue Dogs talk about Social Security, I didn't hear them talk about, this is a bit of an old number, but a number that I recall from a couple of years ago and is at least representative and it will not be precisely accurate today but slightly dated, $1.7 trillion in the Social Security trust fund. That was there a couple of years ago. That trust fund continues to grow today because we are collecting more Social Security than it takes to pay the benefits out to the people that are the recipients of that Social Security.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I don't submit that where we are with this is a good idea. I point that out that there is an account there that presumably we could draw from that is going to address this big entitlement. But it works out like this. Even if that money were going into a lock box, as some said it was, even if that were an account that grew interest at $1.7 trillion and add some more in there over the last couple of years to get that number up, it is probably approaching $2 trillion or more by now, the accumulation in that account goes, it accumulates until about the year 2016. And then it goes the other way. Then we start spending more than we are taking in. And from that year forward, that roughly $2 trillion that will be in there will be spent down by the year, and these numbers aren't the freshest again, but in the neighborhood of 2042, by then the Social Security trust fund is broke. Then what do we do?

I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that, first of all, it wasn't a good idea to put the Social Security money into a trust fund if we were going to spend the money from the trust fund and put it into the general fund. If we were going to borrow the money from the Social Security trust fund and spend it with our overall budget, which we have been doing, that breaks faith with idea that there is a trust fund, because in the end it is an accounting gimmick.

I have in my file somewhere, an electronic file of one of the bonds that are on file. This Social Security trust fund that is approaching $2 trillion is the accounting of it is, yes, electronically but also it is an accounting that is paperwork, actual bonds that are printed on paper that is identical to this paper worth no more than probably not as much as a blank sheet of paper from a copy machine, 8\1/2\ by 11. They print these off. I have one that is a sample. I believe it is $3.54 billion on that little sheet of paper that says trust fund account bond for the Social Security trust fund. Those original documents, Mr. Speaker, are on file in a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Robert Byrd's district, and they are there because some enterprising Senator passed legislation that said, you will keep a paper accounting of the Social Security trust fund.

Well, the paper is an accounting. The electronics is an accounting. But the accountability of our Social Security trust fund is the full faith and credit of the people of the United States as represented through the United States Congress, and when the day comes that we need to tap into that Social Security trust fund, which will be a day in about the year 2016 when we start tapping into that, there isn't any money there. It is only there on IOUs from the government to the government, which is the equivalent of writing yourself an IOU and putting it in your pocket. The value is only the value that it reminds us that we have this obligation to keep our sacred trust with the senior citizens of America. I am pledged to do that. Our President is pledged to do that. I think that that is something that is a universal opinion between Democrats and Republicans in this Congress, that we keep our sacred trust with the seniors in America, that we do not diminish their benefits, their anticipated promised benefits, that we keep that intact, that we don't increase the contribution rate, we keep that intact.

But something that we have done if we had had the support of the Blue Dogs, because the Republicans were in support of this, was the President's proposal that we offer people the opportunity if they were young enough to make the actuarials work out, a personal retirement account that could begin to transition some people off of Social Security. They get their Social Security benefits too, but it would supplement that, and then the need to increase that would have diminished over time.

We couldn't get there, Mr. Speaker. We couldn't reform the huge entitlement of Social Security even to keep it actuarially sound. Some said it is a political third rail the President should never have touched. The President says it is a third rail that you if you don't touch it, it is the third rail, but he couldn't and we couldn't get the job done to reform Social Security even though there was no down side for senior citizens, at least a level guaranteed to them, even though there was only an upside for the younger generations, and one of the reasons is the issue got demagogued across this country dramatically.

The President did at least 30 stops across the country. He articulated what this was about. It would have been good if he would have had spokesmen and women from the younger generation, the under-30- somethings that were half as vocal as the 30-somethings that come out here on the floor that would speak up for their opportunity to be able to ensure their retirement without having to become financially destitute when you get from that point where we start out 16 workers for every one retired at the beginning of Social Security, where we are about three to one now and where we will soon get to two to one under this current program.

Mr. Speaker, we need to look into the future. We need a long-term planning approach to the things we do in this Congress. And this electoral process does anything but. It focuses Members on the idea that you get elected, you come down here and swear into office and while you are doing that, there is someone announcing their candidacy to run against you. They're home in the district 6 or 7 days in a week, stabbing you in the media, raising money and trying to unseat you. You are supposed to concentrate on policy when you have someone trying to unseat your political survival from the day you swore in, and you are up for reelection in 2 years.

So this constitutional system that we have, in fact, it is one that I appreciate and revere. In a lot of ways it makes us very responsive to the public. Our fingers are on their pulse. They let us know; we react quickly. This House can move more quickly than the Senate by far if we decide to do it. That is a good thing.

The bad thing is if I called a meeting and said, we are going to start a new long-term planning caucus here in the United States Congress, and invite all 435 Members, you know, if I ordered a lot of good food and advertised it, some would show up. And then after the next week and the next week and the next week, pretty soon there will only be a small handful of people that would be working on something like that just because the system is set up where it focuses us on the things that are urgent, sometimes at the expense of the policy that is important. That is the down side of this constitutional system that sets us up for reelections every 2 years. But if you give us a lifetime tenure, I'm not sure we would solve the problem either.

And you go over to the Senate side and there every 6 years a third of them up for reelection every election cycle and they don't seem to have a lot more interest in long-term planning than we do over here.

So I look to Wall Street. I look to major corporations. I look to the business communities in America for leadership. I am wondering what are they putting together so that we can have economic viability and a healthy populace that can be raising families and bringing up the next generation so that we can continue this American Dream. I watch what they do, and I get the unalterable message from them that their real focus is on their next quarterly report.

Well, I understand that. You have got to produce profit for your investors, and the board of directors is telling you what they want you to do. But where is the leadership in America for long-term vision? Where is the leadership that will take us down this path where we will eventually get to solve the Social Security problem, to solve the Medicare problem, and I will submit the words of George Will which were, democracies function under the lash of necessity.

And we haven't reached the lash of necessity if we are talking about actuarial tables that start going into zero on the Social Security trust fund in 2016 nor a fund that runs out to zero in 2042. That is not the lash of necessity. We need the American people to be looking ahead and demanding that we put long-term plans in place. And that is important that the media, that the philosophers, that the writers, the people that are opinion leaders in America join with us so we can put the pieces in place for a long-term solution to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid to a lesser degree. All that solves the interest problem, and even then, if we simply had discipline in our spending, we can solve this all with growth, Mr. Speaker.

So if the Blue Dogs want to talk about getting to a balanced budget, I am for that. Let's do so. Let's do it by spending discipline. Let's do it by reforming Medicare. Let's do it by reforming Social Security. By the way, I have a couple of ideas for you on Medicaid. If we can do those things, this budget becomes easy. We need to index our spending then to the factor of inflation which should keep us down below the revenue stream when we have the economic growth that we have if we have good favorable tax policies.

I can go on into subject matter that has to do with reforming the Tax Code that eliminates the IRS and eliminates the entire income tax code. It untaxes all the production in America and puts it on consumption. Mr. Speaker, I would take us all down that path, and I may well run out of time before I can get to that.

But I wanted to address the concerns that were raised by the Blue Dogs. And I would point out that to compare spending, the spending of the National debt to the amount of money that we spend in this Congress on education, I can look through this Constitution that I have in my pocket, and I can't find anything in there that says, thou shalt extract money from the taxpayers to fund education. It is not comparable to the National debt. It is not relevant to the National debt. To the extent we make the decision that we want to invest in education, it is not something that is a legitimate measure.

Neither is it a legitimate measure on the part of the Members on the other side of the aisle. And I believe that includes the Blue Dogs as well. Neither is it a legitimate measure to argue that because we spend billions of dollars in Iraq, we ought to spend billions of dollars on SCHIP. There is no legitimate measure. They are not linked. They can't be linked. But if you want to link them, if you choose to link SCHIP spending to the global war on terror, to the funding that supports our men and women whose lives are on the line in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and other places around the world, if that is your will, to link that spending, then let me associate this for you.

I point it out this way, Mr. Speaker, that if it is a zero sum game, and by presumption it is a zero sum game if we are going to compare national defense spending to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, then the zero sum game comes down to this: How many bullet- proof vests would you deprive our soldiers and marines of in order to fund health insurance for middle, let me say, upper-income kids? Because we are talking about a Congress that passed subsidy for health insurance premiums for families in my State up over $103,000; $103,250, 400 percent of poverty. That was the Pelosi plan. That was, Mr. Speaker, the 400 percent of poverty that passed off the floor of this Congress.

I submit that subsidizing health insurance premiums when people are making over $103,000 a year is an irresponsible expansion of this budget. It cannot be defended within the context of the previous hour that was delivered by the Blue Dogs. It can't be defended by anyone unless it is their will and their intent to move us to socialized medicine.

What is our line here? I will argue that in the 1990s we passed welfare reform. This welfare reform was called workfare in a lot of cases, to move people off of the multigenerational dependency on welfare, move them into work, transition them smoothly so they could get there and observe and recognize and act upon the reality that when people moved off of welfare when they started to earn more income, they would no longer qualify for Medicaid which was, of course, the health care that is provided for the low-income among us. The working poor weren't going to have health insurance for their children.

So this Congress passed SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Plan, to subsidize, in most cases, to replace, to buy the health insurance premiums for working-poor kids, the children of the working poor, so they could transition out of welfare and onto work without losing the health coverage for their children. Pretty good idea. When it passed out of this Congress and went to the States, the States had this opportunity to take it up. We took it up in Iowa. We called it HAWK-I. We called it the Healthy and Well Kids in Iowa.

We set that at 200 percent of poverty. I supported that and adapted some of the language technically and voted for 200 percent of poverty level. That 200 percent of poverty level then grew. The State got an exception where one could exempt 20 percent of the income of a family. So you get into a situation where the 200 percent of poverty, that turns out to be about $41,000 and change a year for a family of four; when you exempt 20 percent of the income, that goes to $51,625.

That is where we are today. I don't call $51,625 the working poor in my State. It might be in some States. It's not the working poor in my State. Most people don't make more than that in the State, but most people provide the health insurance for their families and their children. When it's provided through the employer, this bill that was pushed through this Congress provides a perverse incentive to crowd kids off of private health insurance and put them on the government- funded health insurance. That is the crowd-out factor.

The crowd-out factor was a lot bigger for the 400 percent of poverty. I don't recall that number, as I stand here, Mr. Speaker, but as that bill went over to the Senate and it was negotiated down to 300 percent of poverty, the crowd-out factor became 2 million kids in America that today have health insurance that is paid for by their parents or at the workplace of their parents, and those 2 million kids would be crowded off of their own private insurance rolls and put onto the government- funded insurance rolls.

Now they would match up with a number about 3.8 million kids that don't have insurance today. They have health care, but statistically they don't have insurance. That sometimes is a fluid number. There are people in transition between one policy and another. That is added into that 3.8 million. But the 2 million is a hard number. That is the number of kids that get crowded out, pushed off their own private health insurance.

That is unacceptable. If we are trying to insure children of the working poor, we don't take it up to $103,250 income for a family of four and say we are going to subsidize it up to that point, now we have helped the poor kids, because $103,000 is not poor. That is really wealthy where I come from. That is 400

percent of poverty. That is not the answer to subsidizing health insurance for the kids of the working poor. That is what SCHIP is supposed to be.

Three hundred percent of poverty is what this House passed the last time after it was negotiated in the Senate. That is $77,437 in my State. In some States, it's $83,000. That is not the working poor for a family of four. Probably not for a family of any normal size that we would see today. But that is the standard that this House has passed again. Still, it crowds out 2 million kids. One of my objections, one of my real objections to this is that they have changed the language in this bill. They have changed the language that under current Medicaid qualifier standards there has to be a demonstration of citizenship or a lawful presence in the United States that extends beyond the 5-year prohibition for receiving any welfare benefits here in this country.

That provision has been weakened by an addition to a section in this SCHIP bill, and it has been done so by the majority, and they have done it more than once. When we raised the objection and said that this language has changed and it will provide taxpayer dollar benefits to people who are in this country illegally to give them Medicaid and SCHIP, the majority said, no, that's not true because we have a paragraph in the bill that says none of these funds shall go to fund illegals.

I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that they wouldn't have had to add the language to the bill if they weren't going to do something with it. The language that they added to the bill is scored by the Congressional Budget Office, who analyzed the language and has a job in a nonpartisan way of calculating the impact on our budget, and they concluded it would cost an additional, the changes that open the door to allow people who are deportable to collect health insurance benefits and health benefits in the form of Medicaid, illegals in the United States, the cost to that is, according to the Congressional Budget Office, $3.7 billion in Federal tax dollars, $2.8 billion in State tax dollars. The easy math on that is $6.5 billion all together it costs the taxpayers of the United States to fund Medicaid and SCHIP, most of it, a vast, vast majority of it, for illegals, that if we simply ask the immigration customs and enforcement why don't we deliver that benefit in the form of a voucher and you guys take it up there and hand it over, when they met with most of these people they would have to take them into custody and take them home to the country where they belong.

That is the reality of the law. That is the law, Mr. Speaker. $6.5 billion, and yet I have people here in this Congress and around the country that say: Steve King is wrong on this. This bill really doesn't allow for funding to go to illegals. It really doesn't open the door. My answer to that, first of all, is if you think I am wrong, what is your number? Submit to me your number. Would you like to submit zero? Say that to the Congressional Budget Office.

Right here, Mr. Speaker, is the CBO report that shows the $3.7 billion, and the easy math that came from the Energy and Commerce Committee to put the States' share in that comes to $6.5 billion. My question is: If you think I am wrong, what is your number? The second question is: If I am wrong, why is the majority so insistent upon keeping their language in the bill that opens the standards up for Medicaid qualification that just simply says all you have to do is write down a Social Security number and we are going to recommend that the Social Security Administration verify that number, maybe send a letter back to the provider or to the State if that number doesn't match up.

We know how well that works with employment in this country. We have at least 6.9 million working illegals in America. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, those 6.9 million, which may now be 7 or 7.1 million people, at least 55 percent of them have false documentation that they present in order to get the job. That is a Social Security number that has been submitted in the same fashion under the same standard as would be required for Medicaid qualifications. We know how well it is working with hiring illegals in America when you say, give me a Social Security number. It is not working. That is why we are in the middle of this immigration debate, Mr. Speaker.

So, I will submit that that same standard has no chance of working any better if you are going to use it to be able to qualify applicants for Medicaid and SCHIP. It defies logic to think that the Congressional Budget Office hands out a document that says $3.7 billion Federal, and Energy and Commerce calculates the State share of that and it comes to $2.8 billion, and you are at $6.5 billion in cost. Why does it cost $6.5 billion more money, if there is nothing in this bill that funds illegals? And why is the majority going to fall on their sword to protect the language that opens up the standards, if it doesn't change anything? One can't get past that. Facts are inconvenient truths to some people on the other side of the aisle and sometimes on this side of the aisle.

But what I recognize is I have been joined here by my colleague from New Jersey who occasionally will be watching C-SPAN at night and have a thought and a concept that he needs to get out here this evening. So with that in mind, with great gratitude, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Yes.

I thank the gentleman for coming to the floor and giving us a New Jersey perspective on this issue of SCHIP and also the overall budget that we have.

As the gentleman arrived, I was reaching for a quote in my memory and I came up a little bit empty. And so I looked it up while I was listening to the gentleman from New Jersey.

You have heard a number of facts that have been rolled out by the gentleman from New Jersey. You have heard a number of facts that I have rolled out here. I have said they are stubborn things. But it was John Adams who spoke to facts in memorable fashion when he said: ``Facts are stubborn things. And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.'' John Adams, and that was before the Declaration of Independence that he made that statement, as I recall.

And so as we laid these facts out here, this SCHIP initiative that we have today, current law, family of four qualifies in my State up to $51,625. It may be higher than that in New Jersey.

But the bill vetoed by the President and the bill that was passed out of this House last week is a bill that funds up to 300 percent of poverty, family of four, $77,437. That is off of Governor Culver's Web page. By doing the simple calculation that is provided there on whether you qualify or whether you don't, the $51,625, and 300 percent of poverty is pretty simple, you just do the math on that.

This House passed it at 400 percent of poverty. That was the Pelosi plan. The argument is this is not the cornerstone to socialized medicine.

Mr. Speaker, I submit when you cover 95 percent of the kids in America with SCHIP, which you would do once you get up over that 400 percent of poverty, only 5 percent are left on their own insurance. The rest are crowded out. The 2 million who would be crowded off their own insurance plan under this plan which has been vetoed by the President and then brought back in substantive identity to the first bill by the Pelosi-led Congress, that legislation still crowds out a huge percentage of the kids.

I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Again I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. I would ask him to point out to the body the acronym of SCHIP that he illustrated in his speech. I know that poster is available, and so I would direct the attention of body to the gentleman from New Jersey and the poster.

I very much thank the gentleman from New Jersey.

I want to point out that this acronym has been out here now for over a week. When it says SCHIP stands for Socialized Clinton-Style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents, the criticism that has come for that is that no one has argued with the substance. They simply say, well, this is emotional. It is reactionary. Well, tell me what's wrong? Does this not lay the cornerstone to socialized medicine, to provide for taxpayer-funded insurance for kids and families up over $100,000 for the 400 percent that was brought across this floor in the first place.

Mr. Speaker, does that not lay the cornerstone for socialized medicine? I submit, yes, it does.

And what happens in this county when, under current SCHIP, we have adults on up to age 25, 85 percent of those receiving SCHIP funding in Minnesota are adults. Some argue 92 percent. It is 66 percent in Wisconsin. I mean, these are huge numbers. This isn't for kids the way the system is today. But it is to lay the cornerstone to socialized medicine. I will support that statement.

As John Adams says, facts are stubborn things. Here is a fact about laying the cornerstone for socialized medicine. This is what President Bill Clinton said about achieving socialized health care on September 29, 2000: ``You know, when Hillary and HHS Secretary Donna Shalala and I started working on this back in 1993, we proposed a solution that would have covered all Americans. And it was too much for the system to accommodate at once, so we've gone back, piece, by piece, trying to achieve that. We have now the Children's Health Insurance. Next, we need to deal with the 55 to 65-year-old age group.''

Does anybody think that this isn't part of a plan to lay the cornerstone for socialized medicine when the very words came out of the mouth of Bill Clinton on September 29, 2000? He was still President then.

And a speech he gave here on the floor of Congress on September 22, 1993, where he laid out component after component of the plan to get to Hillarycare. And by the way, it was Hillarycare. It was Hillary working behind the scenes in some secret meetings to put together an overall health care proposal which was socialized medicine.

Mr. Speaker, it was wrong then. It is wrong now. This is the cornerstone of socialized medicine. It is a component of Hillarycare.

Bill Clinton again, September 29, 2000: ``You know, when Hillary and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala started working on this back in 1993, we proposed a solution that would have covered all Americans.''

Well, a solution that covers all Americans, I would submit, isn't your private health care program, isn't the one that has been built by the free enterprise system, the one that has provided the incentive to do the research and development that has given us the best health care in the world. A system that would have covered all Americans is socialized medicine. That is a definitional fact. This is a direct quote from President Bill Clinton, September 29, 2000.

I say SCHIP stands for Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents. It is a matter of historical fact. She met over and over again, and some would say the meetings could have been more lawful. That is not my issue so much as she was driving a health care policy as First Lady as if she were the lead health care policy wonk in America. It collapsed when the American people revolted against it because it was Hillarycare, because it was socialized medicine.

It came to us Clinton-style, but he delivered it here on the floor of the House of Representatives on September 22, 1993. In the year 2000, when he found out they couldn't drive it through, he said, well, we are going to give you a solution that will cover all Americans, but we are going to give it to you a piece at a time.

So when SCHIP passes at 200 percent of poverty, then we will raise it to 400 percent of poverty. This is what the Pelosi Congress wanted to do. These are all facts, these inconvenient, stubborn things. At 400 percent of poverty, you have only about 5 percent of the kids any longer on private health insurance. So the culture to provide for your children's health insurance premium is gone. It is wiped out. It is destroyed by a Congress bent on laying the cornerstone to socialized medicine, SCHIP. Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare. Those issues are all addressed for what, Mr. Speaker, for illegals and their parents.

I have spoken to this. Here is the CBO score: $6.5 billion increased costs in fundings that are not currently going to illegal recipients of Medicaid, and those funding that currently are going to SCHIP to illegal recipients, that comes from the changes that are in this bill that passed this House last week and the bill the President vetoed, the bill that this Congress refused to override. That $6.5 billion.

They can argue that they changed the language. They did. They were distinctions without a difference, and the proof that it lacks a difference is because the Congressional Budget Office scored, evaluated the cost to taxpayers, at precisely the same dollar amount. Regardless of whether it was the language they first brought or the language that they amended it to, the distinction is without a difference. It still provides for health care for illegals in America.

Mr. Speaker, fact after fact come out here. These inconvenient truths, to quote a famous author in America. I will go down through some that I have missed.

It does weaken citizenship requirements. The loss in taxpayer dollars, the net loss to my State is $226 million. Everybody that has a State where people smoke will pay 61 cents more a pack. When they do that, they will pay more taxes.

It is also a fact that one of the most regressive taxes we have is the tax on tobacco because people less well-to-do tend to smoke more. It is an inverse relationship when they do a little better. We could look into the reasons for that, but we know this. Poor people pay a greater percentage of their income on the current tobacco tax, and will pay a far greater percentage of their income on the proposed tobacco tax. The idea on the part of the Speaker's side of the aisle is you would raise the tobacco tax and, therefore, there would be an incentive for people to smoke less.

I agree there would be, and I'd like to see what those numbers produce and maybe that's a good thing, and I'd like to evaluate that tax policy on that.

But we've got another little problem here, and that is, that in order to fund this increase, we have to have 22.4 million new smokers in America. So we've got to go out there and unleash Joe Camel again and get him out there recruiting the kids in America to start smoking, because if we don't do that, we can't fund their health insurance, and even if we do do that, we're still going to have, according to the first bill they passed at 400 percent of poverty, 70,000 families in America that qualify for SCHIP and still qualify to pay the alternative minimum tax, that tax on the rich.

So I'll submit, Mr. Speaker, that this is a bit of a bizarre proposal, and it's awfully hard to explain the rationale behind it when there are so many conflicting inconsistencies. But in the end, it's a net increase in cost to my State

of $226 million. It will take an increase of 22.4 million new smokers to fund it. It will fund, at 300 percent of poverty, families of four in my State earning $77,473. It will crowd 2 million kids off of the private family and business, job-funded insurance rolls, cost $6.5 billion to fund the illegals that are participating in programs that today are barred from so and add taxes to cigarettes of 61 cents a pack.

Now, you add that all up, those are the facts. Those are the stubborn things. Those are the inconvenient truths that the other side of the aisle has to deal with. I simply called it SCHIP, ``Socialized Clinton- style Hillarycare for Illegals and Their Parents.''

So, Mr. Speaker, in the remaining time, I think that I should do a bit of a demonstration for the sake of popular demand. I wanted to point out for the body that we're spending $8 billion on our southern border, and this is supposed to keep us from the $6.5 billion in costs that are accumulated here under this SCHIP bill that came out of the Pelosi Congress.

But on that border that's 2,000 miles long, $8 billion, that's $4 million a mile. So I thought, you know, I've got a mile of gravel road that runs west of my house, and if Michael Chertoff came to me and he sad I'm going to give you $4 million but it's your job to make sure that only 75 percent of the people that want to cross that road get across and 25 percent of them stay where they are, that's our current efficiency rate that we're getting out of our $8 billion and $4 million a mile on our southern border today. We interdict about 25 percent of those trying, and about 75 percent get across. You might argue it's one out of three, but they'll testify one out of three, one out of four. We stopped 1,188,000 going across that border in the last year that was reported to me. That means about 4 million try. That's about 11,000 a night, 11,000 a night. Twice the size of Santa Anna's army pouring across our southern border, not in the day, at night. Every single night, Mr. Speaker.

What would I do if Michael Chertoff said, I'm going to offer you a contract. I'd bid it. It wouldn't be a no-bid contract. I'd want to compete for this, $4 million for my mile of road. What would I do?

Well, I'd get out there and build something because I know the Humvees cost a lot of money, and uniforms and retirement programs and health plans for our Federal employees cost a lot of money. Now, I love our border patrol. They're doing a great job, and I've been down there to work with them, but I would submit they could use some help. I would give them a little structure. I'd go in there and say, Your job would be a lot easier if we build you a physical barrier. I'd want it double. I'd put the fence in, and I'd build the wall. The wall would be something that would last a long, long time.

This would be the trenched footing that I would put in. It would be slip form, Mr. Speaker, and I would set this trench footing into the ground. I'd drag her along, and I'd pour slip form right behind it. It would look like this from the end. Then I'm going to set it up in this stand, and I'll show you how easy it is to build a wall. It will take about, let me say, $1.2 million, about $1.2 million a mile, and you just simply put this in about like that. That would be a piece of concrete that would be about 13 feet high, 13-and-a-half feet high, about half that for width, and then you pick up your little crane and drop this thing in here. That's about 12,000 pounds per formation.

Mr. Speaker, I thought I heard your gavel as I dropped that in the hole. I apologize for that. I was making a little too much noise.

I would wrap this up simply by then submitting that I believe I have demonstrated how we can protect America at about $1.2 million a mile as opposed to $4 million a mile. I'd encourage this Congress take a good look.