Floor Statements

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

Having sat here and listened to the discussion that was presented by our gentlemen from the Carolinas and talking about the drought in the Southeast, I am quite interested in the map that they have laid out for us to see.

Coming from an agriculture State and district myself, I will say I have significant empathy for the drought plight in that part of the country. That huge area of bright red tells me how tough it must be down there where it hasn't rained very much in a long time and gives me a sense before how long it will be before you can see green again in your part of the country, Mr. Etheridge. We have lived through that in past years, and I can tell you, it goes deeper than just looking at a picture. It goes to the very lives of the people you represent.

I yield to the gentleman.

And I thank you. We will work together on this issue. There is nothing your producers can do when it doesn't rain. Perhaps we can have a hearing down there and it will bring rain like it did in Kansas.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to express those sentiments, but I come to the floor tonight to discuss a different subject matter.

The subject that I've chosen to discuss tonight is the Dream Act, and I do so because a vote on cloture is scheduled on the floor of the United States Senate tomorrow sometime, I believe, in the afternoon.

The DREAM Act, Mr. Speaker, you will remember is an act that's been pushed for several years here in the United States Congress and also pushed at the State level. What it is about, it is a bill with a wonderful name, and once you read through it and think about the ramifications, it's not such a wonderful bill. It has actually meant the demise of a number of public figures. People who have served in this Congress, people that have served in the State legislatures and people who have aspired to serve in this Congress have found themselves enamored by the wonderful name, the DREAM Act, but also trapped up in and captured in the pitfalls of the reality of what's behind this DREAM Act.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you will permit, I will describe what the DREAM Act does, and that is, it provides, let me say it this way, an opportunity for in-state tuition discounts to go to people who are otherwise unlawfully present in the United States, usually younger people that have graduated from high school. It gives them in-state tuition discounts, or allows the States to do so, and then gives them a conditional legal status in the United States provided they enter into college or enter into the uniform services, not always our military, but some type of uniform services.

This sounds good over the top of things, but it works out to be this: it defies a current Federal law. In fact, it has to amend a current Federal law, a law that's been defied by at least 10 States, and it's a law that was in the 1996 Immigration Reform Act, sponsored by now- ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith of Texas.

This legislation in 1996, current Federal law, Mr. Speaker, prohibits a State and institutions of higher learning from granting residency in- state tuition discounts, breaks on the costs of the education, to students who are unlawfully present in the United States, that's a nice word for illegal aliens, Mr. Speaker, unless those universities and those States that set that policy grant that same tuition discount to all students who are lawfully present in the United States wheresoever they might reside.

So let me just draw an example, being from Iowa. Let's just say, for example, that there is a student that grows up on the east side of the Mississippi River and a resident of Illinois who wants to go to college at Iowa State University. And if Iowa had the DREAM Act as a policy, and they defeated it in the State legislature a couple or 3 years ago, actually let it die in committee as I recall. But if that student who grows up and goes to a high school in Illinois, a resident of Illinois, chooses to go to college at Iowa State, they will pay an out-of-state, nonresident tuition of about $16,000 a year; and by the way, a resident of Iowa will pay about $6,000 a year. So not quite three times as high if you're a nonresident student.

And by anecdote, I can tell you that in California the numbers are comparatively about $3,000 a year to go to school at a California institution if you're a resident, and I believe it's about $23,000 a year if you're a nonresident. You pay that kind of premium if you come from out of state to go to school in-state. Each State sets their own policies. These numbers aren't hard; but, conceptually, they're accurate numbers, Mr. Speaker.

So the out-of-state student, the nonresident student, pays a premium to go to college at an institution in a State that they're not a resident of. That's been a longstanding practice so that the State can encourage, foster, and subsidize the education of their residents in the hopes that they have highly educated students that will stay at home and grow the economy of the State that pays the taxes to support those institutions of higher learning.

But that's a little too convoluted, Mr. Speaker. I'll just say that States want to help their own residents. So they've set these policies, and that's why it costs more money to be an out-of-state student going to school in another State than it does to go to school in your own State, a longstanding practice.

The DREAM Act turns that all on its head, and for illegal alien students who have come into the United States in violation of the law, whom if ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were to be required to deliver this in-state tuition discount, let's call it a voucher, it's not, it's a discount, but if they had to deliver it in the form of check or a voucher and if ICE had to deliver that, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they would be compelled to pick up that prospective student and send them back to the country from which they came so that they could be legally residing in their home country.

That's the law, Mr. Speaker, and the Dream Act turns this on its head. It grants people who are here illegally, all the way up to age 30, if they will enter into a school and start their studies on a 2- year study program or if they will go into the uniform services, not necessarily our armed services, then they get conditional residency or conditional legal status in the United States. And then, if they keep their nose clean, they get a green card which is lawful, permanent residence, and it's about 5 years to citizenship. And the formerly illegal immigrants have access then to all the chain migration tools that anyone else has who comes here legally for those who have respected our laws.

Now, that means they can bring in their siblings. It means they can bring

in their children. It means they can bring in their parents, and that whole chain migration can start over and over again.

We had a chart that was put together on the chain migration that comes with the policy that's there that's called family reunification, and it looks like about one legal immigrant can bring in about 277 family members by the time you go out through the chain of the family tree. That would also be true for an illegal immigrant who would be granted amnesty under the DREAM Act.

So in-state tuition discounts, amnesty for illegal aliens, put this bill, this bill that if the cloture as has been filed and if it successfully passes tomorrow, then the Senate will go to a vote on the DREAM Act. If they do that and the House should take up the same bill and then the President should sign it, you will have illegal aliens who will be sitting in desks in the institutions of higher learning within our States studying, going to college at the expense of the taxpayers and at the expense of the Federal taxpayers because we do appropriate funds that go into these institutions.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, there are only so many desks in a classroom. There are only so many slots in our institutions of higher learning, and that's why we have admissions requirements. That's why you apply and you put in your grades and all of the other qualifications that are there, and very tough decisions are sometimes made by these universities to allow people to come in and study there or to cut them out.

You will remember some high-profile cases. For example, the affirmative action cases at the University of Michigan and at the University of Michigan Law School. There are only so many desks that are available. Imagine granting an in-state tuition discount to someone who came across the border and into the United States illegally and someone who is getting a $6,000 education, when the student sitting in the desk right next to them is a United States citizen, naturalized or born in the United States, whose mother or father has served perhaps in Iraq or Afghanistan, who has perhaps been killed over there to defend our freedom, and that poor student without a father or a mother has given their life for our freedom is paying out-of-state tuition prices to go to school at their preferred institution, sitting in a desk next to someone who is unlawfully present in the United States and would be deported if it weren't for this DREAM Act that grants them amnesty.

Now, that sets up a friction in this society, Mr. Speaker, that's illogical. It's irrational. It rewards the wrong thing, and in the end, it would not be tolerated by the public if they begin to understand what this really means.

The Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff's DHS, under this DREAM Act would not be able to go in and use any of the records; and so if they want to protect this society, if they want to go in and apply the law, they can't even look at the records that are there that are part of the data that's compiled to grant this supercitizenship to people who are eligible for deportation. And I say supercitizenship, Mr. Speaker, because this supercitizenship path, by the way, grants more rights, special rights to illegal aliens to go to school in our institutions of higher learning at a tuition discount.

For example, if you have a legal alien, someone who has applied for a student visa or has lawful, permanent status, lawful permanent residency here in the United States, a green card, and they're going to school at an out-of-state institution, they have to pay the out-of- state tuition rate. If someone comes in from Korea or Guatemala or let's say Russia, Poland, comes into the United States legally, student visa or under a green card, maybe even in a path to citizenship, and they have a residency in New Jersey, they can't go to school in New York with an in-state tuition discount, and they sure in the world can't go to school in California for $3,000 because they'll be considered an out-of-state resident and they will be.

That's the way it is for American citizens, both naturally born and naturalized. That's the way it is for people who have followed and respected and honored our immigration laws, whether they're on a student visa or whether they're here on lawful permanent residency, a green card. They all have to follow the laws of this country, and they all have to pay the going rate that reflects their residency of their State.

And consider, Mr. Speaker, if you will, consider the children of military families, whether or not they've lost a parent in this global war on terror. Those children move around a lot, and some of them don't qualify necessarily for the in-state tuition discount maybe anywhere, and they would be paying a premium as a son or a daughter of our military veterans, sitting next to a desk of someone who before this act would be passed today will be unlawfully present in the United States, subject to deportation who would end up getting a discount for the tuition.

This is the bill, Mr. Speaker, that the Senate proposes to bring up tomorrow with their cloture vote; and if they vote cloture, and we'll have this debate on the floor of the United States Senate, and you're going to be able to, Mr. Speaker, look across over to the Senate and be able to evaluate the set of values that the United States Senate brings to the table and this set of values that produces supercitizenship, superaccess to citizenship for illegals.

I recall some of the debates that we've had here on the floor of this House. Discussions and speeches, I should say, rather than debates; and I recall how easy it is for some of the Members to look at this and conclude, well, this is the DREAM Act, and why would we want to punish kids who are simply here unlawfully? Can't we give them an education, and isn't that a better thing? Yes, if your view is that simplistic, Mr. Speaker, if that's all the view is, isn't it better for the kids that would be beneficiaries of this? The answer is yes.

But we could grant in-state tuition discount to every kid in this country, and in my State it would cost several hundred million dollars. The State legislature is not willing to do that. The current law is, if you grant that in-state tuition discount to students who are illegal, then you grant that same discount to everyone in the United States, wherever their residency might be. And so all of those students that are paying out-of-state tuition, that $16,000 in Iowa, would end up getting the $6,000 annual education as opposed to the $16,000 education. A $10,000 premium that's there that's levied against all of those students that come from other places around the country and the world would all be level down to $6,000.

They can do that today if they choose, Mr. Speaker; but they will not do that because the boards of regents and the State legislatures across this land don't want to take the financial hit. They don't want to level the premium. They don't want to give this kind of benefit to all American citizens. They don't want to give this kind of benefit to the sons and daughters of our military. They don't want to give this benefit to those who are legally emigrating here into the United States. And they don't want to give this benefit to those who are on a path to citizenship here in the United States provided they're not residents of the institution in question.

No, sir, Mr. Speaker. This is all about special right, special treatment for people, for students that are unlawfully here; and the numbers break out to be something like this. A million, more, we don't know. There's not a cap on it, but the best estimates say more than a million; and we know that when you grant benefits, it attracts more people. And there will be people that will come into the United States illegally and present themselves to go to college at a tuition discount, and they will say, oh, yes, I've been here that 5 years or so that the Senate bill requires that I'm here; and by the way, I have these falsified utility bills and rent canceled checks and things of that nature that say that I've been here so I meet the minimum standards. Give me that tuition discount, too.

That's the view and the strategy, the special extra citizenship rights that come with it for more than a million people. And we know also, Mr. Speaker, that whenever you open the door up and you count the numbers, the numbers get greater, not smaller. Ronald Reagan said, what you tax you get less of; what you subsidize you get more of.

And we are here talking about opening the door to subsidizing significantly a two-thirds discount, a 66 or 67 percent discount, on college tuition for people who are eligible for deportation.

I think it's breathtaking how far they are seeking to reach over in the United States Senate. I think the people understand this. I think they understand that this is a super amnesty plan. Whatever your heart says, can we just please engage our brains for a little bit and think about what this means; what it means if we give in-State tuition discounts to people who are unlawfully present in the United States, those who, as I said earlier, if ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, had to deliver the paperwork that said here is your tuition discount, they would be compelled to pick these students up and send them home again. Some of these students up to the age of 30 are taking advantage of the soft heart of Americans.

So extend this on out, what's the motive? Some is driven by the churches, I understand. I appreciate the ministry that they provide. You know, I am a strong proponent and adherent to the values that come from our churches and the good movements in America that come from the pulpit. But if the churches from America believe that we should be providing in-State tuition discounts for those people that the law says need to be sent home, can you please pass the collection plate. Don't come here to Congress and ask that we squeeze that out of the sweat of the taxpayers, because they are the ones in the end that pay the price, and the American citizens that won't have a desk in a classroom, because that desk is already filled by somebody who gets a cheaper rate than they can get.

There is only so much room. There are only so many benefits. We can help in the foreign countries better than we can open our doors here for an unlimited amount of people coming in. When we undermine the integrity of our immigrations system, when we do so, we take away the options that are constitutionally bestowed upon this Congress. The Constitution directs us to set the immigration policy here.

I recognize that we have a legal and appropriate right to deal with acts like the DREAM Act. We ought to shoot it down. We ought to vote it down. We should defeat it. We should not let it slide its insidious policy across the halls here between the Senate and the House of Representatives. It should not be passed.

In fact, the Senate has three times here in the 110th Congress, three times just this year, voted to defeat the DREAM Act because they understood the political repercussions from the American people who understood what amnesty is. This bill grants amnesty. This bill says, it says that if you are here unlawfully, if you are subject to deportation, but if you apply for this DREAM Act and apply to go to school, under a super discount, we will give you conditional lawful status here in the United States. That's amnesty. It's also a path to citizenship, and it opens the door for family reunification, the chain migration that we talk about. It does all of those things. That's amnesty.

Amnesty, to define it for the benefit of those who have heard a lot of different definitions, the consistent definition of amnesty that addresses this is the definition that we have used in the Judiciary Committee over and over again. In our debates as we mark up immigration bills, in our hearings as we cross-examine the witnesses on immigration, to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crimes, to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objectives of their crimes. That's amnesty. That's what the DREAM Act does. That's what's moving, that's what's cooking, that's what is shaking over in the Senate.

By the way, the beneficiaries of this act don't have to finish their college education. All they have to do is engage in it for a couple of years. That starts the ball rolling. As I said earlier, they don't have to serve in the military; they just have to serve in the uniformed services. There are many holes in this act.

Let me take this, if I can, back to another subject matter that's associated with this, and that's the subject matter that also threatens to find its way into legislation that we expect will be moving in the United States Senate, and that's AgJOBS. AgJOBS is a bill that grants amnesty to people that are unlawfully here that are working in the agriculture industry, people that are picking lettuce, as Senator McCain has so well illustrated. And the AgJOBS bill says if you have been here for 5 years and you apply under this AgJOBS, we will grant you a lawful status here in the United States. That also is amnesty.

The AgJOBS bill that looks like it's most likely to emerge in the United States Senate gives a path to citizenship, provides immediate lawful presence here in the United States, a path to citizenship, a reward to immigration lawbreakers, a pardon to immigration lawbreakers and the reward of the objective of their crime, which is, we presume, in most cases their objective was to get jobs here in the United States.

I would point out that the low-skilled jobs here in the United States have the highest level of unemployment. It's not the other way around. There is no statistical data that supports that this country is starved for low-skilled workers.

When we look at the low-skilled workers, the unemployment rates go over 10 percent, well over 10 percent. American citizens are being bumped from jobs, those jobs. Low-skilled, undereducated American citizens who were born here and naturalized here are being bumped from those jobs by illegal aliens who are taking those jobs cheaper.

Of course they can. In fact, they have to, because some of the job market they can't compete in, in the legitimate part of the job market. So they all come in and work cheaper, but on the other hand they don't have the risk of liabilities that go along with steady employment like a citizen does with a regular address who has the obligations to make their contributions to the Federal Government, to the State government and to the local government.

It's not to say that many of the illegals don't pay taxes, but here is where it comes to me this way. Someone who presents a Social Security number, that's often someone else's, and sometimes it's just a made-up number. They then have been consistently hired to go to work through a number of different professions; most, I will say, many of the professions. They will often record the maximum number of dependents with the H.R. team that's there for the company so that they get the highest amount of take-home pay and the least amount taken out for their Federal and their State income tax in the States that have income tax, and that's almost all.

If you have someone come in, and let's just say they are making $10 an hour, and let's say it's 40 hours a week, and it's simple math, and I am just doing it as I stand here, so that's $400 a week. The withholding that would be there for the State taxes at $400 and for the Federal tax at $400 a week, if you would claim a number of dependents, let's just say six or seven or eight, you are already in the category at that kind of wage where you wouldn't have any withholding for Federal income tax, you wouldn't have any withholding for State income tax. You would still have to pay the payroll tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

That gets sacrificed to the no-match Social Security file, of which there are hundreds of thousands of no-match Social Security numbers on record. The deposits that go in on those keep growing in the Social Security trust fund. Now, that's a whole different speech, but the sacrifice is made on the part of those illegals who are working on an assumed Social Security number, not their own, obviously. They sacrifice the payroll taxes, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because it's cheaper to do that and it's possible to do that.

Their take-home pay is their gross earnings minus the payroll tax, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, 15 percent of that, half of that, and the employer matches the other half, but no withholding for Federal and for State.

I get from the parking lot of some the companies that I represent the check stubs from these workers. Americans will pick them up off the parking lot where they get torn off and left in

the wind to blow. I have manila envelopes full of these that have been kind of crinkled up, walked on, a little muddy, a little dusty. They are like an accordion in a manilla envelope.

I take those out and look through them. Check stub after check stub, not a dollar withheld for Federal income tax, not a dollar withheld for State income tax. Of course, the payroll tax has been paid. At least the names are not on those check stubs, and I don't recall if there are Social Security numbers on them. That's the kind of thing that's going on all over the country.

The taxes that are paid from sales tax, the contributions that go to property tax, yes, there is a tax contribution, but there is a tax evasion that's there, and it's obvious. To turn in no-match Social Security numbers and go to work under those standards is a standard practice. The AgJOBS component of this is amnesty. It does grant a pardon to immigration lawbreakers, and it does reward them with the objective of their crime, and it rewards an industry that's grown more and more dependent upon illegal labor.

You know, I understand that when you have got a crop in the field, you need to get that crop out. When you plan for this, you have to also plan for the labor. I also recognize that there has been a growth in the labor-intensive agriculture in this country, because there has been an easy and a steady and a ready supply of cheap, illegal labor to come in and do that work in the fields. So it's inhibited us from developing the machinery that we might otherwise develop to more mechanically plant the crop and harvest the crop and maintain that crop during the growing season and to transport it.

If the labor is cheap, you are not going to develop those things, you are not going to do the bioengineering that has been done with the tomato plant that makes it mechanically harvestable. I can make a more clear example that would be something like this.

I have a constituent, whom I have great respect for, that is a very modern agriculture producer. I believe he has at least a 16-row planter that he puts the crop in with in my part of the country. I also understand that he has bought land in Brazil where they raise cotton and soybeans. When I ask what kinds of chemicals he uses to control the weeds in the cotton, he says, ``I don't use any.'' I said, ``Well, how can you raise cotton without herbicide?''

Well, he says, ``I have 96 people, each with a hoe, that go down through the rows of cotton that hoe that cotton. When they get down to the other end, they turn around and they come back to the field in a different row.'' Ninety-six people paid $3 a day cultivate that cotton with a hoe.

Now, the only thing that has changed in that technique since the dawn of agricultural time was we have a metal hoe instead of perhaps a bone or a wooden hoe. That technology that has been there has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. It hasn't moved an inch.

Same kind of thing down through those rows of cotton, chopping cotton with a hoe. That's what's going on from the same operation where you have a man who is a very modern person with the most modern equipment in the upper Midwest who markets his grain and does his purchases, very, very astute, on the Internet, professional in his field, very well respected, active in the professions that had to do with the ag industry. But when the economics dictate that you can hire 96 people with a hoe for $3 to $4 a day and it's cheaper than putting a machine out in the field where you put a man on the machine and you buy the fuel and provide the repairs and you have to buy some spray in order to kill the weeds in that cotton, when the math works out that stoop labor is cheaper than mechanized labor, that tells you something about what happens when labor is cheap. It slows the growth of our society. It slows the development of our society. It inhibits the development of our technology and puts us in a situation where we actually de-adopt the technology. You park the 16-row planter, that's only figuratively speaking, and you put the people in the field with the hoe. That's literally happening. It's not just happening there; it's happening on thousands and thousands of farms in the areas in the world where labor is cheap.

Our idea here in the United States is we don't have enough cheap labor. I would look back through history and challenge anywhere over here on the other side of the aisle to rise and ask if I will yield, I would be happy to yield, if you can give me an example, if you can give me a single example of a society, a culture or a nation that has failed or collapsed due to a lack of cheap labor. I would submit it's the other way around. Societies have been undermined from within because they didn't have enough higher education or technological background to keep up the paces or keep up with the times.

If you look at the States that are highly educated and highly skilled. They have the highest income, the highest average income. They have the highest household income. They are the most prosperous people. And this Nation should be about raising the average annual productivity of its people.

So one might submit, what are we going to do for the labor, how are we going to harvest, how are we going to harvest that lettuce if we don't have enough people who are willing to go down and pick that lettuce? How are we going to do the celery? How are we doing to go into the peppers, the strawberries, the tomatoes? We have that a little more mechanized now. How do we do all of that?

If everyone woke up tomorrow morning in the country where they can legally reside, not ICE doing their job, but if just miraculously that magic wand, poof, caused that to happen where Michael Chertoff didn't have that job any longer of providing the transportation to send people to a legal country, if that happened, what would then happen to the economy of this Nation?

And I hear scare stories coming out of the Wall Street Journal, out of Wall Street, out of, I don't know how to describe the words here, kind of a nouveau aristocracy in America that seems to think somehow they have a birthright to cheap labor and a birthright to somebody to take care of their lawn and their garden and their mansions, and that they will raise their children in a gated community and send them off to an Ivy League school, and so they'll never really be burdened by this growth of the lower class that they are promoting, and they think they have a birthright to that.

But I would submit this: that's not what America is about, Mr. Speaker. The strength of America has been an ever-broadening middle class, a middle class that's ever been more and more prosperous. We don't want to shrink this middle class. We don't want to suppress their growth and their improvement. We want to broaden the middle class and we want to lift it up.

And by the way, we don't want to expand the middle class, Mr. Speaker, from the ranks of the upper middle class. We want to expand the middle class from the ranks of the lower class. But for the first time in the memories of living Americans today, and maybe for the first time in the history of this country, we are seeing the lower class expand, the middle class shrink and the aspirations of middle-class Americans diminish.

Now, if we look at young people that grow up in Middle America that decide a college education is not for me, I just want to get my high school degree and go to work at the plant, punch the clock and earn a pretty good wage, maybe earn a living wage, and go home and take care of my family, my kids, play ball with the kids, cut the grass, go fishing, take time off on the weekends and live this life of this American Dream, buy a modest house and pay for it, send the kids to college if they want to go. Does any child that gets that high school degree and doesn't aspire to a higher education have a hope of being able to do those things in today's economy, Mr. Speaker? And I'll argue, it can be done. It's unlikely that it will happen, because the wages of the lower skilled and lower educated have been so suppressed by the ranks of illegals and unskilled lower skilled illegals who have come into this economy.

And I'm hearing from the people on Wall Street and in the Wall Street Journal that this country can't survive economically if we don't have that 12 to 20 million people to do this work that ``Americans'' won't do. All work Americans will do, and there's not a job in this country you can't find an

American doing it. Americans are doing all kinds of work in this country.

But here's the magnitude, and that is, there are 6.9 million working illegals, by the statistics that are put out by the people that do this analysis. That's 6.9 million out of about 12 million. That's the standard numbers we've been working with. I think it's more than 20 million, but this proportion works out in any case.

Out of the 6.9 million working illegals, that's part of, that's 4.7 percent of a work force that is 142 million. So 4.7 percent of 142 million, and if you do the math I think it comes out to 6.9 million. That's how many working illegals we have. Okay. That represents 4.7 percent of the work force. But they're only doing 2.2 percent of the work, Mr. Speaker, because we measure the annual output under the gross domestic product of our workers.

And because those who are here unlawfully working in this economy are, on average, lower educated and lower skilled, their production, even though they're 4.7 percent of the work force, is only 2.2 percent of the work, Mr. Speaker. And so if you have a work force that's doing 2.2 percent of the work, and let's just say it's a factory that has 1,000 people in it, everybody working diligently, and that factory does all their work in an 8-hour day, and you went to work as the CEO at 7:30 in the morning, sat down at your desk, and a memo hit your desk that said you're going to lose 2.2 percent of your work force today, they're not showing up.

Now, say that's at 7:30, and yet you need to meet your production quota by 5:00 that night when everybody clocks out. They clock in at 8. They clock out at 5. They need to get 1,000 widgets made that day, and you have to figure out how you're going to solve that problem as a CEO when 2.2 percent of your work doesn't show up. And I'll submit, here's the answer. Any CEO can figure this out easily. They'd sit down and do the math and say, well, we've got to get our production up. So people aren't going to show up till 8:00, that's all right. When they get here at 8:00 we're going to let them know that we're going to cut their coffee break in the morning by 5\1/2\ minutes. We're going to cut their coffee break in the afternoon by 5\1/2\ minutes. That adds up to 11 minutes out of the 8-hour day; 11 minutes out of an 8-hour day is 2.2 percent of the overall day.

And so the illegal work force in America, if you look at the United States as one huge macrocompany, and if that work force just stopped producing for that day, you would be losing 2.2 percent of that day's production. If we did all of our work in this country in an 8-hour day instead of a 24-hour day, that's 11 minutes out of 8 hours. And if it's a 24-hour day, you've got about a little over 3 minutes out of each shift is all that it amounts to.

I can't be convinced, Mr. Speaker, that this economy would come to a screeching halt if that happened to gradually drift away from us because the administration began gradually enforcing the law. I can't think that it's a cataclysmic event that would be, that would come falling down on this economy. I can't think it would slow us down. I believe, Mr. Speaker that we would recover in a heartbeat from that kind of a transition.

And that's presuming, Mr. Speaker, that that 2.2 percent of the work force that's being done by illegal labor is all essential work. And if we look across at some of that work, some people are taking care of lawns. Some garden. Some are cleaning the houses. There's work out there that we could find a way to recover from. Like somebody said to me, oh you want to enforce a law, but who is going to flip your steak? Who's going to cut your grass? Well, Mr. Speaker, I cut my own grass, and I flip most of my own steaks, and if I had to flip every one of my steaks to preserve the rule of law in America, I'd be very happy to do that.

That's really the essential pillar here that we're talking about with the immigration issue in the United States, and that is, what are you willing to do to preserve the most essential pillar of American exceptionalism, the rule of law? Are you willing to cut your own grass? Are you willing to flip your own steaks? Are you willing to shorten your coffee break up for a little while, by 5\1/2\ minutes, morning and afternoon, or 3 minutes a shift out of a 3-shift day if you're working 24/7? Are you willing to do those things? Would you notice the difference if you didn't? Would the nonessential work in the United States shrink if we didn't have economical illegal labor to do that work?

Mr. Speaker, if you bring me 100 people that will work for a dollar an hour, I guarantee you I can figure out a way to make a living with that. I can find a way to put them to work where they're going to return four, five or six or seven or $8 an hour to me. And so the cheaper labor gets, the more demand there is. And yet we have people that are considered otherwise to be wise, economic gurus who seem to, well, I will say just flat advocate that we should set the immigration flow into the United States, legalize all of those who would want to come here, legalize every willing traveler, Mr. Speaker, as long as there's a demand for their labor.

And I will submit that the more labor there is, the lower the price will be. The lower the price there is, the more demand there will be. Labor, Mr. Speaker, is a commodity like any other commodity in that the value of it is determined by supply and demand in the marketplace. Labor is a commodity. Corn, beans, gold, oats, crude oil, you name it, Mr. Speaker, you name it, they're all commodities. And the value of those commodities are determined by supply and demand in the marketplace. Corn's up, beans are up. Can't get the cotton out of the field, I heard in the previous Special Order. It's not worth bringing it out I guess if the price is that low, according to Mr. Spratt. But the value of labor will be determined by the supply and demand, what the market will bear.

And so if we flood this economy with low-skilled labor, as we have, we will see unemployment rates in the lower-skilled ranks, the lower- skilled jobs go up, as we have. Unemployment rates of over 10 percent in some of the lowest-skilled jobs. Those rates go up. And that shouldn't be a surprise to any of us.

But it might be a surprise to some of the elitists who have a different view of this country than I have. I grew up in Middle America, small town and rural America, a place where we understand the value of hard work, a place where our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors, if they were here in this country long enough, goes back always to drive a stake out in the ground and homestead the land and make your living out of that and start your business and grow your community and your family and your churches and work with your neighborhoods and make this place a better place than it was when you came, and earn that with the sweat of your brow, and work hard, but work smart and build for the future generations.

That's the roots that I represent from the middle part of America. We respect hard work. We respect honesty. We respect integrity. We respect the values of faith and family. And yet we are sons and daughters of immigrants. And, in fact, I remember walking into a community building in one of the small towns that I represent, and this is a very German community. There were about 400 to 450 people in there for a benefit auction for a friend of mine. And I began to ask the question, how many people in here grew up in a German-speaking home or else their parents did? It was almost everyone in that building, and yet they fly the flag, they are some of the most self-sacrificing patriots this country has produced. They understand these American values and they understand the rule of law. They came here legally. They have great pride that they have adapted themselves to the American society and culture and prospered and handed to their children and their grandchildren the things they dreamed for their children and grandchildren, but in a society that was not just intact with the rule of law with respect for the rule of law, but one that was actually strengthened by their adherence and respect for the rules and for the law.

And here we are, in my opinion, the central pillar of American exceptionalism is the rule of law. If we don't respect the laws of this country, then what foundation have we?

And I will always make the argument that our rights come from God, and that they're passed through the hands and the minds of our Founding Fathers

who, I believe, were guided, they were guided by God to put down for us the parameters of this free Nation to be a guiding light for the freedom for the world. And who are we to trail in the dust the golden hopes of men if we aren't willing to defend this rule of law, this rule of law that preserves our property rights, our freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, all of the freedom from double jeopardy and the list of all of those rights that were in the Bill of Rights. Who are we to trail that all in the dust because what, because we have an emotion that overcomes our intellect, because we've severed ourselves from the thing that we've inherited from the Greeks, the age of reason.

We've lost our reason and lost our way if we believe that a good name for a bad bill supersedes the rule of law. The DREAM Act is a good name. I wish I'd thought of that. I'd have stuck it on something too, only it would have been a good bill underneath the title. This is not a good bill under the DREAM Act. This is a bill that directly undermines the rule of law. It rewards law breakers, Mr. Speaker, and when we do that, we can't hope to sustain the rule of law in America any longer. If we have 12 million, 20 million people who are granted amnesty, maybe under the DREAM Act it's only a million for starters. That will grow, and the chain migration will grow from that, and your one million could conceivably and I don't think literally it could happen but it could conceivably go out to more than 200 million.

That's how the stats map it out. And we know that's pretty unlikely that it would go that far. But if it's one million people going to 2 million or 3 million under the DREAM Act and we grant amnesty there, and then we have the AgJOBS component of this that grants amnesty to people who are here illegally, working illegally for about 1.5 million for starters, and then, we work with this myopic idea that if there's a demand, that must indicate how many we need, even though the more cheap labor you have, the more demand there will be for more cheap and cheaper labor. And it makes a simple economic equation. The unions used to understand this, Mr. Speaker. They used to understand that they wanted a tight labor supply. And so I'll go back to that.

But the DREAM Act is a bad bill that grants amnesty for a million or more people that would do the chain migration for their families, attract more, and more would be signed up.

By the way, there is no cap on this. There is no deadline. The way this bill is written, applications for in-State tuition discounts, special super citizenship rights for illegal aliens goes on and on. It never ends. It isn't that just the people that are here right now today, but it's the people that would forever apply. So the number clearly is over a million. And 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, we know how these things go. It always gets out of hand. It's 1\1/2\ million under AgJOBS, those who have been working illegally in our fields. But that 1\1/2\ million is for starters and it goes on and on. And when we get to the full amnesty package that the Senate three times has voted down now and now wants to give us the components of their amnesty plan, their comprehensive amnesty bill, one bitter pill at a time, things that have bad bills with good names, slip them to us one at a time, put them in a package into the Senate and send them over there in a must- pass bill. Plan that strategy, and as this amnesty number grows from a million under the DREAM Act, 1\1/2\ million under the AgJOBS piece to the next component and the next component and the next component of amnesty, and we end up granting, as the Senate advocated, a comprehensive amnesty plan to not 6.9 million or 12 million, but everyone who is here illegally right now. That number some say is 12 million. I think it is more than 20 million. We grant amnesty to them, and they will do as those recipients of the 1986 amnesty bill did. They will be the strongest advocates for another amnesty plan.

And if you will notice, no one here in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, and no one over across the Rotunda to the United States Senate has said, well, this comprehensive amnesty plan is an amnesty to end all amnesties. They haven't said that. First, they are still in denial about it being amnesty, and yet not one of them will define amnesty unless they have found a way to define it around where their bill is exempted, but it isn't an objective definition. They won't stand up and tell you to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crimes. But those 12 or 20 million would be advocating the same way that the 1 million who were to be the recipients of the amnesty to end all amnesties in 1986 that turned out to be more like 3 million who were the recipients of the 1986 amnesty. They were advocates of more amnesty. They say, well, that's been good for me and it's been good for my family, so we need more of that. And all of them who advocate for more amnesty are undermining the rule of law.

And they are a smaller number by comparison. It started out by being 1 million. It turned out to be 3 million or more. The 2 million difference was mostly fraud, counterfeit documents, people that came in here and took advantage of the sympathetic nature of the American people. And so with 3 million advocates for amnesty, 2 million of them beneficiaries of fraud, and 1 million were actually the target of the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan at least had enough integrity to declare it to be the amnesty bill to end all amnesties, they have been advocates for more amnesty.

Imagine what 20 million beneficiaries of an amnesty would be. A mass lobbying group for family reunification, chain migration. Bring in your unlimited number of family members directly in here under that path and then have them all. Not just those who received amnesty but those who were beneficiaries of the chain migration from those who received amnesty. They turn into the tens of millions and perhaps more, maybe more than 100 million and on up who have little respect for the rule of law, who have been rewarded for breaking the law, who have now come to believe that if a law is inconvenient and enough other people don't respect and honor that law, eventually Congress will capitulate and change the law to accommodate your behavior.

That is no kind of a Nation to have; not when you have a Nation like this Nation, the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. We are beneficiaries of the sacrifice and the vision of our Founding Fathers, and we are charged with defending those values and handing this country over to the next generation in better condition than when we found it. Not worse. Not digressing into anarchy where the law is disrespected and where it has no value and no teeth. Not turning us into a class envy society. Not turning us into a society where we are pitted against each other, a society of victimology. Not that. Not a society where we point our finger at people and call them names rather than make an empirical argument. We need to be rational human beings. We're the beneficiaries of the Age of Reason in Greece where they actually built a culture around the idea that they could think rationally and connect their thoughts in a rational fashion and defend the conclusions that they had drawn by the sequence of the deductive reasoning that got them there. That is a foundation for our science, the theorem, the hypotheses, a number of other approaches to Western thought that was founded in the Greek society 2 and 3,000 years ago that found its way across through Europe and had a pretty good stay in France during the Age of Enlightenment. And as the Western civilization, the core of it, the dynamic moving force rolled out from France in the Age of Enlightenment over into the United States and arrived here at a time when we had a continent that was just begging to be settled, full of natural resources, and a free enterprise economy with property rights and low and sometimes no taxation and low and often no regulation, and we had a people that set about the manifest destiny to settle this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean and did so in record time, in an historical blink of an eye. We were able to do many of those things because we had also learned the talents and the skills and had built within our culture that ability to deductively reason.

And today we have people who emote, people who feel. We have college professors who teach their students never say anything except ``I feel'' or you can say ``I believe,'' but if you say ``I think this,'' your thoughts can be challenged, but your feelings cannot. So I feel, and then someone will tell you I feel we should pass the DREAM Act. I feel we should pass AgJOBS because I feel for the beneficiaries of this program. And, by the way, I feel that we need more cheap labor in this country, and I feel that food would be more expensive, and I feel that there is work Americans won't do, and I feel we ought to bring people in here or those who came here in here and legalize them because they will do the work that Americans won't do. So in the end, even though there isn't any data out here that supports my irrational feelings, I just feel this, and therefore you ought to follow my feelings.

How can a Nation, Mr. Speaker, how can a Nation meet the challenges of this global, modern 21st Century if we are going to be guided by these feelings that trump rational thought and empirical data?

I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that one of the foundations, one of the pillars of American exceptionalism, the central pillar is the rule of law, but one of the pillars is this culture, this unique American culture was the recipient of the work of the Age of Reason from the Greeks and a recipient of the enlightenment from Western Europe and primarily from France that came here at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution with all the natural resources. And we grew this Nation, yes, on a Christian-Judeo foundation, a work ethic, called a Protestant work ethic until they found out that Catholics did pretty well with that work ethic too. We understand some of the things that made this a great Nation. But letting our feelings rule our thoughts is not one of those pillars of American exceptionalism. That is an example of American intellectual weakness, that we can't confront these issues with our minds, with our reason, with our data, because with that data we can see where this can take us.

The DREAM Act, the act that grants in-State tuition discount to people who are eligible for deportation. Now, I just cannot rationally get to a conclusion that that is the best way that we can spend taxpayers' money or send a message to the broader society. I believe we need to adhere to the rule of law. I believe we need to stand on the rule of law, and we need to enforce the rule of law. And it needs to be respected by the States, the States like California and Kansas and about eight others who have decided to defy the Federal law and grant in-State tuition discounts to illegals within their State institutions but charge out-of-State tuition premiums to the residents of other States who might want to go to UC Berkeley or the University of Kansas or a number of other schools within those two States and eight other States that are defying Federal law. And we are still taking this through the courts. And the DREAM Act, Mr. Speaker, invalidates all lawsuits that have been brought forward to enforce the Federal law which establishes the requirement that these States grant the same tuition discount to residents of other States that they might to illegal aliens in the desks in their own schools in their own States.

AgJOBS, another amnesty plan. AgJOBS says if you worked in this country and worked in agriculture, worked for the preponderance of, and that is my word, not the bill's word, 5 years, we are going to grant you provisional legal status here in the United States. Legal status under the DREAM Act, legal status under the AgJOBS act. You add them up, and by their numbers, that's 2\1/2\ million who get amnesty. They won't call it amnesty, obviously, Mr. Speaker. But we know those numbers would be significantly larger.

And then when one grants the special status, the special conditional legal residence in the United States to these people, what's the argument to deny it to anyone else? What's the argument to deny a reward of the objective of their crimes to all who have broken immigration laws except perhaps those who are convicted felons and those who have conducted themselves in otherwise abhorrent fashion?

This is irrational, Mr. Speaker. The American people often don't understand what this legislation is. That's why there is such a concerted effort to strategize on how we name a bill here in this Congress, how this bill is named, because that is all that people hear is the name of the bill. They don't get to read it. Most Members don't read the legislation that comes through this place. But the public doesn't read the bill, and if they did, they don't really have the opportunity to examine the components of it. So to critique the legislation, they have to rely on somebody else. So the practice is give it a nice sounding name, and then when I do my press conferences and talk to the press, they will ask me, Here's a list of one, two, three, four, five really nice sounding pieces of legislation. You voted against all five of them, Mr. King. Why did you do that? And my answer is it is a nice sounding title, but it is a horrible bill. And you will see that happen often, especially since the gavels have changed hands in here in the 110th Congress, Mr. Speaker.

So I reiterate to you and to the people that are overhearing this conversation that we must draw the line. We need to pick up the phones and call the United States Senate again. We need to shut down their telephones in the switchboards in the United States Senate and tell them we don't want a DREAM Act. We need that killed in the United States Senate. We need to cease this amnesty. We need to preserve the central pillar of American exceptionalism, the rule of law.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 43 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, October 24, 2007, at 10 a.m.

I thank the ranking member for yielding to me and appreciate the privilege to address this issue again here on the House floor.

I think we miss the point sometimes on what this is about. This isn't about sometimes the nuances of all of this. This is about where we take this Nation, and I'm seeing this debate in Iowa and across this country.

And what this is about, SCHIP stands for Socialized, Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents. That's what happens, and it is illegals that are being funded by this because all they have to do is write down a Social Security number.

The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has given us a number, $6.5 billion in additional costs that flow over to people that are not citizens because we've lowered the standards. Whatever gets said, that's the language that's in there, and the cost is there, $6.5 billion.

So this is SCHIP, Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents. This is the cornerstone of socialized medicine. It's put in place. That's what this debate is about: make people dependent so they don't have individual responsibility and you can have more people dependent upon your votes on the floor of this Congress and less vitality in America.

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

There have been a number of times that I have come down here to convey a message to you and the American people. And after having listened to the gentleman from Florida and his 30-Something colleagues, my material has just gotten so massive, I'm not sure I can rebut all that in the time that I have, let alone convey the message that I came here to convey, Mr. Speaker.

First of all, there seems to be great confusion on the Democrat side of the aisle about the difference between health insurance and health care. They seem to believe, or at least would like to have the American people believe, that kids in America are being denied health care.

This debate about SCHIP has never been about health care. I would draw this comparison: You will hear often in the debates in this country about people are pro-immigrant or anti-immigrant. And when I say that, Mr. Speaker, people draw up an image about being pro- immigrant and anti-immigrant. Some people think illegal immigrants; some people think, appropriately, legal immigrants. When we say ``immigrant,'' we should imply legal immigrant, and when we talk about illegal immigrants, we should say so.

The same goes with health care and health insurance. To interchange the terms and, I think, willfully inform the

American people that this debate is about health care and to stand on the floor of the United States Congress and convey a message, Mr. Speaker, to the American people that there are kids in America that are not getting health care is not an accurate statement. And the gentleman from Florida, if he would examine his words and the meanings of the language, would know it's not an accurate statement.

This is a debate about how many Federal dollars we are going to extract from hardworking Americans to put into federally subsidized health insurance, hopefully for kids. That's what SCHIP is about. But it is not even about all kids, because today, under the current program, the program that was drafted up in 1997 and became law in 1998, was created by a Republican Congress, and it was created in the immediate aftermath of welfare reform.

Remember welfare-to-work? We had generations of people that had become so dependent on welfare that they forgot about working. We needed to move them off of welfare, and we called it ``workfare'' part of the time.

We also recognized that people that were low income, the working poor, when you would take them off of welfare, they didn't have enough funds to fund the health insurance for their children, so we created the State Children's Health Insurance Program. That's SCHIP. It's 10 years old now today and we are talking about reauthorizing it. That is federally funded health insurance premiums for kids.

But this program, even under the current law, has morphed into a program that if you go up to Minnesota and take a look, 87 percent of the recipients of SCHIP are adults. And most of those adults are not parents; they are single adults. And if you go to Wisconsin, 66 percent of those who are on SCHIP are adults. They have changed this program and they have morphed it away from being a program that was about health insurance premium subsidy for kids. That's a discussion they can't name.

And I challenge anyone over here, stand up now, I will yield to you. Name one kid in America that doesn't have access to health care, one health care provider that slammed their door in the face of a kid in America or anyone in America because they didn't have health insurance.

No. We take care of everyone's health care needs in America. That is not the crisis. If it was, you can bet the Pelosi side of the aisle would have marched them down here and maybe brought them up into the well for a photo op. But that population of this country doesn't exist. Everyone in America has access to health care, legal or illegal, for that matter.

And every child especially has access to health care.

Now, we would prefer that they all have health insurance because we believe that those who have health insurance do a better job of going for their regular check-ups, and the medical providers will track their cases and be able to monitor them and be able to get early warning signs of chronic diseases or illnesses, and be able to maintain their health in a far more effective fashion for two reasons.

One is it improves the quality of life for the children in this country, and the other is it saves money. That's why we established the SCHIP program in the first place. But it wasn't designed to take hard- earned taxpayer dollars and put them into the pockets of people who could afford health insurance for their own children; and especially it wasn't designed to be able to put the Federal incentive in place to push kids off, to talk kids off, to put an incentive so that their parents made a decision or their employer made a decision not to insure them when they were already insuring them.

And yet if you look at the numbers, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that the gentleman from Florida would have to acknowledge gives us the most objective number we have, says that under this proposal that the President appropriately vetoed and that this Congress refused to override would take 2 million kids today that are funded with private health insurance and push them off of that onto the government roll.

Now, why would we want to do that? What would be our incentive? If nobody's going without health care, if we have kids that don't have health insurance that are getting health care, why would we create a program or why would we grow a program that's going to take 2 million kids off of the private rolls and put them on the government? You have to be somebody that believes in socialized medicine to advocate for such a thing.

And when Republicans bring a policy that recruits more of the uninsured to go on the rolls at 200 percent of poverty and below, where I have voted and consistently supported this program and voted to appropriate funds to this program, both as a State senator and as a Member of Congress, 200 percent of poverty, I can take you to where it is in my State today, that's an example I know to be fact, we can always discuss what's fact and what isn't, but in my State today a family of four, that's mom and dad and two kids, qualifies for SCHIP, that in Iowa we call it Hawk-I, premium subsidy if they're making less than $51,625 a year, Mr. Speaker. Now, that's probably a little above what's middle income for a family of four in the State of Iowa.

And so if we've already gone above the line of where the median is, this Pelosi Congress passed this SCHIP legislation, not over here at 300 percent of poverty, passed it over here at 400 percent of poverty, Mr. Speaker. That was the vision of the San Francisco values that have been brought here to the gavel in the chair where you're seated right now, 400 percent of poverty. Now, was there a clamor from the public that we should take their tax dollars and subsidize health insurance premiums for already insured kids that families were making over $103,000 a year? I didn't have a single letter that said so. I got a few that said, I think we ought to have socialized medicine. I think the Canadian plan is pretty good, the British plan is pretty good. The European model is all right.

They disregard the long lines and the poor care. They disregard the fact that when you go to socialized medicine you have companies created in Canada for the purpose of facilitating access to American health care systems, companies that have sprung up because the Canadian is barred from having any special pass to go in front of the line; they all have to get to the back of the line. And so people don't always live long enough to get to their health care provider in places like Canada. That's what I want to avoid.

And the companies in Canada that are created will set up this package and it will be, well, if you need a hip replacement, here's how we will do this. We will set it up so you can go to a clinic for a check-up, and we'll fly you down to whatever city it might be, let's pick one, let's say Minneapolis, and there we will give you a hotel room, or let's go to the Mayo Clinic, that's even better, in Rochester. We'll fly you down there. Here's the package; here's your hotel room; here's what it's going to cost you to go to the clinic; here's the surgeon, here's the anesthesiologist; here's the whole package.

Now you figure out you can write the check to take the weekend tour to go down to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and get your new hip replacement and go back to Canada, because they can't get access to health care there because they have socialized medicine. That's what this debate is about, Mr. Speaker. It's about laying the cornerstone for socialized medicine in the United States of America.

Here we are in a country where every kid, every person, every adult, legal or illegal, has access to health care, and we would like to increase the numbers of insured. But a Nation that has the highest quality health care in the world, one who is the most innovative of all nations in the world, the ones that has produced more new pharmaceuticals, more new surgical techniques, more new medical technology than any other nation, however you want to measure it, as a percentage of our GDP, as a percent of our population, measure it just as the sum total of the contribution to health care in the world, this country's medical practitioners and providers are the ones that have done that.

And this cornerstone to socialized medicine that is attempted to be laid here by this Pelosi Congress undermines that innovativeness, that service, that quality that we have. And

that's why 150-some of us voted ``no'' on overriding the President's veto. That's why the President vetoed it, because your health care, Americans, is more important than the political demagoguery that's going on here on the floor of the United States Congress.

The confusion between health care and health insurance, this debate is about health insurance, it's about us on the Republican side wanting to increase the percentage of covered kids under SCHIP under the 200 percent of poverty here, those that are not covered now that can be and still qualify, and us, as Republicans on this side, wanting to roll down the numbers of adults that have found their way into this system to be 87 percent of the recipients in Minnesota, 66 percent in Wisconsin, and a dozen or so other States that have crossed this line.

That's a standard that we're for, and it's something that they are opposed to. They won't speak up to the real issue that's here, Mr. Speaker, but this isn't about health care. It's about Federal subsidy of health insurance; it's about taking dollars out of people's pockets.

And so at this level over here, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that it works this way: we have this thing called the alternative minimum tax, which was created to tax the wealthy. They weren't paying enough tax, so Congress created a new tax, the alternative minimum tax. And under this SCHIP proposal there will be, the one that passed Congress the first time, that's over here, 70,000 families in America would qualify for SCHIP subsidy, Federal taxpayer funding, and still have to pay the alternative minimum tax, the tax on the wealthy, at the same time they're being subsidized and they can't afford the health insurance for their kids.

Now, figure that out. Think about how the circle has crossed. One circle over here is those that are so poor they need help, and the other circle over here is those that are making so much money we've got to give them an extra tax. But when you cross those two circles together, Mr. Speaker, and where they cross, that crescent in the middle, is 70,000 families, 70,000 families paying the alternative minimum tax and qualifying for Federal benefits for health insurance. I think that tells you that the loop for socialized medicine would be closed with this, and that's another reason the President vetoed it.

Another subject matter that was brought up by the gentleman from Florida is this subject of the billions of dollars that are spent on the global war on terror, and of course he would focus it on Iraq, which is a battle ground in the global war on terror, billions of dollars. And the argument is we can spend billions of dollars on the war, but we can't spend $35 billion subsidizing health insurance for middle-income and upper-income children of those parents that are middle- and upper-income.

Now, think about this: How cynical would you have to be to draw a diabolical argument that here we spend money over here on the war, if we've got enough money for the war, we surely have enough money for health insurance for these kids? I mean, if that's the case, if the gentleman from Florida is drawing a legitimate comparison, then you have to look at the resources over there for our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines and say, well, I'm sorry, we're going to have to take $35 billion out of your resources and put them over here to subsidize health insurance for these kids, these kids that are getting health care, by the way.

So how many fewer bullets, how many fewer bullet-proof vests, how many MREs, how much tank fuel or aircraft fuel, how many repair parts for a Blackhawk helicopter, how much surveillance equipment out there we would have to sacrifice to take away from those soldiers to fund this Pelosi plan for SCHIP? That's the other side of the argument.

So if they're sincere, and I have heard Member after Member, Democrat after Democrat, come to this floor and go to the media and send out press releases that we're spending money on the war, we ought to be able to spend the money on the kids, well, if this is a zero sum game, then how many bullet-proof vests do they want to take away from our soldiers? How many Humvees? How much armor protection personnel? How much training, how much communication, how much human intelligence would we be willing to take away and how much risk would we be willing to put our soldiers through so that we could justify this program?

I think when they're confronted with the reality of that argument, they would have to confess that they would never allow an amendment on the floor that would cause them to have to put up a vote and go on record to make that decision. But they will ask you to believe that somehow, that because we spend money on war, that gives justification to create a socialized medicine program here. We know what the agenda is: it is socialized medicine.

And then I would argue, also, that to lay this thing out clearly, I'm going to go down through these, if I can, Mr. Speaker. This is a bit of a surprise package, I'm not sure what's underneath here, but we'll go with what we have, and that is, how do we fund this SCHIP according to the Pelosi plan?

Well, we're doing it with an increase on tax on cigarettes. Right now, the Federal tax is 39 cents a pack. This bill that the President vetoed, that this Congress refused to override, adds 61 cents a pack to cigarettes. So now the Federal tax will be $1 a pack. The States can do whatever they want. The idea is if you raise the price of cigarettes, people will smoke less. Well, that's kind of a good thing, I would think, Mr. Speaker.

But if we're going to fund this SCHIP program, these $35 billion worth of increases, then over this period of time, as we see here in this chart that is laid out, it takes it out to 22.4 million new smokers have to be recruited in order to fund this expansion of this socialized medicine program of laying the cornerstone by SCHIP; 22.4 million new smokers. Now, that runs directly against the belief, and probably to some degree of fact, that the more it costs, the less people will smoke. So we add $1 a pack, and now we have to still raise, and even though the price goes up by a 156 percent increase, we still have to recruit 22.4 million new smokers. Now, I don't want to be involved in that, Mr. Speaker. I don't want that on my conscience. I don't want to have to bring Joe Camel back and run him through the schools so we can get new smokers to fund insurance for these kids.

And another thing I would add is that, if this is about the kids, every dollar that is added to this program is added to the national debt. Now, who is going to pay that national debt? Somebody that's 58 years old or somebody that's maybe 8 years old? And I'm going to say that the ruse that this is about the kids, while at the same time pushing that $35 billion into the national debt and asking those same kids that you say you're trying to help to pay the debt they incurred, I think is where the real hypocrisy lands, Mr. Speaker. 22.4 million new smokers? Not a very sound plan.

This chart tells you what happens when you start raising the premium subsidy up for health insurance. When you get up here to this level and you get to 400 percent of poverty, which this Congress passed, then 95 percent of the kids that are on private health insurance will drop off of that private health insurance and they'll go on government. So even if they're making $1 million a year, 95 percent of those kids go to the government premium side.

If you take it on down to 400 percent of poverty and below, it's 89 percent. And as we go down lower to where we are now, it's 50 percent. I contend that, if the parents have a job and the health insurance is with the job and the employer has put a health care package out, their health insurance package out there that includes the family, and most do, why would you put a program in place that's going to cause the employer to do this calculus: I don't know why I'm paying for that if the government will pay for that. I'm going to offer a proposal here that's going to save me money. I can take that and put it in my bottom line as an employer and call it profit and tell my employees, we're going to sign you up for SCHIP.

I had a conversation with my son and daughter-in-law a couple of weeks ago. They blessed us with two little beautiful granddaughters, so they're a perfect model family of four. And I said here in Iowa, where this number right here, Mr. Speaker, if this bill had been overridden today that the President vetoed, in Iowa, a family of four would qualify for SCHIP funding at $77,437.50,

to be precise. Now, that's that family of four, that's my son and granddaughters and daughter-in-law. The calculus is pretty easy for them. They just say, well, we're self-employed, I guess we could do this. We could set our wages up to make sure that we don't break the cap on SCHIP and the kids would be funded then by the government, wouldn't they? And I said, I don't want to hear about that.

It was a bit of a levity kind of a conversation because they are going to take care of their responsibility and they have and they will continue to do that. But if that can be figured out in 5 seconds in the kitchen of my family, think how it can be figured out in every boardroom across America that will see an advantage here to push the kids, the children of their employees, off of their own privately funded health insurance, put them on the government-funded one, and put the profit, the savings, in their bottom line. You know that is going to happen. The people that will be the most believers of that have to be those on the other side of the line that don't believe in much for ethics and the free enterprise system that we have.

That is how that is going to work. You push people off health care and so you get to this, Mr. Speaker, and this is what this is really about, SCHIP. Some might think that is for the State Children's Health Insurance Program. But I will submit that the real motive behind this, we have Presidential debates going on and candidates all over this country concentrated in my State, New Hampshire, and others, and you can feel and sense they have been pushing health care 6, 7, 8 months to bring this debate to a head, and a delay in this Congress in coming to the negotiating table so we can actually extend this program in a responsible fashion is partly rooted in the Presidential politics and in the partisan politics in this Congress. I think the majority of it is rooted in that. So I will submit SCHIP really stands for Socialized Clinton Style Hillary Care for Illegals and Their Parents. And I hope the camera is on this so it doesn't get missed. SCHIP, Socialized Clinton Style Hillary Care for Illegals and Parents.

By the way, I did not get to that illegal component that was laid out by the gentleman from Florida. Well, one can point to language in the bill that says ``you don't get to send any of this money to people who are otherwise deportable.'' That language is in the bill. But, Mr. Speaker, I will inform you, this body, the people in this country, that there is additional language in the bill that weakens the citizenship standards that exist today, not just for SCHIP, but for Medicaid as well. We have citizenship requirements for Medicaid that you have to demonstrate, you have to prove your citizenship. And of those conditions that will be producing a birth certificate and another document, a photo ID perhaps or a passport or a list of other documents that demonstrate your lawful presence in the United States and your eligibility for SCHIP and for Medicaid; those are current law requirements. This bill that says in one paragraph ``this money can't go to illegals'' says in another paragraph ``but if you know how to write down a Social Security number, that will be all that is required.''

The Social Security Administration has put out information that says you cannot verify citizenship by a Social Security number. There are millions of Social Security numbers that are not numbers for citizens. There are millions out there that are nonwork Social Security numbers, and there are millions out there that have been given to people that are here on work visas, student visas, visitors, you name it, for one reason or another, so they can get a driver's license or buy insurance, or maybe qualify for a benefit, millions of Social Security numbers that do not connote citizenship. And the only standard that is left, that is required in this current bill is you have to submit a Social Security number. And it is implied, it might even be specific, that it be a valid one. But we know how well that works when we have 20 million illegals in America and we have somewhere between 7 and 12 million working illegals in America, many, in fact most of them, using phony Social Security numbers. So if they can get a job and that number can report their wages every week and we can't figure out where they are, how in the world can anyone over hear say, ``well, none of this money is going to go to illegals'' when the Congressional Budget Office has made it clear and issued their report that the net cost to taxpayers because of the opening up of the citizenship standard is 6.5 billion, that is with a B, $6.5 billion, Mr. Speaker.

There isn't an argument on this that is seriously grounded in the facts. We take our facts from the Congressional Budget Office.

So I will roll this together. In my State, currently a family of four qualifies for hawk-i, SCHIP funding, for their health insurance. This isn't health care, remember; it is health insurance, at $51,625 a year. A family of four. That is off the Web page of Governor Culver, by the way. And if this bill had passed, it would have qualified that same family of four at $77,437 a year. But this Congress first passed 400 percent of poverty, which would have qualified that same family of four at 103,250 or so dollars in that legislation, over $100,000, and not a fiscally responsible peep out of the Speaker, out of the Democrat side of the aisle that I heard, out of my Governor. No one stood up for the taxpayer on that side of the aisle. That is because they are actively engaged in laying the cornerstone for socialized medicine.

I will continue, 2.0 million children, taken off of their own private insurance, nudged off, because the government will pay for it, why would you pay for it? If it is free or you have to write a check, which line are you going to get into? There will still be a lot of patriotic Americans who will get into the ``I will pay for my own line.'' God bless you for that. That is, by the way, 2.0 million children. That is a Congressional Budget Office number, the highest standard we have here; $6.5 billion for illegals to go on Medicaid and SCHIP? That is a Congressional Budget Office number.

You can't convince me that this isn't going to legalize access to health care services for illegals who, if we had the voucher delivered by ICE, the Immigration Custom Enforcement, would be compelled to pick them up and send them back to their own country. Think about that. If we made the couriers for vouchers for SCHIP to be ICE, they would have to come along and say, ``Well, okay, here's your voucher, but you're not going to be able to cash it in because I am sending you back home again because that is the law.''

How bizarre is it to hear the rhetoric coming out of that side of the aisle? These are the facts, Mr. Speaker. It weakens the citizenship requirement. It is a net loss to my State of $226 million, more tobacco tax paid sent to Washington, we get $226 million less. Bad deal, Governor Culver. You ought to understand that. That is also a number that is put out by a government office, and that is the Centers for Disease Control produced a number of a minus $226 million just for Iowa. Other States did worse. Other States were net gainers. The tobacco tax, 156 percent increase, and then, Mr. Speaker, not forgetting about the 22.4 million new smokers that we will need to get this program funded.

So, all in all, Republicans have taken care of this. We created this program. State Children's Health Insurance Program is about providing help in health insurance premiums for the children in lower income families that don't qualify for Medicaid. It is about the transition off of Medicaid on to private, on to self-reliance, on to all the dignity that comes with carrying your own load, helping transition gradually and easily off on to that. It is about that.

It is about protecting and preserving our private health care system that is the best in the world. That is where we are on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. That is where the President is on this. The other side of the aisle is about laying the cornerstone for socialized medicine, because once you get 95 percent of the people dependent on a program, they consider it an entitlement. Democrats know that. The Democrat leadership knows that at least. And that, I believe, Mr. Speaker, is the strategy.

I don't know how, when they come back with the next argument that was laid out by here by Bill Clinton that they wanted to lower Medicare eligibility to 55 years old, then you look at

this universe of people, people collecting SCHIP today at age 25, remember all those adults in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, up to age 25, and if we lower Medicare eligibility to 55, now who is paying the bill for all the health insurance and health care in America? Well, it would be those folks between the ages of 25 and 55, Mr. Speaker. And don't you think that side of the aisle knows the resentment that will build when someone writes their own check for their health insurance premium and their check for the alternative minimum tax and their check for their income tax and they realize that they are paying for theirs and everybody else's. If they can't say no to this, then they are going to come back to us and say, ``Give us the Canadian plan. I give up. I capitulate. Because I just can't fund it both ways. You have made it too easy for too many people. Now it is too hard for me.''

That will be the calculus among the American people. That will be what ultimately closes this and builds this socialized medicine that they are trying so desperately to build. And by the way, there is no provision to fund this thing past these years that I have shown here, Mr. Speaker. That cliff in the funding drops off. It drops down to a very small percentage of the overall revenue stream. The reason is they believe that they will have a President and a majority in the House and in the Senate that will have given us the full-ride socialized medicine. So they don't have to worry about funding this through this program. Watch as this unfolds. Bill Clinton stood back in this well September 22, 1993, and he gave about an hour speech, 12 pages long, that lays out the game plan. Now his wife is poised to carry out the balance of it.

I stand here in resistance to socialized medicine or laying the cornerstone for it, but I stand with my colleagues in protecting the kids in America, protecting their freedom, protecting an investment in them. I refuse, I refuse to put this burden as a national debt upon those same kids and ask them to pay it when they get to be the age of adults.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 25 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, October 22, 2007, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

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

And as I have listened to some of the dialogue that has been rolled out here before me, I think it's imperative that someone come to the floor to bring another voice and another opinion and another viewpoint to this subject matter, particularly of SCHIP.

The first point that I would make, Mr. Speaker, is that the SCHIP issue that has been kicked around this Congress now into its third week that perhaps comes before the floor tomorrow in an effort to override the President's very prudent and well-reasoned veto has been turned into a political issue rather than a policy issue.

SCHIP, State Children's Health Insurance Program, now, one could read that acronym and perhaps get a little better idea of what it stands for by reading the poster, Mr. Speaker. And I have heard presenter after presenter here this evening over on the other side of the aisle address this issue as children's health care and the allegation that the people that are guarding the taxpayers' dollars and seeking to get the resources that are here for the SCHIP program into the benefit of children, those who want a responsible program, those that don't want to chase people off of their own private health insurance but those that want to encourage parents, responsible parents, those who can afford it, to provide the health insurance for their children, those who want to encourage employers to provide health insurance as part of the employment package and keep in that package the insurance of the children, those of us who don't want to grow government, that want more personal responsibility, those of us who respect and appreciate the best health care system in the world, those of us who recognize that if there is a private sector investment, if people are responsible for their own health care, if parents take responsibility for their children's health insurance that this invisible hand that Adam Smith wrote about, this consumer's guide to how the health care in America will be developed, how it will evolve, how the research will be done, how the development will be done, how we will be marketing health insurance and how we will be providing services, this best system we have in the world is something we want to preserve.

And I can't think of a single thing we could do to destroy the best health care system in the world rather than to institutionalize it and federalize it and make it a socialized medicine program. Now, how do you do that?

Well, here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, of the United States Congress, September 22, 1993, President Clinton asked for a joint session of Congress. It's unusual for a President to ask to come speak to the House and the Senate in a joint session aside from the State of the Union address, but he did that on September 22, 1993, I think because Hillary actually advised him to, myself. And I have read the speech, and it is about a dozen pages long. And in that speech is component after component of a nationalized, socialized medicine program that was rolled out by the new Clinton administration in the fall of 1993.

And America looked at that. And, Mr. Speaker, I still have that poster, and I have it in the collection of my archives that shows ``Hillary Care.'' It shows a laminated poster about that wide and about that high, and if you look at it in its fine print, it's the flow chart for all the government agencies and all of the price limiting and price control and all the eventual, one can only conclude, health care rationing as well.

That whole flow chart is there on that laminated chart. That laminated chart is something that was put up before Americans in magazine after magazine, newspaper after newspaper, and published by good organizations so we could understand what it was that the Clinton administration wanted to impose upon Americans in September of 1993.

And as he laid out this case here from just in front of where you are, Mr. Speaker, he began to make a compelling case because he's a good salesman. But the American people sat and watched their television, and they reached down and pinched themselves: Do I really believe what I hear? What is coming out of the mouth of this President that sounds so good? Well, on that night the American people thought it sounded all right. They heard the message that you don't have to be responsible for the bills and you don't have to make any more health care decisions. The government will do that for you. The government will take the money out of the pockets of the people that are more wealthy than you are and put it into the pockets of the people that are of your income and less and take over some of that responsibility that you have, and somehow the world will be a better place.

Well, that was the marketing technique of that dozen-page speech September 22, 1993, Mr. Speaker. But when the sun came up on the morning of September 23, 1993, the Americans that had pinched themselves when they listened to the speech had slept upon the policy, and they began to take it apart piece by piece, one component of the flow chart, another component of the flow chart; and we ended up with an educated American populace that, after having listened to some people like ``Harry and Louise,'' after having listened to Senator Phil Gramm over in the Senate say ``We are going to have national health care in America over my cold, dead political body,'' which was a statement that Phil Gramm of Texas made on the floor of the United States Senate back during those years more than a decade ago, Mr. Speaker, the American people one at a time, sometimes by the dozens, sometimes by the hundreds, and, in fact, by the thousands rose up and said, no, we don't want national health care. We don't want that.

But a component that we did support, a component that was brought forth from this Congress in about 1997, by my recollection, and I could be off a year or so, Mr. Speaker, so I qualify that, was this component that we call SCHIP, State Children's Health Insurance Program. SCHIP was something that came out of this Republican Congress that was designed to subsidize

health insurance premiums for the children in families that were low income but not low enough income to qualify for Medicaid. That's the policy that was put in place in the mid-1990s, Mr. Speaker, and that is the policy that in 1998 went into law, as ratified in the Iowa legislature as I was a State senator there. We called it ``Hawk-I.'' We did that to give it a State moniker. And the policy that was put in place in Iowa and across this country at the time was 200 percent of the poverty level.

If you are a family of four, let's say Mom, Pa, and a couple of kids, and you are making something less than 200 percent of the poverty level, then you would qualify for a Federal subsidy for the health insurance program. And there were matching funds there. So it was a pretty good deal for the State to draw down Federal dollars to set up the SCHIP program, and every other State that I know of and the Hawk-I program in Iowa, as we called it, SCHIP, 200 percent of poverty.

Well, some might look at the charts today and dial it up on their Web page, and I think I have one here from Iowa. But the number it has, it shows about $41,000 for a family of four. And that family of four, though, has an exemption, and the exemption is 20 percent. So as I look at the number, Mr. Speaker, it comes together like this:

If you are a family of four, an income limit at 200 percent of poverty in the State of Iowa, $41,300, but you get a 20 percent discount. And 20 percent of your income is not included because, presumably, that's some of the waivers that have been granted. And 20 percent of your income is not included because you use that for living expenses. I actually think a far higher percentage of that income is used for living expenses especially in lower-income people. But 200 percent of poverty, $41,000 and change, 20 percent not included. So it really works out to be that you take the $41,000 and divide it by .8, and what qualifies in Iowa today under this SCHIP program, current law, not the one that passed the House of Representatives here that was negotiated down in the Senate, but what is current law today that I've defended, that I've supported, that I've voted for, and that Republicans have appropriated funds to for about a decade, the current law in Iowa is if you are a family of Mom, Dad, two kids, you qualify for SCHIP funding, which is Federal subsidy for your health insurance, at $51,625.

Now, the debate should be, not about the allegation that there's somebody here that hates kids. I don't know anybody that hates kids. Most of us have children. We all love our kids; we love our grandkids. To make those kinds of allegations should be beneath the dignity of the people over there on that side, or either side. We know that's false and that specious, and it's myopic to believe that. And somehow they think you, and I speak to that in general terms, Mr. Speaker, as the voters, will buy the idea of the allegations that they make.

But we set this up for low-income families. Low-income families are someplace, I think, below $51,625 for a family of four, but that's what qualifies today. This Pelosi Congress passed an SCHIP program that granted Federal subsidies for health insurance premiums at 400 percent of poverty; 400 percent.

So could we still, under the House plan, the ``Pelosi plan,'' could we ever claim that this is a program for poor kids at 400 percent of poverty? Well, what does that mean to the average American, Mr. Speaker? I don't know. But I live in Middle America, and we're pretty much an average State for income and an average State for population. And we have got a few things that are above average, I have to confess. If pressed, I can give you a long list, but 400 percent of poverty promoted and passed off this floor by the Pelosi Congress is $103,250 for a family of four. That's what this Congress was determined to put out here to the American people. That's what this Congress passed over to the Senate and said it's for the kids. It's for the poor kids. In fact, it was for the poor kids up to $103,250 in income for a family of four.

Now, this debate hasn't been about for the kids; I mean, this subject, this policy isn't about for the kids, and it isn't really any longer about the poor kids. It's about the argument that they're not saying, which is, are we going to lay the cornerstone for socialized medicine or are we not? Are we going to go along with the idea that we want to take away the incentive to be personally responsible as a family, a working family, maybe a two-income working family, maybe mom making $50,000 a year and pa making $50,000 a year and coming in there at $100,000 for a family of four and then saying, but taxpayer, let me have a little bit of money to fund the health insurance for my kids.

Even if the employer is providing that policy and it's part of the employment package, this program that was pushed by the majority in this Congress would take two million kids off of their own private health insurance that was funded by the labor of their parents, whether it's a direct check written to purchase the health insurance or whether it is the employment package that's there, two million kids off of that list and put them on the government-funded health insurance.

Now, why would anybody want to do that? Why would anybody that believed in this great gift of freedom that we have, why would anybody step in here and say, I don't want you to have that kind of personal responsibility. We don't need that kind of independence in America. We don't need that kind of character. We don't need that kind of work ethic. We want to take that away from you. We want you to be dependent upon these other taxpayers over here because somehow the nanny state can do a better job than you can do at taking care of your own kids, your own family, your own well-being. That's the psychology. And it has a certain amount of contempt for those working people that have the pride and the dignity to take care of themselves.

We, on this side, respect that labor and appreciate that. And many of us have pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, paid for the health insurance for our children, taken care of our own, and paid the taxes besides that went to the people that were truly needy, those people that were on Medicaid, those people that were lower income. And some of us came up out of low-income, and actually, there have been years when I had no income when I got done figuring out my income for a bad year for a small businessman; sometimes it's in the red.

We carried our own share of this load and paid our share of taxes and took care of our own kids, and now we come along here and say, well, you don't know how to do that. We can find a better way because somebody out there is paying some taxes, and we can take their money and we're going to stick it back in here and create a program that takes the burden off of you.

And so what are we willing to do? If we listen to the majority, if we listen to this San Francisco policy that has been coming forth here for the last 60 minutes, if we would accept the idea that, unless you're making over $103,250 a year, at least in Iowa, for a family of four, you shouldn't have to pay for your own health insurance for your kids, the government can do it. Well, that's the cornerstone of socialized medicine, Mr. Speaker. And the argument otherwise just doesn't sustain itself against the facts.

And the constant argument that comes up that this is about children's health care is another misnomer. They start out with the wrong foundation in their argument. This is not about children's health care. This is the same kind of argument of rolling together the argument of illegal immigrants and legal immigrants, packaging them all up into one and using the term ``immigration,'' and then saying that because we're opposed to illegal immigrants, we're also opposed to legal immigrants.

Well, the same argument is what they're trying to apply here. If one is opposed to providing health insurance subsidies from hardworking taxpayers to people making over $100,000 a year, they interpret that to mean that you're against health care for kids.

You know, we are still a rational society. We still have people that can deductively reason. We have people that can add up two plus two is four and be able to reason that when the allegation is made on the other side of the aisle that somehow anybody is against

health care for kids when every kid in America has access to health care, every kid in America that's in a family, I will say every legal kid in America that's in a family that meets those low guidelines for Medicaid has 100 percent of their health care taken care of.

And those between Medicare qualifications and on up to that threshold, Iowa is an example, of $51,625, those kids have their health insurance premiums subsidized by the Federal taxpayer. That's current law. This Congress wanted to take it to $103,250; and when it went over to the Senate, it got negotiated down to 300 percent of poverty. That is still, in my State, $77,437. I say that's no longer middle income.

We want to take care of those people that are having a hard time making it, but we do not want to create a dependency society, unless, of course, you come from that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, and you're politically dependent upon a dependency society. And that's what's going on. That's what this argument is about. This is about creating a dependent society that will constantly come forth and support policies that make them dependent upon those people that are currently in the majority.

And how does the vitality of this Nation succeed if we're going to continue to dial down the vitality of Americans? Don't we know the difference, couldn't we figure this out? We saw socialism come crashing down November 9, 1989, when the Wall started coming down in East Germany, in East Berlin. That should have been the definite answer on a managed economy.

But I continually hear the argument come up over and over again, people over here, they get elected to the United States Congress that don't believe in the free enterprise system, that don't believe in the incentive program, that don't understand the invisible hand, that think somehow the free market economy is built to take advantage of people that don't have as much as anybody else. They don't seem to understand that we have people that start out with nothing that get wealthy in America, and that's realizing and living the American Dream. Even though they have some of those Members in their own caucus over there who have succeeded by these free market standards, they don't believe in the free enterprise system. They believe in a managed state, they believe in a nanny state. And so they want to be a nanny to all the kids, because if they do that, then those families become dependent upon them for the largess that's dipped out of the pockets of the working people in America to the point where this policy, this SCHIP policy that passed off the floor of this House of Representatives, would have not only funded kids and families up over $103,000 a year, families of four, but 70,000 of those families that would qualify for SCHIP, 70,000 families, not 70,000 kids, but 70,000 families also would have obligated to pay for the alternative minimum tax, the tax on the rich that was created years ago.

Now, tell me how you argue that's not socialized medicine when you've got to subsidize the health care of families so they can afford to pay the alternative minimum tax. That's the strategy. If you start on one end and you start on the other, you have people that are well off, paying more and more taxes, that's called ``progressive taxes.'' Those progressive taxes go higher and higher and higher. They come in from this way. And then you subsidize over on this side and you take care of things like heat subsidy and rent subsidy and health insurance premiums and Medicaid. And you come in from this way, you fund people's families this way, and you tax the wealthy this way, and then when they meet in the middle, you have socialism. When you have taken from the rich and given to everybody else and you have done this great class leveler, if everybody has the same income, now you've reached socialism.

But this goes even further, this SCHIP program. It crosses the line, Mr. Speaker. And so those paying the alternative minimum tax are pulled down here. Those that are receiving the SCHIP program subsidy up to 400 percent of poverty, the first passage out of this House, we're over here, 70,000 families in the middle. We've come all the way.

This policy closes the entire gap on the question of whether the people on this side of the aisle are truly Socialists, whether they believe in a free market system or whether they believe in a dependency society. Well, it's a dependency society that they believe in, Mr. Speaker.

And I will add, there are Presidential politics involved in this agenda. Now, simply, if the majority cared about the policy, we would be sitting down negotiating what it is we can agree on and trying to come up with the votes to put a policy together there. But, instead, they allege that there are all these kids that are not going to get their health care. Never true, always false, always a false statement.

In fact, when those statements were being made, we had passed off of this floor a continuing resolution that guarantees current SCHIP policy all the way to November 16th of this year. We did that so we would make sure there was no gap for any kid in America. And by the way, if we didn't care about SCHIP, wouldn't we have maybe not funded it, or underfunded it, or let it expire, or voted it out sometime when Republicans were in the majority?

How can one think that the allegation from Democrats today, when they've got the gavel, that now all of a sudden the people on this side that created SCHIP and funded SCHIP and nurtured it and protected it for a decade now have changed their mind? It's a ridiculous assumption, and it's false, Mr. Speaker. And this is about whether we're going to lay the cornerstone for socialized medicine. So political and Presidential politics play right into this.

We have these debates going on all over the country. They are concentrated in Iowa, and they are concentrated in New Hampshire. I will concede that, Mr. Speaker. And so every single Democrat Presidential candidate is for expanding this SCHIP as far as they can get it. I haven't heard a single one of them say, that's a bit too much, I think we've gone too far. I think we might have come so far from the left that we crossed over and tapped into those alternative minimum tax payers, that was maybe too much. Not one. Not a voice of fiscal responsibility, not a peep out of the advocates that says that they would ever draw the line anywhere. Because, truthfully, Mr. Speaker, they wouldn't draw the line anywhere. They simply would keep spending tax dollars, keep creating more government programs until there is no free market system left.

This is the cornerstone of socialized medicine. This does have to do with the Presidential politics. That is one of the reasons why it's been raised up to this level. When the President correctly and appropriately vetoed this bill, this $35 billion expansion, he had on the table $5.8 billion in increase, I support that. I support an extension of this, and I'm an original cosponsor of the legislation that carries this SCHIP funding out another 18 months to get us past the silly season of the Presidential and congressional elections, and perhaps we can have a serious debate then about the policy.

Meanwhile, I haven't heard a lot of noise about deficiencies in the program we have today. We have so many discrepancies in this program, Mr. Speaker, that we haven't really had the time to weigh them all in here on the floor of the United States Congress. But I want to make sure that I lay out what this really is about, SCHIP. Here's what it really stands for, SCHIP, ``Socialized Clinton-style Hillary Care for Illegals and Their Parents.'' That's SCHIP. I'll say it again. ``Socialized Clinton-style Hillary Care for Illegals and Their Parents.''

Well, I didn't address the illegal part of this. And there has been significant discourse across the country, but who has got the facts right on whether this legislation enables and enacts funding for health insurance premium subsidies, and in this case, also health care for those who are eligible for deportation?

Let me say this, Mr. Speaker, if ICE, if Immigration Customs Enforcement were required to deliver the voucher for SCHIP, as designed by the Democrat majority here in Congress, if they delivered those vouchers, Mr. Speaker, they would be compelled to bring a lot of those folks and deliver them back to their home country. That is the fact of

this, because they have reduced the standards, the standards under Medicaid more so than SCHIP, the standards under Medicaid that are current law today, see, you have to qualify as a citizen of the United States in order to qualify for the benefit. If you want to come over here on a visitor's visa, or a student visa, or a green card, we have already, long ago, made the agreement that we don't think that the taxpayers should subsidize those folks who come here to America for the first 5 years. So we set the standard, demonstrate your citizenship. There's a whole list of ways to do that. The primary two are a birth certificate with supporting documents or a passport, which has already required the supporting documents. That is the standard that is in current law, Mr. Speaker.

This legislation that was promoted here by the Pelosi Congress and sent to the Senate and passed off the floor of the Senate, and thankfully vetoed by the President, has lowered those standards so that now presentation of a legitimate Social Security number is all that is required to demonstrate your lawful presence in the United States and your eligibility, for now, in this particular case, it also includes Medicaid, as well as SCHIP. The result is that we know that we have millions of people employed in the United States illegally who have presented a Social Security number that may or may not have been a legitimate one, but all they need to do is identify a legitimate Social Security number, present it to their employer, their employer sent that number off to the Social Security Administration. That was all that was required. There might be 1,000 people with the same number. Well, they all get paid every Friday and the benefits all get stacked up on that, and it is called the no match list in a way. Some of it is duplicates. There is also the no match list. Then there is the nonwork Social Security numbers that are given to people that aren't eligible to work here but they needed the number for another reason while they were here as a visitor. There are millions of nonwork Social Security numbers.

Well, all of those that are legitimate or valid may not identify an American citizen, and the Social Security Administration has put out a statement that it is inadequate to take a Social Security number and use that to verify citizenship. But that, under the new standards by this majority in Congress, would be all that is required now to qualify for Medicaid benefits and, Mr. Speaker, to qualify for SCHIP benefits. In Iowa that's Hawk-I.

The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the net cost to taxpayers, and now I have to do the math on this, is $3.7 billion in extra funding by lowering those citizenship standards. Much of that will go to illegals, people that are unlawfully in the United States, people that if ICE delivered the check, delivered the voucher, if they are going to follow through on the law, they would have to pick them up and take them home.

There is another $2.8 billion that is the States' share of that obligation. So the net cost for opening up, the standards that allow people who are unlawfully present in the United States and ineligible for Medicaid benefits and SCHIP benefits to open up those standards, the net cost to the taxpayers directed by the Congressional Budget Office is $6.5 billion.

Yet, Mr. Speaker, I have highly positioned people here in the House of Representatives and over in the other body that say, that's not true. Well, if that is the case, Mr. Speaker, let them roll the language out. Show me where that loophole is closed. I have read the language. I am saying the loophole doesn't exist. I believe that this is, as I said earlier, SCHIP, Socialized Clinton-style Hillary-care for Illegals and Their Parents. That will be the result. That is the cornerstone of socialized medicine, the weakened citizenship requirements.

I will make another point, and that is when my State gets finished paying the increase in tobacco tax, the 61 cents a pack that is added on to the current Federal 39 cents, that is a 156 percent increase of tobacco tax on cigarettes. Now, I am not here to plead for the smokers except I will plead with you all, Mr. Speaker, if you are smokers, please quit. We all know it is not good for you. Read the side of the pack. That is where you get all the information you need to know to make that decision. But when you increase the tax, we have a lot of middle- and low-income people are smokers. They will pay a disproportionate share of that tax. But when they pay that tax in my State, of course, there will be an increased revenue on tobacco tax in all States. That money, that 61 cents a pack additional that brings the tax up to $1 a pack, flows here to Washington, D.C. and then we sit here and make the decisions on flowing it back to the States. We know, according to the Centers For Disease Control on this particular statistic, we know that in my State, we pay additional taxes, and then money comes back in under SCHIP, and the net loss to my Iowa taxpayers is $226 million. $226 million is our net loss for this program. Why would we want to be for a program that is going to cost everybody in Iowa more money and you get less back? This brilliant plan, and I will get that to a chart here to illustrate it a little bit better, but this brilliant plan also presumes that there is going to be a whole lot more smokers that will be recruited in order to fund the extra cost of this SCHIP program. That number is over the years of this program an additional 22.4 million new smokers.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I am having a little trouble with the math on this. How does this work? How does this work that you increase the tax on tobacco and you kick that tobacco tax up from 39 cents, add 61 cents, now you are a buck a pack. Now that cigarettes got 61 cents more expensive, we are going to have 22.4 million more new smokers. It defies any kind of logic or any kind of rationale. That is typical for Washington, some will say. But I think we have a strong record of being for the kids. We have a strong record of providing for their health care. No one could bring a child out here on a poster or to the floor or before a press conference and say this kid didn't have access to health care. In fact, the examples that have been used by the majority on the other side, Mr. Speaker, are examples of kids that already qualify. And if they do not, I would like to have them point out the exceptions.

So at this point in this opportunity that I have, I see that my good friend from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett) who has been a strong and vigilant voice for the taxpayers of America and prudent policy that produces the right result has arrived on the floor.

I would be happy to yield him such time as he may consume.

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. While you are here, a question arises in my mind and perhaps you are more astute in the nuances of history, and neither of us were here during the nineties when the welfare to work, the welfare reform program was put into place. I pose this question. There is a part in my recollection I am not certain about, but it seems that one of the criticisms to welfare reform, getting people off of welfare and putting them on work, ``workfare'' we often called it, and there was significant success in some of the States. Wisconsin got a lot of publicity, I think, that launched Governor Tommy Thompson on a pretty successful path. Also, in my State we did a very good job and very successful working in conjunction with the policy established here out of Congress.

But it is my recollection that a component in the master plan to succeed in welfare reform was that if you took people off welfare and they couldn't afford health insurance for their children, they would be more likely to stay on welfare and less likely to work. So that was one of the components of the psychology in creating the SCHIP program in the first place, dialed in at 200 percent of poverty.

I would ask the gentleman from New Jersey if that is consistent with your recollection.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I put this poster up. This shows the different levels in the maximum income levels for qualifications in Iowa income today, which I think is representative across the country. This is the number that I spoke about earlier. This is current law as it is applied in Iowa today, a family of four qualifying for the State Children's Health Insurance Program subsidy dollars making $51,625 a year. We also have significant number of kids that qualify, not just in Iowa, but across the country, that are not recruited, they are not signed up under this program.

Now, I am going to operate under the theory that if the family has sufficient income or if they have the health insurance that's provided through their employers, they may well not want to complicate their plan and they may be a lot happier taking care of their own health insurance premiums. I am happy if they are.

Mr. Speaker, it isn't my job to come here to this United States Congress and ask people to be more dependent upon the tax dollars that we are squeezing out of the working people in America. That is all the taxpayers in America have to contribute to this. So we want to take care of the poor people, take care of those at that threshold of Medicaid, but we chose that number to be at 200 percent, and because of waivers, we are at $51,625 for that family of four in Iowa.

This is what the Pelosi Congress passed; the first pass off the floor that went to the Senate, which set Iowa at $103,250 for a family of four. Who in the world thinks that that is poverty, a six-figure income for a family of four, that is a poverty level where you can't sustain your own income or you can't sustain your own responsibilities for health insurance. By the way, who's making that kind of money that doesn't have some kind of arrangements for health insurance?

Well, there is an answer to that, Mr. Speaker. In one of those posters, I think it's this handy poster behind here. Before I go to the next poster, I want to ask the gentleman from New Jersey, at this 400 percent of poverty here, the 300 percent, for 200 here, what kind of creativity does New Jersey have and what one might expect on a chart if one had this set-up for the New Jersey residents.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, as you spoke, I put up this chart that tells us about what level of health insurance is there for kids. As you go up the chart here, and I will draw the line at 300 percent of poverty, 77 percent have health insurance; at 400 percent, 89 percent. Then actually up to 400 percent, 89 percent do. Once you reach the level that was passed off here by the majority in this Congress, there are only five percent of the kids that don't have health insurance.

So what were we trying to fix that covered 95 percent of those kids? What was it that had a greater value to this society than people being able to make their own decisions with their own money. I will argue again, this lays the cornerstone for socialized medicine and it pushes kids off of their own private health insurance.

The CBO has some numbers that shows for everyone that would be picked up and put on health insurance, there is another one that has their own health insurance that they will be leveraged off of it. A one-to-one ratio. In that number are 2 million kids that are currently insured by this current program, the bill that will come up again tomorrow, where we will sustain the President's veto. Should we fail to do that, there will be 2 million kids in America that will lose their own private health insurance because their decision will be made let the government pay for it instead.

I call that irresponsible. I call that poor policy. If you believe in socialized medicine, if you believe in a managed economy, if you believe in a managed society, if you believe in less freedom and more dependency, then make the argument, make the argument, Democrats. If that is your vision, stand up and say so. But instead they say no, it is not about socialized health care. This is about kids.

Well, I care about my kids. I care about their future, Mr. Speaker. I care about my grandchildren and their future. And when I hear my colleagues over on this side of the aisle talk about the legacy that we are shaping here on the floor of the United States Congress, they are thinking about the legacy that has been handed to us, down from God through the hands of our Founding Fathers, on to that document where they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, which is the Declaration, and on to the Constitution, this great legacy that has flowed to us, God's gift of freedom, is being diminished day by day on the floor of the United States Congress, trading off our freedom for dependency, trading off our freedom for, even today with the FISA debate, less security.

What is the vision here on the other side of the aisle? I want to hang onto those gifts that we have. I want my children to have more opportunities than I had, not less. I don't want to diminish those opportunities by taking away from them their freedoms, taking away their decisionmaking, making them so dependent that they lose their vitality, that they forget that they have to go out and work, earn, save and invest and plan for and manage their own future.

Even Jimmy Carter said back in about 1976 that people that work should live better than those who don't. Too bad he didn't follow through on that philosophy. But that was a memorable quote that I thought was a memorable one that he made when he was campaigning for President back in Iowa back then, that people that work hard and plan have to have some reward, and if you take their reward away, the hard- earned sweat from their brow, and you require them to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax, because you say you made too much money and the tax rates we made aren't good enough to get all the money we want out of you, so we will add this extra Alternative Minimum Tax on here, and 70,000 of those families have to have the health insurance for their children subsidized because you set up a policy that is closed and cross the loop from independents, from progressive tax, to socialism, then we are here to say, Mr. Speaker, that is wrong.

I take that stand and I draw that bright line. That is wrong. I want freedom. I want personal responsibility. I want to reward the people that make their own decisions. They need to have the freedom that comes with the dollars that they earn to the maximum extent possible.

I will be happy to yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey, and I take you north of the border. We started to hear in the news in the last week or so something that has been brought to our attention here in this Congress where we have some Interparliamentary exchange, and I have sat down with the Canadians perhaps 3 years ago.

They pressed the case that we need to do a better job of controlling our borders because we had people pouring into the United States, coming here illegally, and once they got established here, they realized there were welfare benefits to be had in Canada. And they were having thousands, at that time, about 3 years ago, they had about 50,000 illegal immigrants that they said had poured through the United States and into Canada and they were putting too much pressure on their welfare system.

So I asked the question in that meeting, what percentage of those that arrive sign up and qualify for welfare? Their answer was, Mr. Speaker, virtually 100 percent of them, because that is how the Canadian laws are set up as a magnet.

If you saw in the news this past week, there is a community there not too far north of the border into Canada that has started to raise an issue, and they said they are enclaves that are being created here with illegal immigrants that have been illegal in the United States that have gone on into Canada because the welfare benefits are better.

They interviewed some of them on the street where they laughed and smiled about how it was that their welfare check came on time, there weren't so many snags and snafus in the welfare system in Canada, and they were glad to be there despite of the winters.

That was the message I got, Mr. Speaker. And I think that study in sociology that the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett) has laid out speaks to that, that people will follow a path, and if you grant them a safety net, that is fine. It fits the standards I think of the American people. But when you crank that safety net up, at some level the safety net becomes a hammock. Then they rest back in the hammock and they lose their desire to produce, there is not a reason any longer. So the merit that comes from having to produce, of having that responsibility, is part of what gives us a vitality in this country.

As I started this discussion out in the beginning, I talked briefly about the defeat of communism, the defeat of socialism, the collapse of the Soviet empire, because they found out that a managed economy and socialism didn't work. That when you let people earn, save, work, invest, and they decide when they make their purchases and they decide how they go about doing that, that creates opportunities in a free market system.

You simply cannot manage an economy without it. It manages itself under the free market system, and people have an incentive to go to work because there is a reward for that work. If you take that reward away and you do the great leveler and you make the argument like is being made in this Socialized Clinton-style Hillary-care for Illegals and their Parents, if you make the argument that you make too much money, we are going to take it. And, by the way, we are going to take all of that that comes down someplace in the middle, and then we are going to subsidize your expenses on up to that point, and in fact we are going to cross them to where we are going to tax you on the alternative minimum tax and provide health insurance for your kids, that is the definition of the nanny state. That is a definition of socialism, and that is a definition for a nation losing its vitality, its confidence, its ambition. And the sum total of the individual productivity in America under this plan, Mr. Speaker, goes down. American people will not work as hard. They will not be as prudent and as responsible under this program that they have brought off this floor in this Pelosi Congress, and that diminishes all of us.

We need to be about raising the average individual productivity of all of our people and the quality of our life and raising our own personal responsibility. It is not just economic, Mr. Speaker, it is cultural. It is the work ethic. We used to call it the Protestant work ethic until we figured out that the Catholics got with that program pretty good, too.

But we went to work and we raised our families. We understand that is our first responsibility, then our neighborhood and our community. Also our schools and our churches and our States and our country. God, then country, make this a better place than it was when you came. That is the charge that has been handed to us because we are such grateful beneficiaries of this American Dream that has been passed to us. And we squander it under this program.

We diminish all of us when we increase the dependency, especially when we can't make an honest argument, an argument that speaks to the issue, an argument that says over there, if they just stand up and say ``I am for socialized medicine,'' at least the Presidential candidates, the Democrats, have done that.

They haven't quite done that over there yet. They want to change the subject matter. They are for socialized medicine. We are for freedom. We are for the kids.

I yield to the gentleman.

One other point. This isn't all just about kids on SCHIP. You have States like Minnesota, 87 percent of the beneficiaries are adults, not kids. We need to take these resources and push them down to where they go to the kids that are the reason for this program. We need to provide and maintain this personal responsibility. Two hundred percent of poverty has been a good target for more than 10 years. Four hundred percent of poverty is taking the path to socialism. Three hundred percent is too much. But this program that is before us today is Socialized Clinton-style Hillary-care for Illegals and their Parents.

Mr. Speaker, I will let that be the last word.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 48 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, October 18, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member from Texas (Mr. Smith) for yielding to me. I do appreciate the privilege to serve on this committee.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 2102, the Free Flow of Information Act. It would protect journalists in most circumstances from having to reveal their sources or produce documents and notes to government.

This is not a problem. The press has flourished for over 200 years without a Federal privilege. The Department of Justice reports that since 1991 they have issued only 19 subpoenas to reporters seeking information. Only 19 since 1991. No one is above the law. Even reporters, as the Supreme Court has held, sometimes need to divulge information during the investigation of crimes. We have not seen the level of professionalism in journalism that we see in the medical profession, for example, and I think that is an argument we ought to weigh also.

Mr. Speaker, I would bring up the issue of our national security. Some of the people who hide behind the shield of journalism today routinely release classified national security data and publish it as if it were their patriotic duty and hide behind the shield of journalism.

H.R. 2102 places a heavy burden on the Department of Justice to demonstrate a compelling need for a reporter's source, which can be negated by the personal whims of hundreds of Federal judges who would handle these cases. The shield bill also makes it more difficult for the Department of Justice and other government agencies to fight crime and protect our national security. For example, the bill contains a limited number of examples where the privilege doesn't apply. Most of the Department of Justice crime fighting activity, such as efforts to combat child pornography or alien smuggling, is not addressed under this bill.

For example, there is a flaw in the bill because the Department of Justice could obtain source information to prevent a terrorist attack but not acquire the same information after the fact, after an attack, say, on the Twin Towers or on the Capitol. Additionally, H.R. 2102's definition of a journalist is so broad it would protect the media outlets of designated terrorist organizations, even terrorists themselves. I know the chairman has addressed that issue, but the language still remains broad.

Congress, State legislatures, and the courts have taken significant steps in certain circumstances to assure confidentiality, as have 49 States. Examples of protected information include pre-patent research, a person's medical records, the fact that someone may have sought medical health care, information related to a victim of sexual violence. The list goes on.

Mr. Speaker, with these very private subjects, there are significant legal, moral, or fiduciary obligations granted to protect people when their disclosure could cause serious and irrevocable hardships. People who improperly disclose them should not be protected through a media shield law just because they gave the information to a reporter or blogger, not someone else.

Historically, when Congress has enacted public access legislation, it has balanced the competing rights of personal and business privacy. Consider the Freedom of Information Act. It is one of the most important ``public right to know'' statutes in this country's history. FOIA specifically exempts from disclosure information protected by law, proprietary or privileged business information, and information that could lead to unwarranted invasions of personal privacy. Similarly, whistle-blower laws only protect the reporting of information related to suspected wrongdoing, not the disclosure of all private information. Congress's long-standing commitment to these distinctions in protecting confidential and proprietary information can and should be continued.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 2102 protects the inappropriate leaking of a good deal of legitimately private information in the same way it protects a source who has disclosed information in an appropriate situation. For example, if a source told a reporter the name of a victim of a sexual assault, H.R. 2102 would block the victim from holding the leaker- source accountable for any harm such a story could cause.

The same would be true for information related to the location of a domestic violence safe house or employee records that might include Social Security numbers and credit information from stores and credit bureaus. It could also provide an absolute privilege when a source for purely personal purposes leaked information in violation of a specific court order protecting the contents of discovery or settlements that were sealed by a court. When and if such information appears in the media, the person harmed would be unable to use the judicial process to assure that the law fulfilled its purpose, even when every other avenue had been pursued to no avail.

So my question is, Mr. Speaker, what are we trying to fix? What is the problem? Nineteen subpoenas since 1991, a handful of cases stacked up against a mountain of information that has been pored through in the public media, classified information leaked into the New York Times, for example, jeopardizing our national security, and what is Congress doing about that? We are coming here to produce a shield law to protect even more of the same behavior.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for organizing this Special Order this evening and pulling together a lot of the thought process regarding the Republican vision versus the Democrat agenda.

Looking at the 40 consecutive months of job growth, I would take us back to why we didn't have job growth before this began in August 2003. I would like to frame this for when the Bush Presidency came in in January 2001. That was in the middle of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. We had an economy that was really a false economy. It was a speculation on the ability to store and transfer information more efficiently than ever before, but it had not been corrected for.

Well, the dot-com bubble was in the middle of bursting in January 2001. By September 11, 2001, the financial center was attacked, America was attacked and the Pentagon was attacked and they had the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. This was another attack on our finances. This was a double-whammy cloud that came over the very new Bush administration.

So we came forward with two rounds of tax cuts. We asked for $545 billion worth of tax cuts over that span of time. We got a pretty good chunk of that. In two rounds, those tax cuts have been what produced this thriving economy that shows a stock market that sets new highs, and also this job growth of 49 consecutive months of job growth.

What the gentleman says is exactly true. Believing in the free market system and allowing people to keep more of what they earn, allowing them to make those decisions, that was entirely the philosophy behind the tax cuts. It has proven to be true throughout all these years, and it continues to grow this economy in the face of some very poor messages coming out of this Congress. Thankfully, not much of what has been attempted on the other side has been accomplished.

I think a strong market indicates that Wall Street doesn't believe that the Democrats are going to accomplish very many of the things they would like to do.

To go back to the tax component, and I don't know how I overlooked the corporate corruption which was also a component, Enron, Global Crossing, some of those things, the accounting things that were going on. I recall some people made a lot of money out of Global Crossing. Some went to jail; some didn't. Some are supporting Presidential campaigns. We ought to take a look at those folks and how that worked.

But I would like to take this back to a philosophy that I would ask the American people to think about, that is, Ronald Reagan once said: what you tax, you get less of. He also said what you subsidize you get more of. But what you tax, you get less of. And so the Federal Government, in its, I'll say lack of wisdom, places a tax on all productivity in America. And Uncle Sam has the first lien on all productivity in America. That is our Federal income tax, personal, corporate, capital gains, the tax on your pension, the alternative minimum tax, the whole list of all of the Federal taxes, Social Security tax is another one. That list of taxes is taxes on productivity. Interest income, dividend income, all are measures of our productivity. The Federal Government has the first lien on those taxes.

What I want to do, what a lot of us in this Congress want to do is adopt a national sales tax, a national consumption tax, H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax. I will say this: everything good that anyone's tax proposal does in this Congress, it does all of them in one package. That is not just my opinion. That is the opinion of a lot of economists and some very highly placed, respectable people.

But to put that in place, we have to take the tax off of production and put it on consumption. We will have far more production. The estimates of some of the top economists go from a growth in our economy of maybe 8 to 9 percent up to 33, 35 percent growth in our economy. But nobody thinks there will be less growth; we think there will be more growth.

But changing the dynamic way we tax, no tax on production, earn all you want to earn, save all you want to save and produce all you want to produce, there is a reward for that because then you get to decide when you pay taxes, and that will be when you consume.

Another thing that is an important component of this, and Alexander Tyler once said that when a democracy realizes, and I will argue we are a constitutional Republic, but he referenced a democracy, when people realize they can vote themselves benefits from the public treasury, on that day a democracy ceases to exist.

We have a number, maybe 44 percent, of Americans don't pay any income tax. That number has been growing. It is 2 or 3 or 4 years old, so I am going to suppose that number is bigger and maybe it is over 50 percent. If half of the people realize they can push their Congressmen and go to the polls and elect people that will vote them benefits out of the public treasury, then soon we are in a situation where that half of the people don't want to work. They don't want to produce any more. So they sit back. They were in the safety net that was created by the nanny state, and now that safety net has been cranked up to the elevation of a hammock, and there they sit, not producing, just sitting not being productive individuals in this society.

That is exactly what I am talking about. People decide they want to be dependent on the taxpayers. They think it is cheaper for them to let somebody else pay for those services. This is a perfect example.

I was in the Iowa senate when we shaped the SCHIP policy and supported it at 200 percent of poverty. There are waivers in there, and I can speak specifically to Iowa's numbers. They vary across the country depending on the waivers and what the States have decided to do.

I think it was New Jersey that said no matter what the President says, they are going to grant SCHIP benefits to 450 percent of poverty. In Iowa right now it is 200 percent of poverty, and there are 20 percent that are waivers. So a family of four making $51,625 a year qualifies. That is mom, dad and two kids. The kids qualify for federally funded health insurance programs making that kind of money.

The bill passed off the House, this Pelosi-led Congress, was 400 percent of poverty. That meant that same family of four in Iowa that qualifies at $51,625 would qualify at over $103,000. Well, in the Senate it got negotiated down to 300 percent of poverty. So in my State that is still over $77,000 for a family of four.

So you have to decide. There will be 2.1 million kids that I will say will be bribed off their own private health insurance by Federal tax dollars. They will say: go on the Federal plan.

They will never be able to do that one again because there will be such a high percentage of the kids that you can never reach into that universe. I don't know if there will be any kids on privately funded health insurance if this SCHIP bill passes. That percentage goes up well over 80 percent of the kids that will be on federally funded health insurance, and there will be companies that are providing health insurance for their employees and the family, and they will take a look at this and decide I am paying them less than $83,000, which is a commonly used number, so why don't we just offer health insurance to the employee and their spouse or significant other, as the case may be, and just say we don't provide it for children because the Federal Government does.

This bill takes us to the tipping point where it slides over the other side. It is the cornerstone for socialized medicine. It closes the gap, just a technicality to pick up the remaining percentage of kids that would be on private insurance.

By the way, here in this Chamber, September 22, 1993, President Clinton spoke to a joint session on health care. He laid out a lot of this plan which we know now was Hillary's plan, and she began her hearings and her secret meetings after that, Harry and Louise shut that down, along with Phil Gramm and a good number of other people who believe in freedom and private health care.

But Clinton came back and said if we can't get this done in one shot, we are going to do this incrementally. And the next step for full, federally funded coverage for children in America is to go and lower Medicare from 65 down to 55. If we do that, the people in the middle, SCHIP is covering some kids up to age 25 today. So the people in the middle ages, 25 to 55, they are the ones paying for their own and they would be paying for everybody else's.

That is the group of volatile people that will realize they are paying for everybody else's health care, and they are paying for their own. They will say, put me on it, too, I'm paying for it anyway, and then we will have a Canadian plan. That is what I see coming.

I would think they would be worried about that right now. Their Prime Minister came to the United States for melanoma surgery. There are entire companies that have been spawned in Canada who are in the business of setting up the transportation and the access to U.S. health care for the people that are very sick or maybe die in line in Canada that can come down to the United States.

One of the good insurance programs that you can get up there is being able to have your heart surgery taken care of by flying you from Ottawa or Montreal or Quebec down to Houston for heart surgery. That is the Canadian package. There is no place to go if we don't have an American plan.

And by the way, the research and development, the innovation, the things that make us the best in the world in health care, disappear too because the profit incentive is taken out. Then we get mediocre along with the rest of the world. That ends up reducing our quality of life, and it costs American lives.

I do have a bill that I've introduced in this Congress, whose number has escaped me, that provides full deductibility for health insurance purchased by individuals, and that's been slow in the coming. It's been lagging. It's rooted back in wage and price controls of World War II. When they froze those wages and prices, then employers figured out that if they couldn't give a raise, they could give a benefit. So health insurance became the benefit that got added on because wage dollars couldn't go up.

When that happened, we built a foundation of employer-based health insurance in this country, and now it becomes the politics of holding on to that employer base. That's why there's not the flexibility that we need to have there.

But an entrepreneur, an individual that starts up a business, a ma and pa store, they have to pay some of the highest premiums because they don't get into a group plan, and they can deduct 100 percent of the health insurance for their employees but not for themselves.

There's something really wrong with that. That needs to be fixed. I would take this thing on over to a lot more freedom, and whenever you give up tax dollars, some of them provide you security like through the military, through those services that can't be provided any other way. Transportation is one of them. But at some point, as you peel out the tax dollars and hand them over into that hand of Uncle Sam, they represent your freedom that you're granting over there to the Federal Government. The Federal Government then decides who's going to be able to exercise their freedom at your expense.

I want to feed my share of this and hold up my end of this freedom, but I don't want those dollars to go to discourage people from holding up their end of this load. That's the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

We're all sociologists here in this chamber. We're here trying to figure out how do people react towards certain stimuli or lack of stimuli, raising taxes, raising regulations, imposing criminal penalties and prison sentences. Everything in between, across the spectrum are all things that we should be analyzing and having some understanding of how people will react.

But we understand the motive for earn, save and invest, and we are philanthropists. We give at church. We give to charities. All of us in this country do, more on our side than the other side statistically, but if you let people keep their own money, they'll also understand a good place to put it out of the goodness of their heart.

Mr. Speaker, due to an error in my office, the name John Salazar was added to the bill H.R. 3554, and I would ask unanimous consent that his name be removed from H.R. 3554.

Madam Speaker, as always, I very much appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

There are a number of issues that are before us this evening that have accumulated over the last week or two that I believe are worthy of our consideration and our discussion here, and among them are a couple of debates that we had today. And perhaps the first of which was a fairly intense debate that we had on a bill that addressed the Iraq war, and that would be H.R. 3087, and this is a piece of legislation that came out what seems like a weekly effort to weaken the resolve of our troops, make their job harder in Iraq, seeking to answer to MoveOn.org and energizing the anti-war liberal left in America and energizing our enemies across the world, including and I mean specifically al Qaeda.

And, Madam Speaker, many times I have come to the floor and spoken to this issue and reminded Americans that we are at war. And when a Nation is successful in a difficult war, they pull together and bind together in the same will. There was an address made here on the floor talking about World War I, World War II, and other conflicts we have been in as well as the Iraq war that we are in right now. I would take us back to World War II as the central example of the time when the Nation pulled together. And there were rations here in the United States. Most everybody found a way to contribute to the war effort. My father went to the South Pacific for 2\1/2\ years. My mother tied parachutes in a parachute factory. The unemployment rate was down to 1.2 percent, and as far as I know, that is the lowest unemployment rate that this country has had. And that was at the same time that many of the women went to work that traditionally had not.

This Nation pulled together, put 16 million Americans in uniform to defend ourselves on two major fronts, the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific, and mobilized an entire Nation, an entire people.

The movies were about patriotism and defending the American way of life. We had pride in our culture and who we were. And the legacy that flows from that is that the United States, ultimately after we walked our way through the Cold War, we emerged as the unchallenged only superpower and the greatest Nation on Earth. That is the legacy of the selfless sacrifice and the single will of a people when they came together when they saw that they were attacked from without, threatened from without, and they saw that the world was in danger of being consumed by totalitarian powers.

And after that Second World War, we went through the Cold War. Again the world was in danger of being consumed by totalitarian powers. But the will of the American people during the Second World War was unquestioned. They understood that our job was to defeat the will of our enemies, and that meant that we had to apply military might in both directions, to the east and to the west, break down their ability to conduct war; but in the end destroying their ability to tactically attack our military was just a means to an end. The end was to defeat the will of the German people and defeat the will of the Japanese people, which the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did finally defeat the will of the Japanese people.

Now here we are engaged in this war against al Qaeda, against radical extremist jihadists, people who have committed themselves and say they have a religious belief that their path to salvation is in killing us. It is our way of life that threatens them. And they have come across the oceans and attacked us here on our soil. And they have global plots that weekly there's some kind of information that emerges about sometimes second and third generation immigrants who come into the Western European countries and determine that they might be sent back to Pakistan or one of the other countries over in the Middle East to be trained to be a terrorist and they come back into the Western society and plot and sometimes successfully attack people from Great Britain and in other countries in Europe. And we have been fortunate in this country not to have an effective attack against us since September 11, 2001.

But the enemy that we are against, the enemy we are fighting across the world, this global terrorist army out there that are rooted in al Qaeda in that philosophy and their affiliates, and it is a loose affiliation even within al Qaeda itself, the principle enemy in our battlefield that is Iraq is al Qaeda in Iraq. That has been clearly brought to this Congress, and it has been a message that has been delivered to us by General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, and others. Who is our enemy? Al Qaeda in Iraq. The number one enemy. There are a number of other enemies there, and there is a struggle going on for power.

But we are in the business of defeating the will of our enemy. Our brave troops have put their lives on the line, and many of them have given their lives in that effort to project freedom to that part of the world, protect our freedom here, and defeat the will of the enemy. They lost their lives, sanctified the soil in Iraq with their blood to defeat the will of our enemy in Iraq.

And yet here on the floor of the House of Representatives, since the gavel in and the passing of the gavel in this new 110th Congress, there has been almost weekly, with only two or three exceptions that I can think of, at least one resolution or a bill or a piece of legislation here on the floor of the House of Representatives that serves to do what? It serves to encourage our enemies, to encourage the will of our enemies, and weaken the will of the American people.

So if this war is not to be won, and I believe it will be won and I believe that the indications that are coming from Iraq since the beginning of the surge, information such as the lowest monthly loss of American lives was in this past month of September, the lowest month in the last 14 months, this at a time when we have upped the troop numbers over there by at least 30,000 and engaged them in an aggressive posture of searching and destroying our enemy and hunting them out in the neighborhoods and our troops that are actually living in the neighborhoods rather than in their compounds, that kind of information is coming to us.

And I have been to Iraq five times. The last time was towards the end of July. The things that I saw there gave me a preliminary view of the report that General Petraeus would give us here in this Congress in just this past month, a couple of weeks ago. The news has been encouraging. And, of course, no one can declare victory there, but one can certainly see that we have made significant progress. It's moving in the right direction. All of this, Madam Speaker, in spite of, not because of but in spite of, these demoralizing resolutions that have come to the floor of this Congress.

And this one that was out here today is another demoralizing resolution,

this H.R. 3087 that has been delivered here and supported by a larger number of my colleagues than I have seen in the past. And I wonder what the motive is, what they hope to gain, what the upside would be to bring a resolution such as this.

This resolution has in its findings the statement that the authorization for use of military force against Iraq resolution of 2002, where this Congress voted to authorize the President to have the authority to engage in military action in Iraq that was enacted into law in October 2002, and it says here ``authorize the President to use the Armed Forces as the President determined necessary and appropriate in order to defend the national security of the United States.'' I agree with that statement. I think it's consistent with the use of the military force resolution.

However, the findings of this resolution that passed off the floor of this House tonight have a false statement in them. It states: ``the continuing threat posed by the Government of Iraq at that time'' was the reason that we passed the use of military force resolution here that went into law in 2002. I will state again, and this is right off the resolution: ``the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by the Government of Iraq at that time.''

As I have read through this entire resolution that did pass, current law that did pass, and I looked for the reference to the reason being our opposition to the Government of Iraq, and it's capitalized, Government of Iraq at the time, and going through these references in here in this resolution over and over again, there is a multiple number of references to Iraq, and I have read every one of those references to Iraq. I have them here highlighted, and there is not a single reference to the Government of Iraq or the Government of Iraq at that time.

They're all references about Iraq itself. And I could go through this, the Government of Iraq, destroy Iraq's weapons, declared Iraq to be, on and on and on; no reference to the Government of Iraq.

And yet, this resolution that passed the floor identifies the use of military force resolution as the reason that they brought this one forward and makes a statement that because the resolution from 2002 identified a threat posed by the Government of Iraq, and then it goes on further to say that, the Government of Iraq, which was in power at the time of the authorization for use of military force, was enacted into law, but that because the leader has been removed from power, he has been indicted, he's been tried, he's been executed by the new and freely elected Government of Iraq; therefore, the current Government of Iraq does not pose a threat.

Now, this rationale of, we went to war in Iraq, we gave the President the authority to use military force in Iraq, this resolution today that says it was because it was against the Government of Iraq, and because the government has changed and no longer poses a threat, we have no reason to be in Iraq is that it is an irrational rationale that is founded upon a falsehood. And this entire resolution then is based upon a falsehood that is supported by a flawed premise.

So, to get here with a resolution, then, that requires the President to present to this Congress a contingency plan for a redeployment of the Armed Forces from Iraq that would include a range of possible scenarios, multiple possible timetables to require the President to, and I understand this resolution actually says the director of the department, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and a list of the cabinet members, it really means the President, Madam Speaker, it will require the Commander in Chief to have his cabinet then present to this Congress, describe the possible missions they might have of redeployment, project the number of members of the Armed Forces which would remain in Iraq in order to do a number of things; protect vital U.S. interests and national security, conduct counterterrorism operations to protect the Armed Forces, the United States Diplomatic Corps, and support, equip and train Iraqi forces, these things that we would need military forces for. And it says ``provide a range of possible scenarios.''

And so this resolution, if signed into law, and I would hope that the President would veto such a thing, would require the Commander in Chief then to present a series of different alternatives and means to deploy our troops out of Iraq, put those in public before this Congress, who we know can't keep a secret, show our enemies a whole list of contingency plans.

Now, part of successful warfare is to have a few things in your pocket that you don't tell the enemy about. It's essential that we be able to have some surprise tactics, and so far I think the enemy is slightly surprised that the President has resisted the push of the Speaker and the majority leader in the United States Senate and taken a clear constitutional and principled and patriot stand that we are going to follow through on our commitment in Iraq. And as we see them make progress over there, we're watching resolutions come to this floor, Madam Speaker, that undermine our troops and their mission, as resolute as they are, as stoic as they are, as committed as they are. It doesn't recognize either the fact that everyone serving in Iraq from this United States military is a volunteer, a volunteer for the branch of the military that they're in. They weren't drafted; they signed up voluntarily. They knew that they had very good odds of being deployed to Iraq, and many of them are on their second tour, some on their third tour and even some on their forth tour of duty in Iraq, selflessly carrying out their duty and asking us, let us finish our mission, we're making progress here.

This, Madam Speaker, is a disgraceful thing to bring to the floor of the House of Representatives. It serves no useful purpose unless one wanted to serve a purpose to encourage our enemies and demoralize the will of the American people, which seems to be one of the goals that I have seen come out of this Congress on a weekly basis. And I and a good number of others voted ``no.'' I know some voted ``no'' because they didn't think it went far enough. They don't seem to recognize that in their constitutional oath, they swore to uphold the Constitution. And from the perspective of the Constitution, we don't have any authority to micromanage a war.

One of the previous speakers in the previous hour said that we don't need 535 generals, or words to that effect, and we don't. It's not that we don't need them; our founders understood, when they drafted the Constitution, we couldn't have 535 generals, that we couldn't have wars micromanaged by Congress. They knew what it was like to have a Continental Congress and a Continental Army and try to get the confederation of States that we had at the time of the Revolutionary War to go together and voluntarily provide funds to fund the military. And what was going to be the command and control structure? They knew you had to have a strong central government to have a strong military. And they knew you couldn't fight wars by committee; you had to hand that over to a Commander in Chief. That's why, when they drafted the Constitution, they clearly established in the Constitution that the President of the United States would be the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces. That's one of the things that's constitutional that we all need to recognize when we take our oath to the Constitution.

And another is the constitutional authority that this Congress does have. We have the authority to raise an Army and a Navy, and by implication an Air Force. And we have the authority, and I say a duty and obligation, to fund it. But we do not have the authority to micromanage it. We don't have the authority to be calling shots in a war. That's got to be one person, not a committee, not a mercurial switchback from one side to the other or a never-ending chain of resolutions that has no strategic purpose, no logical purpose in law, only a purpose to try to encourage the people in this country that are in the business of trying to encourage our enemy, and the ultimate effect is to demoralize the people in the middle who are really the ones that are subject to this debate.

The people on the left that show up here to demonstrate in this city against this military effort are never going to change their mind, Madam Speaker. That's not going to happen. There is no amount of logic or rationale, no human experience that can flip

them over the other way. They are dug in. And there are some folks on the other side that are going to stand with our President and with our Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and they are going to stand with our dear departed who have sacrificed, and they're going to stand with our wounded, they're going to stand with our military families and they're going to stand with the mission and the people that have been asked to carry it out. They're going to support the troops and the mission.

There are some people on the other side, on the left side of the aisle, that will say ``I support the troops but not their mission.'' They don't seem to recognize the dichotomy of that position. You can't ask someone, ``You can put your life on the line for me, I support you, but it's not a good thing you're doing. I don't agree with your mission.'' You cannot do that to people. If you support the troops, you have to support the mission.

And so, Madam Speaker, we are where we are today, as irrational as it is, as demoralizing as it is, as debilitating as it is, another debate on this floor that has no purpose in law, just tries to make an argument to those people in the middle that might be swayed to go over to the side of the pacifists on the left. That's been our debate here on the floor.

And I believe I will tack on to that another resolution today that I think was an unnecessary resolution, and that's a resolution that drew a good size number of votes that were votes for ``present,'' and that's the resolution that took up the issue of Ramadan. And I think the language in that was excessive, so did a good number of Members of this Congress; all didn't have the will to put up a ``present'' vote, and no one had the will to put up a ``no'' vote. But I would point out that Ramadan has been the bloodiest month throughout this global war on terror, and so if that is the holy month, I would like to see Ramadan lifted up to be the bloodless month if it's going to be a peaceful religion.

And now, Madam Speaker, I would like to take the subject matter off of these depressing things and on to another subject matter that is not particularly thrilling either, and that, Madam Speaker, is the subject of SCHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Plan.

This legislation that passed out of this Congress in the 1990s that I will say emerged from the Clinton administration and was intensely debated in the State legislature where I was at the time, where we adopted a bill off of that that we called ``Hawkeye.'' And that's just the Iowa version, and it wouldn't apply unless there happens to be a Buckeye in Ohio. But the SCHIP program was an intense debate here and it continues to be debated across the country. The President is poised to veto the SCHIP bill, and I think he has very sound reasons to do so, Madam Speaker.

First of all, the idea that we would increase the health insurance coverage for families that are making three or four times the rate of poverty defeats the very concept of the idea of SCHIP. And that is that we wanted to provide, and it was Congress' intent to provide, health insurance for those children in families that were not so well to do, that didn't quite qualify for Medicaid coverage. And so from the Medicaid side of this, it wasn't quite enough to reach up into those lower-income families, and so SCHIP was created. And as it was created and it came to the States, we adopted in my State an SCHIP program that covered 200 percent of poverty, trying to reach those kids that weren't insured.

So, here are the levels that were produced by the Congressional Budget Office just this year. If you cover between 100 and 200 percent of poverty, half of the children will have private health care anyway, about half of them within that range. The legislation that first passed off of the floor of this Congress, this Pelosi-led Congress that was then modified by the Senate is way over on the right. That's 400 percent of poverty. That shows that when you offer subsidized health insurance to that level at 400 percent of poverty, you're going to get 95 percent of the kids that were insured that will roll off of that health insurance and onto the government program. The various stops in between, 300-400 percent of poverty, 89 percent, well, that's nine out of 10 kids that are already covered, you're going to get them off and onto the government program; 200-300 percent at 77 percent.

So what was our mission here? What were we seeking to do? One is the SCHIP program needed to be reauthorized, it was expiring and needed to be reauthorized. And so it needed to be brought before this Congress, and we needed to make a decision on how it was going to be shaped and what the parameters of SCHIP would be. And I would have liked to have seen it extended to 200 percent of poverty. And I would like to have seen some of those 25-year-olds that were collecting SCHIP insurance be taken off of those rolls and roll this thing down to where it be kids, not young adults that should be taking care of their own health insurance. But instead, the leadership in this Congress saw fit to bring legislation to this floor and roll over the top of an intensely opposed minority at 400 percent of the poverty level.

Now, to give you an example of what that is, the poverty level is fairly consistent across the country, but in Iowa, if that SCHIP plan that was first offered by this Pelosi Congress that was passed off this floor over to the Senate were enacted into law in a State like Iowa, a family of four, a mom and dad and two kids, would qualify for SCHIP coverage even if they're making $103,249 a year. Now, I call that pretty well off. If you're making six figures, you've got two kids in the family, four mouths to feed, you should be able to find a way to take care of your own health insurance. Likely, that's going to be available in the workplace; at least 75 percent of those jobs do provide health insurance for the employees. But the Senate has modified this language and kicked it back over here at 300 percent of poverty. So in a State like Iowa, under this 300 percent of poverty, they would be offering SCHIP health insurance subsidy up to $77,437 a year for a family of four.

Now, I can take these numbers up to families of eight and on and they go way off into the stratosphere. But a family of four has been our standard across this country. Currently, if you're in Iowa and you're a family of four and you're making less than $51,625 a year, you qualify for subsidized health insurance premiums, $51,625. We call that middle class where I come from.

And so this policy that first passed off the floor, the 400 percent of poverty, went so far that 70,000 families in America that would qualify for SCHIP funding would also be compelled to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax, that tax that was designed to make sure that the rich didn't slip by without paying their fair share. That was a special tax for the rich, the Alternative Minimum Tax. 70,000 families in America are making so much money that they would have to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax and we would have to subsidize their health insurance premiums for their kids, presumably because in order to pay that extra tax on the rich, the Alternative Minimum Tax, presumably we have to subsidize their health insurance so they've got the money to pay the extra tax.

That is bizarre, Madam Speaker. It is bizarre if you believe in a free market system, if you believe we are ever going to have a health care program in the United States that actually rewards those that take responsibility, one that allows people to have a choice and one that allows people to make decisions for their own health care.

But that is not where this is going. This debate has a couple of contradictions within it that the discerning ear will hear. One of them is on the part of the left, the Pelosis, Harry Reids and Hillary Clintons and all the Democratic candidates for President, Madam Speaker, very loosely interchange the term, and this is as near as my ears picked up, very loosely interchange the term ``health insurance'' with ``health care.''

For example, my Governor came to this Hill. And sitting in a congressional delegation meeting with the Senators and the Representatives, all Members of Congress, sitting in the room, said that there are 40,000 kids in Iowa that don't have health care. I am not aware of a single kid in Iowa that doesn't have health care, at least access to health care. If they are poor, they get

Medicaid. If they are at low-income, they get SCHIP or hawk-i. If they go to the emergency room, they will all get care regardless of whether they are qualified, whether their parents take the trouble of getting them health insurance. So there are no kids that I am aware of in Iowa that don't have health care.

It may be true that 40,000 don't have health insurance. It might be that there are a number of those kids that are covered under Medicaid that don't make enough money to be in that threshold level for SCHIP. But it is not true that 40,000 don't have health care. That is the sloppiness of the exchange between those two terms. ``Health care'' and ``health insurance'' have become kind of an easy slip into the utilization of the terms. In the same fashion that some people say ``immigrant'' when they mean ``illegal immigrant,'' some people say ``health care'' where when they say ``no health care for kids'' they really mean ``kids that currently don't have health insurance for one reason or another.'' But they are not alleging, at least, that there are kids in this country that don't have access to health care. That is one of the problems that we have in our communications. It is not that they don't have access to health care.

Another one is the complete flat-out denial on many of them on the left that this SCHIP plan is the cornerstone for a socialized medicine program. Now, you can argue about what kind of shape it takes, but if you listen to Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or Barack Obama, they are all for some kind of a national health care plan. A national health care plan, once adopted, becomes a single-payer national plan where everything is merged together. They want to negotiate for the cost of Medicare as a group, and they will want to negotiate for the cost of all services with the leverage of the Federal Government. They will want to do that with the cost of pharmaceuticals. This takes away the competition that comes from within that drives the research and development, that provides for the highest quality medical care in the world. If you adopt the Hillary plan from 1993, eventually it merges into a single-payer Canadian plan.

Now, I took the trouble today to read through, Madam Speaker, William Clinton's speech before the floor of this Congress that he brought here in, this is September 22, 1993, when he came to give a speech before a joint session of Congress. This is about an hour speech, 13\1/2\ pages, single-spaced, where Bill Clinton laid out Hillary's health care plan. It is very adeptly done. It was quite interesting to read through this health care plan.

Some of the comments that he made were kind of astute. One was that he thought we needed Medicare prescription drug coverage. We did do that. That's a piece of that plan. We got that accomplished here in this Congress, Madam Speaker. Some of the other arguments, we are drowning in paperwork, we must produce savings. He goes into how you produce savings. Well, that is going to be some form of limiting. He said he doesn't want to limit prices, but he would limit the increase in prices, which by now we know would be price limitations. Mountains of unnecessary procedures. It is quite interesting that President Clinton is opposed to mountains of unnecessary procedures. But we know that because of the high cost of the litigation, the lawsuits against medical providers and the medical malpractice insurance premiums that are necessary because of the intensive litigation against the practitioners of health care, we know that that is a reason why a lot of these tests are done.

We can argue that they are not necessary one at a time. But every doctor has to make the decision on whether he is going to be defending that decision in court, because the Monday morning quarter backs, the after-the-fact ambulance-chasing lawyers will raise those issues up for litigation. If they see a deep pocket, they will go for it. The deep pocket has been the medical industry.

So the mountains of unnecessary procedures ties into the unnecessary litigation that is part of this. However, there is nothing in the Clinton plan that addresses the high cost of litigation. That is a big reason why we have the high cost of health care here in the United States. We have tried to limit that in this Congress. We have tried to limit it in the last Congress and tried to cap the malpractice to $250,000 in noneconomic damages while still letting everyone who has been a victim of malpractice get themselves whole. We couldn't get it past the trial lawyers, the trial lawyers in the Senate in particular. But the Clinton plan gives full deference to the trial lawyers' interests here and doesn't approach that expensive component of health care at all.

He addresses fraud and abuse. I agree there is some of that. He calls it, though, under our broken health care system that power is slipping away from Americans. Then, let me see, an interesting component here on about page 9 or 10, we will impose new taxes on tobacco, directly out of SCHIP is right off of this page, new taxes on tobacco, Federal taxes at a dollar a pack. Some of the States, including my own, have raised taxes. That turns into, and I am not a smoker, Madam Speaker, I think it would be a wonderful thing if no one smoked. But it is a legal activity. The marketing of tobacco is done as prescribed by the Federal Government. So this tax, a higher percentage of poorer people smoke than people that are better off. So this tax becomes a very regressive tax on the people that do smoke.

It does advocate here, though, that we should be able to deduct from our taxes 100 percent of our premiums if we are a small business. I do support that. There were some components in here that were good. It was an interesting read on what was delivered to the floor of this Congress in 1993, the things that have transpired since then and the effort that is coming out today.

I would note that nothing in this speech of these multiple pages here in this roughly an hour-long speech of Bill Clinton from September of 1993, all on health care, and really all packaged up on the Hillary plan, nothing in this addresses health savings accounts. Yet we passed health savings accounts here off the floor of this Congress. They are the opportunity that we have to continue to provide the private market health care here in the United States and to give people choices and let them have control over their own plans. I think that was the strongest reason to vote for the Medicare prescription drug component piece of the bill.

The health savings accounts were the most important component. It allowed, in the beginning, young couples to put $5,150 in a tax free, into a health savings account. I would like to see that expanded and accelerated so that young people would get to the age of retirement with six figures times X of money in their health savings account, enough money that they could purchase a paid-up, lifetime health insurance plan. If we could do that, then they could roll the money that is left over out of that and put that back into their savings account, their estate, whatever they choose to do with it. That is a good thing to build on, health savings account, and rewarding those providers that provide high-quality care for a low price, that is the best combination. That is something also we should do, Madam Speaker.

We have made some progress here. We have made some progress under this Republican Congress in past years. But this year, this SCHIP plan goes too far. The people that advocate this were the same people that advocated 400 percent of poverty. I haven't heard a peep of fiscal responsibility come out of the other side. So where would they draw the line? I have drawn it, Madam Speaker, at 200 percent of poverty. I put that vote up in the late '90s. That's a matter of record. I have been here on this floor, and I support the SCHIP program to a limit. That limit is 200 percent of poverty. I would ask those advocates that came to this floor and voted for 400 percent of poverty, what is their limit? Where do they draw the line? They wouldn't draw it at 400 percent of poverty when there is hardly anybody left on any private insurance, hardly any kids left. Ninety-five percent of the kids are gone and pushed into the government-funded program. Their choices are really substantially limited.

How many million kids would be talked off of private health insurance by this bill as it came off the floor of the House the other day and that essentially it does concur with the Senate? I can tell you that number. That

number is produced by the Congressional Budget Office; 2.1 million kids in the United States would be leveraged off of or talked off of and given an incentive, their parents would be given an incentive to take them off of their own insurance plan so the government can pay the insurance that the families are already paying.

Is this that consistent with the motive here that we are trying to get health insurance to kids who don't have it when 2.5 million of them who do have it will be taken from their own self-sustaining, family- funded health insurance plan, often funded by the employer who will see the opportunity to cut down on their costs and push their employees' kids over on to an SCHIP plan? 2.1 million kids moved off. How many kids in the future, if this bill becomes law, how many will never see a private health insurance plan? For how many of them will it become automatic, employers will make the shift, they will write new policies, they will offer to their employees?

As they do that, the employees won't know there is another choice. I can easily see an employer sitting there in the HR office, the manager saying to a prospective employee, Here is our plan. We will pay for your health insurance and we will pay for your wife's health insurance. We have a good plan, but your kids will go on SCHIP. We have a way to facilitate that for you so we make that real easy.

While they are doing that, they will be saving some dollars in the premium. But it will end up being private insurance for mom and dad, government insurance for the kids to 95 percent or more. When it is 95 percent, who is left? Just a few people who stubbornly want to be self- reliant and stand on their own two feet. Just a few people, Madam Speaker, will be all that will be left if this thing goes all the way to 400 percent.

Even at 300 percent, you are looking at 89 percent of those kids are gone. Then, year after year as employers change their plans to taking advantage of now another government handout, and as they hire new employees, and as this thing shifts and evolves, there will be fewer and fewer kids on private health insurance, but millions and millions of them that never go on.

This isn't just the numbers of 2.1 million that go off within the next year if this bill becomes law. And that is at the 300 percent, 2.1 million. It is not just that. It is the tens of millions and ultimately the hundreds of millions that will never see a private health insurance plan until they become the age of adulthood, which by then the proponents of SCHIP would like to have a plan in place for those people, for those kids, as they become adults.

Bill Clinton promised us that when Hillarycare came crashing down, when it collapsed in the weight of the opposition of the American people that wanted to keep their freedom and didn't want a Canadian- style plan and understood there was no place for them to go to get their health care if the United States was going to be shut into a Canadian-style, rationed, long-lines health insurance premium, when the American people brought that crashing down, when Senator Graham said, This passes over my cold, dead political body, when that happened, then Bill Clinton came before the American people and said, Well, this is more than the American people can absorb all at one time. So we will get this done a piece at a time. We are going to feed this to the American people a piece at a time. When we do that, we will get them the SCHIP. Then we will also go for the 55 to 65 year olds.

Now, Madam Speaker, do you get the picture, the 55 to 65 years olds? First, we will bring the kids in. Who can say ``no'' to the kids? Who can say ``no'' to 300 percent? In fact, a whole bunch couldn't say ``no'' to 400 percent of poverty. We know 400 percent of poverty is 95 percent of the kids. So if you get to 500 or 600 or 800 percent of poverty, you are going to get, statistically, we say today, virtually all of them. So at some point, we just say that all kids qualify because there are hardly any kids that are not on there.

Then, if we follow this path that is advocated by Bill Clinton back in the mid-1990s, lower the age of Medicare eligibility down to 55, now your window, we have got people that are 25 years old qualified for SCHIP today on SCHIP in the States, and we have people there at 400 percent of poverty. If you lower the Medicare age down to 55, 25 to 55 is only that 30-year window. Well, that is the most productive years. Those are the people that will be paying the taxes.

They will be the ones that feel the pain the most, and they will say, why do I pay for all this health insurance and health care for the seniors that are 55 years old that have a lot of years and vigor left in them, and the kids that are now kids up to age 25? Why don't you just give me mine, too, under the same version, because, after all, I am paying for it anyway. I am paying for my own at work because it's part of the wages I earn, and I am paying for all the kids up to age 25, well, at least a lot of the kids up to age 25, and the adults from age, as Clinton advocated, 55 on up.

Does anybody believe that Hillary Clinton disagrees with Bill on this one-hour long speech? I would submit that she wrote a lot of it; in fact, may have written all of it. This policy that she's advocating today reflects much of it. I can't quite find contradictions in it.

So we need to understand, Madam Speaker, that this debate is not about trying to provide health insurance to kids that don't have it. Many say it's providing health care to kids that don't have it. But we know this: Every kid in America has access to health care. Most kids have health insurance. At 200 percent of poverty, you're looking at 77 percent of those kids that have insurance. Maybe that number is a big number of kids that don't have health insurance, but they all have access to health care.

This debate isn't about the health of the kids. We didn't hear examples in any significant statistical number of kids that are suffering because they don't have access to health care. We heard a socialized medicine debate here on this floor, Madam Speaker. And that is what is going on in America.

This is where the landing zone is being prepared for the presidential candidates who are advocating for a single-payer Canadian-style or nationally-mandated socialized medicine program. They think it's their ticket to the White House. They think the American people want to become even more dependent yet on the nanny-state of government.

Well, Madam Speaker, I oppose that kind of a philosophy. Myself and many millions of Americans oppose that kind of philosophy. We are still out there, Harry and Louise; we are out there, Phil Graham. We are still going to stand here and we are going to oppose a Federally- mandated, single-payer, Canadian-style socialized medicine health care system in this country, and we are going to oppose the expansion of current SCHIP law that goes beyond the 200 percent of poverty, up to the 300 percent and more, and allowing, by the way, the States to discount the income so that that 200 percent, now 300 percent of poverty, goes higher than that yet.

We are going to oppose all of that, because what we are really talking about here is the Pelosi Congress laying the cornerstone to the next generation of socialized medicine. SCHIP is the cornerstone of the next generation of socialized medicine, Madam Speaker, and I oppose it primarily for that reason.

I want to point out that this country has the best health care system in the world. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it consumes perhaps 17 percent of our GDP. That is a lot. We pay for it because health care is worth it to us. If it were not, we would say, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to pay the premium. Give me my money in my wages. I don't want that to go off to my health insurance. I think I am going to take some risks with my health. I don't want that test. See if you can keep my premiums a little cheaper, because you're spending a little too much time. No.

Madam Speaker, we are for high quality health care, and when it comes to our health, as people in this Nation, and our lives, no cost is too high for us. Because of that, it has driven research and development and driven the educational institutions and the research hospitals. The system that we have out there that produces new doctors and nurses and inventors and the infrastructure of our hospitals and clinics

and a delivery system and the medical equipment that has been developed over the last generation or two is an amazing thing to understand in its broader scope. All of those things are rooted in a belief that we need to provide ever better health care for our people. It has extended our lives and it has extended the quality of our lives. We have been willing to pay for that.

Now, I think there are many things we can do to keep the costs down and provide more efficiency. One of those would be a digital recordkeeping system that would allow for a Web page for all the prescriptions of a patient to go on there, and have a firewall for security, and allow a doctor to put in a patient's records and instantly be able to read the entire file from anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. I think we will get there.

Those are some things we can work with as to having an integrated medical records system. It will save lives and it will save money. It will avoid duplicate prescriptions and avoid duplicate tests and duplicate x-rays, list after list of things that can be more efficient. That is not something you produce and drive here by saying we need to go to a single-payer plan or socialized medicine plan. That is something government can help facilitate, and I think we should.

I want to have my choices. And I think we also need to grow these HSAs and increase the amount of deductible that goes into the HSAs and allow the insurance company and encourage them to produce plans that adjust the premiums, so if people have healthy lifestyles, that is reflected in a cheaper premium. And if that can be reflected in a cheaper premium, they can roll more dollars into an HSA, and if they have control of management of that from the standpoint of if they live healthy lifestyles and they go in and get regular checkups, they will see cheaper premiums, which allows them to grow their HSA. And if that happens, when there is enough money in their HSA, they can raise the amount of their deductible and lower their premium, which will take less dollars out of their paycheck, and as that transition goes on, they might want to have a larger copayment as their HSA becomes larger and larger.

Meanwhile, insurance becomes more what it is about. It doesn't need to be about covering every medical treatment, the loose-change medical treatment. It needs to be for the catastrophic, those that would knock us down economically and cause us to have to rebuild ourselves again.

We can structure this system so there is more responsibility in it, less litigation it. We can limit the medical malpractice, and we need to do that. I don't expect this Pelosi Congress will do this, Madam Speaker, but I do expect the American people are going to understand where their costs are and want to elect a Congress that will follow through on the medical malpractice and will grow the HSAs and will give us back even more of our freedom when it comes to health care and health insurance, not less.

SCHIP is the cornerstone of socialized medicine, and it is wrong to advance ourselves down that path. It also results in a 156 percent increase in taxes, that is the tobacco tax that I mentioned, and it has no fiscal responsibility. It also has a cliff in the funding.

The funding of this system that is here, even under the 300 percent version that was the last version passed off of this House, the funding is set up so it will require there be an additional 22.4 million smokers recruited to go on the smoking rolls in order to fund this SCHIP. So if you increase the cost of a pack of cigarettes and you presume that there will be 22.4 million more smokers, when taxes in the Federal are a buck a pack and a lot the States have very high taxes as well, would one have to conclude there will be fewer smokers instead of more, and those that are fewer will also smoke less because of the cost?

This inverse ratio then result in the Heritage Foundation's estimate of 22.4 million new smokers to fund this over the next 10 years. Then this funding that is set up is a gimmick funding that produces a cliff, a cliff that happens in the funding, the acceleration of the funding, which will be the collection of increased tobacco taxes until the year 2011. At the year 2011, it hits the spot where there is the drop off in revenue. There is no provision to continue the revenue, and as things stop, you there will be a drop in revenue of 75 percent. No provisions for how to fund the increase in costs that are sailing off into the stratosphere. Instead, there is a 75 percent cut in the revenue. The revenue drops off of a cliff.

What we know then is they will come to this Congress and say, well, you can't say no to all these kids, these 89 or 95 percent of the kids in America that have been talked off of their private health insurance and talked on to a government-funded health insurance. You can't say no to them. So in order to fund them, you are going to have to raise taxes or increase the national debt.

That is what is in store for us with this SCHIP program that we are dealing with today, Madam Speaker.

Then, not the least of which, but among it, is the lowering of the standards on requirements for qualification. We have State agencies that have been requiring birth certificates, passports and other verifiable documents that demonstrate lawful presence in the United States, that demonstrate citizenship, so that we are not providing these kind of benefits to people who are otherwise, actually in fact at the time, deportable.

I mean, to give taxpayer dollars off to people who are deportable is a deplorable thing to do, and it is beneath the standards that have been set by the previous Congresses. And so this SCHIP legislation that is there allows the States to waive a passport requirement, waive a birth certificate, citizenship-proving requirement, and allows them to simply accept a Social Security number.

Now, some will argue that there is a line in the bill that says that these funds can't go to illegals. But, Madam Speaker, the legislation in the bill doesn't require the States to verify citizenship or lawful presence. It doesn't require them to ask for a passport or a birth certificate. In fact, it stipulates that they can accept a Social Security number. And it may actually be a valid Social Security number, but the Social Security Administration themselves have said there is no way to verify that that number actually represents the person that you have before you.

We know that from our immigration debates, and we also know that there are thousands, in fact millions of illegals in America who are working in this country under a false Social Security number. That is the same standard by which we would grant SCHIP benefits to illegals that are here, who otherwise are deportable in the United States.

This SCHIP legislation weakens the standards. It wasn't content to stay with the standards that we had. I didn't hear complaints about the standards that we had. We asked for verification of lawful presence in the United States. No, just produce a Social Security number. So if you can beg, borrow or steal someone's Social Security number and you present that, that can be accepted by the States as adequate proof of lawful presence in the United States.

So this law, this SCHIP legislation, opens the door up for more benefits to go to illegals. And when I say that, I mean people that are deportable, those who, if adjudicated, will be sent to their home country.

That shows one of the things that is wrong with this government, this permissiveness. The Federal Government has enforced our immigration laws less and less over the last 20 years, and this is another piece of it. This same party that brings this permissiveness, this subsidy for deportables, was the same party that advocates for border security. Now, that, Madam Speaker is another dichotomy that I find to be a bit ironic.

So I stand on the rule of law. I think that our laws should be enforced. I think if people violate those laws, you have to enforce it and you have to adjudicate them, and you have to sometimes make an example so the rest of the public recognizes that this is a nation of laws.

But this SCHIP law undermines our national security, it encourages the subsidy of illegals, and it will require another 22.4 million new smokers. It will cost my State of Iowa a net of $226

million. That is the figure that is produced by the Center for Disease Control, that shows that when you add the new taxes into my State and all the money that gets added up on the taxes that would be collected in Iowa, and then you subtract from it the extra grants that would go into Iowa to take care of raising the SCHIP from 200 of poverty to 300 percent of poverty, from $51,625 for a family of four, up to $77,430 for a family of four, you do that math, extra taxes taken out of the State, grants for SCHIP coming back in, the net, not a net gain for Iowa, Governor Culver, I hate to tell you this, it is a net loss of $226 million. So, it isn't even fiscally prudent for Iowans to engage in this.

There are other states that have a net loss as well, according to the Center for Disease Control. The title of this is SCHIP Expansions, Winners and Losers, Net Impact on States New Grants.

This is, Madam Speaker, the look of the map that is produced here, and this is the data that has been delivered by the Center For Disease Control. The map is produced by one of our Members of Congress, I believe.

But, at any rate, Iowa loses $226 million. Our neighbors in Wisconsin, $330 million. Missouri, our neighbors to the south, $496 million. Florida loses $703 million, Madam Speaker. That might be of particular interest to you. $703 million. South Carolina, $239 million. North Carolina, $536 million. This list goes on and on. Kentucky, $602 million. Indiana, minus $517 million. Ohio, minus $426 million.

So there are winners and losers. There is a transfer of tax dollars and a transfer of wealth that takes place with this SCHIP legislation. The transfer of wealth just shows what an economic boondoggle it is for some States. It shows also that some States, their leadership is clamoring for this SCHIP increase. I haven't noticed Republican Governors clamoring for SCHIP increase. I haven't noticed Republican candidates for the Presidency clamoring for an SCHIP increase. They recognize that this increase to 300 percent of poverty, that the attempt to take it to 400 percent of poverty, this attempt to talk kids off of private health insurance, is the cornerstone for Hillarycare, for socialized medicine and lays a foundation for the Presidential debates that will be unfolding from this point until November 2008.

It sets it as the central issue for the Presidency in the event that MoveOn.org and the get out of Iraq at any cost pacifists can't make that issue stick. If they lose that debate, as said by the Democrat whip, that is a big problem for Democrats if there is a good report from General Petraeus.

Well, the report he delivered to us was honest and objective. It was delivered by a patriot. It was delivered by a man who I believe knows more about Iraq and our military operations as well as the political and economic operations there than anybody in the world. It was objective. It was delivered prudently, carefully and factually. And yet, as John Adams said, facts are stubborn things.

Whatever we might choose to do, we can't escape the result of the facts. The facts support a continuing improvement in Iraq. The facts indicate that this debate that is going down this path on SCHIP is not a debate about getting health insurance to kids. This is a debate about laying the cornerstone for socialized health care in the United States.

I think it is utterly wrong and undermines our free market economy. I think it takes away the freedom of the American people. If you take away the freedom of any people, you undermine their productivity and you take away their spirit. If you are a Nation that provides, if you become the nanny state and you provide everything that people want, and FDR created those freedoms, some of these are constitutional, two of them were extra-constitutional, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

This SCHIP plan fits into that idea that people should be free of want and free of fear. They shouldn't fear not having health insurance for their children, and they shouldn't want for anything. This has gotten so bizarre in this Pelosi Congress that we have a farm bill that came to this floor and is passed over to the Senate now that has increased the food stamps, the nutrition component of the bill, by 46 percent. Even though the proponents of that bill could not find a statistical argument that there were components of Americans that were suffering from hunger or malnutrition, in fact they had to admit that people were getting their past meals and they knew where their next meals were coming from, but they stated that people had food insecurity, I'll call it food anxiety. And so because sometimes they weren't sure that some of those meals down the line might not be there, they ate more.

Madam Speaker, I think it is an appropriate thing to get me down to this closing here because it is ironic to quote from the testimony that came before the Agriculture Committee. This would be testimony by Janet Murguia, March 13, 2007, representing LaRaza testifying on food stamps about food insecurity. This is a quote: ``There is also mounting evidence that the overweight and obesity trends in the United States are due in part to high levels of food insecurity.''

In other words, food anxiety, food insecurity cause people to overeat. They become overweight and if we give them more food from the taxpayers' dollar, then they would eat less and be more healthy and slender and all would be wonderful.

Yes, I guess if you are committed that tax increases and more government responsibility and less personal responsibility are the solution to everything, you can even include the idea that if you give them more food stamps, they would eat less as part of your rationale. It is no more rational here to take SCHIP and take it up to 300 or even 400 percent of poverty. The only rationale I see here is socialized medicine. Lay the cornerstone for socialized medicine, lay the cornerstone for the Hillary campaign for the Presidency.

Pick up this speech from September of 2003, ``Move Ahead Into Socialism.''

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, October 3, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlemen from New Jersey and Utah; and Mr. Speaker, it's a privilege again to address this House and you and talk about the integrity of our voting system that we have here in the United States.

I start my opinion and my view out on this focused long before the year 2000, but really focused on the 2000 election. I recall watching that drama unfold in Florida, and at the time, I was chairman of the Iowa State senate, State government committee, and I knew that it was my job to be sure that Iowa could be set up and structured in such a way that they never became a State like Florida was, going through the throes of those decisions that were being made down there by their State supreme court and ultimately by the United States Supreme Court.

It was an agonizing thing to watch, and I watched it intensively for 37 days in front of the television and my Dish TV, and everything I could pick up in all the print, off the Internet and my telephones. I worked them constantly because I knew the next leader of the free world was going to emerge from the system that Florida had, and that, of course, was the catalyst that created HAVA, the Help America Vote Act.

I came to some conclusions, too. I chased all those rabbit trails on the Internet down to the end, and I uncovered what I believe to be a significant amount of corruption within our electoral system across this country, flat out open, intentional fraud committed in a number of States without a lot of prosecution to back it up, kind of a blind eye.

I will speak one State discovered the laws were set up in such a way if you came in and presented yourself as Joe Smith, and even if Joe Smith was actually working the election board and knew very well that it was his registration you were pointing to and you alleged to be him, Joe Smith himself couldn't challenge the person who presented themselves as Joe Smith because the election laws prohibited challenging the identification of someone whom you know to be misrepresenting themselves. Can't ask for an ID, can't ask for a picture ID. You can't even prohibit them from voting in your name, and you can't ask for a provisional ballot in some States, and those kind of things open up this system.

So I came at this with a little bit different view than I think the gentleman from Utah has from this perspective. Yes, I want the States to have the maximum amount of autonomy. I want to see that in the hands of the States. I don't want the Federal Government to run this; but by the same token, a State that has a faulty electoral system, without true integrity then, also can be the State that chooses the next leader in the free world, which affects all Americans.

So if you could envision a scenario of Florida that resulted in an altered election result for the President of the United States, you can also envision an interest that this Congress has, but it should be very narrow. It should be very limited, and it should be consistent with our constitutional views.

The voter registration that the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) mentioned, I looked across the voter registration rolls, Iowa in particular, and found them to be replete with duplicates, deceased, and in our State, like the case of Florida, felons. Duplicates, deceased and felons; and yet there we sat with all that software, that database with all those registered voters, and we couldn't even run that database to sort out when there were duplicates,

just simply leave the registration of the most recent activity. We couldn't even get that done.

I brought legislation through the Iowa Senate that required the Secretary of State to sort that voter registration list to certify that the list be free of duplicates, deceased, and felons and that the Secretary of State certify that they be citizens. Not a very high standard that they should be a citizen of the United States to vote here in America. Those things were all met with the stiffest opposition by the members of the other party, which convinced me that they believed that they had an advantage with a system that was full of those kind of contradictions and integrity, I can put it that way.

I recall running across a significant amount of information that was compiled by the Collier brothers in Florida, and neither of these brothers happen to be alive today, for different reasons I understand. But one of the pieces of their documents, and they did a movie and there's a fair amount of print material out there. They had gone into the warehouse where the vote counting machines, the punch card vote counting machines were stored, and they asked the fellow how is it that you rig a vote here. He said, well, it's simple. He opened the drawer and pulled one of the plastic gears out of there and said we just grind one tooth off of these plastic gears, put them in the voting machine, and that puts in one extra vote for our guy out of every 10 votes that are cast.

Well, that will change most elections, Mr. Speaker. Something that open, that blatant in the annals of the public record of the United States. And so HAVA was passed here in Congress, the Help America Vote Act, all with good intention. I think they went too far with HAVA then and provided a lot of help for the local election boards.

One of the things that they did was require that there be the electronic voting machines; and the purpose of that, one of the foundational reasons for that was so that they could be operated by the blind, which means they need to be able to plug in earphones into that machine so that you can listen to the tones and vote. There were a lot of successes in blind voting with absentee ballots, and that wasn't a concern that ever came to me; but it was an accommodation that actually was a significant component that altered these requirements that came out for HAVA.

So it would be nice to be able to accommodate the blind. They ask for very, very little. By the same token, it opened this system up now where we have electronic voting machines across this country where there is no legitimate means to audit the votes that are recorded on them. We have thousands and thousands of electronic voting machines that simply have a software trail, not a paper trail.

And as I mentioned about how the grinding a plastic tooth off of a plastic gear can change the results of the counting of the ballots, the punch card ballots in a place like Florida and many other places at that period of time, the software can do the same thing. We have something like 900 software engineers that have said that this software can be hacked, it can be altered; and of course I believe it can be.

Now, the most important point of this is one thing is that we to have a lot of integrity in our system, Mr. Speaker. It can be altered, it can be hacked; but if we got to the point where the American people lost their confidence in the integrity of this system, our entire constitutional Republic comes crashing down around us because no one would accept the results of an election. They would challenge it like they do in Mexico, or I was there last month, and the President of Mexico wasn't allowed to even give the state of the union address to their own congress because they had rejected the results of the election, among other reasons.

But here we respect the integrity of our electoral process. We held it together through the 2000 issues, and Florida cleaned up a lot of the things that went on down there. I need to say that for the benefit of my brethren from Florida. But if we ever lost confidence in this system, our entire constitutional Republic is at risk.

So whether there's a Republican majority or a Democrat majority, whether there's a Democrat or Republican in the White House, whether one side dominates the other side, it's important to both sides of the aisle that we have a maximum amount of integrity in our electoral process.

So what I have done is drafted legislation that's called the Know Your Vote Counts Act. It is very simple. It isn't this expansive thing that adds a lot of conditions on and makes it so that the voting machines that are out there now are obsolete and have to be retooled and cost a lot of money. What it does is it requires a paper audit trail in all precincts. So the electronic voting machines that are touchstone or touch key voting machines now can easily be retrofitted with a mechanism that scrolls that ballot out there so you can see it through a piece of Plexiglass, records your vote on it, and touch a button and say, yes, I like that vote, that's how I voted, boom, drops down into the box. That is part of the paper audit trail.

It's that simple. That's the purpose of my bill. The purpose of it is to give that voter the complete confidence that the way they have cast their ballot is also the way that that ballot is recorded on the paper which becomes the audit trail; and then if there is an audit, the paper ballots are counted. That simple.

I mean, in Canada they just put a little X on the piece of paper, count those pieces of paper, and really don't have a lot of problem. We need to have the paper trail because electronically you just simply cannot guarantee an audit trail.

And we've lived with some unreliable audit trails in the past. The old lever voting machines, I don't think any of those are actually functioning at home anymore, but I voted with those old lever voting machines, and I didn't realize at the time that you simply can't really do an audit. You can go back, take it apart, look at that entire paper scroll that's back there, but you really can't do a legitimate audit.

And when something falls apart, when you have a meltdown, when you have a software failure or a hardware failure or you simply have a challenge to the integrity of the system, you have no way, Mr. Speaker, of knowing whether the electronic record that may remain on that hard drive, no matter how many redundancies you put into it, you can never assure that it hasn't been hacked.

As much as you want to trust the system, you still can't be sure of that. The only thing that you can trust is paper. We designate paper to be the trail. We stay out of the business of the States beyond that, but I believe it is to the interest of the Federal Government and the Congress and the people in this country to go to that step to ensure that when the next leader of the free world is selected that it is done with a process that has a maximum amount of integrity and the minimum amount of imposition of regulations on the States.

One of these pieces of the whole bill versus the Know Your Vote Counts bill that is the King bill is that it requires also that not only there be a paper audit trail but that the machines spit out a receipt that tells you how you voted.

Once you walk out of the room with your little receipt like your credit card receipt that says here is how you voted, it has absolutely no connection to the process in the voting booth. It does you no good. It is simply an expensive component and serves no purpose, except I will say that there is no machine that is manufactured anywhere that I know of certainly in the world, certainly in the United States, that at this point can comply with the language that is in the whole bill.

So I am submitting, Mr. Speaker, the bill that is Know Your Vote Counts Act. It is a very, very simple bill that simply requires a paper ballot to be generated, and that that paper ballot be verified by the voter, and that that paper ballot becomes the audit trail. It is that simple. It is something we need to do. This is 2007.

So I thank you for your attention, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Of course.

If the gentleman would yield. I think you have made the most salient point about the flaw in the whole bill, which there are two pieces of paper generated with every ballot. One of them becomes the audit trail that you can see through the Plexiglass, and when you push the button and say, I accept this as my vote, and it drops down into the lock box for the audit trail. And then of course the chain of custody of all of that is another subject we can talk about.

But to walk out of there with a receipt that says ``I voted this way'' does open up the door for the walking around money that we know goes on in some of these precincts to be handed over in exchange. And I can see where subcontractors could be hired to work within the neighborhoods, that you would pay a commission on how many ballots or how many receipts you could collect, so many dollars a vote. And you could say, okay, it is $20 for a vote and my commission is 5 bucks. So $25, $5 of which the contractor would get; that opens up the door for all kinds of vote buying. And that is the strongest, most compelling reason to reject the whole bill. And I will have this bill in and it will be available for Members to sign on to, and hopefully we can move it on the Know Your Vote Counts Act. It is a very much more narrow bill.

But there was another component that I left out of that in my earlier piece that I just want to inject into this discussion briefly. And that is, I said that we needed to have voter registration lists that are free of duplicates, deceased, and felons, and, that the registrants be certified to be citizens on that list. But also, the requirement for a picture ID. I mean, they do that in places like Venezuela, a picture ID to go and vote, and that is a method by which you match up the name with the name on the registration. It is a small thing to ask for. And when I advocated for that, I ran into the opposition that said, well, no, that is a poll tax because everybody doesn't have a picture ID. My grandmother doesn't have a driver's license; therefore, she doesn't have any way to identify herself with a picture on it.

Well, I would argue that the Department of Transportation will issue one of those picture IDs for $5. But then that is charged to be a poll tax. And every argument will work in any port in a storm, but if you want integrity, those are the things you have to do.

Well, Mr. Garrett, first, I think in terms of if I needed to follow an electronic trail of, let's say, if I made a deposit that was an electronic deposit into, maybe it was an electronic automatic deposit into my bank, and the distributions that went out from automatic payments that go out of the bank, and in conjunction with credit card bills that flow around the country and come back, a full electronic trail, I have not run into an experience where I can't actually track all of that money, because someone is accountable at every level.

If the deposit doesn't show up in an automatic deposit, I can go back to the people that were to make that deposit, say, do that in the form of a paycheck or a purchase item. Well, where's your distribution record? Where's your transfer records? And if they don't have any, one can presume they never transferred the electronic deposit into my account. If there's money missing from my account, I can track and see where did it go. But I can have that confidence of doing that through the banks, through the credit cards without a lot of problem.

But we never know. We never know how a person actually votes. That secrecy of the way you vote cannot be tracked. Once you walk out of that voting booth, there's no connection between the voter and the actual ballot that was cast. So that requires a different level of integrity. And as far as an audio receipt that would say to you I just cast a ballot for Scott Garrett, I ask, do you agree with that and push enter and walk out of there, the audio receipt that you might hear or electronic receipt that you might hear, does not preclude a hacking that could register a different kind of result. Those are the reasons why I track an audit trail, a paper audit trail.

And I would submit also that this bill that I have, the Know Your Vote Counts Act, is very, very simple language. And I want to applaud the folks in Utah and anyone who's mirrored their leadership for the integrity that they've put into their system with a picture ID and a paper audit trail. But it simply says the system shall provide an auditable paper record showing the vote that was cast and recorded by the system. And so the paper is the audit trail. And we don't prescribe how that is actually transferred, the records are transferred. That's also part of the whole bill. Requires certain methods of transfer of those records from the precinct on to the county and there on. We don't interfere in that. We just say, paper audit trail. Produce it. You can retrofit the existing machines.

I actually like the optical scanning ballots where you fill in the dot. And those have the, as far as my understanding of the technology, and I have looked at a lot of it, the highest level of accuracy. And we also have the auto mark ballots that will take the ballot, the paper ballot on the screen and you can push the button and it'll actually fill in the dot on the paper, and then that paper becomes the audit trail as it goes through the scanning device and counts the ballots.

So I'm for those things that are simple. But I do also know that human beings are fallible, and we need to have an audit trail for the machines that might well fail us and the people that might well fail us, and we need the highest accuracy that we can get. I think this bill provides this. And I do think they've got to get it right in Utah. Of all the things I've written for letters and articles, I must have sent one out there some time a long time ago and you guys picked up on that. No. I really want to compliment Utah. You've driven that yourselves for good reason, and I appreciate that, and I appreciate the fact that you have yielded to me, Mr. Garrett, and I'd yield back.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey's yielding.

I just had a lingering question that I wanted to pose to the chairman of the Constitution Caucus, that being the issue that was raised here a half hour or so ago, Madam Speaker, and that is the issue of the electors who are chosen. And I would ask the chairman if he would opine on as to whether the electors are bound to vote as directed by the voters within the State or are they bound to vote according to their own conscience if push comes to shove? And do you know of instances where the electors have actually broken their faith with the voters and voted the opposite way within the States?

And I would concur with the gentleman from New Jersey, Madam Speaker. My recollection, and it is not recent research but dustbin recollection, honestly, of several instances where the electors, when formally casting a ballot for the presidency, have broken their faith with the voters, broken their pledge, and voted the opposite way. Not enough in our history to compel us to make that a mandatory vote, but enough of it in our history to ask us to be vigilant about that particular vulnerability, because that hangs upon the integrity of those who were chosen as electors who formally cast that ballot for President of the United States and could, if there were a small group or, under certain circumstances, even one of them that decided to take the destiny of the country and ultimately the world in their own hands, flip their vote the other way.

This system that we have, though, I appreciate a great deal. I know there has been an initiative more than once that has been offered generally, or, in fact, in all cases that I know of, from the Democrat side of the aisle to turn this Presidential election into a popular ballot as opposed to an electoral ballot. And I for one think that would be a horrible circumstance if we have such great difficulty down to 527 votes in a State like Florida with recount after recount.

And, by the way, history has established clearly that it was a proper result. All of the recounts, including the Miami Herald's audited analysis of that, came to the same conclusion that it was a Bush victory in 2000 over Al Gore.

Still, if we had a popular ballot for the United States, we wouldn't be able to settle the ledger for each State, for example. We would simply have tens of millions of votes all cast into one pot, and you could come down to one vote in the end. And it would be impossible, I believe, to do an audit trail of all of those ballots and come out with a national consensus on a popular vote. And as the President said, if he would have needed to win the popular vote in 2000, he would have campaigned to win the popular vote in 2000. But he campaigned to win the electoral vote because that's the rule that we operate under. And I think the Founding Fathers had a significant amount of wisdom and foresight to give us this electoral system.

No system is perfect, but this system does have a slight vulnerability, and that is the integrity of the electors themselves and then the integrity of the electoral process, which is significantly, I believe, more vulnerable. So that is why I advocate the Utah plan for the States in America and the No Your Vote Counts Act nationally so that we can have a paper audit trail to keep the integrity up so that people can have confidence and stand behind this system so our constitutional Republic will last for another couple of centuries anyway.

If the gentleman would yield, and I know we only have 2 minutes left, in that era, also, it wasn't contemplated that there would be essentially a two-party system that would so polarize the opinions on who should be the next President of the United States. I think the Founders envisioned more flow and flexibility between the two competing philosophies that were there surely and that we have in this day that are more distinct.

If the gentleman would yield, John Quincy Adams has given me a significant amount of comfort the times that I have been in the small minority on the losing side of the votes here on the floor because he said, ``Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone. You can take the sweetest satisfaction in knowing that your vote is never lost.'' John Quincy Adams, a man of principle.

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to be recognized to speak here on the floor of the United States Congress and have the opportunity to address you--while I understand that there are--many of our Members overhear this conversation that we are having and so do the American people. That is the important part about this; it is the people's House and the people need to be heard.

And I would take us back to, Mr. Speaker, the people were heard. They were heard on the immigration issue. They were heard on that issue twice in this year, in this legislative year, Mr. Speaker. And that is, even though we had a great number of immigration hearings before the Immigration Subcommittee here in the House of Representatives, and where I am ranking member on the Immigration Subcommittee we listened to dozens and dozens of witnesses that testified across the breadth of this issue of immigration that has been on the front of the minds of the American people. It has been in the front of our minds for the last about 2 years, and it becomes part of debate in every conversation that has to do with American policy.

Certainly, being a Member of Congress from the State of Iowa where we are the first in the Nation caucus, we have a number of presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, that are in that State much of the time. It is a rare night that the shades aren't closed and there isn't at least one presidential candidate that is spending the night in Iowa after having spent the day and will spend the next day there. In fact, just at the Iowa State game last Saturday, I ran into two presidential candidates just random, not planned, just by the fact of the circumstances. They hear about the immigration issue on a daily basis, wherever they might go across the State of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and beyond. The Presidential candidates are getting an earful from the American people. And the reason is, the American people understand that they are going to have to defend this central pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of law. They rose up to defend it when, I call it, the comprehensive amnesty bill was brought before the Senate this year. We didn't bring a large bill before the House. I don't know if we are actually going to bring one. But twice it was brought before the Senate, and each time the American people rose up and they sent e-mails and they sent faxes and they made phone calls and they stopped in and visited their Senators in their district offices back in their States and also came out here to Washington to go into the Senate offices on the other side of the Capitol dome.

The presence of the American people, the intensity of the message that they delivered to our Senators said, we don't want amnesty. And however you define amnesty, the American people know what it is. And so what I have done is, Mr. Speaker, is I have brought the definition of ``amnesty'' to the floor of the House of Representatives so we can be talking about the same thing, because what I hear from the American people is the same thing that I believe, and I believe this:

The rule of law is sacrosanct and must be protected. We can't suspend the rule of law because it creates an inconvenience for an individual or a family or a class of people.

It is kind of like the Constitution itself in a way. The Constitution defines and protects our rights, and it is a unique document and it is the oldest document of its kind in the world. The oldest continuously functioning, surviving, effective Constitution in the world is ours, ratified in 1789. And that Constitution sets out parameters, guarantees individual rights, establishes the rule of law, determines where those laws are actually passed, here in this Congress or those responsibilities that are left to the States or to the people

And yet when we disagree with the results of a constitutional decision, if the American people decide that we like our Constitution, we revere our Constitution and the parameters that are established in this Constitution, Mr. Speaker, if we want to change it, there are provisions in this Constitution to amend it.

We respect this Constitution as being sacrosanct; that it means what it says, and it means what the text of the Constitution said as understood at the time of ratification. And when we amend this Constitution, it's a pretty high bar, but the provision is in here because we are going to hold that standard and adhere to the language that's here because we understand that that's what holds this civilization and this society together. And if we want to amend it, then we go through the process of amending, and it has been done a number of times. It's a high bar.

But that standard of respect for that profound rule of the Constitution is the same standard that we need to have with respect for the profound viability of the rule of law. When we ignore laws, they're undermined. If we ignored the Constitution, if we simply decided I

don't like the results of the language that's here, I'm going to disregard this Constitution and cast it asunder and operate in a fashion that we see fit, if we do that, the Constitution is systemically destroyed. It would be destroyed by our failure to respect it. It would be destroyed by a Supreme Court that didn't respect the text of the Constitution. It actually has been undermined, in my opinion, by a number of the decisions of the Supreme Court when they didn't respect the text of the Constitution, its original intent and its original understanding.

And if the administration, the Department of Justice, if the people in this Congress, if the people in America don't have respect for the rule of law in the same fashion we must have respect for the Constitution itself, then the disrespect for the rule of law, the ignoring of the law, the failure to enforce the law, the turning a blind eye, the whisper, that's okay, the people that break the law because it's inconvenient to them, all of you, Mr. Speaker, all Americans who ignore the rule of law undermine it, erode it and erode that central pillar of American exceptionalism, the rule of law.

Think of this as a huge pillar that's been established by our founders. Think of building a large office building or a shining city on a hill or a castle. What would you put it on? You'd put it on a foundation. You would drill down to bedrock and you would build your foundation for a shining city on the hill or a castle or a large office building. You would build that foundation down to bedrock. And if you had to hold it together with a central pillar, build it all on the strength of one pillar, it would be a large pillar drilled to bedrock, and that pillar would be the rule of law.

There are other pillars, too, that you'd use to hold up the corners. Our Christian faith, the Judeo-Christian values, our family values, marriage, free enterprise, free enterprise capitalism, property rights, those things all are corner pillars that hold up the outside.

But the central pillar is the rule of law. And the things that we do in this country that disrespect that central pillar of American exceptionalism, the rule of law, erode it like it would erode a concrete or a marble pillar of a bridge, for example.

And all of us that might chip away by disregarding the law, by disrespecting the law, by failing to enforce the law, by turning a blind eye, by allowing entire classes of people to ignore and defy the law, those things become a corrosive agent that erodes that central pillar of American exceptionalism, that rule of law.

That's why it's so important that we adhere to the law. And if we don't like the law, then we need to come, Mr. Speaker, to the floor of this House of Representatives, offer legislation, offer amendments to the legislation, perfect that legislation in a full debate process here, and amend the law. Not ignore it.

And now I'm hearing from the administration that to not pass comprehensive immigration reform, which I refer to as a comprehensive amnesty plan, brings about de facto amnesty, in fact, amnesty, amnesty in reality. That's the language that's coming out of our administration and has been for the last couple of months since the people last rose up and drove another stake in the heart of the comprehensive amnesty plan.

Well, to not pass comprehensive immigration reform does not mean that there has to be a de facto amnesty. First we need to define what amnesty is. I have put this poster out here and this poster defines amnesty.

We've had many debates with the American people on what amnesty actually is. Presidential candidate after presidential candidate, politician after politician, Senator after Senator, Congressman after Congressman will tell you, I'm opposed to amnesty. And they will say that because they know the American people are opposed to amnesty. And in some of their cases they have a strong conviction that they're opposed to amnesty, Mr. Speaker. But that's not in all cases.

But in most cases they want to avoid the criticism of being a proponent for amnesty. And so to do that they say, I'm opposed to amnesty. The thing that they don't do is define amnesty. If you can't get them to define amnesty, then you have a pretty good suspicion that maybe they're not really against amnesty in all of its shapes and forms.

And so I've put up here the definition, after a careful study, of amnesty itself. Amnesty, to grant amnesty, Mr. Speaker, is to pardon immigration law-breakers and reward them with the objective of their crime.

Now, a pardon for immigration law-breakers, and generally an amnesty is a pardon to a class of people, a group of people. Whereas the President might pardon an individual, he has powers to do that, and that happens. Often it happened at the end of Bill Clinton's second term when he pardoned a large number of people for a variety of reasons.

Well, this is a pardon for a class of people. To define that pardon a little bit, class of people, would be the immigration law-breakers. All those people that came to the United States, both illegally, and those who came here legally and overstayed their visas, found themselves unlawfully present in the United States, or misrepresented their status here in the United States, maybe as a lawful immigrant without the right to work in the United States but misrepresented themselves in order to work and earn money. For whatever reason, they have broken immigration law. If they allowed their visa to expire and stayed in the United States, they've broken immigration law. If they came into the United States illegally, if they came here with contraband, if they came here and misrepresented themselves, if they worked when they didn't have a permit to work, if they came on a student visa and took a job, if they came on a visitor's visa and took a job, they've broken immigration law. To give them amnesty is to pardon them, those people who broke our immigration law. And that's really enough for that amnesty definition, but I thought I'd be a little more generous because this defines then what the Senate tried to do, what the majority in this House of Representatives seems to be seeking to do, and that is, not only grant them a pardon, not only grant them amnesty, the people that have broken our immigration laws, but also reward them with the objective of their crime or crimes. Pardon immigration law-breakers, reward them with the objective of their crimes.

Now, I define that that way because some will say, well, reward them with a job. Some came here for a job. All did not. And, in fact, of the 12 million that the government admits are here, about 7 million of them are working. About 5 million of them are not. So it's clear that 42 percent of them who come here, even for a job, are not working. And some are keeping house, some are not in the work force in one fashion or another.

But I want to point out, Mr. Speaker, that we don't get one worker per illegal immigrant, one who comes across that border just for a job. Seven out of 12 are working. Five out of 12 are not. Fifty-eight percent are working, 42 percent are not. That's how it breaks down out of those that come into the United States.

What was their objective? Some was to get a better job, coming here for a better life. Some came in here with illegal drugs on them with the willful intent to smuggle those drugs into the United States, take them to the next level of the distribution chain, sell them, pocket the money. Some came in here illegally, dropped off their contraband and went back to get another load. And that goes on and on and on. Every single day, Mr. Speaker, there are people coming into the United States illegally carrying illegal drugs to the tune of $65 billion a year in illegal drugs coming across our southern border. That's 90 percent of the illegal drugs, $65 billion worth. And I'll perhaps come back to that.

But I wanted to drive this point in, Mr. Speaker. What is amnesty? And when a presidential candidate takes a position and says, I'm opposed to amnesty, I believe, Mr. Speaker, that the public should ask them, do you agree with Steve King's definition of amnesty? If not, what is your definition of amnesty? Do you agree that amnesty is to pardon immigration law-breakers and reward them with the objective of their crime? Or do you have another definition that allows you to grant amnesty and say that it's not amnesty? For example, if you require them to leave the United States and go, touch back to their home country, or go to

their embassy and sign up and then go into the work force, wouldn't you consider that to be amnesty? Do you think that you're waived from the responsibility of declaring it amnesty if you ask someone to pay a fine?

That's the Flake/Gutierrez bill, the bill that we held a hearing on. It will be 2 weeks ago tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, a large hearing on the largest amnesty bill that this Congress has seriously considered. We had witness after witness come forward, and they wanted to testify that this wasn't amnesty in that bill. It wasn't amnesty because it was going to require them to pay a fine. And I think in that bill it's a $2,500 fine.

Well, the going rate for a coyote to bring someone into the United States, and the report that comes back to me is, I'm sure it works cheaper but someplace in that $1,500 to $2,500 category is in the main of the going rate to be illegally brought into the United States and pay a coyote to do so. So the fine they'd ask to pay is equivalent to the freight that you would pay a coyote to bring you in illegally. That's what they would sell citizenship for, a path to citizenship. Not guaranteed. I'll concede that point to the other side. But it's not guaranteed because if you commit a crime, if you get in trouble with the law, if you're not on good behavior, if you don't at least sit through some English classes, then they don't want to give you citizenship.

But those provisions that are written in there are not provisions that are a higher standard that we'd ask of someone who came into the United States legally, someone who came here with a visa, someone who acquired a legal green card, someone who, in that 5-year program, could find themselves taking the oath of citizenship.

Another one of the allegations that's made is, well, if you're against this comprehensive immigration reform, they don't dare call it amnesty, and they wouldn't call someone who is here illegally a criminal, or they would not call them an illegal immigrant or an illegal alien. All of those terms, however accurate they are, are anathema to the people who want to pass their comprehensive immigration reform, which is comprehensive amnesty.

No, Mr. Speaker, they won't use those terms. They say undocumented immigrant who simply is here looking for a better life. True for some of them, Mr. Speaker, but certainly not true for all of them.

So we face the systemic devolution of the rule of law here in the United States, the rule of law that's founded upon this Constitution, that's written in the U.S. Code, and something that is established there as a majority of the House of Representatives and a majority of the Senate, and then signed by the President of the United States, and then the American people shut down the switchboards in the United States Senate because they oppose amnesty.

The American people, Mr. Speaker, are with me on this definition of amnesty, to pardon immigration law-breakers and reward them with the objective of their crime.

And so today, we're involved in a political dynamic, and the political dynamic is this, that the people over on the majority side of the aisle, for the most part, see a political leverage gain if they can grant amnesty to the 12 to 20 or more million people that are in these United States illegally.

The people on the other side of the aisle, some of them, see an economic advantage and maybe a political advantage working with those who have gained an economic advantage by hiring the cheap labor. And so they say, this economy will collapse if we don't have the cheap labor that comes from, they will say, immigration, immigration, immigration.

When I ask them to define the difference between legal and illegal immigration they have a little trouble there, too, Mr. Speaker, because they have constantly, for the last 2 to 3 and more years, sought to blur the distinctions between legal and illegal.

And they will say that those of us that want to secure our borders and re-establish the rule of law and end automatic citizenship for babies that happen to be born to illegal mothers on U.S. soil, they will accuse us of all being against legal immigration.

But truthfully, those who undermine the rule of law, those who are for the open borders have brought about this debate that has tried to blur the two together, and because they are blurred together, we can't get at the real subject matter of how to establish a good, sound legal immigration policy because of 12 to 20 million illegals in the country. It's kind of like when you apply for a college education and there are only so many desks available in the classrooms, only so many slots available. Let's just say 20 million slots for immigration are filled up by people that broke American law to get here. That's 20 million slots that we can't give out of this Congress to somebody that respects our law. And that is not just a policy of American immigration that should be set by Congress, and the Constitution defines immigration as a responsibility for Congress to set. It's not just that. And it's not just that the people of America are denied the opportunity to establish immigration policy, because they are. But it's that 12 to 20 million or more people who have elected to break American laws are now sitting in those desks, taking up those slots, filling up the available space that we might have to bring a legal immigration policy.

So this immigration policy is out of our control. It is out of control here on the floor of the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. It is out of control in the United States Senate. It's not within the control of the President of the United States or administration. It's out of our control. It's out of the control, out of the hands of the people of America. They shut down amnesty in the Senate by shutting down the phones, but another reason it is out of control is because people from other countries have broken our laws and have come here and every one that did so took away a piece of our ability to set our own policy here on the floor of the United States Congress.

So I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that the people I know, the people that align themselves with me, those who will stand up and speak for border enforcement and the rule of law and shutting off illegal immigration coming into this country, are not opposed to immigration. I don't know anyone that is opposed to legal immigration, smart immigration, and one day I will put this up on a poster too, Mr. Speaker, but an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. That's the policy that we have a responsibility to deliver to the American people. And we do not have a policy to a foreign country that reflects a responsibility to them to relieve the poverty, the pain, the suffering that goes on in other countries in the world. We can reach out with some of our compassion, but we simply do not have an obligation to absorb the poverty in the world. In fact, we don't have the ability to do that.

What we do know is that this lifeboat, America, this wonderful Nation that God has gifted us with the responsibility to do the best we can within the parameters of the Declaration, the Constitution, the rule of law and those pillars that I mentioned, all of those things, we have a responsibility to preserve and protect this American way of life.

Think of America as a huge lifeboat. This lifeboat has got to have a captain. It has got to have a course chartered. It has to be steered. There have to be people pulling on the oars. And there have to be people that are unfurling the sails and swabbing the decks and down in the engine room and making this entire lifeboat of ours function and function properly. And if we go sailing off on a zig-zag course or drift with the winds up onto the shoals, eventually we will have so many passengers aboard this lifeboat that we will sink the lifeboat. At some point we can't function. The engine room doesn't work. We can't chart our course any longer because the load of humanity has gotten so great, and the process of training them and bringing them on board with our crew has gotten so far behind that we can't get it up to speed.

How many can we bring into America and still function? How many can we bring into America and maintain this overall greater American culture that we are?

The thing that binds us all together, this common sense of history, common sense of struggle, common sense of destiny, a common language. The language that binds us all together that

happens to be the most powerful unifying force known throughout history, throughout all mankind, is a common language. We start breaking that apart, and we find out that there are something like 37.5 million immigrants here in the United States, the largest number ever to be here, and in the highest percentages they speak foreign languages in their households. The American culture is being undermined and diminished, Mr. Speaker, by the illegal immigration that comes in.

And the legal immigration that we have, it's our job to set the valve down on that to allow an appropriate amount of legal immigration so that those that arrive here can do a number of things. The most important is that they assimilate into this civilization, into this American culture. That means they have to adapt to this broader American culture. It doesn't mean that you have to give up all of the culture of the foreign country. Those things that come from those countries that we adapt into this society, we would want to pick and choose the ones that are good. All things that come from other cultures are not good. There is a reason why people leave the countries that they leave. There is a reason why they come here.

I would like to say, Mr. Speaker, that this America is not just a giant ATM. It's not just some big machine that anyone can sneak across the border and punch that ATM and get some cash to come spitting out of it. This country is more than a cash transaction. This country is more than cheap labor for big business. This country is more than opening up our borders so that you can gain a political margin that's here and advance this cause of socialism on the left side and advance the cause of capitalism on the right side.

If you give either side the destination of their argument, if you give unlimited political power to those folks on the liberal side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, and if you give unlimited economic advantage to the employers of cheap labor on not just the right side of the aisle, but I am finding out more and more on both sides of the aisle even more equally, turn those two forces loose with this policy on immigration, then big business will say ``I want more cheap labor'' and big politics will say ``I want more political power.''

So they bring in 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million more and pour those into the equation, and business comes out with their cheap labor and left-wing politics comes out with their political power. But what happens to the middle, Mr. Speaker? What happens to the American people? What happens to blue-collar America? What happens to the union worker who has trained, has skills, and has organized his ability to be able to collectively bargain and sell his skills as a unit with his other union members? How difficult is it to sell your skills as a unit and collectively bargain when you're watching 11,000 people a night pour across our southern border that come in that are low skilled or unskilled? How difficult is it to market yourself as a labor unit, a blue-collar labor unit, into an economy that is bringing more people in that will work cheaper than you want to work? How difficult is it to strike a labor agreement in a factory when there are tens of thousands, in fact, maybe even tens of millions of people outside that factory that will take those jobs at a cut rate from what you are getting today? How do you negotiate for a raise if there are thousands of people sitting outside the gates of your plant and those thousands of people are saying, I know, you're making $22 an hour and you're having trouble making ends meet with taxes as high as they are and having to make your copayment on your health insurance and on your retirement plan?

I know that $22 an hour squeezes you down a little tight and you would like to get a raise, maybe 5 percent, 6 percent raise. You are willing to turn up a little more production, add a little more professionalism, to be able to work better with management to produce a product that is going to be more competitive. That is how things work between management and labor when it's working right. But what kind of leverage do you think you have, blue-collar America, when there are tens of thousands of people outside the gates of the factory that say, $22 an hour? I will work for $10 an hour. I will work for $9. I will work for $8. And if you give them their $10-an-hour job, they will go to work for that, of course, and they won't press for a raise. And if you bring in another 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 million people, that $10-an-hour job is being pressured by the people who want to work for $5 or $6 an hour.

You have to understand that labor is a commodity. It is a commodity like corn or beans or gold or oil. The value of labor is determined by supply and demand in the marketplace. Labor is a commodity. That's why labor unions throughout history have always wanted to see a tight labor market so that they can negotiate for a good return on the labor. And business can operate in that kind of environment, too, because they want a high level of professionalism. They want job safety. They want skilled employees, people that are proud of what they do, people that can come in as a unit. And that is the bargaining power that is there.

Now, I want to emphasize also that I support merit shop employees. You don't have to be organized to market your skills. If you have a skill and you bring that flexibility to the job and the employer looks at that and determines, here is someone that doesn't come out of a labor shop or a labor union but I can use him in four, five, or six different areas here and he is flexible enough that he can jump from machine to machine for me on the factory floor or out on the construction job. Someone that you want to make sure that you can provide health insurance for them as an employer and retirement benefits for them and vacation benefits for them. Those things all come because labor has value, and it is the hardest commodity to deal with if you're in business. The rest becomes fairly predictable, and that is what business wants also is predictability. But labor today, the blue- collar labor today, organized labor today, confounds my sense of rationale. And I would think that if you are a rank-and-file labor member that your rationale would be confounded too, because the people who do the negotiations for the unions in America should be pressing for a tight labor market and a higher wage and a higher benefit and better retirement plan and vacation time. That has got to be the push. And the trade-off is more skills, more training, more efficiency, more professionalism, let me say the symbiotic relationship between labor and management.

But what is happening is the leaderships within the union are going the other way. I think the union bosses have written off the rank-and- file union members. I think they have forgotten about the tight labor supply. I think they have decided that they will not have the political power here in America if they stake their future on smaller numbers of workers. So they must have made one of those calculuses back in the smoke-filled room that decided, let's just write off this group of people and let's bring in as many as we can. Let's go for an open borders policy. Let's adopt the people that are today illegal into our side of this argument, and if we can get them legalized, we can get them to vote and we will get political power, and eventually we will get what we want with higher wages and better benefits for our workers, which, by the way, translates into more power, more cash for union bosses.

Mr. Speaker, if we have blue-collar rank-and-file people out there, I do believe that they ought to take a very good look at the rationale behind the leadership within the unions that are filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, because they are enforcing current immigration law, and they would go to court to get an injunction to stop just sending the no-match Social Security letters and asking them to take action to clean up the no-match Social Security numbers in America, whether or not there is a legal argument. And, Mr. Speaker, I don't believe there is a legal argument. I believe from the legal perspective it is a specious argument, but in any case, it is not a moral position that they have taken. It is not a moral position to say you shall not enforce the law and I'm going to go to the court with my ACLU and AFL-CIO lawyers and we're going to ball up this system and prove to you that we can shut down government enforcement of the laws. That, Mr. Speaker, is an active and willful assault on the central pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of law.

That's taking a concrete stone and a concrete saw and cutting notches into that pillar of American exceptionalism, the rule of law, which eventually will topple the rule of law. Where do you get a job then, Mr. Speaker? Where does business do their business then? What is the future for the rest of the world if the American civilization capitulates to those kind of assaults? These are some of the things that are on my mind, Mr. Speaker, as I read the news and watch the things that are happening and engage in the debate in the Judiciary Committee, where we've had some hearings now on the massive amnesty plan called Flake-Gutierrez.

When I hear the constant statements being made that the U.S. economy would collapse if we didn't have the people that are doing the work in this country that are defined by them as ``undocumented,'' and those that I will call illegals, to address that subject matter, Mr. Speaker, first the American people need to understand that we are not hostage to any threat of running out of cheap labor in America. As I've read through history, I've yet to identify a single sovereign state throughout history that ever failed because of too low a supply, not enough cheap labor.

But in America today, you will see that the unemployment rates are the highest in the skills that are the lowest. That tells you that those jobs are being taken by people who have come across the border illegally or overstayed their visa, illegal aliens taking low-skilled jobs, many of them are illiterate in their own language and uneducated in their own language, and so they will take the lowest of skilled jobs because, whatever it is, it's better than where they came from. And unskilled Americans are missing out.

Now, we have something like a 13 percent high school dropout rate that would reflect my area, the region of the country that I'm in. The numbers go higher in different parts of the country. The numbers go up to 30 percent and more in inner cities. What's there for opportunities, Mr. Speaker, for those low-skilled Americans, American born or naturalized American citizens who are low skilled? What is there for them when the highest unemployment are in the lowest skilled jobs?

And so the question is, can we accept at face value the statement that an American economy can't function without the illegal labor that's here, without undocumented workers, to use their vernacular, Mr. Speaker? And I will argue that the American economy would function better if it had 100 percent legal workers that are here. Some immigrants, many naturalized, many naturally born American citizens, all of that put together, legal people in America working, are going to make this economy function better than opening up our borders for tens of millions of people who come in here without skills, without language, without the first indicators that they will be able to assimilate.

Here are some of the statistics that tell us why: We have 300 million people in America. That's a lot more than I thought we would have at this stage in my life. The administration won't answer the question of how many are too many; what do you think the population of America should be by the year 2050, or 2100 for that matter?

Three hundred million people in America, about 142 million people that are in the workforce. Now, if you look at that and you realize that those that are working in America, that are working unlawfully here, are about 6.9 million and, in fact, the testimony on the Flake- Gutierrez bill of the Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago, they said 7 million. So we're in there real close. We don't disagree. But let's just say my number, 6.9 million, I think they rounded their number up, 6.9 million working illegals in America. Well, that's a lot of folks. That's twice the population of the State of Iowa, for example. But as a percentage of the workforce, it amounts to about 4.7 percent of the overall workforce. And so 6.9 million people working, and that's out of their number of about 12 million altogether, and you can extrapolate that up to the 20 million or more that I think it is, but 6.9 million people working representing 4.7 percent of the workforce. But here's the catch, Mr. Speaker. They're doing 2.2 percent of the work. And they're working awfully hard to do that. I don't diminish the effort and the work ethic that's there. But we measure our gross domestic product by the overall production of the individuals that we have. Highly skilled, highly trained professional individuals command a high price, Mr. Speaker. The reason they do is because they're worth a lot, and they're worth a lot more. I have to pay a lawyer more than I get paid most of the time. We pay doctors more than we pay carpenters. We pay carpenters sometimes more than we pay taxi drivers. The list goes on because the value of the skills are also established in this society by supply and demand in the marketplace. That's the spectrum of the commodity that I defined as labor a little bit earlier, Mr. Speaker.

So 6.9 million illegals working out of the workforce here of 142 million, representing 4.7 percent of the workforce, producing 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product. Now, we're not going to pull the plug on that overnight. That's another one of those red herrings that get drug across the path of this debate. I don't know anyone who says we're going to go out here and in a single day round up 12 or 20 million people and put them on some transportation units and take them back where they came from. In fact, the Representative from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison) in the Judiciary Committee asked this question of a witness, how many trains and boats and planes would it take to send them all back? I quite enjoyed the answer of the witness who said, Well, they got here somehow. They can get back somehow. They can take their own transportation and go back for the most part.

It's not the question of whether we're going to round everybody up and deport them. No one that is debating this policy is advocating that we actually do that. But let me just say, suppose, Mr. Speaker, suppose a magic wand were waved and the fairy dust came and sprinkled across all 50 States in America, and the sun went down, and tomorrow morning when it came up everyone who was here in this country illegally woke up in their home country magically, without angst, without trauma. Just suppose hypothetically everyone woke up tomorrow morning in a country that they were lawfully present, where they could lawfully work and lawfully contribute to the society and reform the countries that need it, we would be out, well, the 12 to 20 million people that are here today. The workforce, though, the point that is being argued, there would be 6.9 million jobs out there tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock, if everybody is going to clock in at the same time, 6.9 million jobs. Let's just say all those people worked on the same shift, 8 to 5, with an hour off for lunch, and they're all gone, and they represented 2.2 percent of your production and you had a factory that had a delivery deadline that said you're going to have to get your quota out that door and loaded on trucks and gone, and that day between 8 and 5, you've got to produce your daily quota. You get the notice at 7:30 in the morning that the fairy dust has been sprinkled and you're going to be missing 2.2 percent of your production that day. Well, as a CEO, that isn't a very tough question. If we're all a factory here, if I were the CEO, I would put out a memo, and it would take me about 5 minutes to figure out what to do, and that would be a memo that went out to everyone. When they punched in that day, there would be a little notice above the time clock: Punch in, you're coming to work at 8 o'clock, and your 15- minute coffee break, I'm sorry for this inconvenience, has to be ratcheted back to 9\1/2\ minutes this morning. It's got to be ratcheted back to 9\1/2\ minutes this afternoon because we've got 11 minutes of our 8-hour day here that will be lost in our production because 2.2 percent of the production didn't show up for work today. That's the magnitude on the American economy that we're dependent upon right now. The magnitude of 11 minutes out of an 8-hour day is the production that's being done by illegal work in America. Now, would anybody actually argue that we couldn't get by with 7 hours and 49 minutes of production instead of a full 8 hours of production?

There are a lot of other ways to solve the problem or skin the cat. You can shorten the lunch hour by 11 minutes. You could work 11 minutes past 5

o'clock. You could do any combination of those things. You could skip a coffee break and actually pick up production that day. It's not the equivalent even of one single coffee break on an 8-hour day if we did all of the American GDP in one-third of our 24 hours. But, of course, we know it's spread across all 24 hours and 24/7. That's the reality of it.

So 6.9 million people out of a workforce of 142 million, representing 4.7 percent of the workforce, doing 2.2 percent of work, representing 11 minutes out of an 8-hour day, and you could divide that by three if you wanted to spread it around. So it would be 3\2/3\ minutes, 3 minutes and 40 seconds out of each 8-hour shift, if you wanted to take it down that way, Mr. Speaker. Hardly something that this country can't adjust to or couldn't deal with, even if it were abrupt, let alone something that will only be incremental in its scope.

This is a red herring that has been drug across the path by the people on the other side. They have their reasons and their motivations, but a rational approach to an economic situation in America isn't something that they bring to the table, Mr. Speaker.

As a matter of fairness, I would also make the point that there are significant industries in this country that have become ever more dependent on illegal labor. That exists in the packing plant industry. It exists in the agriculture industry. It exists where there is a requirement for very low skills or trainable skills, and people that aren't required to have language skills often fit into that category as well.

But the lower skilled environments that have become more dependent upon illegal labor have done so incrementally. It's been an evolutionary process. In speaking, Mr. Speaker, to the organized blue collar workers in America, in some cases management has come in and broken the union and replaced the union with illegal labor, or let's say a mix of illegal labor. And as this flow began, the recruitment in foreign countries also opened up. While that was going on, the Federal Government was turning a blind eye to enforcement of immigration. And the people living in the communities didn't actually see it in its broader magnitude. And the resentment came a little bit at a time and the realization came a little bit at a time.

I have spoken at significant length here, Mr. Speaker, about the responsibility of what happens when foreign countries set our immigration policy, when illegal immigrants from foreign countries come in here and take a slot that a legal immigrant could have, that takes away our ability to set an immigration policy.

But the largest responsibility has been and the first blame has been on the administration's lack of enforcement. This takes us back to 1986, to that amnesty bill that at least President Reagan had enough frank intuition to declare it an amnesty bill. The distinctions between the 1986 bill and the legislation that's before this Congress today and the Senate this week are really not significant in their scope. Amnesty in '86 is amnesty today.

But when the '86 bill was passed, it was billed as an amnesty to end all amnesties, Mr. Speaker. And I, sitting out there in the countryside, running a construction company, struggling through the farm crisis, absorbed the statements that were made here on the floor of Congress by the leadership here in Congress, by the President of the United States when the '86 amnesty bill was passed. I knew that I had to collect I-9s from job applicants, and I had to take a good look at their driver's license and their other documentation and make sure that it was a credible representation of who they were. I did so diligently. Those I-9s are still in my files and they're covered with dust. Nobody ever came and checked on that. They probably didn't need to check a little construction company, but they needed to check some large companies. They needed to have a presence out there that they were enforcing immigration law. And from 1986, the great threat that the Federal Government would be out there aggressively enforcing that new immigration law that was an amnesty to end all amnesties was a huge threat, a cloud that hung over all of us. We wanted to make sure that we dotted the I's and crossed the T's. And we lived in fear that the Federal government would shut us down, fine us or imprison us for not following Federal law. That was 1986.

But every month that went by, the threat diminished because the enforcement didn't materialize to the extent that we anticipated at least. And every year that went by, the enforcement got less. And as we went through the Reagan years, it diminished. And as we went through the first Bush presidency, it diminished. And as it went through the Clinton presidency, I was full of frustration because I was honoring immigration law, and I was competing against my competitors who sometimes did not honor immigration law. And I had two choices: I could adhere to the law and hope for enforcement when that competition had cheaper labor because they violated the law. I could do that, or I could throw up my hands and say, Well, if he can do it, I can do it. Well, I was raised in a family that revered that central pillar of American exceptionalism, the rule of law, and respected it. I still revere it and respect it, even more so today, Mr. Speaker. So that option of ``if you can't lick 'em, join them'' wasn't an option for me because the rule of law and respect for it prevented me from going down that path.

Today, we have watched the enforcement decline incrementally. I went through the Reagan administration from 1986 until the completion of Ronald Reagan's term. George Bush, the first President Bush, his lack of enforcement diminished it. The Reagan years, by comparison, were pretty good. The first President Bush diminished from there.

When Bill Clinton came to office, I began to really watch closely the lack of enforcement in the Clinton administration. I was full of frustration, as a construction company owner, that I was competing against that lack of enforcement. Yet when I look back at the statistics of the companies that were sanctioned during the Clinton administration, I see that, on the graph, it continued its decline of enforcement through these years that we are in today with a little uptick in the last year. I am not yet convinced that that uptick in enforcement from this administration is an uptick that comes from conviction on the rule of law or whether it is an uptick in increase and enforcement of immigration law to send a message to us that there will be enforcement if you just give us the comprehensive amnesty plan that we have asked for. You can choose your opinion on that, Mr. Speaker. I choose not to come down on either side of that argument for the sake of this discussion here.

I will say that this country has not been well served over the last 20 years due to lack of enforcement of immigration law. The country has been flooded with people that came in here illegally because we haven't enforced our laws and part of the things that came with that. Now, I will make the point, and it is a point that the opponents would continually make. I will make the point that most who come here do break the law to come here. But their goal is to provide for their family. At some point you make that decision, however hard the decision is, to provide for your family. But all who come here are not coming here to provide for their family. All who come here are not coming here with the goal of getting a job and finding a better way and finding a path through legalization and then bringing the rest of their family members here. That all happens. I admire the family network. I admire the faith network. I admire the work ethic that is within a significant majority of those who come here both legally and illegally. But I have a charge. I have a responsibility. I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. The complication of that oath is that I uphold the rule of law, as well. So I look into the statistical data that tells us what happens when we don't enforce the rule of law.

I listened to the immigration hearings over the last 5 years of constant immigration hearings, not every week, but sometimes multiple times a week, averaging every week at least, Mr. Speaker. The testimony constantly came. We are losing 250, 300 and then on up to 450 and more people who died in the desert in an effort to come into the United States. That is sad. It is

tragic. I have seen the pictures. It is a hard thing to look at. But I began to think, Mr. Speaker, about that other responsibility, that responsibility that we all here in the Chamber have to the American people, the responsibility that is part of our oath to uphold the Constitution. The implication is we uphold also the rule of law.

So I began to ask the witnesses that were testifying as to the loss of life in the Arizona desert. But what has happened to the people that did make it into the United States? What has happened to the American citizens who fell victim to the hand of some of those who came in here that are criminals, recognizing that $65 billion worth of illegal drugs pours across our southern border every year? That is all a crime.

By the way, for the point of record, Mr. Speaker, anyone who alleges that it is not a crime to illegally enter the United States is wrong, that it is a criminal misdemeanor to cross the United States border in violation of U.S. law. So sneaking across the border in the middle of the night makes that person a criminal. One of the Presidential candidates said otherwise. He might be a district attorney or prosecuting attorney. Federal law says it is a criminal misdemeanor to enter the United States illegally. So those who do so, and among them are those who are smuggling in illegal drugs, among them are those who are trafficking in illegal humanity, among them are those who are trafficking in prostitution and victimizing small girls and children. In this huge human wave, we have contraband. We have criminals. They commit crimes here in the United States.

So, one of the questions is, what would happen to the drug distribution chain if the fairy dust were sprinkled across America and tomorrow morning everyone woke up legally? It would shut town the distribution of illegal drugs in America if magically tomorrow morning everyone woke up in a country that they were lawfully present in. It would shut it down literally, virtually, any way you want to describe it, Mr. Speaker, because the links in the chain of the distribution that start in places like Colombia, China, Mexico, 90 percent of the illegal drugs coming across our southern border, those links in the chain are links that are built within the stream of humanity which is the illegal humanity that is here in this country today. That is the path of their fellow travelers, however good their virtues are, however high their ideals of providing for their family, getting a job and creating a home, they still also provide a conduit within a culture that is the distribution of illegal drugs.

With those illegal drugs comes the massive damage to human potential, especially to our young people in America. Yes, we have a responsibility here to shut down that demand. That is ours. We need to take that on. I can't look the Mexican Government in the eye and say, ``You need to help us shut down the illegal drugs in America and that will solve the problem.'' It will not. We need to shut down the demand in America. That is an American problem. It is a problem that causes problems in Mexico as well. That is a different subject, Mr. Speaker, and I will take that up perhaps another time. But this conduit for illegal drugs is a conduit that flows within illegal populations in America, and there are links to every distribution chain in America that go through that illegal population. So, that is one thing that would happen.

Another thing that would happen is there is a high crime rate, a higher crime rate in all the donor countries that send us people across at least our southern border and probably all of our borders, a higher crime rate than we have here in America. For example, violent death in America, 4.28 per 100,000 people. That is a statistic. Mexico, 13.2 per 100,000. That is three times the violent death rate in Mexico to that of the United States. So one could presume that out of every 100,000 people you would bring in, you would have three times more murderers than you would have within a typical population of the United States. That is not, when you look at the broader scheme, Mr. Speaker, as surprising or shocking as when you realize that Mexico has a lower crime rate than most, I will say, all of its neighbors with the exception of the United States, and most of the countries that are south of Mexico have a higher crime rate.

For example, the violent death rate in Honduras is nine times that of the United States. El Salvador can't find any statistics on. I can tell you in Colombia the rate is 63 violent deaths per 100,000. It works out to be 15.4 times more violent deaths per 100,000 than there are in the United States. Out of there comes a lot of cocaine, drug network, and drug trafficking.

My point is, Mr. Speaker, that American people die at the hands of criminal aliens here in the United States at a rate that we can't quantify nor comprehend at this point. I have a responsibility to protect the American people. This immigration policy that we have here in America, Mr. Speaker, is not a policy to accommodate any country in the world. It is a policy designed to enhance the economic, social and cultural well-being of the United States of America.

Every immigration policy for every sovereign state in the world should be established with the interests of that sovereign state, whether it would be Mexico, the United States, Holland, Norway, Russia, you name it. Every sovereign state needs to set an immigration policy that strengthens them. I support that we first seal the border, build a fence, build a wall, shut off automatic citizenship to babies that are born here to illegal mothers, workplace enforcement, pass the New Idea Act, end Federal deductibility for wages and benefits that are paid to illegals, and shut down that jobs magnet. I support all of that. Force all traffic, both human, contraband and legal cargo through our ports of entry on our southern border. Beef them up. Add more science. Make sure that we are effective in the job that we do on our border. I support all of that. By doing so, we have shut down the jobs magnet and we have shut off the illegal traffic coming into the United States. We have really made it difficult to bring illegal drugs into the United States at the same time.

We do all of that, Mr. Speaker, and then what we get out of that other side is, now, we have cleared the field so we can establish a rational immigration policy for legal people, legal entrance into the United States, and we can score them according to their ability to contribute to this economy. We can put out a matrix, a point system, that says, especially if you are young you have a lot of time to contribute to the economy, if you have a high education, you are going to make a higher wage and you are going to pay more taxes and you are going to be able to fund your own retirement and that of a bunch of other people while you are here. We can score this system up so we can have an immigration policy that does enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of the United States.

But what we cannot do, Mr. Speaker, is we can't grant amnesty. We can't pardon immigration lawbreakers. We can't reward them with the objective of their crimes. If we do that, we ultimately destroy the central pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of law. If that happens, there is no foundation to build a greater America. There is no foundation upon which we can lift this country up to a greater destiny. There is only the devolution of a civilization that is great today, maybe was greater yesterday, and that would lose its opportunity to be greater tomorrow.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 26 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 10 a.m.