Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for yielding, and for his leadership and his hard and diligent work in committee.

I also compliment the chairman from Minnesota who has a gracious approach to this and generally a reasonable approach to this issue. But this Davis-Bacon issue is something where I meet a philosophical divide. I don't know if there is another Member of this Congress who has live lived under Davis-Bacon, earned Davis-Bacon wages and paid Davis-Bacon wages, but I can tell you I am one who has done both. And it goes back through 28 years of the construction business; 1,400 and some consecutive weeks of tracking wages and paying the thing called ``prevailing wage'' and knowing prevailing wage is not prevailing wage. It is always union scale. And the reason for that is because no one reports the prevailing wage for fear they will be organized to be become a union and they will have to pay a union scale.

I have difficulty with this because I hire my people year round. We make sure that they get a good living wage for the full year. We provide health insurance. We provide retirement benefits. And when you pay people a union scale, then you can only plug them on a machine for the hours of running that machine. You can't afford to have them grease it or haul it or fix it.

So I know employers that will work 16 hours a day in order to keep the machines supported so their union scale man can climb in the seat of it. This is a distortion of the free enterprise system.

I will argue also that this bill has an earmark in it, and this earmark is the mark called Davis-Bacon wages. Now, earmarks go back to when a pig is born you notch his ear so you can track his genetics through the marketing system. Well, this is an earmark into the first generation of money that goes into the revolving fund. Then once that money is in there, it comes back around again and again with a Davis- Bacon earmark in it, and I know Midwesterners really appreciate this argument, but the next generation of pigs, you at least got to earmark him when he is born.

This one automatically earmarks every generation of money that rolls through this revolving fund now until the end of perpetuity, and that, Madam Chairman, is a bridge too far. We are not just labeling this Davis-Bacon wage scale. It is Davis-Bacon wage scale in perpetuity.

I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for working so well together on this amendment.

Madam Chairman, really all this amendment does is it just stops the expansion of the Davis-Bacon, and it says we are not going to move this Davis-Bacon into a revolving fund. That is what the language that is in the underlying bill does, and this amendment simply strikes out the insertion that applies Davis-Bacon.

So what does that really mean is a question that Members need to evaluate when they are thinking about what kinds of services and what kind of work can we get done out there across America. I understand the intensity of the Louisianans here today. They have a lot at stake. That is why we brought this legislation.

In the $14 billion cumulative total that is part of this overall bill, I know, from hands-on experience being a contractor who has bid projects both ways, Davis-Bacon and merit shop, and my average number is a 20 percent increase; there are numbers out there higher and lower, but 20 percent, this bill wastes at least $2.8 billion. That could be projects. That could be projects that are going to help the people in this country.

That money is at least wasted, but then it goes into the revolving fund, and it pollutes the rest of those dollars that are in there. So if I do the calculation on this, we come up with a number, it will be about $280 billion over time; 20 percent of that is $56 billion. So we are not putting just $2.8 billion here into the waste bin; we are putting $56 billion perhaps into the waste bin, Madam Chair, and it keeps us from being able to get these taxpayers' resources into projects that can really help people, especially the people that so desperately need them.

I will tell you from my experience as a contractor who has worked and bid Davis-Bacon projects, I have gone into communities to bid these types of projects and had to do the bid according to the costs that are inflated into them, and had the community look at the overall bid, low bid. And I have been low bid, have had them reject my bid because it was too high; they couldn't afford it. They would pull the bid back, repackage the package without Davis-Bacon, and I could come in there cheaper, as did my competition, the community went without Federal dollars, as this inflated too much.

These communities went without Federal dollars because it was too expensive to use the Federal funding. That ought to tell us something. As they went back and they funded it out, they bonded it out themselves. They pulled it out of taxes. Sometimes they go back and raise private dollars because of the overall inflation that is imposed by this kind of policy. This is the one that goes in perpetuity.

You mark this revolving fund with this bill. And it isn't just these dollars, it is every single dollar that touches it from this day forward on into the future of the United States until some time comes that this Congress gets a grip, gets a hold of itself and decides we can't afford to be putting this on.

I would add also that as you have an employer and an employee, they agree what to work on. I listen to the gentleman, Mr. George Miller, say it will keep them from making enough money to pay their health care. No, it is the other way around. It keeps us from hiring employees in year-round jobs where we provide, as the employer, the health care and retirement benefits because we can only afford to use them under these scales just for the job they have. It is inflationary. It is inefficient.

I would ask for a ``yes'' vote on the Baker-King amendment.

Madam Speaker, we have had I think a very eventful week here this week and accomplished a significant amount and had some intense debates here on the floor of this Congress. In my time here and in anybody's memory here, I don't think anyone remembers a time that there have been three motions to recommit that have actually succeeded and attached that new policy on to the bill that was prepared for final passage here on the floor. That makes it an eventful week.

Madam Speaker, I reflect here that at the beginning of the 110th Congress there were a lot of objections to a scoreboard vote board that was kept open when Republicans were in charge for the sake of being able to allow people to change their votes until everyone was satisfied. There were strong and loud and vociferous complaints to keeping that board open when it was the Republicans in charge.

I am not here to make a loud, vociferous objection to the Democrats keeping the board open, but I am here to point out that the shoe is on the other foot today, and today this motion to recommit went up on the board, and it had 147 Democrats that voted ``no'' on the motion to recommit.

The motion to recommit, what it did was said that no individual who has been issued a transportation worker identification card may board a maritime vessel if the individual has been convicted of or found not guilty by reason of insanity in a civilian or military jurisdiction of any of the following felonies. In other words, nobody is going to be boarding a maritime vessel if they are guilty of these crimes: espionage or conspiracy, sedition or conspiracy to commit sedition, treason,

and a number of other crimes along through the list one can imagine, distribution, manufacture, purchase receipt, dealing with explosives. In other words, terrorists, people who have been identified as terrorists, convicted as terrorists. The motion to recommit said no one will be boarding a maritime vessel that has those things on their record.

Upon the first vote that was up there, the peak came out to be 247 Democrats voting against a motion that would block those who have committed those violent crimes, those crimes against this country. Then the board was left open, and as minutes went by, and I didn't watch my watch, but I am going to suspect it was 20 to 25 minutes, I watched Democrats vote their convictions and then began to adjust to their convictions, and 111 Members changed their vote here, getting down from 147 that voted ``no'' to 56 that voted ``no,'' and final passage became 359 to 56 on the passage of the motion to recommit.

So I point out that sometimes that criticism that comes when you are in the minority doesn't seem like when the shoe is on the other foot that the rules you claim should apply are the ones that actually apply when you find yourself in a position of making the rules.

I would point also out that the circumstance before the Rules Committee, since that word came out of my mouth, Madam Speaker, and in the Rules Committee, we brought rules before, there were rules that were brought before this full Congress and approved for the 110th Congress. This was going to be a 110th Congress with a new majority and a new Speaker and there was going to be sunshine on everything we did. There was going to be a level of integrity in the process that was here. There were great objections to the process we had, and there was going to be a change, a new era in government, which means more openness, more honesty, more reporting.

But written into the rule was an exemption for the Rules Committee, so they are not required to report the recorded votes within the Rules Committee.

Now, how is it that here we are a more open government, but we are writing in provisions that allow for more secrecy? And that is the fact, Madam Speaker. That is the fact that came before this Congress. That is the fact that many of us voted against on the rules package. That is the amendment that I brought before the Rules Committee a couple of days ago.

What is ironic about that is that I have to go and appeal to the same people that want the secrecy and ask them if they will let me have a vote here on the floor about taking away the secrecy they have assigned themselves. Of course, the people that sat in judgment, that assigned themselves the secrecy, said, no, we won't allow a debate on it; we won't allow a vote on it. We are going to maintain the secrecy. And, by the way, it was offensive to them to have anyone raise the issue that they should be required to report the votes of the Rules Committee when there is a recorded vote.

So that amendment was denied. The American people were denied a debate. They were denied a vote and denied an opportunity to even judge whether this is a more open process or whether it has become a more closed process.

But I think these two instances that I brought up just this week, Madam Speaker, illustrate that the process is not more open, it is not cleaner, it is not with more sunshine on it, and it is not more reflective of the representation here in this Congress. There are other instances as well as I could go on, but I think that suffices to make my point.

Madam Speaker, I came here to talk about another issue that has been rolled out in the media yesterday and today, this issue of the supplemental appropriations bill that the President has asked for in order to fund our troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

The President has made a request so that we can provide adequate materials, supplies, training and equipment and munitions to our military that are on the front lines who put their lives on the line for our freedom. I am pledged to uphold that support for them. But what I see come out, at least with the report of the news with regard to the supplemental, has so many strings attached. This is an unprecedented attempt on the part of Congress to micromanage a shooting war.

Our Founding Fathers understood this, and they declared in the Constitution that the President is the Commander in Chief. They didn't write in the Constitution that the President will be presiding over a committee of 435 Members of Congress on the House side and 100 Senators on the Senate side and they shall be a committee that will micromanage the nuances of a war.

The Founding Fathers knew that you could not fight a war on consensus, that you can't fight it on majority vote. You have to have a Commander in Chief who is in charge. That was a clear understanding of history and human nature. It was reflected by our Founding Fathers into our Constitution, Madam Speaker. And yet to this day, I don't know how many Members of this Congress even understand how the Constitution controls the things that they do, even though every single one of us takes an oath to this Constitution at the beginning of every Congress.

Every 2 years we stand up and we say: ``I pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States.'' I do so here on the floor. I make that oath on a Bible.

Most don't because it is hard to remember to bring the Bible with you on that day, but most do go over and have their picture taken ceremonially with their hand on the Bible. Well, I do both if I've got the time, but the one I don't miss is I bring the Bible to the floor and I take that oath, ``so help me God,'' to uphold this Constitution.

And if it is inconvenient to have a provision in the Constitution, we have to live with it until it becomes so inconvenient that we are willing to amend it. But we do not have the authority here in this Congress to amend the Constitution, neither does the Supreme Court and neither does the commander in chief. The people of America have to ratify an amendment to the Constitution. And that is how the Founders saw it because they understood they were not creating a democracy, Madam Speaker. And if anybody is teaching out there in the classes of civics and government that go on all over America in nearly every school in America that we are blessed to be born and live in a democracy, I have to say, Madam Speaker, that is an erroneous lesson to be teaching our young people and to be perpetuating through the adults. And, in fact, a lot of the people in this Congress still believe this is a democracy.

Well, when Benjamin Franklin stepped out of the Constitutional Congress he was asked by a lady on the streets, ``What have you produced?'' And his answer was, ``A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.'' And that is what we have. We have a constitutional republic because our Founders understood that if you went to the pure democracy form, and they studied the democracies of the city-states in Greece; in fact, I have been there to see the displays at the National Archives of the pottery that the Greeks had and their method of voting demagogues out of the city and banishing them for 7 years. And some of that system is still within our Greek system on our universities today.

The Greeks identified a demagogue as someone who was so skilled with their rhetoric, so moving and passionate in their delivery of their oratorical speeches, that they could move the masses by emotion rather than rationale. So they banished the demagogues from their city-states because it sent them down the path of emotion rather than deductive reasoning.

So the Founders understood that we didn't need to have the masses moving by emotion; they understood that the definition of a democracy was two wolves and a sheep taking a vote on what's for dinner. Majority rules; guess who's for dinner?

They wrote rights into our Constitution and into the Bill of Rights because they understood human nature, and they knew there had to be protections in place higher than a majority vote, higher than being in the majority. There had to be guaranteed constitutional rights for all citizens in this country on equal standing, drafted in, plugged into the Bill of Rights and ratified by the several States, and now

ratified by all of the States, the 50 States in the Union. Those guarantees must be in place.

This Constitution, Madam Speaker, means something. And the language in this Constitution means what it says. The text of this language means what it meant, means what it was understood to be when it was ratified. And if it is inconvenient or if we disagree with the fundamentals, we should amend it. We shouldn't ignore it.

This Constitution grants Congress, this body in particular I am speaking to, but also the Senate as well, only two authorities when it comes to war; number one is, first, I will state it again, the President is the commander in chief of all Armed Services. We didn't have an Air Force then, but that is implied. So that is the standard, Madam Speaker.

And then the Constitution grants Congress two different authorities when it comes to war: Number one, the authority to declare war. That has happened several times in our history, but the last time it happened was in the beginning of World War II.

The second constitutional authority Congress has is to fund the war. But what we are seeing come out of the Democrat side of this is to micromanage the war in such a way that they can squeeze down and constrict the commander in chief's authority and responsibility to conduct war. And that can only end in disaster for our troops and disaster for the destiny of our country.

But we do not have that authority to micromanage. We can appropriate to the Department of Defense. We can appropriate to the Department of Homeland Security and some other lesser departments within the fringes. But we don't have the authority to micromanage.

I am going to go further, Madam Speaker, and take this position, that if this Congress should decide that building a bunch of ICBM missiles and placing them in places, say, across the polar ice cap are a high priority and they appropriated the money for that and we found out that we were in a shooting war that flared up maybe in six different places in the world and we needed to spend that money for armored Humvees and bullet-proof vests and more M-4 machine guns or more surveillance equipment, whatever it might be; if this Congress refused to change that appropriation, I am taking the position that the President has the authority, because he is commander in chief at a time of war, to do an interdepartmental transfer and prioritize those dollars within the Department of Defense in the place that he sees fit because he is the commander in chief. Anything less than that, Madam Speaker, is something that ties the hands of the commander in chief and the feet and puts our military at risk. That is the effort that is coming from the other side of the aisle here. And it is one that will eventually debilitate this country. This debate has encouraged our enemies and has diminished our ability to succeed.

And so if we look back at history, I don't believe there has been any time in history that this constitutional principle that I have laid out here has been challenged and been taken to court. And even then, I wonder how the Supreme Court would come down on this. But there were times back in 1973, 1974 and 1975, at least 2 of those 3 years, if not 3 of those 3 years, when Congress put strings on Department of Defense appropriations. And those strings said this, that none of these funds and any funds heretofore having been appropriated, meaning any money that is out there in the pipeline now, none of these funds can be spent in either North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia. And it shall not be used in the skies over those four countries or offshore from those four countries. So none of our appropriations money could be used there by the restrictions that were put on by this Congress, the micromanagement of this Congress.

But the fact was that we pulled our troops out of Vietnam at that point. It wasn't the President's intent to go back into Vietnam, but it was his intent to provide air cover. So when that message went, North Vietnam probably didn't have C-SPAN then, but they watch what goes on in this Congress, just like our enemies do in Iraq and the Middle East today; they understood that Congress had lost its will to conduct war in Vietnam. And they began to marshal their forces and provide the munitions and the armament necessary to mount the invasion, which they did in the spring of 1975. And in the aftermath of Congress micromanaging a nonshooting war, 3 million people died in the South China Sea, in South Vietnam and in the countries of Laos and Cambodia, 3 million people, because Congress injected themselves into a decision that was made by the commander in chief.

But the commander in chief didn't challenge that. The commander in chief at the time, the initial one was President Nixon, who was very weak politically. And then, of course, the appointed, not elected, President Ford, whom I revere, neither challenged that restriction put on by Congress.

So I don't believe we have a constitutional challenge that has taken place because President Ford and President Nixon did not challenge the Congress when they began to tie the strings in Vietnam.

This Congress is preparing to tie the strings. And I am saying to the public, Madam Speaker, and to the President, my position is I am going to uphold this Constitution. I'm going to defend the President's right to do interdepartmental transfers of funds if they think they are going to tie strings to this. I think the President can ignore any conditions that this House puts on him if the money is appropriated at DOD because that is his responsibility as commander in chief, not the responsibility of this Congress, not the Pelosi Congress, not the Murtha Congress, but the President of the United States is the commander in chief.

In fact, I believe the last gentleman I mentioned would like to be the commander in chief. And given some of the legislation that he has drafted and introduced in this Congress, I think he would probably squeal had he been the commander in chief and someone tried to put the strings on him that he has tried to put on the White House.

And I would add that, in the Department of Defense appropriations bill last year, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) was able to slip language into that appropriations bill that would prohibit any basing agreements from being negotiated in Iraq. He stated that it was for permanent bases, but the language said any bases. And there was misinformation that was brought to this floor. And my amendment that tried to strip that out of the appropriations bill failed here on this floor, which compelled me to go to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ask for a letter to support my amendment, which we put to the conference committee. And that letter then was enough to get that stripped out of the language.

That is the kind of thing that is going on; that would have us already moving out of Iraq if General Pace hadn't agreed with me and made that request of the conference committee. And so the conference report came without that language, and we were able to keep our operations going in Iraq. It was that close in a Republican majority. And now you see what's coming, Madam Speaker, under this new majority.

And here are some of the bullet points that come up on this subject that would come from the majority side of the aisle. This new appropriations, the strings that would be tied, the strings that I contend are unconstitutional, one would be, the legislation prohibits the deployment of troops who are not fully mission capable. Now, who would decide that? A definition apparently that is identified by the majority here in this Congress.

There are a list of other conditions in this, but I also recognize that the gentleman from Arizona, who has a heart full of appreciation for our troops and the Constitution, is on the floor. I would be very happy to yield so much time as he may consume, Mr. Shadegg.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg), and I pick up a point that Mr. Shadegg made, and that is about what the enemy thinks and what happens if we should pull out of the central battlefield in this war on terror called Iraq.

So I am going to just make this transitional point here, Madam Speaker, and that is, I have a date written down here. July 11, 2004, I was sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City waiting to go into Iraq the next day, and I turned on al Jazeera TV, and I saw the face of this rather notorious person right here, Moqtada al Sadr, and he was speaking in Arabic with the English crawler going on underneath, and as I read what he said, and I heard it sparingly in Arabic, he said, If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. Moqtada al Sadr who has now absconded to Iran to be with his cronies who have been funding him, supporting him, sending him munitions and training him.

But the philosophy that he has voiced here is a philosophy that echoes back in the ghosts of Vietnam and through Lebanon and Mogadishu, and that is, do our enemies take great heart in believing that we do not have the will to complete a military task if it gets difficult or if it gets long?

So the voice of Moqtada al Sadr saying Americans will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu will be replaced should we not succeed in Iraq, and I will point out that Prime Minister Maliki stood right back here at this microphone some months ago, and he said, if this war against terrorism cannot be won in Iraq, it cannot be won anywhere.

Our enemy will know that. We must succeed there on that battleground. The al Qaeda is in Iraq. They have come there to fight us. They have generated a few more out of the Sunnis there in particular; but if we pulled out of Iraq the way the other side would like to see that happen, then the battlefield does transfer to Afghanistan, and that battlefield in Afghanistan will be inspired by a failure to achieve victory in Iraq.

I would point out that the next poster you will see on this floor after such a time, if this Congress acts in a disgraceful fashion, then the next poster you will see will not be the face of Moqtada al Sadr, Mr. Speaker, but it will be the face of Osama bin Laden himself and the quote will not be quite like this. It will be close, though. It will read like this: If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Afghanistan the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu and the same way they left Iraq.

That is what is coming if this side of the aisle does not suck it up and understand that far more American lives are at risk if we do not have the will and the resolve to succeed. Playing politics with the lives of American soldiers and playing politics with the destiny of America just simply cannot be tolerated.

This supplemental appropriations bill, as it is announced to be written, and we do not have a draft to work with yet, is, I believe, an unconstitutional micromanaging of the powers of the Commander in Chief of the United States.

I wish to support and reiterate the statements made by the gentleman from Arizona when he said with the tick of a clock, the fight is over. Can you imagine, Madam Speaker, that a war would be like a prize fight and you would go for 10 rounds, or if it is a championship battle, maybe 15 rounds, could be 12, and when the round is over, the bell rings and the fight stops, and we come home on a date certain, at a time certain, without succeeding in a victory? That is an amazing and astonishing thing, and anyone who is involved in a guerrilla warfare of an insurgency against the United States will know all they have got to do is go underground, hole up and wait; when American soldiers are finally gone, whether lifted off of the U.S. embassy or whether they happen to be deployed out of their troop ships or flown out in jet airliners, they would know that then the enemy would have that battlefield to themselves.

The point made also by Mr. Shadegg, we came in uninvited, we cannot leave uninvited. That is a profound statement that should be in the conscience of all of us, and we have made progress. We have made significant progress.

The attitude of the Iraqi people I thought was good 3 years ago or even 4 years ago, and I do understand that their attitude is betting better and better, but they are also nervous that we are not going to stick it out.

But if we should leave, there is no doubt things will get worse; and the worse that I would describe, Madam Speaker, is I do not think this is necessarily the worst-case scenario, but I will describe this as a likely-case scenario, and that is, right now Iran is fighting a proxy war against the United States. They are doing so in Iraq. They have been funding and supporting two large Shia militia. One of them would be Sadr's militia and the other one is the Badr Brigade. They have been supporting anyone who will increase the chaos and the disorder in Iraq. They have not only been funding them and supporting them and they have been putting munitions into Iraq that are used against American service personnel and against Iraqi military security personnel. That has gone on for at least 2 years that I know of and it has gone on intensively and finally came out in the press a little over a month ago.

Iran is fighting a proxy war against the United States, and those who attack the United States and provide munitions and funding and training have a sovereign sanctuary to retreat to and hide in, and that is Iran.

I know of no example in history where you have had an insurgency that was funded by a sovereign sanctuary nation that has been protected from the assault of the troops that have been attacked out of that nation, and that prevailing side has always been the side that had the sanctuary, not the side that gave sanctuary.

I am opposed to giving sanctuary in Iran to them so they can fight their proxy war against the United States. If we have enemies, they cannot be hiding behind national boundaries. We must regard them as enemies wherever they are. But if we do not prevail in Iraq, and the pervasive influence that has taken place there by the Shi'a from Iran is imposed in the southern part of Iraq and also in Baghdad as well, which it surely could be controlled by the Shi'as, that would allow Iran in the aftermath with their hegemony to control 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil.

If Ahmadinejad has control of 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil, and about two-thirds of the real estate in Iraq and ultimately maybe more than that, his coffers get flushed full of cash. As the cash flows out of his treasure chest, he starts putting more and more money into his war chest, and that war chest becomes more and more nuclear capable, accelerating their development of nuclear weapons, weapons, in the plural, multiple plural, and means to deliver them, which means more and more missiles to put nuclear warheads on them, not just to threaten Israel, which Ahmadinejad has sworn to annihilate.

He has also sworn to defeat and annihilate the United States. Those missiles would not be constrained to just having the range to drop into Tel Aviv, but they would have soon the range to get into Western Europe and, not much later than that, the range to reach the United States.

This is a nation that has a suicidal tendency and a belief that they are called upon by Allah to annihilate the infidels. Infidels happen to be anyone who doesn't agree with them on their religion.

So think, Madam Speaker, in terms of a Middle East that is controlled by Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Iran. They set on the Strait of Hormuz. If they have that valve, they will have

the valve at the Strait of Hormuz to control what goes in and what goes out, which amounts to 42.6 percent of the world's exportable oil supply. That is easily enough to make them filthy rich and easily enough to affect the world's economy if they crank that valve down and shut down just a valve, it is a figurative valve, shutting down the oil exports going out of the Strait of Hormuz. They would control all of the Middle East if this happens. Then this Nation would go into a recession, probably a depression.

If that happens, that reflects back to China, because China also is out there on the world market doing all that they can for the oil that they need, and they are dependent on the U.S. economy. The United States and China would be the big losers. Russia and Iran would be the big winners. Iran for obvious reasons; Russia because they have a lot of oil.

That explains why Putin has taken a hostile position against the United States. He wants things to go that direction in Iraq. He wants us out of there. He wants the Iranians to take over in Iraq because that helps his world dominance and that helps his power base. That is an equation that I don't believe is considered by the retreatniks that are writing these line items of micromanagement into this supplemental appropriations bill, this, I believe, it will come out to be an unconstitutional supplemental appropriations bill.

I would be happy to recognize the gentleman from Arizona.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona. I reflect upon the last time we fought this enemy, and the first time that I know that we fought this enemy goes clear back into the early part of the 1500s, and I pick it up in a book called, ``Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters,'' when the Corsairs, Barbary pirates, would set upon the merchant marines that were sailing around the Mediterranean; they also raided the coastlines from Greece all the way up along the coast, Italy, France, Spain, up to England and as far north as Iceland.

Iceland itself was the furthest, most northerly venture on the part of the Barbary pirates, who pressed 400 Icelanders into slavery, took them back to the Barbary Coast on the north shore of Africa and put them into slavery, where they died faster than any of the other slaves. But all together the history totals up about 1.25 million Christian slaves pressed into slavery by the Barbary pirates. This was just in the 1500s.

Now, the first shooting war we got into in the United States began right after the end of the violence in the Revolutionary War. We finished, the battle was over, and 1783, here in this country, we had the protection of the French flag for our merchant marine at that time on the high seas; 1784, we lost the protection of the French flag when we had won our independence. Between that period of time and our Constitution being ratified in 1789, the protection of the French flag left us.

So, from 1783 was when hostilities ended with Great Britain; 1784, the Barbary pirates fell upon our merchant marine ships, pressed our soldiers into slavery, and we had to build a Marine Corps and a Navy to go on and take on the Barbary pirates who were negotiated with in 1786 by Thomas Jefferson and by Ben Franklin and by John Adams. Jefferson brought a report back to this Congress, and that report is clearly a document within the history of this Congress.

It can be found in a report that is delivered over here in the Library of Congress, where he said that he had tried to negotiate with the Muslim leader at

the time, and he asked: Why do you attack us? Why do you kill us? We have no quarrel with you. We have had a peaceful posture with regard to you, and yet your whole regime sets upon us in the high seas.

The answer he got back was, Allah commands that we do this. He commands that we attack and kill you, or press you into slavery until you either pay homage or adopt and convert to our religion.

That report comes back from Thomas Jefferson. Those are the same circumstances that we are in today, just a few, couple 300-plus years down the line. Jefferson's analysis was, how do you negotiate with people who have a religious belief that they need to kill you in order to be saved? In fact, in Jefferson's report, the world of Islam over there, the Barbary pirates at the time said that anyone who was killed attacking the infidels would surely go to paradise.

He understood them. That is why he bought a Koran, was to do his oppositional research. That is what we are up against today, the same thing. If we don't understand our enemy, if we don't understand nosce hostem, which is a Latin term for, ``know my enemy,'' came out of Romans, then we have the kind of appropriations bill that would have all these strings tied in such a way as the President can only deploy unprepared troops, and then it sets up some standards for that. If we need to defend ourselves, we couldn't do so unless we met this standard that is created by the other side of the aisle.

This bill presumably also requires the Iraqi government to meet the key security, political and economic benchmarks established by the President in his State of the Union address. That was January 10.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Mississippi.

I also recognize you are a fair-minded Mississippian, and I appreciate that and the tone and the history that you have added. And perhaps on your walk across here, you might not have heard my remarks with regard to the Vietnam era and the constraints that were put on the appropriations bill then. And so I don't think that we are in disagreement on the precedence or the history. We may or may not be in disagreement on the constitutional aspects.

And what I have done is taken a position that Congress does not have the authority to micromanage. And I was not here to put up a vote on that, but you can expect, Madam Speaker, how I would have voted had that been the case.

But these micromanaging efforts, and this is a newspaper publishing information, would appear to require that the Iraqi government meet key security, political, and economic benchmarks that were established by the President in the State of the Union Address on January 10. Now, those were goals at that time. I don't speak for the commander in chief on that, but I know now that we are well passed January 10. On January 10, there wasn't a plan that had been unfolded like the plan we are working on today. And you have to be flexible in a time of war. And to go back and pull things out of his speech and say, and we are going to tie you to that on appropriations, I think that does two things: I don't think that is prudent, and I don't think it is constitutional.

Another one would be the Iraqi failure to meet these benchmarks would mean the beginning of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and will restrict economic aid to the Iraqis. Another case, Madam Speaker, of setting up a standard here in Congress, and the slow wheels of this Congress can creep along. And then we put something in place that would prohibit us, prohibit the commander in chief from being flexible in time of war.

It goes on. Another standard would be, if progress toward meeting any key benchmark is not met by July 1, 2007; we will hardly get any legislation passed before then; a redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq begins immediately and must be completed within 180 days.

Madam Speaker, progress towards meeting benchmarks, that is a gray line, not a bright line but a grey one. Well, we are making progress every single day, but I don't think the people that are drafting this legislation would agree that we are making progress every single day. So, therefore, by their judgment of this standard, that would mean that we begin pulling out July 1, 2007, just a few months from now, and may be even retroactive, because I don't think this bill can get out of this Congress by then.

Another one says, if key benchmarks are not met October 1, 2007, a redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq begins immediately and must be completed within 180 days.

It goes on and on. And, again, this is a huge, huge reach for Congress to get involved in the micromanagement of a war. There have always been consequences.

And, by the way, the gentleman from Mississippi that raised the issue of the appropriations bill in the early 1990s Congress that said, get out of Somalia, if you look at the aftermath of that, I think it would have been far better for the United States had we stayed and had we completed the mission there; it would be perhaps done by now and not a place where there are terrorists pulling into that. There has been a long, drawn out war in that area since that period of time that has washed back and forth across that countryside. And part of it is because we lacked resolve. And part of that is shown right here in the words of Muqtada al-Sadr.

So, Madam Speaker, I would bring up one more point, and that would be, we have made progress there. And the progress that we have made, some of it is measured by construction projects that are completed. There has been a lot that has been said about things not getting done in Iraq, and I would submit that I have been over there a number of times but twice specifically to review the construction projects that have been initiated and in progress and completed. And this shows in green the projects that are completed. Along that map, it is easy to see that we have got most of our work done. We are nearing the end really of all of them. The green are completed. The yellow is under construction, and the red are those that are planned but not started. Tiny little numbers under the red here. Big numbers under the green. Significantly smaller numbers than those that are under construction.

We have gotten a lot of projects completed, Madam Speaker, and we are almost to that point where we can wrap up this work that started here in Iraq, that started out with $18.4 billion. We put supplemental funding in there. And then a final number, I can't speak to factually here on the floor, although it is significantly larger than $18.4 billion. There has been a lot of infrastructure that has been picked up to speed. If you look around here on the edge, these are all border forts along the edge on the border between Iran and Iraq. That is also the case down along here with Jordan and Syria. We have fortified the border and put people there on the outposts. That has done a lot to slow things down, but it has not done enough to keep it from coming out of Iran.

I have been to a good number of these projects. Some would be sewer projects in Sadr City, Baghdad, itself that began about 3 years ago. And under the

first armored division controlling that, General Carelli, who is now the Corps commander there. I have been up here to the Kirkuk area where the mother of all generators sits there producing electricity 24 hours a day, every day, a gas-fired generator plant. There is work done all over this area. We have gone back and reflooded the swamps where the swamp Arabs lived that were dried up and drained by Saddam Hussein. They have moved back into that area. About 8,000 square miles were drained; we got about 4,000 square miles put back in. We have done a tremendous amount to improve the environment there in Iraq, and 80 percent of the violence is confined to Baghdad and 30 miles within Baghdad. So why would we be concerned that we can't control this or we can't manage this?

I would point out that, in 1944, on December 22 of 1944, the 101st airborne was surrounded at Bastogne, and the Nazis demanded that the 101st surrender. And General McCollum's response was a retort, it was ``Nuts.'' The Germans didn't know how to understand that, Madam Speaker. But what it meant was: We are staying here. We have got you right where we want you. You are all around us. We can hit you. We can fire and hit you in any direction.

And the Americans underwent a relentless artillery barrage, but the response, the rhetoric, ``Nuts'' prevailed. And General Patton's Army was able to relieve the 101st Airborne. The 101st today contends they didn't need the help; they would have liked to just whip the Germans themselves.

That was the spirit we had in this country and our fighting personnel in December of 1944. When they were surrounded, and it was hopeless, they said, ``Nuts.'' Now we have Baghdad surrounded and we have Baghdad penetrated, and all we have to do is maintain stability there, and we have people talking about surrender. And I think they are nuts, Madam Speaker, to talk about surrender with all of this investment in blood and treasure, to be so close to success and victory here, and to be waffling and go wobbly at a time when you need a spine and you need courage.

To bring this supplemental appropriations bill with all of these strings attached that are designed to appease the 75 or 76 members of the Out of Iraq Caucus and the left-winged liberals here in this Congress, not because of their leadership on war but because of their position on other issues, I think, is a disservice to the American people. The American people know how important this is. And the fathers and mothers, the widows and widowers, and sons and daughters of those who have given their lives for Iraqi freedom and a safer future for Americans must be respected and honored.

As the father of a son who was killed over there, a Gold Star father from California said to me, and his name was John, he said, ``It is different now. You can't pull out of there now, because that soil is sanctified by the blood of our children. You must stick with this battle and succeed and not lose your will.''

As a major from Kentucky said to me the last time I was there, ``We appreciate your prayers. We have everything we need to do what we have to do. We have all of the weapons we need and the clothing and the food and the training that we need, and all of the support that we need. So when you pray for us, pray for the American people. Pray that the American people understand this enemy that we are up against. Pray that the American people don't lose their resolve. We will not lose ours.''

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I am compelled to come to the floor and stand up and speak in opposition to this rule.

The rules package that came before the floor of the House, an unamendable rules package, was amended before it came to the 109th, to the 110th Congress, eliminating the requirement that the Rules Committee and other committee votes be published when there is a recorded vote.

Yesterday, before the Rules Committee, I brought an amendment that would require the Rules Committee to print recorded votes if they were to receive any of the funding that is authorized. I got about a third of the way through my presentation when I was interrupted by the chair, and the point was made that they have printed their votes to this date. The argument was made that since they have complied with my amendment, then there is no reason for my amendment, in fact, no latitude for me to continue my debate with regard to that and my presentation.

So I rise in opposition to this rule because, first of all, we need to have sunlight on everything we do, and a requirement to provide to the public access to recorded votes is something that ought to be in the rule. It ought not to be an option. If it is the practice of the Rules Committee, then this amendment codifies the practice of the Rules Committee, and it should not receive objection, especially the vociferous interruption objection.

I also object to the way I was treated before the Rules Committee. I will keep coming back regardless. I will not be intimidated, and I intend to raise the sunlight on everything we do in this Congress. I want to see all of our

work become available on the Internet, in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format. I want all the sunlight possible, so the bloggers can see, and I would love to see television cameras up before the Rules Committee as well, Mr. Speaker. I think that will help the decorum of the Rules Committee.

But I intend to come back. Like the Governor from California, I will be back.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment that is filed and should be in order at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, my amendment is a simple amendment. What it does is it recognizes that this authorization was authorized by Congress in 2002. It was authorized for $1.5 billion. This authorization takes us on up well over that. What I have done with my amendment is I do a 5-percent reduction in the authorization by the individual line items, and they all are on page four, so it amounts to a 5-percent reduction and takes us down to a number just a little bit above the inflation-adjusted 2002 number. So the $1.5 billion that was 2002 after adjusted for inflation comes to $1.69 billion. My amendment takes it up to just about $1.7 billion. This overall is not in the President's budget and we don't have this in any other budget, in Republicans or Democrats here, so this is an extra authorization.

Federal spending in the 110th Congress is out of control. The first five bills of the 110th Congress wasted about $14 billion of taxpayer money. If American taxpayers are going to be forced to foot the bill for projects that cities and States should be paying for, then they should only have to be forced to pay a reasonable amount. And if Members cannot vote for a reasonable reduction as done by this amendment, it proves that the majority in this Congress carries with it a tax-and-spend attitude. The restraint is what is in my amendment.

The funding authorized under this bill is $1.8 billion. My amendment will bring spending in line to about the inflation-adjusted portion, as I mentioned earlier. We need to make sure that our adjustments do so without wasteful government spending. We should not sit back and allow the majority to force their expansive jumbo jets or their poorly masked, earmark-ridden continuing resolutions on the American taxpayers.

Mr. Chairman, we all have to learn to tighten our belts. We have to learn how to do more with less. We have to draw the line somewhere. And we actually should draw it everywhere where we can to squeeze this down. The checks that this Congress have already written in a closed and rigid process are simply too large. In last year's elections, the new majority party promised the American people that they would rein in Federal spending and return fiscal restraint to Washington, DC. So far, that has not been what I have seen here in this Congress. I offer this opportunity to the minority and the majority to bring us back to a level of fiscal restraint.

We can and must do something about the deficit. We must do it right now. We have our opportunity right here. By voting for this amendment, you are stating that American taxpayers should not have to pay higher taxes in the future because we couldn't control our spending today. I think it is clear. This is a carefully drafted and a reasonable spending restraint amendment. It is a 5-percent reduction and it takes us down to an inflation-adjusted number from the 2002 authorization. I haven't heard a lot of discussion here about the expansion in needs. I did hear some significant requests that I think are relatively legitimate.

But it is important for us to be responsible in our request. It is important that we tighten our belt a little bit. If we can take it up one notch here, we can take it up another notch on another authorization and another appropriation, Perhaps we can get through this process. Having met PAYGO, for example, maybe we can get through this process and actually have a budget that is closer to balance than some we have seen in the past. Maybe we can get to the point of the promises that were made that we are going to have a balanced budget this year. I am looking forward to seeing that. I am trying to be helpful in offering this amendment, and I would ask my colleagues to support this fiscal restraint, fiscally responsible, reasonable amendment that preserves the authorization of 2002, makes adjustments for inflation so real dollars will buy the same amount of projects that would have been brought subsequent to the 2002 authorization, which, of course, was not appropriated to.

Mr. Chairman, I urge passage of this amendment.

I appreciate the gentleman's remarks, and I am very much in agreement with you that this is a responsible thing for us to do. And I again thank you, and I would be very happy to accept the recommendation and your support, and I would be willing to do the same.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding.

I feel compelled to respond to many of the remarks that have been made here on the floor about the condition of the health care treatment for our veterans. I won't deny that there were unacceptable conditions in Building 18. I don't believe there has been any empirical data or quantifiable information that says it has gone beyond some of the rooms within Building 18.

But I know when I go out to Walter Reed and when I go to Bethesda and when I go to Landstuhl and I look those people in the eye that are there every day with compassion fatigue that are giving their heart and soul and everything they have for the health care interests of our brave soldiers who have been wounded defending our freedom, a lot of that freedom and a lot of that mission have been opposed by the people on this side of the aisle, there is a strong commitment in all of those

hospitals by the personnel that are there. They work long hours, and they give the best service with everything that they have. And I will agree that there is a bureaucratic problem and we ought to find a way to put some software in place and put a system there so we can track patients and they don't get dropped from the system and they can be expedited through with the most efficient and high-quality care possible.

But this being an issue that is being stampeded and run up the flagpole goes beyond trying to fix the problem. It is an effort to try to undermine the mission of our soldiers overseas, and I think that is deplorable, Mr. Speaker.

So I stand with the people that serve America, those that put their lives on the line, those that have lost life and limb. I stand with the people who stand there and help them. And we need to be supportive and encouraging and fix the problems we have and remove the politics from this debate.

I yield back to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for organizing this Special Order here this evening, and I also thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Deal) for making his presentation and making a compelling case for why we have to end this thing we call birthright citizenship, anchor babies, or more appropriately, more accurately, as automatic citizenship. It was never part of the concept constitutionally that we should grant that kind of a thing, for all the reasons that Mr. Deal said and all the reasons that Mr. Bilbray said, and a lot of other reasons besides.

But, Mr. Speaker, I would submit this, that I am going to roll out some facts and figures here, and I would ask that you maybe could pay attention and take some notes on this because it is important for us in this country not to be establishing an immigration policy based upon anecdotes or based upon emotions or based upon somebody's feelings, but base it upon some empirical data. We need to base our policy on some facts.

I would point out that I wrote a letter to the White House last year. It was off of a request of that White House liaison that took place last April, and by June 23, I was finally frustrated with my e-mails and phone calls to the liaison who promised to get me some answers.

So I put it in letter form, hard copy, sent it to the White House, sent it as an e-mail also, and instructed my staff to call the White House every week to get answers to the questions. Because it occurs to me that facts don't work for the people that are for open borders, but facts absolutely support the people that stand up for the rule of law and that stand up for national sovereignty and stand up for national border protection and enforcement in our workplace to shut off the jobs magnet.

I think we should start with a simple basis. If you go back to the beginning of Western Civilization and the Greeks, they would ask. They would look at things. They were proud. They lived in the age of reason. They said, I think, therefore I am. We are going to do deductive reasoning. We will start with the most logical, obvious questions, and we are going to reduce it down. If we can narrow ourselves down to a conclusion, we will come to a conclusion. If we can't, we will need more data.

They were proud of the way they could think and reason. That's the foundation for Western Civilization. Had they not developed that age of reason, we would never have had the Age of Enlightenment. Without the Age of Enlightenment, we would never have had the United States of America. So we are founded upon reason.

Questions start from the beginning. Is there such a thing as too much immigration, legal or illegal? That is one of the questions I asked the President.

Then I asked, would you separate that into, is there such a thing as too much illegal immigration? And then, is there too much legal immigration? Then, the question that follows is, within those two categories, illegal in one category and legal immigration in the other category, if there is such a thing as too much, how much is too much? I will submit in the category of the illegal, one is too many.

I don't think the White House can take that position, neither can most of the Democrats and many of the Senators, Democrats and Republicans; one is too many. Is there such a thing as too much legal immigration? Yes, there has to be. Otherwise, you have to be willing to accept everybody on the planet that wants to come to America, and that might actually be everybody.

I would argue that this million or so that come in legally in a year is kind of an acceptable number, but is probably twice as many as the American people like to have. American people don't only want to eliminate all the illegal immigration, they want to reduce legal immigration, and they want to go back to an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well- being of the United States of America.

Call it a selfish policy, if you like, but any Nation that subordinates their immigration policy to the people who will illegally cross the border from other countries doesn't have much of a policy and doesn't have much of a destiny if they don't have control of their own destiny. We have got to be in control. We have got to set that policy.

So I went on down this list of things, and if there is such a thing as too much legal or illegal immigration, then how much is too much? And how many do you believe would be legalized by the Senate version of the bill that passed last year?

Of course, before, I believe it was the Bingaman amendment, it was between 100 and 200 million would be legalized with a path to citizenship into the United States. Under the Senate version of the bill that probably would have had enough votes to pass with the majority of the Senate. Well, there were some caps that were put on because of that amendment that I just referenced, and then the number came down to, and this is the number I would ask of the White House, how many do you believe would be legalized by the Senate-passed version of the bill?

I can tell you at this point that, according to the Heritage Foundation, according to Robert Rector and according to some real good solid statistical analysis done by Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, it comes to about 61.1 million people. The lowest number we could come up with about 53 or 54 million people; 66.1 million is the most reliable number over the next 20 years that would be legalized. By the Senate version, it has got to be nothing but amnesty.

I looked back, and how do you quantify that? In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty bill. He called it an amnesty bill. He was straight up honest about it. It was one of the two or three times he failed me, but at least he was straight up honest. Some will say that was to legalize 300,000, some will say it was 1 million, but not many will say that it actually brought in 3 million, some 3.1 million people who became citizens through this amnesty that was passed in 1986.

I have met some of those people. I have looked them in the eye, and I can tell you, they do not respect the rule of law like the rest of the Americans do. Therefore, they want amnesty for the rest of the illegals that are in this country, because they see it was good for them. Well, if something is good for someone, that is not a measure that it is a good policy for America. It is only a measure that it is good for someone.

But regardless, that was a series of questions that I asked of the President. In addition to that, I asked, would you be willing to agree to a hard annual cap that would control the aggregate of all of the different immigration policies that are out there and say that, from an annual basis, it never exceeds a certain number?

Now, I would start with 1 million and ratchet it down for the American people if I could. We could probably assimilate 1 million people in this country a year if we had good assimilation policies. That letter, with those questions, and those five questions as I recall that went to the President on June 23, and the White House got a call every single week until September.

Finally, I got an answer back, not from the White House, not from Secretary Chertoff, but a subordinate of Secretary Chertoff. The answer that came back was a cut and paste to somebody's constituent response letter and didn't answer a single question that I had asked.

So I wrote a letter back that said, Dear Mr. President, thanks for the letter that was in response to my letter full of questions, but you really didn't answer any of my questions. Would you like to try again? I would really appreciate it. I am the ranking member of the Immigration Subcommittee, and we have to set an immigration policy here.

Finally, I got a letter back, and it said, immigration is too complicated and too serious a policy to reduce it to numbers.

What a shocking thing. That is a single piece of all of this. So when you add to this, you can add that we have a

major problem on our borders. We are seeing $60 billion out of our U.S. economy that are wired into the Western Hemispheric countries other than the United States. Those are transmittals from the wages in America; $30 billion goes to Mexico; $65 billion worth of illegal drugs come across that southern border into the United States. We are watching 11,000 people a night pour across the southern border.

In fact, just yesterday was the anniversary of the battle of the Alamo when Colonel Travis and those brave Texan Americans were slaughtered at the Alamo. Santa Ana's Army was only half the size of a nightly number of illegals that come across our southern border.

Those are simply some of the pieces. There are many other statistics out there that are empirical data, and I pray that this Nation will look at numbers, look at reality and not be stampeded by hyperbole or anecdotes and establish a policy that is good for the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and the privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress this evening. And I appreciate the previous speaker, who has brought up the issue of renewable fuels and the overall energy situation that America is addressing here. And this dialogue has got to be expanded and continued, and so this input that comes from the gentleman from Maryland is an essential part of our discussion and our debate. I know that when Professor Bartlett digs up some scientific information and lays it out here for us, we know that it is well researched and it is well founded and well grounded, and that it becomes a significant part of the overall debate.

And I would add some more things to this overall debate as we talk about energy and then, perhaps, Mr. Speaker, I will move into some other issues as well that are of important concern to the American people.

On this energy that we are dealing with, I have continually heard from the other side of the aisle, well, we can't drill in ANWR. I haven't heard why. We can't drill in the outer continental shelf. I haven't heard why.

I have heard that we have to conserve energy. I think that is good, but it is hard to do that without having the proper financial incentives in place. And one thing we haven't done is reward the companies for doing the exploration, particularly, the exploration for American oil, Mr. Speaker.

And so, as I look at this overall picture, I will submit this scenario that we need to do, and that is, we must grow the size of the energy pie, this overall circle pie chart that we use that is the 100 percent model. And in there are the components we have today called gasoline, diesel fuel, coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric, solar, wind; the list goes on of those components, some hydrogen. But it is a smaller size of supply than we need, and that is why our energy prices are high. And that is linked with the rest of the world, certainly.

But here in the United States, we need to be looking at this from the perspective of reducing and eventually eliminating our dependence upon Middle Eastern oil. That is essential that we do that because the funds that are going into Middle Eastern oil, when we are buying oil on the market, those funds, some of them, end up in the hands of our enemies, in the hands of the terrorists, in the hands of the Islamic jihadists. And that is the strongest incentive to becoming more dependent upon domestic energy and less dependent on Middle Eastern energy.

But additionally, our balance of trade goes the wrong way for us. When we are importing energy from overseas in places like the Middle East, that transfers the wealth of the United States over to and puts it into the countries of the Middle East. And so our approach here needs to be the expansion and the continued promotion of these energy supplies that we have that we can develop here in the United States.

The most obvious of those are the biodiesel components, which have been expanding rapidly here in the United States, and particularly in Iowa and particularly in Iowa's Fifth Congressional District, the western third of the State. We are now and have been for some time the number one congressional district out of all 435 in biodiesel production. And that biodiesel production comes from animal fats and soybeans, and the extraction of that processed into diesel fuel, that has proven to be a very effective and reliable, and much of it a biodegradable type of a fuel, much more environmentally friendly than the diesel fuel that is on the market that comes out of the sands of Saudi Arabia, for example. And so our leadership there in the biodiesel production needs to be expanded, and we are on a track to do that.

We are also, in the district that I represent, ranking number two of the 435 Congressional districts in ethanol production. By some time this year, in 2007, we will be number one in ethanol production. That will rank us first in the Nation in ethanol production of the 435 congressional districts, and also first in the Nation in biodiesel production.

We rank currently today about fourth or at least tied for fourth in wind generation of electricity. That will go up to at least second time this year, and perhaps it will be first.

But some of the things that we are creating here is an intellectual property, Mr. Speaker, a knowledge base that, of the billions of dollars of capital that we have poured into renewable energy, primarily in the ethanol and the biodiesel, but also in the wind generation of electricity, that capital investment produces the energy out of our crops and out of our wind. But additionally, we are building a knowledge base, an understanding of what enzymes work best, what practices work best. We are squeezing more ethanol out of a bushel of corn than we have ever squeezed out of there before, and we will soon be up to that 3 gallons a bushel of ethanol production. And as the enzymes get better and the process gets better, we will also be able to extract ethanol out of the cellulosic, which is about any kind of plant product that is made out of cellulose and other products as well. But that would be the primary ones.

And as we develop our skills, I run into people around the country, especially in our hearings for agriculture, and they will come up to me and say, really, the future for our energy is in ethanol. We need to learn how to do that. We need to go to Brazil and see how they make ethanol in Brazil. And my response to that is, why don't you come to Iowa, see how we make ethanol in Iowa? I have been to Brazil to see their operations down there. They need to come to Iowa to see how we make ethanol in Iowa.

And, in fact, the United States has surpassed Brazil in ethanol production. They make most of theirs out of sugar cane. We make most of ours out of corn. But we passed up Brazil a couple of years ago in overall gallon production of ethanol.

And Iowa produces 26 percent of the ethanol that is produced in the entire country. And our plants are far more modern than those that you see in Brazil. Technology a little different because there they will some days make sugar out of the sugar cane when the market is right, and other days they make ethanol out of the sugar cane. But ours are still far more modern. We conserve energy. We have got efficiencies there. We have software packages that manage and control the flow of all the operations within the plant. We have one or two people sitting there monitoring that 24/7. But an impressive combination of technology and people and know-how pulled together.

And I often, Mr. Speaker, use the model of how Texas was the place where they discovered oil. And among the places, and Texas produced a lot of the oil back starting in the teens to some degree, but more like the 1920s and the 1930s. And as they, the boom State of Texas hit oil, and they began to develop and produce oil and distribute and refine it and distribute it around the country, they also developed the skills, the skills and the expertise of deeper drilling and other ways to extract oil out of the formations, fishing skills to fish broken bits out of wells, Red Adair's oil well firefighters, some of those examples, and then of course the seismic technology and all of the things that go along to making an oil industry profitable.

Well, as the oil began to play out in Texas, the expertise kept growing, and there is a tremendous amount of wealth in Texas that comes from the intellectual property that has been created, the common knowledge or the knowledge base that has been built.

We are doing the same thing in the Midwest in the renewable fuels category, Mr. Speaker. And as that knowledge base grows, there will be people that are brought up, educated in, work in and nurtured within this epicenter of renewable fuels that we are today in the neighborhood that I have the privilege to represent. And as they look around, they will move outside the area, and they will begin to add their skills to ethanol biodiesel production plants that move out to the limits of the corn belt and the soybean belt.

And as that happens, there will be, of course a center of knowledge, a center of technology and people, can-do people with know-how, that emanate from the epicenter of renewable fuels. That is a big future, I believe, for us. And that is one component in this overall energy pie that we need to grow.

So as we grow our ethanol production from corn and grow our biodiesel production from mostly animal fats or mostly soybeans, but also animal fats, that would be a processing product that comes from our plants. As that grows, we also are looking at developing the cellulosic ethanol, and that can come from any kind of plant. And we are 5 to 6 years away from being able to produce the cellulosic ethanol in the kind of volume where we can see how we might be able to add a lot more gallons to the overall supply of gasoline type products that are consumed on our vehicles on the roads.

And yet where we are, that cellulose comes in the form of corn stalks and cane products and switch grass and the list goes on, wood chips. Anything that has plant and fiber in it is cellulose that can be converted into ethanol. So we don't know to the extent that that will be built out across the country, but I believe this: I think you can draw circles on the map in the corn belt where there will be ethanol plants and they will draw corn from those areas. And then there will be other circles where the biodiesel plants draw soybeans particularly or else extracted oil from soybeans into that area. And the gaps, I think, get filled with cellulosic. And there will also be dual crops that come out at least for some time that convert the shell corn into ethanol and the corn stalks into cellulosic ethanol. That kind of thing will happen too to the extent that the economics will drive this.

Capital makes good decisions on where it goes. It will always being attracted to where there is profit. It will always shy away from places where there isn't profit. And right now the capital is being attracted to the renewable fuels. That is a piece of this overall energy pie, and the size of the piece that is ethanol today and renewable fuels needs to get bigger.

Also, we look out on the Outer Continental Shelf. There are 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we know of offshore, a lot of that offshore in Florida. We opened up a tiny little sliver of that, I think it was Lease 181, to allow for a little more drilling way offshore in Florida, but we are wasting or ignoring a tremendous resource where we should be down there tapping into that massive supply of natural gas, pumping it into our markets here because of the foundation for a lot of our production in our plants, particularly plastic production, is in natural gas, is in feedstock, as well as natural gas is a feedstock for commercial fertilizer, and the control of that fertilizer will also be part of the control for the overall food production in the United States.

So it is essential that we keep at an economic and I will even say a cheap supply of natural gas on the markets. And it is foolish for us to ignore the supply that we have and not be out here extracting that natural gas out from underneath the seabed. There has never been a spilled natural gas that had any environmental damage. It has always been one of the safest things that we can do and certainly one of the cleanest things that we can do. Natural gas is a wonderful product, and that natural gas needs to be put into our markets to keep our fertilizer costs down, to keep our production costs down, and to be used more sparingly in the production of electricity because that is a higher cost type of an item, and that can be done more with coal or with clean burning coal.

And we need to also be expanding our energy use beyond the natural gas. We should look at our domestic supplies of crude oil, and offshore there is also a significant amount of domestic supplies of crude oil. One of the largest fields discovered is southwest of New Orleans, offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. And that supply down there, that find that is discovered by Chevron, can be something that will rival and perhaps exceed one of the large finds up on the North Slope. But the North Slope needs to be opened up too, and I mean specifically ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That is an area up there that if God was going to put oil somewhere that we ought to go get that is not going to impact on very many species or on human population, that, Mr. Speaker, is the place.

I have traveled up there, and I have looked at the fields in ANWR. I looked at the oil that is developed on the North Slope of Alaska. And I can see, and I don't think there is a disagreement, that it has been a very environmentally friendly development that

took place up there in the 1970s, and we can do better yet just a little ways to the east in a similar type of a terrain, because we have the technology to allow us to do directional drilling. So we can sit in one spot and we can drill in an area out in multiple directions and extract that oil in a single location with a very minimal footprint on the area up there in ANWR.

There is no justifiable reason not to tap into that. Whatever the promise happened to be back in the 1970s that some people here on the floor of the House have said, well, there was a promise that we would never drill in ANWR or we would never let you drill in the North Slope, well, I don't know who made that promise. I don't see that that promise is in law. I know it is not in the Constitution. But even if it is in law, and I don't believe it is, Mr. Speaker, one legislature, one Congress can't bind a succeeding Congress. They can't make a decision in 1970 that keeps us from doing the right thing in 2007.

And our Founding Fathers would have never taken a position like that. So whoever thinks that they have been disenfranchised by a promise shouldn't have been willing to accept that kind of promise back in the 1970s, if it was ever made. But what would we get out of that, foolishly hanging on to somebody's idea that because it is called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that somehow we can't have a little spot there that is equivalent of a postage stamp on a football field to go set a rig there, drill some holes in the ground, and pull that back out and only have a little rock pad about 50 feet wide by 100 feet long that even Dennis Kucinich wouldn't recognize as an oil field except you would have to take him up there and show him. And that is the case for many people that oppose drilling up there.

The oil is there. It is there for a reason. We need to dump it on our market and do it now. A million barrels a day could be coming back down into this market here in the United States, and that is a million barrels a day that we wouldn't be drawing out from Middle Eastern oil, and the profit from that million barrels a day would not be going into the hands of jihadists or potential jihadists or neighbors to jihadists. It would be going into American companies, and it would be saving money in the pockets of the American people, Mr. Speaker.

And those are two logical things that we need to do: drill the Outer Continental Shelf for oil and gas everywhere that we can find it, go up to ANWR and drill up there because we have already found it. We know it is there.

And so those two are simple commonsense inarguable points that can only be addressed in opposition by emotionalism and hyperbole, not by rational logic or empirical data.

And as we look across at the rest of the energy that we need to produce, we are doing a great job with the wind energy. We have got the wind chargers pumping out electricity. One thing about it, the air really never gets where it wants to go. It keeps traveling around this globe. And we can harness that tremendous amount of energy, and we do so, and turn it into generated electricity, a very clean, a very safe supply of energy. I am glad to see those tall surrealistic windmills churning out all at an identical speed, pumping electricity down through the cables into the ground and on off to our customers. That is a very gratifying thing.

And we would have difficulty, with the political climate that we face today, in expanding our hydro- electricity capability. Whether we can do that or not, I would like for any opportunities and be supportive of the rational ones, but we must keep alive the hydroelectric generation of electricity that is taking place across this country. That is some of the cheapest electricity that we have and some of the safest electricity that we have and some of the most environmentally friendly electricity that we have.

We will have flood control projects on these rivers, or we will have bottoms flooded out continually and, since we built those, particularly Pick-Sloan on the Missouri River when you take advantage of the gravity situation of the water dropping down off of the dams down through the generation plants.

Another place that we need to expand is going to be our nuclear capability. I don't believe we built a new nuclear plant, nuclear electrical generating plant, in the United States since the mid-1970s. And yet statistically nuclear power is by far the safest form of electricity that we have that we can generate. If you want to count the accidents, the fatalities, all the records about the safety of nuclear stand up to support that nuclear is safer than any other. And when you look across the world in places like France, we make a little fun of the French, but they made a good decision on their electricity. They have a different kind of demand than we have, different levels of resources. But their prudent decision sets up nuclear plants in France, and 78 percent of their electricity is generated by nuclear plants.

To the extent that we can generate more electricity with nuclear, that would take the load off the natural gas that is being used in particularly these new plants where they are burning natural gas to generate electricity. That, I believe, is an imprudent path to go down, to build generating plants that plan to burn natural gas, especially if you are doing so in States like Florida that oppose drilling off their own shores where there is gas sitting there in massive quantities but still are building gas-fired generating plants across the State of Florida. Those things add to the negative and make it harder for us.

And I know that there are States that have an ability and a confidence that they can produce cleaner burning coal, and coal-fired generators have been a very effective and efficient way to generate electricity, the base plants in particular, and there is coal that is hauled all across this country by rail from Wyoming all the way to Georgia, if I remember right, 16 million tons going into Georgia out of Wyoming coal because that is the most economical way they can generate electricity in those areas in Georgia that receive that coal from up in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.

But the point is to continually grow the size of this energy pie, put more Btus on the market. One of those pieces of the pie needs to be conservation, to save the part that we are wasting, and then expand the size of the pie for the renewable so that there is more ethanol, more biodiesel, more wind-generated electricity, nuclear-generated power, more base plants for coal-fired generating plants and other means that we can use more coal; and in the process of doing that, we have taken the pressure off. There will be less pressure on gasoline, on diesel fuel, on the places we are most vulnerable, from the Middle Eastern oil and Middle Eastern energy.

That is the path we need to follow, Mr. Speaker, and I believe that is the path that is mostly going to be consistent with that that was presented by the gentleman from Maryland who spoke just ahead of me.

But I wanted to talk about the energy issue in the beginning because I intend to, in what is left of this presentation this evening, Mr. Speaker, talk about how we fix our problems here in the United States, how we address our global problems. And I have addressed the energy issue. And when we have cheap energy, we are going to have at least a foundation for a strong economy. That is why energy is important. We can't be hostage to other countries. We can't have someone else draining the profit and the lifeblood off of the workers of Americans by pocketing high profits because they happen to be sitting in a place where there is a lot of energy supply themselves with low input costs. That is the case today with Middle Eastern oil. That is why I raise the energy issue.

The second thing that matters is how we deal with our foreign relations. We are vulnerable to Middle Eastern oil today. Some 60 percent or more of our oil is imported from overseas. And whether you take that directly from places like Saudi Arabia or Iran or Iraq, other countries there in the Middle East, Kuwait, for example, or whether you buy it from the Canadians, and we don't have much access to markets from the Russians, but from the western shore of Africa, wherever that oil comes from, you are taking it from the world market, the overall supply of oil in the world market. And if you do that, it is essentially the equivalent of purchasing the Middle Eastern oil. And when that happens, of

course, as I said two or three times, that money gets into the hands of Islamic jihadists.

And so today we are in a global war against terror and these terrorists are Islamic jihadists. They live scattered across most continents, if not all continents. There are enclaves there, cells where they are training and planning to attack us. They believe they are called by Allah to kill us because they label us as infidels. It says so in their Koran.

Thomas Jefferson bought a Koran or acquired a Koran, and in there he studied it so he that he could begin to understand the Islamic enemy called the Barbary pirates. And the language is the same. It says the same thing today, and the extremists believe that directs them to kill the people that they define as infidels and infidels being described as nonbelievers in their religion.

So, that is the root of this belief. They believe they are commanded to fall upon us and attack us with every stratagem of war and to continue doing so until such time as the infidels either convert or pay tribute.

That was their demand at the beginning of the wars with the Barbary pirates that began in 1784. That war, the long-lasting war with the Barbary pirates, with the same kind of philosophical enemy and nearly same location, that lasted over 30 years, by my calculation 32 years before it was wrapped up. In fact, it may have been a little longer than that.

The resistance finally stopped in 1830 when the French went in and occupied Algiers. We did our part up to that period of time. It is my recollection the United States was in combat about 32 years, or through a drawn-out war for 32 years, about 6 years of intense combat through that period of time, beginning in 1784, the year after hostilities with the British ceased.

So this is not anything new for us. We just need to go back and read our history and understand that they believe they have to kill us, that that is their religious belief to do so. And Thomas Jefferson said so. All we had to do was read Jefferson. He studied. It reflects today about the enemy we are up against.

Now, this even my needs to have some bases to operate from. They had a base to operate from in Afghanistan. The Taliban and the al Qaeda working with the Taliban, they need anarchy. They need a failed state, a state that doesn't have the rule of law, that doesn't have security, that has a collapsed economy, a place where they can operate freely. They had done so with the Taliban, working with al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

When September 11 came, we went to Afghanistan and put an end to their terrorist camp. When it came time to liberate Iraq, it was a similar motive. And we know that al Qaeda has always seen Iraq since the victorious liberation in Afghanistan, they have always seen Iraq as the central battlefield in this global war on terror, Mr. Speaker.

So, this is the nature of our enemy. And wherever we fight them, they populate most of the continents all around the globe. We have seen the second generation Pakistanis rise up in Great Britain and turn around and plot to and ultimately attack the British people, their hosts in Great Britain. Those kind of cells exist in the United States, they exist in many countries of the world, and that is some of the nature of the enemy we are up against.

So, how do we deal with this kind of enemy? We have addressed it to the extent that we brought a measure of freedom to Afghanistan. We are surely not done there. There is more violence there in the last year, not less. That is a bad sign. We are more aggressive than we have been in the past, not less. That is a good sign. And we have NATO in there now working directly with us, and that is also a very good sign. They have started a spring offensive, and that is going to keep al Qaeda back on their heels. But we may not for a long, long time put this enemy a way to where they quit attacking us.

They don't really have a head leader. They don't have a capital city. They don't have a definable military that we can attack and destroy. But they do attack us with whatever they have, with the resources that they have, and we know that they are in Iraq in significant numbers and we have been fighting there, along with somewhere between five and eight different factions that are engaged in the violence there in Iraq.

But the most pervasive concern that I have, Mr. Speaker, is that Iran has been fighting a proxy war against the United States in Iraq. I have known for approximately 2 years that the Iranians were funding the insurgency there, that they were making munitions, that they were shipping those munitions into Iraq, that they were training and supporting the insurgency in Iraq and committing and fighting a proxy war against the United States within Iraq, from Iran.

Yet the information that we had at the time wasn't quite solid enough to go public, not quite solid enough to accuse the Iranians of what I have known for 2 years they were doing. But today we know. We know they have infiltrated people, military personnel and trainers into Iraq. We know that they are making sophisticated devices to knock out our armored personnel carriers and our tanks and armored Humvees. And we have had at least 170 Americans who have been killed because of these devices, these sophisticated improvised explosive devices. That is an act of war against the United States troops that is taking place in Iraq at the hands of the Iranians.

Now, the downside, the worst case scenario of this is, as I listened over on this side of the aisle a couple of weeks ago, 2\1/2\ weeks ago when we had our debate about the resolution that did this contradictory thing, respected the troops and opposed their mission, a disgraceful debate that we had on the floor, but many Members on that side of the aisle said it is a civil war, that we should get out, we should not be engaged in a civil war.

First of all, Mr. Speaker, it is not a civil war in Iraq. There is not a force in Iraq that is seeking to unseat and depose and replace the duly elected democratic government of Iraq. You have not heard that out of the mouths of the leaders of the insurgencies that are there. They are not there to destroy the government in Iraq. So, that is rule number one. If they are not trying to depose the government, probably it is a pretty good sign it is not a civil war.

Rule number two is there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in uniform today that are defending and fighting for Iraqis. These uniformed Iraqi military and security personnel are not choosing up sides to shoot at each other. If they did that, we would maybe have a definition of a civil war. So, since the Iraq military and the Iraq security personnel are not fighting against each other, but they are fighting to provide security in Iraq, that says there is not a civil war. Because no one is trying to depose the legitimate government of Iraq, that says it is not a civil war.

So that puts the argument I think away on that. You can argue there is unrest, and there is, and there are fighting factions that are competing against each other for power in a relative vacuum in some of the areas, but that doesn't constitute a civil war.

But even if it were, Mr. Speaker, I would point out the United States has engaged in a number of civil wars to try to put down the kind of unrest and been successful to some degree. One of those places would be in Kosovo. We have been in there now for more than 10 years. We have suppressed a civil war there and saved a lot of lives and had a measure of safety because of that.

So, it is not a civil war, but if it were, that is not a reason not to be there, Mr. Speaker. There is a very good reason to be there, and I will point out that very good reason, and that is the Iranian hegemony is pervasive in Iraq. They are bonded with and are a powerful, strong influence with the two largest Shia organizations in Baghdad and the areas outside and south of Baghdad, all the way to the southern border.

The Shia region of Iraq would be taken over by the influence of the Iranians. If we pulled out of there, the Iranians would fill that vacuum. Yes, there would be some fighting amongst the other factions, but I believe the Iranians fill that vacuum.

If the Iranians fill the vacuum through their relationships with the

Shia leaders that they have already been nurturing and funding and supporting, one of them would be Moqtada al-Sadr, who has absconded to Iran with his leaders, with the commanding officers of his militia, if that happened, those people get propped up. Sadr gets propped up, Hakeem gets propped up, and the Iranian influence gets ahold of the 70 to 80 percent of the oil in Iraq that is in the area of the Shias today. Maybe eventually all of it, but almost immediately they get their hands on 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil.

Mr. Speaker, if that happens, then you have the Iranians sitting there where their cash boxes will be flushed, their war chest be full. They will be overflowing with cash. They will be able to will buy any kind of nuclear power that they want to buy, any kind of nuclear material they want to buy. They will be able to accelerate and buy more centrifuges and process fuel and develop nuclear weapons at a faster pace, and they aren't far from having that accomplished now.

They will be able to develop a means to delivery that nuclear capability in the form of missiles, and if they aren't able to develop that technology there in Iran, they can pay for it and accelerate their research to get that done. If they aren't, they can turn around and buy that on the open market somewhere, the means to deliver, from places like North Korea, which has demonstrated a propensity for marketing off their nuclear capability.

But I think we are not many years away from Iran having a nuclear capability. And a cash flush Iran with a nuclear capability and a means to deliver it doesn't mean it just threatens Tel Aviv, Mr. Speaker. It isn't just that Ahmadinejad has declared that he wants to annihilate Israel. That is a big deal. They are the only democracy in the Middle East, aside from Iraq today. But Ahmadinejad has vowed to destroy Israel and the United States.

But those missiles and that nuclear capability that they would acquire if we withdraw from that area would give them also the ability to reach Western Europe, the ability one day not very far down the line to reach the United States, and it becomes a far more difficult equation for us to deal with.

This time, this place, right now, is the opportune time to resolve the issue of the conflict in the Middle East. We have invested blood and treasure, precious blood and valuable treasure, and we owe it to the memories of those who have committed their lives and given their lives to this cause to get the issue resolved in Iraq.

We are far from not being able to win there, and anyone who thinks that this is a difficult military situation hasn't read back through American history to see some of the circumstances that we have come out of in the past, Mr. Speaker.

But thinking of the concept of a cash-flush Iran with their hands on the valve that controls 42.6 percent of the exportable world's oil supply, control of Straits of Hormuz, to be able to fill their coffers up with cash until they overflow, buy their nuclear capability and buy their missiles as a means to deliver it, and then look around the world and say, well, I am called upon by Allah to annihilate you infidels, and I want to start with the Israelis over here, so what I am going to do is maybe not fire off the missile right away, because it might start off a kind of a nuclear firestorm. I will just turn down the valve on the oil and starve the Americans out.

Think what happens Mr. Speaker, if as vulnerable as we are to imported Middle Eastern oil, if we let Ahmadinejad crank down that valve at the Straits of Hormuz and shut down or shut off 42.6 percent of the world's marketable oil supply. It wouldn't take anywhere near that amount to bring this economy in the United States to its knees, because we are too dependent.

If they did that, and our economy would shrink down into at least a recession, most likely a severe depression, and us going into a recession or depression immediately impacts China, China is dependent upon our economy because we are buying a lot of their goods, and China is also dependent upon foreign oil to provide energy for their growing demand that they have. They have a voracious appetite for oil and they are reaching out across the world to purchase more and more oil reserves and find ways to keep that oil flowing into their country.

But if Ahmadinejad gets his hands on that oil, that 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil, and flush with cash cranks that valve down on the world's exportable oil supplies, the United States economy could be pushed into a collapse, Mr. Speaker. The Chinese economy could be pushed into a collapse, Mr. Speaker. And the winner would be Iran, who into have free sailing all over the Middle East, and the winner would also be Russia, who has a tremendous supply of oil. They would become more and more cash flush, more and more rich, more and more able to buy the things that strengthen them militarily.

This equation that I have described, Mr. Speaker, describes why Putin in Russia has been taking a more and more belligerent posture as the weeks and months unfold. He sees this chess game folding out on the world's chess board. I don't know why we can't see it here in the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. But that is the reality we are faced with in that scenario.

So, we must put our cross hairs on the Iranian nuclear capability today. We must say to them, you will never be a nuclear powered country, you will never have a military means to have nuclear power and a means to deliver it, and we have made a decision that that won't happen here in the United States and we are going to go through every diplomatic channel possible, try every kind of sanction, every kind of blockade, every kind of diplomacy that we can, to convince Iran they should stop, back off, dismantle their nuclear effort. But that would be the only option for them. The other option would be to eliminate their endeavor to become a military nuclear power.

That is where the negotiations need to start in Iraq. Iran has to back off. They need to understand that their involvement in the proxy war against the United States and Iraq accelerates the day when they will, with a thunderous response, lose their nuclear capability should they persist down this path they are heading down.

That is where the crisis is today. But the people in Iran have something to say about what kind of a country they are. And they have something to say about what kind of country they will become.

I am hopeful that the people in Iran will look at their leader, who appears to be an unstable and very much a vindictive, violent man, and come to the streets of Iran and find a way to replace him with someone who can bring Iran back into the 21st century so they can become a moderate, Islamic state that can deal with science and technology and education and use their oil wealth to help support the people in the country rather than the kind of violence being planned by Ahmadinejad.

That will help a lot, if Iran should become a free country. For example, Afghanistan today is a free country. Iraq today is a free country. Iran sits in the middle. They are a geographical link between the two. If Iran can be flipped over and become a regime-change free country, we will have the core of the Middle East, the center for the kind of Islamic jihadists that are coming after us from around the world, after Western civilization itself. The center would become a free territory where there are far less odds that they would be raising the jihadists that they are in the environment that they have today.

There would still need to be some things done in the mountains of Pakistan and within Saudi Arabia. There needs to be things done in Great Britain, for that matter; but that would take us a long way towards a final victory in the global war on terror. And being able to eliminate real estate and places where they could train and foster terrorism would be an essential key in a final victory against these Islamic jihadists.

Mr. Speaker, I have spoken to the issue of energy and why we have to do something about energy, and that is take the money out of the hands of our enemies and put it into the hands and the control of the American people. But at the same time, we must succeed in the Middle East. We have come this far. We are very, very close to being able to see an Iraq that can be an ally, a trading ally, a military ally, a partner that will see us as a friend to them in the Middle East.

It has been a precarious path that we have followed. I believe it has been the right path when you look back and ask the question: What did you know and when did you know it?

You can argue each side of everything, but where we are today is where we are. We must move forward and succeed. The military situation there is not a crisis. It is not precarious, but we do have a situation where there is far too much violence there; and a strategy which has been driven by our President, what is commonly called ``the surge,'' has reduced the casualties in Baghdad and divided Baghdad into nine different sections to where it is far easier to control the smuggling of arms and devices between regions in the city.

If we can resolve that in Iraq, and I believe we will get there if we don't lose our resolve here, then we have taken a giant step forward. As we become less dependent on Middle East oil, the United States gets back on stable footing again.

Now, we have a situation also, though, where it is not just that we are purchasing foreign oil, and that is working against us in our balance of trade. In addition to that, we are importing more and more goods from foreign countries and our trade deficit has gone up from 2 years ago, $617.7 billion in our trade deficit. Last year it was $725 billion. This year, the number usually comes out in February, but the trend has been for our trade deficit to increase about 20 percent a year. I think we can look to expect that is going to happen, and we will see a trade deficit in the $800 billion or more category, Mr. Speaker.

Now, there are those who are not concerned about the trade deficit. They say as long as we can buy cheap products built by cheap labor, we should not be concerned. And they will say because we are deficit spending, we shouldn't be concerned about borrowing money from the Chinese bank, for example.

Well, I would ask those people who are so confident as money shifts in this direction, what would be your ideal kind of economy? Why wouldn't you start with an ideal, lay out the metric for the ideal economy, and then try to achieve the ideal?

I would submit it this way. I would like to have a balance of trade. I would like to not be buying more than we are selling. Any business can think of it in those terms. If you are in business and you are producing $100,000 worth of product a year and are selling that out on the open market, and you turn around and you are buying back $110,000 worth of product, it is easy to see you are going in the red. That is how the trade deficit works. There are currencies that change that equation some, and there is credit that changes that, and the credit on our capital; but I would want to ideally start with a balance in trade, and then work to have an export surplus because the wealth comes back to the United States and we would hold their collateral. That would be one thing.

I would want to have a balanced budget here in the United States. I would want to spend no more than I take in. I am different than the PAYGO argument that comes here because I think we have to keep taxes low so we have a vibrant economy that has an incentive.

We did that. In 2001 and 2003, we did two rounds of tax cuts. That saved our economy from an inevitable recession and perhaps a depression that came from the bursting of the dot-com bubble about the time President Bush took office, and it also came from the September 11 attacks, which we know about, the money we had to spend to set up homeland security and the billions of dollars to protect ourselves, and also the billions of dollars we had to spend militarily to take our fight to the enemy.

But this economy needs to be a strong economy. It needs to be healthy and vibrant. I am for balanced trade, perhaps with an export surplus; and I am for a balanced budget, and I am for paying off the national debt. I think we need to do all of that in the form of reducing the demand on discretionary spending in the United States, by setting up the long-term reform of Social Security and Medicare so that growing entitlement funds can be shrunk down, because as it grows, there is going to be nothing left in the budget except Medicare and Medicaid and the interest on our national debt.

It is always easier to fix the problem earlier than later before it becomes a crisis. We didn't have the political will to do that a couple of years ago when President Bush went across the country and gave speech after speech promoting the reform of Social Security. That needs to be done some time. It will happen when the young people start to come forward and start to have their voice heard, along with the senior citizens in America.

But this budget needs to be balanced. We need to end up with a surplus and collect more than we spend and use that to pay down our national debt. Some of that happened. It happened up until the September 11 attacks. That took us out of the balanced budget that was there.

Mr. Speaker, it is time to get back to it. One of the ways we can do that is not with a gimmick; it is with a total tax reform. The most aggressive organization we have for an agency in America, the one that goes out and really does their job is the Internal Revenue Service. They collect that money that they have due. They are effective and efficient at it.

We have a Tax Code that is more pages than I can remember, and more complicated than anybody can comprehend. And that Tax Code is the best Tax Code that money can buy. K Street here in Washington, D.C. and the lobby that is here has created this Tax Code by getting their little exemption and their little tax deduction. As this adds up, it gets more complicated and convoluted, and it suppresses the growth in our economy, Mr. Speaker.

So what we need to do is look at this Tax Code that we have and say we can't fix this Tax Code. It is beyond anybody's comprehension how to do it, and it is beyond our ability to get it solved politically. The only thing you can do is take the Tax Code and throw it over the side. I would be happy to pitch it into the bay in Boston Harbor and eliminate the Tax Code and never let it grow back again. Also, eliminate the IRS because there is where it would grow, another type of a tax policy that we have today, and go to a national sales tax, a national consumption tax, a fair tax, Mr. Speaker.

If we do that, we have changed the entire dynamic of our taxation in America. It works like this: Ronald Reagan once said what you tax you get less of. If we stick with the tax side, what you tax you get less of. What we do here, in our lack of infinite wisdom, is Uncle Sam has a first lien on all productivity in America.

If you punch the time clock at 8 in the morning, Uncle Sam wants his money first. You will work there until April 14 or April 15 before he gets his due, and then you can start giving your money to the State and on down the line. After a while, you get to keep some of the fruits of your own labor.

But the Federal Government has the first lien on your labor starting the second you go to work anytime. If you pick up the phone and make those extra sales calls for that commission, he has the first lien on that commission.

If you invest your money and you collect the interest, maybe passbook savings, Uncle Sam has the first lien on the productivity of your investment.

If it is a pension income, if it is Social Security income, if it is capital gains, if it is any kind of productivity at all, your labor, your investment, Uncle Sam has the first lien on all of that productivity.

So people make decisions like, I don't think I want to work that extra overtime this week. It is not really worth it because too big of a piece comes out of my check and goes to the Federal Government. I think I'll take the day off. I am going to enjoy life a little bit. After all, I don't get to keep enough of the money I earn.

Or, I am not going to expand that extra line in my factory because, after all, I am in a tax bracket that says I can maintain a level of comfort here, so I am not going to take that risk because the reward is not great enough. That is part of the vision that is going on also.

I am not going to make the extra phone calls for the extra sales because I don't want to pay the tax. I want to be able to keep the money I earn.

That is the mind-set of anyone. The psychology has always been the reason

a controlled economy, a managed society, like, for example, flat out pure communism or European-style socialism, the reason the Soviet Union collapsed was because they did not let people have an incentive to be productive and let them earn and keep the money they made. They took that away from them, and human beings being not as rational as capital is, but human beings being rational, they make those decisions that I talked about, those decisions like, I am not going to put out this effort.

You have heard this: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. That was the belief of Karl Marx and that was the belief of Lenin and that was the belief of Mao Tse-Tung.

But the equation that they miss is if you are going to take from a producer according to their ability, and maybe they have the ability to produce five or six times as much as somebody who has the need, why in world would they put out five or six times the productivity of the person who is going to be receiving the fruits of their labor?

The answer to that is of course they won't, and of course they don't, and that is why the economies in managed societies like the Soviet Union will collapse because they don't tap into the best instincts of human nature, which is we want to work hard, we want to produce, we want the fruits of our labor. And by the way, if we are allowed to keep the fruits of our labor, we will also contribute and donate and tithe better than any other people on Earth.

We do all of that, we need to go to a national sales tax, a consumption tax, so you decide when you pay your taxes.

I think there is a Texan here with something boiling up inside him, and I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for picking up on that. There is a reason why there is a strong affinity between this Western Iowan and this Texan and lot of the Texas delegations.

I know that today is the anniversary of the final battle of the Alamo, and I am very much aware of what that means in Texas and across this country. In fact, if you walk into my office, this Iowan's office, framed there is a letter from Colonel Travis. That level of freedom, the Texans reached out for freedom and they had to fight for it a number of times, number of different ways. I like that flag that hangs in Mr. Hensarling's office that shows a picture of the cannon and says, ``Come and take it.'' That is the right kind of attitude.

We have this freedom here in America, and there are people here that do not want our freedom, they detest our freedom. They just want to take our lives, and to understand an enemy like that goes beyond the scope of our religious foundation and our beliefs. So I think it is important for us to understand this enemy.

I would reflect upon a major from Kentucky whom I spent some time with in the Middle East in the early part of December who said: Thank you for all your prayers. Thank you for the support for our military. We have everything we need. We have the training, the technology. We have the weapons. For men that have to do this job, we have everything we need, but when you pray for us, pray for the American people. Pray that the American people will understand the threat that we are up against, and pray that they will not lose their resolve. We will not lose ours.

I think that might be an appropriate time, unless the gentleman from Texas has another remark to make in watching the clock, Mr. Speaker, I would like to close with that thought, that our military is not going to lose their resolve. They understand this enemy that we are against. This Congress needs to understand this enemy we are against. A majority of the American people understand the enemy we are against, and we have a historical time here.

We can close the door on the legacy of Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu, and we can build upon the success in Afghanistan, and we can close the situation in Iraq and build upon that success. If we do that, we have a bright and free future. If we fail to do that, every enemy that wants to come after us will come after us.

I appreciate again Mr. Gohmert coming down here, the way you engage with your constituents and the way that you bring these values, these American values out of the heartland to flow all the way through the middle part of the United States here. I am proud to serve with the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Speaker, and I am glad to have had the privilege to address you in this chamber.

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 3: Page 4, line 6, strike ``$250,000,000''

and insert ``$237,500,000''.

Page 4, line 7, strike ``$300,000,000'' and insert

``$285,000,000''.

Page 4, line 7, strike ``$350,000,000'' and insert

``$332,500,000''.

Page 4, line 8, strike ``$400,000,000'' and insert

``$380,000,000''.

Page 4, line 9, strike ``$500,000,000'' and insert

``$475,000,000''.

Mr. Speaker, I have had the privilege to be seated here in this Chamber and listen to the presentation over the last probably hour and a half or so. It is quite interesting as I listened to the presentation made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the concern about the imbalance in trade, which I am concerned about, and the argument that we need not necessarily free trade, but fair trade.

As I carefully listened to the 60-minute presentation, I hear some things that are wrong, and I agree with some of them, as a matter of fact, most of them, but I heard no suggestions on how we are going to fix this, except ask the administration to do it better and get it right.

I think it is important for us, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to identify these issues that we are going to call problems that we should also step forward and have the will and the foresight to present some solutions.

So in the time I have had here to listen now, I will just present some solutions that I would have liked to have heard from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, because I think we ought to be here to fix the problems we have.

First, I don't have quite the same number of trade deficit that the gentlelady from Ohio presented in the poster here just a little bit ago. I recall that 2 years ago, actually now 3 years ago, our trade deficit was a minus $617.7 billion. Last year it was a minus $725 billion. Her number was slightly higher than that. We should by now have the records for the 2006 trade deficit. I have not had access to that number, and I note the gentlelady from Ohio didn't present a number for the 2006 trade deficit, but it had been increasing about 20 percent a year for several years.

I heard no evidence that convinces me that NAFTA is the only reason. In fact, I will submit that there are a number of other reasons that we have a trade deficit. I would challenge my colleagues, join with me in some of these solutions that I will present here.

But before I do so, I am just going to go back and review some of the remarks that were made and then respond to them with solutions rather than lamentations, Mr. Speaker.

The gentleman from Wisconsin called for fair trade. He showed a poster that has a minus $233 billion trade deficit with China. I don't dispute that number. I expect that is as very close, if not as accurate, a number as there is out there. But that is a portion of and not even a majority of our trade deficit that we have from a global imbalance.

Then the gentleman from Illinois made the statement ``We need fair trade.'' Fair trade in fact was called for by I believe every one of the speakers, and at least no one disagreed with that.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I refuse to allow my staff to use the word ``fair.'' In fact, I refused to let my children use the word ``fair'' as they were growing up, because I know something that most Americans know, and that is anyone who has raised two or more children knows there is no such thing as fair.

If you are going to use ``fair'' and be able to define the word ``fair,'' you have to be talking about a county fair or a State fair or some other type of gathering where people display their wares, because the term ``fair'' is not definable; it isn't universally understood. So one person's idea of fair is another person's idea of a injustice, and it will be ever thus.

We can talk about justice and equity, and we can talk about using the equal enforcement of trade agreements and laws, and I think we should do that; but to even try to define what we would like to do with a term like ``fair,'' we have chosen the vaguest term that there is in the dictionary and the one that submits itself to anyone's redefinition of it.

Also the statement was made that we have no options, we have to vote these fast track trade agreements up or down. That is not true. Yes, they come to the floor as unamendable, but a couple of years ago, maybe 3 years ago, I amended two unamendable trade agreement, and I did so in committee.

These were trade agreements that had to do with Singapore and Chile. Ambassador Zoellick had negotiated immigration agreements into those trade agreements. And so with the wisdom and tenaciousness of the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), we brought those trade agreements before the Judiciary Committee, and although they were unamendable trade agreements, up-or- down, to be voted on, we had a mock markup in committee. And in that mock markup, I was successful in getting two mock amendments put on the mock bill. And when we finished with our analysis of the trade agreements that had been negotiated by the U.S. Trade Representative and had perfected the trade agreements in the process of going through the mock markup, the U.S. Trade Representative then, even though it was supposedly impossible to go back and reopen those negotiations, reopened those negotiations and adapted those two amendments into the trade agreement, and we struck out the immigration language out of the trade agreement. It had no business. It had no place there, and that is one way you can effect a change if you disagree with the trade agreements.

But it sounds to me like the people that are speaking here are against all trade agreements no matter what they might be. They will always be able to oppose any agreement no matter how it is defined because they will always reserve the right to redefine their own term called fair. It will be, it isn't fair. We can't do it because it is not fair. Well, you have to be more specific than that.

As I listened to my colleague from Iowa talk about the Maytag issue at Newton, and that has left a big hole in the central part of Iowa, and I look back on the 34\1/2\ years of my marriage, and there has never been anything but a Maytag washer and dryer in my home washing clothes for our family. That is deep in our heritage, and we are loyal to the brand.

But part of the equation also was that, when it came time to resolve the labor disagreements and to settle the salary and benefit and pension plans, the burden of that was just too high to be able to hold the jobs in Iowa. It is too bad, but those were some of the circumstances that no one over here uttered, when you get collective bargaining and it drives the package up so high; when you overplay your hand, you lose the company. You don't have the option to back down, and the union doesn't come forward and say, I will be happy to take a $2 or $5 pay cut, or maybe we will negotiate the health care plan or do a package that has to do with our contribution versus our benefits, defined contributions versus defined benefits plan, that stuff is hard to get when you have a lucrative labor agreement, collectively bargained agreement, those types of agreements could not be resolved favorably to Maytag. That is one of the reasons why we no longer have Maytag centered up in Newton, Iowa. I think we need to talk about that.

Yes, these jobs are going overseas. But, also, Maytag made an investment overseas to go over there and make washing machines to sell to the Chinese. They invested initially $70 million in that plant. And, finally, after some years of trying, they couldn't make it work and pulled out of that investment.

There are many, many different components to these transactions. It isn't just simply American corporations, that they are simply greedy capitalists and that they quickly move our industries overseas. They are reluctant to go. But we set up the burden of taxation and regulation. And then you have the compensation packages of the collective bargaining agreements; and that being the environment here in the United States, having then to compete against the cheaper labor overseas. All of those things work against us, not just the corporations deciding to make a decision that is simply based on greed. That is not so, Mr. Speaker.

Also, the argument, the gentlelady from Iowa said our trade deficits soar, we need a new trade model. I heard no proposal of what that new trade model is. It is criticism, but it is not a solution. We need to provide solutions.

The other gentlewoman from Iowa talked about Hershey is moving out and going to Mexico. I am saddened to see that go. But some of my colleagues who have been here a number of years have had an opportunity to put a fix in place so we could sustain, could have sustained some of these businesses that we are losing, and we could still sustain many of these businesses today if we could get to work and roll up our sleeves and do the right thing for real tax reform.

That would be to simply bring forward H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax. And that eliminates the IRS and the Income Tax Code, so it eliminates personal and corporate income tax. It eliminates the tax on your interest income, your dividend income and your capital gains. And it eliminates the AMT. It takes the tax off your savings and investment, and your pension and Social Security. It does all of those things.

One of the things I would think my colleagues would want to do if they are concerned about the trade deficit, I would think that they would want to border adjust the taxes so we weren't operating here in the United States at a disadvantage, having to put taxes on the cost of our goods and be competing against imported goods from overseas that do not have that tax component in there. That is part of what they are talking about, is unfair trade, subsidized goods was the term used by the gentleman from Pennsylvania, the onslaught of foreign subsidized goods.

Well, they may be subsidized goods, and I am sure there is a definition that can be applied to that, but we do the opposite. We put the tax burden on everything that we manufacture in this country, on materials and labor, and it has to be built in and embedded in the cost of the things that we sell, because corporations, companies that are in business to sell a good or a service or any combination of the two, do not pay income tax. They can't pay income tax. They collect it from people. The end user, the last stop on the retail chain, are the ones that pay the taxes, but it is collected through the companies that sell the goods and the services, and then they transfer it to the IRS in the form of corporate income tax, business income tax and sometimes the personal income tax of the executives and the shareholders as well.

Corporations and businesses don't pay taxes; they collect it from real people. The consumer is the last stop on the retail dollar. Once we can get our minds around that absolute truth, then we can begin to talk about how we can work together to border adjust our taxes and become a more competitive Nation again.

The studies that we have had done indicate that the components boil down to this: On average, 22 percent of a product that is on the shelf for sale here in the United States, 22 percent is the embedded cost of the tax structure that the company that is producing that product has to build into the price. So that says, if you are selling a widget and that widget is a dollar, 78 cents is the cost of the widget and 22 cents is the cost of the tax.

If you put that on some more expensive items, go from the $1 widget to the $30,000 vehicle, and we have millions of dollars worth of vehicles coming into the United States every year. Some of our trade deficit, I can tell you, would be $800 million worth of Mazdas that

come over from Japan every year, made in Japan, put on ships, brought here, off-loaded into the United States and marketed on our dealers' lots, $800 million. As that price goes up, and that is a couple-of- year-old number, we could be into a billion dollars, and that would be one-700th of our entire trade deficit because we are buying Mazdas but we are not exporting Chevys or Fords back to Japan. If we sent a billion dollars worth of Chevys or Fords to Japan instead of them sending a billion dollars of Mazdas to us, then we pick up a two-for, and we reduce that trade deficit by $2 billion, not $1 billion.

But if you put a Chevy and a Mazda on a dealer's lot and each has a sticker price of $30,000 and they are comparable vehicles, comparable quality and accessories that are built into that price so the competition will establish that price and they are selling against each other at $30,000; if we pass H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax and we cease taxing all productivity in America and we put the tax on sales instead of income, a national sales tax, that $30,000 Chevy, the price of it goes down.

If you take the tax component out, you take 22 percent out of that $30,000 Chevy, and it takes us into that area of $23,400. The Mazda stays at $30,000.

When we put our tax back in, we have to build it back in, the sales tax on the price, now the Mazda goes up by 23 percent, and it ends up as a $39,000 Mazda. That is the amount you would write the check for to drive it off the lot. But you would write the check for the Chevy or the Ford at $30,400. That is an $8,600 marketing advantage that we would gain simply by getting rid of the IRS and the Income Tax Code and put our tax back on sales and allowing these companies and competition to drive the embedded tax component out of everything that we are producing here in America.

That gives us a 28 percent marketing advantage here in the United States. So when foreign companies are competing against American manufacturers, they would have to look at that huge 28 percent advantage that we would have. I can tell you, there would be a lot more products produced in the United States.

I will take you back to the $800 million worth of Mazdas coming over from Japan by ship every year. Those cars are made in Japan. A lot of the components are put together in Japan, and wherever you make something, that is where the labor and jobs are. When we are purchasing from a foreign country, we are transporting and exporting our job market there.

Now, that is true for everything that we are purchasing that is a good from a foreign country. Those jobs, whenever we send money overseas and purchase a good from a foreign country, we are also transferring jobs there.

We pass the FAIR Tax, those jobs come back home, many of them, and we hold most jobs here. We end up with a 28 percent marketing advantage, and it does a number of other things. That is, it doubles our economy in 10 to 15 years. It fixes our balance of trade, that minus-$725 billion, probably a larger number now, because we can compete not only here better, and we will be pulling jobs back here and creating more jobs here in the United States, but also our export markets. Many times the export markets turn on a 1 or 2 percent margin.

We pick up instantaneously a 28 percent advantage from where we are right now if we can take the tax component out of the products that we are selling. So we do a number of good things. We hold our manufacturing base here. We hold our jobs here, especially our blue collar jobs, the jobs like Hershey and Maytag, that are leaving America. These are manufacturing jobs after manufacturing jobs. Those kinds of jobs stay here. We create more jobs here. These are American- made products, and the dollars will stay here. As those dollars stay here, they turn over seven times in a community, as the economists tell us they do. They create more and more and more jobs. Pretty soon we would have that trade deficit gone. We would end up with a trade surplus. We would end up with a healthy, robust industrial base in America and a strong economy that would be doubled in 10-15 years.

If we do that, the rest of the world would have to stand up and take notice. We are already the most dynamic economy the world has ever seen. But we have a problem, a series of them. But, Mr. Speaker, the problem I am speaking of is the problem of going back and indexing Alexander Tyler's statement, that when a democracy realizes it can vote itself benefits from the public treasury, on that day the democracy ceases to exist.

We are at least 44 percent of Americans not paying income tax. If we go to a national sales tax, a FAIR Tax, that does a number of things, but it untaxes the poor, and I will get to that in a moment. But it also makes taxpayers out of every consumer in America. And we are all consumers.

Each time we step up, and I think of little Johnny stepping up to the counter, and he is going to buy his baseball cards, and he is going to put a couple of dimes up there for Uncle Sam. Those children from little on up will understand that the Federal Government is expensive, and they will know that they are funding the Federal Government, and they will be buying into the Federal Government. And they will also be advocating for let me have a few less services and let me keep a few more of my dimes. That penetrates into young people.

I remember a story told by a candidate for Congress in last summer's primary election. He had a little son; I believe his name was Michael. Little Michael had saved up his money. Little Michael, he picked up his box of Skittles, and he had counted out 89 cents for the box of Skittles.

So he put his money up on the counter with the box of Skittles, carefully counted out 89 cents, and the lady at the check-out register rang it up and said that will be 96 cents. He did not have anymore money. He got that look on his face of what am I going to do; they are 89 cents; I have 89 cents. The lady said, well, with the tax. Little Michael turned to his dad and said, Dad, I have to pay tax on Skittles? Yes, that is what you have to do if we eliminate the IRS and the Federal income tax code. You could be a consumer who chooses when to pay your taxes, and like little Michael, pay taxes on Skittles at age seven or eight or less, and realize how expensive the Federal Government actually is.

That changes the psyche of an entire culture. People that are always looking to the Federal Government for a solution begin to realize they are funding the Federal Government and they are part of the solution. They are bought into this.

Going for a national sales tax, a consumption tax, a fair tax, Mr. Speaker, does everything good that everyone else's tax policy does and more besides, and that is not just my words. Those are also the words of one famed chairman who has been the lead guru on economics here in America for a lot of years.

It fixes everything that you can fix with a tax policy. It fixes everybody, all the pieces that come along here, puts them all together and does more besides. It border adjust taxes and it provides incentive for savings and investment. It doubles our economy in 10 to 15 years. It repairs our balance of trade and puts it on a surplus of balance of trade, and this growing economy then, on top of that, Mr. Speaker, it solves our deficit, our deficit in our revenue that we have here, our deficit spending because, when the economy doubles, we are going to have a lot more dollars that come flowing in here.

We replace the payroll tax, the Social Security, the Medicare and the Medicaid, with a consumption tax portion. I advocate for a 23 percent embedded tax that is made of these components. I said I would get back to this.

Three percent of that 23 percent provides a rebate into everybody's household to untax everyone in America up to the poverty level. So let us say the poverty level is $20,000 for a family of four, and I think the number is actually $18,500 for a family of four. They would pay about $458 in a month in taxes if they were going to consume to the level of their income. So this 3 percent goes into a fund, and immediately at the beginning of every month, it would do an automatic transfer into each household as registered by the Health and Human Services for the level of sales tax that that family would pay just up to the poverty level. So anybody that is living at the poverty level or below pays no tax, pays no national sales tax, but those that start

spending above that, above that $18,500, they start then paying the sales tax on that until you get to someone like I presume Bill Gates would be a rather robust consumer, I do not know that, but if I were he, I would be a robust consumer. People of that kind of income will be the ones who will pay the highest percentage of tax off their income. This is progressive, but also, it untaxes the poor. The first 3 percent collected is the portion that goes in to untax everyone up to the poverty level, and then those of us who spend more than the poverty level will pay our fair share of taxes going on up. That is 3 percent.

Eight percent goes to replace the payroll tax, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, so that we no longer have to have that most regressive kind of a tax. That is a very regressive tax on especially the lower income people. There is no exemption for you if you are only making $10,000 a year. You are going to take the .0765 percent times two, and that is 15.3 percent, multiply that by your $10,000, and you are going to give up $1,530 to the payroll tax even if you only make $10,000 a year.

So you can see, Mr. Speaker, that is a 15 percent tax on some of the poorest people in America. We eliminate that tax and put it back on consumption. And by the way, when people max out on Social Security, the most wealthy people are paying at a lower rate on the payroll tax than the poor are among us. So payroll tax is a very regressive tax. We replace it with 8 percent. We untax everyone up to the poverty level with 3 percent, that is 11, and then to replace the income tax itself and be revenue neutral that takes a 12 percent embedded tax. That is how we get to 23.

This plan works. Every time I turn this rubrics cube around and look at it another way, it looks better and better and better, but my colleagues over here are content to stand here night after night, give us a list of lamentations on what is wrong with the President, the administration, the previous majority, the decisions that have been made here in this Congress over the last 15 years on trade. They argue that free trade is fine as long as it is fair trade, but I did not hear anyone advocate for any trade agreement that they ever agreed with. So that makes us trade isolationists unless they can come forward with some real changes.

Well, I will submit that I can support trade agreements. I can support them, Mr. Speaker, if we can have smart trade, but also, we need to have a more competitive environment for America's producers. That means pass the fair tax.

Also, a couple of years ago, I was sitting over in China. As I watched the negotiations go on and engaged in them, I saw the eyes of the negotiators on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, and I watched their smiles and I watched their heads nod. We were talking to them about the billions of dollars of intellectual property that is pirated by the Chinese, and it is essentially a national standard. At least there is so much of it that goes on, there is not a punishment going on for it, this standard of stepping in and stealing our intellectual property as quick as it comes on the market.

We might have a Hollywood movie that comes out and before the premier, the DVD has been pirated by the Chinese and it is on the streets in its black market version, undercutting the intellectual property and the creativity of Hollywood. Those things happen.

The copyrights and also the patents and the trademarks, those 3 pieces of intellectual property are consistently and persistently and strategically pirated by the Chinese. The Russians, too, only the Russians just are not as good as it yet, and they are getting better.

As I listened to those negotiations and as we put pressure on them over there to bring criminal charges against those who are stealing U.S. intellectual property rights and selling Rolex watches, fake Rolex watches would be another example that brings to that mind's eye, Mr. Speaker. As we put pressure on them to bring criminal charges and civil charges, they said to us, well, we are fining people for stealing U.S. intellectual property and we are moving forward more aggressively to enforce. So I asked them for a report on those fines, and they gave me 150 pages. It was all in Chinese, Mr. Speaker, so I did not really have the ability to determine that except that, by their witness and their verbal presentation to me, they had levied some fines for X number of yuan, Chinese dollars, but we also know that a government-owned company, that if it is owned by the government and if the government fines that company, it is like me deciding I am going to fine myself and I will take a couple of dollars out of this pocket and put it over here in this pocket. Makes no difference to a Communist State and State-owned businesses if the State fines the company. The State is the company, and so those statements did not move me very much, Mr. Speaker.

Then I asked about criminal charges, and they said, yes, we have brought some criminal charges and we are getting more rugged with our enforcement. So I asked the point blank question: Who have you locked up in jail? Who is in jail today because you are stealing our intellectual property? And of course, the answer was, Mr. Speaker, well, we have not locked anybody up just yet, but we are moving forward to enforce.

Well, I came to the conclusion that the Chinese saw it as a price of doing business. The cost of doing business was to smile and nod and speak nice and make nice to Americans that are over there that want to alleviate the burden of the pirating of the U.S. intellectual property rights and that they will continue smiling and nodding and hosting Americans as long as we are willing to come over there to complain, but nothing is going to happen. Nothing is ever going to happen unless we bring some leverage against them.

So I will submit a second solution for the folks over here and ask them: Do you care to weigh in on this? I would be happy to yield to you, and I hope you come to the floor at a later time, too, or we can get together and you can sign on to some of this legislation that actually provides solutions to the problems that you so articulately laid out here tonight.

But one of these solutions is this. Direct the U.S. Trade Representative to conduct a study to determine and evaluate the loss to American intellectual property rights holders to the Chinese for the pirating of those intellectual property rights. Once that amount is quantified, and Mr. Speaker, I can tell you it is in the billions, then direct the U.S. Trade Representative to levy a duty on all goods that come from China in an amount equivalent to be able to recover the complete loss that American property rights holders have sustained because of the piracy of their property rights and to distribute those proceeds back into the hands of the people that hold the copyrights, the trademarks and the other intellectual property rights.

That is another concrete solution that I would lay out here for the folks that come to the floor and talk about what is wrong but do not provide a solution and do not provide a way to fix things and turn them around and make them right, Mr. Speaker.

I did not necessarily come here tonight, though, to talk about the shortfalls of the presentation that was made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I came here tonight, Mr. Speaker, to talk about a great big issue that we have to face in this country.

As I stand here, this being the week beginning the 5th of March, it has been my understanding for some two to three weeks that the senator from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy, was preparing to introduce a, I will put it in quotes, a ``comprehensive'' immigration bill sometime the week of the 5th of March. I am hopeful that that does not happen, at least coming out of him, the subcommittee chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee of the Judiciary on the Senate side.

We saw what they did last year over in the Senate and actually passed, and it was an abysmal piece of policy, Mr. Speaker. Now they are winding up to try it again, same person or persons, same face, same philosophy. That same philosophy is amnesty first, enforcement maybe never.

I remember Senator Kennedy standing out here on the Mall just on the West side of our West portico when we had demonstrators by the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands last spring. He said to them, and these demonstrators, many were not lawfully present in the United States, one can presume I

think accurately, and he said to them, some say report to be deported; I say to you, report to become an American citizen.

That was the clarion call of the left wing liberals and the voice of Senator Kennedy calling for people, come to America, come here illegally and when you are here, we are going to pave the way for a path to citizenship for you and hand over to you all the benefits of American citizenship.

Well, I say to Senator Kennedy, if your mantra is amnesty, those of you who stand on amnesty, you deserve to be branded with the scarlet letter A for amnesty and treated as such because amnesty undermines the rule of law in this country.

These are some pillars of America that are essential for us in order to be able to sustain ourselves and sustain ourselves into the future. In order to identify those pillars of American civilization, we need to look back and identify what has been some of the roots of American exceptionalism. Why are we an exceptional Nation with such a dynamic economy? Why have we been so robust as a people?

There are a number of reasons, but one I would point out is that because we have brought in immigrants from all over the globe, because it was difficult to get here, because many of them had to sell themselves for seven years to pay off their passage to the United States, to work off the cost of that ride aboard ship across from Western Europe, for example, the people that had that sense of a dream, the sense of wanting to come here to realize their American dream, to raise their families here, they also had that sense of adventuresomeness.

Within all of that, the dream, the industriousness, the creativity, the sense of adventure, that desire to join with us in our manifest destiny as we settled a continent in lightening speed, all of that was the vitality that came in with our immigration. We were able to skim the cream off of the crop in Nation after Nation after Nation. Donor Nations gave up a measure of their most vital population because they came here so they could spread their wings and they could excel.

That is one of the pillars of American exceptionalism. Without belaboring that point very much any more, another pillar of American exceptionalism has been the foundation of our Constitution, which is drafted based upon the principles that you will find in the Declaration. And in the Constitution are our basic rights, freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and the second amendment rights, the right to keep and bear arms, and what used to be in our fifth amendment, the right to property, which says, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

But now after the Keloe decision, it says, ``nor shall private property be taken without just compensation,'' the for public use words have been eliminated from the fifth amendment by the Supreme Court in the Keloe decision.

But up until that time, the sanctity of property rights rode right along with the sanctity of our first amendment rights, and we have done a good job of defending our second amendment rights. Throughout this is the vitality of America, because we have individual rights that are guaranteed, and they are passed down from God to each one of us. Then the individuals, we the people, then hand that responsibility over to our elected representatives to represent us in places like this House of Representatives.

But we have guaranteed rights, and those guaranteed rights and the rights of due process and to be protected from discrimination in a court of law have given us a sense of justice and a sense of the rule of law that gives every American, every American citizen and those who aspire to be American citizens, solid ground on which to stand, confidence that it is predictable into their future so that they can invest capital, borrow money against their property, be able to pay off the mortgage, be able to reach for the stars and dream, create and become an entrepreneur, be one of those people that really makes a big difference and realize their fortune and their dreams. These are some of the foundations of American exceptionalism, but the rule of law is a foundation for it.

If we grant amnesty to people who broke the law to come here, then we have undermined the rule of law. If we undermine the rule of law, we don't have the culture for a strong America any longer. We have lost a pillar for what makes us great.

So to reward law breakers does exactly that. As I listen to people that come in and testify in the immigration subcommittee meeting, I will often hear people; there will be those that come in and say, well, I was a beneficiary of the amnesty in 1986. I came in illegally when Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty bill; there was supposed to be some say as low as 300,000 that would get amnesty. I recall about 1 million, but we know that went over 3 million who received amnesty because the fraud was so rampant.

The document forgers kicked into high gear. For everyone that got a designed amnesty in a legal fashion, there were others who by hook and crook got their amnesty. But all of them are for amnesty today if they happen to be alive and still in this country, and so are their families and their friends for amnesty. They say, well, it is not a hard thing to figure out. It was good for my dad or my mother or my brother or my uncle. Look, they are here in America, and they are doing well.

Why shouldn't we give amnesty to other people, because it has been good to us. Now that is a very simple equation and not a very rational thought process but, for every one we grant amnesty to, there will be several who will say, I think that is a good idea because my friend or my relation thought amnesty was a good idea.

If this becomes amnesty for 12 million or 15 million or for 20 million or more, and they bring in their extended families at the tune of maybe as many as 273 for every anchor baby that comes into the United States, we won't just have 12 or 15 or 20 or more million who have no respect and, in fact, contempt for the rule of law; we will have 100 or more million that will have contempt for the rule of law.

That then would utterly destroy the rule of law in America. We would go back to a third world kind of country where the rule of law doesn't work down south in places like Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia. It is the rule of who has the power and who has the guns.

I see that my friend and colleague from Texas, the wonderful doctor, whom I seek his counsel quite often, especially on these technical issues, has arrived on the floor. I would be happy to yield as much time as the doctor from Texas (Mr. Burgess), would consume.

In reclaiming my time, I thank the tenacious Texan for coming to the floor. He knows how much I revere Steve Forbes and Steve Forbes' financial acumen, as well as Alan Greenspan's. Perhaps on this subject matter it is one versus the other.

I also notice the gentleman from Texas, however compelling the argument, didn't present a list of things that his tax policy does better than the tax policy I advocate. But I think we both recognize that either is far better than what we are dealing with today.

There is nothing coming out of the other side of the aisle, particularly from the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel, except, well, we are going to figure out some ways to raise some of these existing taxes and maintain the convolutions that are within them. That is what we have to look forward to.

The stock market last week had its worst single week in 4 years. I don't think its coincidental that the tax increases that this have come out of this Congress, the Pelosi Congress, and the noises coming out of the Ways and Means Committee, particularly the Chair, have added instability to our New York stock exchange and all of our financial markets. Once the inertia of this continues, we might find ourselves in a significantly poorer situation and not very far from now.

I, also, on the immigration issue, there were some statistics that I had made a promise that I would unfold here and send this message out, and that is that we are faced with a tremendous amount of loss here in America in the lives of Americans because we are not enforcing at our border.

As the gentleman from Texas said, we need to first stop the bleeding at the border and get that under control. We need to push all traffic, both, all products, all contraband, all human traffic, through the ports of entry. We need to beef up our ports of entry.

You know, as I was sitting in an immigration hearing a couple or 3 years ago, I began to listen to the testimony about how many people died in the Arizona desert in a year.

It is a significant number then; it was about 250. Now, I think it is 400. That is sad, and it is tragic, but I, again, wonder, the 11,000 a night that sneak into the United States across our southern border, I sat down there by the fence in the dark and had the infiltration going around on either side of me, and that 11,000 a night is calculated by this Border Patrol agent who testified they stop between a fourth and a third.

And they stop 1,188,000 last year. If you do the math on that, that shows about 4 million a year get into the United States, and out of that 4 million, that works out to be about 11,000 a night.

I would expect there is someone around here that knows the size of Santa Ana's Army when he came across the river. But me being a Yankee, I have to guess at it. I think it was about 6,000 strong. It was then that when they attacked the Alamo at San Antonio. But if it was 6,000 strong or less than that when they attacked the Alamo, I would just suggest that twice the size of Santa Ana's army comes across the border every single night.

They may not be in uniforms, and they may not be marching in orderly ranks, and they may not be all of them armed, but they are carrying with them $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming into the United States, $65 billion.

And we are spending $8 billion a year on our southern border. And out of that $8 billion, that is $4 million a mile, and we are getting some kind of efficiency rating of our dollars of maybe 25 percent of enforcement, and often I hear a 10 percent number from the Border Patrol people that are down there.

So what is the price to America? $65 billion worth of illegal drugs that comes out of the pockets of Americans. And the price in lives? The question that I ask and commissioned the GAO study for was, How many Americans die at the hands of those who do get across the border? And that number came out, not quite apples to apples and I had to do a calculation or two off of other government studies to match up with the GAO study from April of 2005, and it works out to be this: of the inmates in our Federal and State penitentiaries, 28 percent are criminal

aliens. And I am going to presume that if we had enforced our laws, none of them would have been in the United States.

So if you take 28 percent and you calculate that across the murders that we have in America, and that is about 16,000, a little over that, you will end up with a number 28 percent of that is 4,518 murder victims in the United States at the hands of those who are criminal aliens in the United States. You add to that the victims of negligent homicide, most of them drunk driving victims, and that is going to run 28 percent of those, that comes out to 4,746, Mr. Speaker. So you add those two together, that is 9,264 lives in America die violently every year at the hands of criminal aliens, presumably who would not be in the United States had we aggressively enforced our laws.

That is a shocking and astonishing number. It is three times the amount of victims that we had on September 11, and that is an annual number every single year.

Now, what does it cost us in dollars? Incarceration costs alone of the 267,000 illegal aliens that we have locked up in our prisons that we can count, and many of them we don't know, but we know we can count 267,000 and they will cost us in incarceration costs $6.7 billion just to lock them up.

So we are spending $8 billion on the border on our Border Patrol for maybe 25 percent efficiency; we are spending $6.7 billion to lock up the criminal aliens and hold them in our prisons. And then, on top of that, the cost to murder victims, and that number has been calculated by government numbers at $3.9 million per murder victim. That comes out to be $17.05 billion in the cost of murder victims in dollars. And those victims of negligent homicide, I have measured that a little bit smaller at two-thirds of that overall cost of the murder victim because the investigations don't go so far. That comes to $11.37 billion.

So I add these numbers up: Incarceration costs, $6.7 billion; the value of lost productivity in lives of murder victims, $17.05 billion; the value in lost productivity in lives at negligent homicide victims, $11.37 billion. It comes up to $35.12 billion out-of-pocket costs out of the United States just for those who were killed and to lock up those who kill. That does not include rape victims, assault victims, grand larceny and theft victims. That list goes on and on and on.

Sex victims is another one. We have identified about 240,000 sex criminals who are criminal aliens. And of those, they have at least four identifiable victims. So you do the math on that. It is just a few short of 1 million victims of sex crimes, and many of those are sex crimes where there is a murder involved as well.

The price to this society is unbelievable. It has only begun to be quantified. But to put it in a context, it works like this: $65 billion worth of illegal drugs is costing our economy $35 billion-plus a year, just the victims of murder, negligent homicide, and to lock up those who do the same, $35 billion.

The value of the entire oil industry of Mexico is $28 billion. We pay more for murder victims and negligent homicide victims here in the United States and plus locking them up than all of the oil revenue of a pretty good oil-producing country the size of Mexico.

And then, additionally, another $8 billion a year just to guard our southern border. And on top of that, there will be a report coming out very soon, if it is not out already, that shows that remittances is a term they use. This is a transfer of wages from mostly immigrants here in the United States, some illegal, some legal, out of the United States. That number has been going up incrementally year by year, and last year it was $45 billion a year that was transferred out of the United States in remittances, or usually wire transfers, back to home countries.

This report that is due to come out if it is not out now will show $60 billion transferred in the last year, $30 billion of it going to Mexico, $30 billion of it going to other places in the western hemisphere, but usually the lion's share of that goes into Central America and the Caribbean.

So when you look at the dollars transferred out of our society, $60 billion being sent out by labor, $65 billion paying for illegal drugs, $35 billion to pay for the cost of violent death, and $8 billion to guard the border, you can see, I think, Mr. Speaker, how massive this burden is here for the taxpayers and the victims of crime here in the United States.

And one thing that I have always wondered about crime victims is that if society really paid that whole cost, if we had to write the check for the $35 billion or so that it costs for victims, the violent death in America at the hands of criminal aliens, if we had to write the check for that, the taxpayers would be outraged if it were a line item on an appropriations bill here in the United States Congress.

But, instead, it isn't quite like that. There are costs picked up by the taxpayers, investigations, prosecutions, incarcerations. We pick those up. But the real costs comes out of the lives of the people who are their victims in great huge whopping chunks of their lives, their future, for their families, their productivity, and leaves a hole that can never be healed again.

That is the burden that is all of this, and the injustice of it comes from the psychology that the State is the one that is wronged and the crime victim is made whole when the State believes that they are whole. And the crime victim in this country by our process is seldom made whole, and as a matter of fact, maybe is never made whole.

So we have a big problem here in America. But sometimes there are faces that need to be identified, too, Mr. Speaker, and so I have gathered up some of the faces of these perpetrators. When I stand here and say 9,264 violent deaths in America, that is kind of faceless. I would point out, too, though, that maybe people were skeptical of my numbers. Maybe they think that those numbers are too high. I would ask, what are your numbers? Produce those.

But here is another way of looking at it. Violent death in America is 4.28 out of every 100,000 people. Violent death in Mexico is 13.2 out of every 100,000. That is a good, solid three times the violent death rate in Mexico as it is the United States.

Now, Mexico happens to be one of the more peaceful countries south of us. If you go to Honduras, their violent death rate is nine times that of the United States. And I don't know what El Salvador's is, they don't publish that. But when you get to Colombia, their violent death rate is 15.4 times the violent death rate of the United States. And, on top of that, the people that are coming in from those countries are young men. Young men will commit more than twice as many violent crimes as any other demographic group, in fact, significantly more than that.

And they are coming from countries that are more violent, and they are bringing drugs from those countries to the tune of $65 billion. So there is crime and violence associated with the drugs; there is crime and violence associated with young men. There are young men coming from countries that are far more violent than in the United States. And when you sit down and do the math and calculate out, if you were going to predict the crime results here in America, you would find, Mr. Speaker, that the 28 percent that are incarcerated in our prisons today that are criminal aliens probably don't represent the overall crime impact on the United States society.

But to personalize this a little bit, I have brought a few of the faces of these evil perpetrators down here to the floor. This, being one of the more evil. This is the face of Santos Cabrera Borjas. He is a 22-year-old, was a 22-year-old illegal alien from Honduras, that country that has got nine times the violent death rate of the United States. They can live with a lot higher level of violence.

Here is the kind of violence you get with one of these people. On June 4, 2006, Borjas murdered an innocent 9-year-old boy named Jordin Paudler of Georgia by hacking him to death with a hatchet. Borjas was in a car that was driving through the neighborhood, it had a wobbly wheel, and this young 9-year-old boy Jordin Paudler called out to the car and said, You have got a bad wheel on your car, being helpful, like young boys will do, like a lot of good Americans are. And Santos Cabrera Borjas got out of the car and attacked this young 9-year-old boy with a hatchet and twice split his forehead with a hatchet and left it in, as I understand it, all because he tried to help.

This is an example, and I will bring many of these examples to the floor as time unfolds, Mr. Speaker, and this is one of the faces of evil. There are many, many faces of evil. We have a big debate in front of us. I thank you.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 41 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, March 6, 2007, at 10:30 a.m., for morning hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to this modified closed rule today. Although several worthy amendments were offered in the Rules Committee last evening, and I am grateful I will have the privilege to offer one here on this floor later on today, but only three were made in order, and three of those that were not made in order deserve special mention, I believe, here in this rules debate that we are having.

The first would be Representative Musgrave's amendment to repeal those provisions that permit employers to require employees to join or pay dues or fees to a union as a condition of employment, that being the right to work amendment. I have long supported that language, going clear back into the seventies as an employer and a small business owner.

Secondly, Representative Emerson and I both submitted separate amendments that would exempt businesses employing 50 individuals or less from the legislation.

Third, Representative Chabot attempted to exempt small businesses by using the Small Business Administration definition.

I have spent my life in small business. I started one in 1975. I met payroll for over 28 years. That is over 1,400 consecutive weeks. I faced the regulations day by day by day, and one of the reasons I stepped into public life was to try to reduce the regulations that are so oppressive to small business.

One of the things that you will realize when you are a small business owner and entrepreneur is that you have to be an expert in all things. You can't have a whole floor of lawyers that are there to sort out all the regulations, and you surely cannot have union members that are in there that are there to organize your employees in a fashion that is unfair.

If you are a small business, and say you have 12 or 15 employees, and I actually saw this happen on a job where there were 18 heavy equipment operators back in the early '70s asked to vote on whether we would go union or not, and I know exactly how every single member of that crew voted today. I can name them. I can tell you how they voted. You know that in that kind of an environment.

We are here without a secret ballot. That is what is taken away from this. I hopefully will be able to offer a motion to recommit based upon that. But that is the Charlie Norwood language that needs to be considered here. There has got to be a secret ballot to protect small employers' employees, especially because the intimidation effect is far greater in a small company than it is in a large company. If I can remember over a period of 34 years how they voted on that vote back on that job in the interstate in Iowa City, then you will know every week how your colleagues are going to vote.

We need to respect the initiative of Charlie Norwood, our good friend. We need to protect small business. We need to exempt small businesses from this. We are not going to get that real debate on exempting small businesses here, Madam Speaker, and that is unfortunate.

I appreciate the fact that this process has been opened up some, but I do think if there is an idea that is good enough that you can present it and say this should be etched in stone for all of America, which this overall bill does, this card check bill, then we ought to at least have the courage of our convictions and debate those convictions here on the floor of the House of Representatives here in the United States Congress. A rule that doesn't allow that then is a rule that tells me the courage of your convictions really aren't there.

Madam Chairman, I have an amendment made in order under the rule.

Madam Chair, my amendment is an amendment that is adapted from a piece of legislation that has actually passed this Congress in the past and is called the anti-salting legislation. And a salt is when a union often has an employee on their payroll, sends them to accept employment at a non-union operation, where their purpose there is to organize in favor of the union. It is really kind of a spy technique to define it.

My amendment is actually pretty plain and pretty simple. And the operative language in it is that: Says nothing shall require an employer to hire an employee if that employee is in furtherance of some other employment or agency status.

That is the standard that is in the legislation. And I would point out that this puts the employer in a very, very difficult spot. They will often be able to identify the salts that get lined up, and some of the practices that take place will be there will be companies that will have expansion opportunities, and perhaps they want to hire 100 employees and they have got the demand to do that, but they are afraid that they will be targeted by what I will consider to be labor organization practices that are designed to take grievances before the NLRB for the purposes of organizing within that company, and if they can't get organized within the company, then they are willing to take the company down, as exemplified by CR Electric's $80,000 costs, Construction Electric forced out of business, $32,000 in costs.

Titus Electrical Contracting spent over one-half million dollars defending themselves against baseless charges. These things happen. And when an applicant comes forward before a merit shop employer and that applicant is clearly a salt from the union, then it puts the employer between the devil and the deep blue sea. He has two choices: He can either decide not to hire the employee, in which case there will be trumped-up charges bought to the NLRB which will cost them money; or, he can decide to take his medicine and do the hire, in which case if he does the hire, he knows that he has got an organizer there.

Now, I support labor organizations' ability to do that. They have a right to collectively bargain. And that should be in place in this country and it is, and I am philosophically in support of it as well. But we can't be allowing these kind of tactics.

This amendment is a simple piece of legislation.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Parliamentary Inquiry

May I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Madam Chairwoman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder).

If the gentleman would yield.

Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentlelady from Colorado (Mrs. Musgrave).

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

My response would be I have no further speakers and 1 minute remaining.

Madam Chair, first in response to the gentleman from New Jersey, the language that is operative here that addresses the union membership issue that you raise says, ``in furtherance of such person's other employment or agency status,'' so they could hold two union jobs as long as the purpose of the one was not to undermine the organizations of the other.

I have lived with union salting. I have seen it happening. I have seen scraper operators with a load of dirt drive into the mud hole, and then when we pushed him, went to push him out, they would put it into neutral and step on the fuel and act like they were trying, but they weren't. They were slowing down the operation before a union vote. I lived through this.

I understand what union salting is. I support the organization of a union's ability, but I do not support the devil's choice that is given to the employer that takes down small businesses, breaks companies.

We can't have that kind of thing in this country. The devil's choice, the spot between the devil and the deep blue sea, is where they find themselves. This lets an employer make a choice at the hiring as to whether that employee represents themselves for the job for the employment. Of course, they should have the job if they are otherwise qualified.

This salting bill passed this House of Representatives in March of 1998 with a significant margin. We will have a vote up today on that. I appreciate that.

Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I bring an, actually, very simple amendment to the floor here. What it does is it just adds to the list of the issues that shall be considered by the President when considering one of the covered transactions. The simple language out of the amendment is that the President shall consider the potential effects of the covered transaction on the efforts of the United States to curtail human smuggling and to curtail drug smuggling. It covers a focus on human smuggling and drug smuggling.

I support the underlying bill, and I recognize the important role played by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in protecting the American people and the security interests of the United States.

One important piece of this legislation will require the President to consider certain factors relating to national security when deciding whether to prohibit the acquisitions, mergers or takeovers that this legislation is intended to scrutinize.

The provisions of the bill provide the President with good criteria to use when deciding what actions should be taken to halt a merger acquisition, but it does not go quite far enough.

Mr. Chairman, my amendment of this bill would add a simple and straightforward requirement to the subject matter of things that the President should take into consideration when making these decisions. My amendment would require that the President consider the potential effects of the transaction on our work to stop human smuggling and drug smuggling.

This bill rightfully calls for the President to consider important factors relating to our national security, but it doesn't make any mention of the two important national security issues that threaten the United States, and we face it every day, and that is human smuggling and drug smuggling.

To give us some background, in the year 2000, the Interagency Commission on Crime and Security in U.S. Seaports, reported that of the 12 major U.S. seaports that it visited, narcotics seized in commercial shipments at the 12 ports constituted 69 percent of the total weight of cocaine, 55 percent of the marijuana and 12 percent of the heroin seized at U.S. borders.

Now that is the amount seized, not necessarily the amount that crosses across the border. There has been some effectiveness there, but we know the DEA has some numbers that also are shocking and might have a little different sense of proportionality.

But not surprisingly, the commission also stated that smuggling of illegal aliens is a problem, and those same 12 ports in that period of time, 1,187 stowaways and 247 individual fraudulent documents arrived aboard sea vessels. This is something that needs to be focused on by the President, and that is just those that were caught.

Of the many threats that face the United States in the global war on terror, we must closely evaluate every merger, every acquisition and every takeover that could put our country at risk, and especially those through drug and human smuggling and especially in this time when we are faced with this global war on terror.

This amendment, I think, is an amendment that improves the bill. I support the underlying bill, and I appreciate the work that is done on the part of the Finance Committee and on the part of the chairman and the ranking member.

Madam Speaker, for my bill, H.R. 997, inadvertently and by obvious mistake, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) was listed as a cosponsor of the bill in error instead of the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Price). I would ask unanimous consent that we grant the request of both gentlemen, that the gentleman from North Carolina's name could be removed from H.R. 997.

And I would apologize to both the gentlemen from North Carolina and Georgia who are named Mr. Price.

Welcome to the Speaker's chair and the gavel of the United States Congress. It is a big and important thing to serve in this place, and it is always an honor to walk down here on the floor. It is absolutely an honor to be seated there in the Speaker's chair that has seated so many esteemed colleagues on both sides of the aisle. And the kind of leadership that has come from there back through history, the halls and the floor here echo with their influence, and the destiny of America has absolutely been redirected by that seat and by that gavel, and will continue to do so. And I very much look forward to continuing to work in this capacity.

I come to the floor this afternoon, Madam Speaker, to raise an issue here and carry on a discussion that is the most intense discussion item across America. And I would challenge anyone to walk into a coffee shop or a place of work or anyplace where Americans gather to talk about the issues of the day, and you don't have to change the subject, just stop and listen, ask a question and see what comes up first. Maybe the weather, maybe a sports team.

But when it shakes down to it, Madam Speaker, and we have talked about all of the amenities and the niceties and the general discussion topics that don't have a lot of substance but carry on the day, in the end, in America we get down to one of two subjects, and that is either the global war on terror on which Iraq is a principle battleground, or it is immigration. And sometimes it is both.

And having just come back from another trip to the border last week about now a week ago, and having been flush full of the things that I learned down there, I am compelled to come here to the floor, Madam Speaker, and raise the issue and begin to examine this subject and topic a little bit more.

We have now, for about 3 years, had an intense debate and discussion on immigration, and there are those of us here in this Chamber, in fact, this House of Representatives last fall voted to build a double fence/wall on the southern border, and laid out the distances, the locations and the distances from those locations. And, when calculated and totaled up, it becomes clear that Congress has mandated, the House and the Senate has mandated that there be 854 miles of at least double- walled fencing, a double fencing or a double fencing and wall constructed upon our southern border in priority areas, Madam Speaker. And last week, I went down to review some of the beginnings of that construction.

It also establishes a mandate that the Secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Chertoff, will establish interlocking cameras and other technology along the border, and he has until May 31 of this year to complete the construction of the interlocking technology according to authorization of the Secure Fence Act, and another year to complete the construction of the double fencing and that 854 miles of that priority area. And then, with the exception of an area at Laredo that is 15 miles, that are 15 miles of either side of Laredo, and that those 15 miles can be constructed in the 2008 construction season on up until December 30 of 2008, that is the congressional mandate, Madam Speaker.

That is the mandate that was passed by a significant majority here in the House of Representatives, and a mandate that was passed by a vote that I do remember in the Senate that was 80-19. It was bipartisan, obviously. It had very solid support. And the reason that it had such solid support is this physical barrier that is mandated by Congress and signed by the President, bipartisan mandate, House and Senate, Madam Speaker; these physical barriers or these pairs of physical barriers, double fencing and walls, are something that is not an administrative decision; it is not something that is necessarily prone to human failure or human error or human lack of will to enforce. If you put those barriers in there, they are going to do some good regardless of whether there is anyone there that is maintaining and manning and guarding them or not, which, of course, we need to do.

And any kind of a structure that we put in place must be maintained, it must be guarded, it must be manned. It needs to have sensors on it. But these barriers will allow our Border Patrol officers and other backup enforcement officers that we have to be able to respond in a more effective fashion. And if they are going to defeat the barriers, it will take time to do that. And if they trip the sensors, and they should, that will give our Border Patrol officers an opportunity to descend upon that site and make the kind of arrests that are necessary so that the word gets out that there are areas of this border at least that you had better not try to cross.

Now, this area in San Luis, Arizona is just south of Yuma. It is a community on the U.S. side that is as far southwest as you can get on the border in Arizona. This is a location that has had some rather permanent steel wall right on the border that has been there for some time, and we have added to that. Now, this permanent steel wall, this is a steel landing mat, interlocking landing mat that is welded together along that border, is being extended in both directions from San Luis. And I reflect also in hearing the remark from the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) that we need some 200,000 welders by the year 2010 or 2012, I forget which exact year that was.

I have heard those kinds of cries for help before, and I have lived through those deadlines, and we always seem to come up with the number of people we need to do the job that is necessary. One of the things we do is we just simply pay people what it is worth and they show up to do the job. But if they are short about 6 or 7 welders in 2010, they can get ahold of Secretary Chertoff who picked up a welder down there and welded some of that steel wall together right on the border of San Luis, Arizona. And that also was the case with Senator Johnny Isakson, Senator Ben Nelson, Congressman Mike Pence. And I am not sure, that is the ones that I saw, there were probably others that also lended a hand, as I did, to weld some of that fencing and wall together. It was more symbolic than production, but symbolism does matter in this business, and it helps encourage the people that are down there building those barriers.

And particularly, our National Guard that are down on the border, approaching 6,000 strong, they freed up at least 500 on-line slots for Border Patrol agents that can be up-front patrolling. And they are constructing fence and wall with the time that they have down there on the border. Their morale seems to be good. They act like they believe in their mission. I believe in their mission. I am encouraged by the fact that they are there, hands on, building, constructing, putting barriers in place, because this Congress mandated and the President signed, however unenthusiastically, he did sign the authorization of the Secure Fence Act that mandates 854 miles of double fence wall on our border.

And then, after the mandate and the authorization, the authorization which is the mandate, then we heard continually from the critics across the country, well, you will never fund it. And if you never fund it, then it will never be built. So it was only, the allegation that it was only the part of Congress to just simply make a promise that we

didn't intend to fulfill. And I heard that criticism all the way through the campaign season to November 7 and all the way beyond that well into December, and I have heard smatterings of it since then and questions that come from the media. And at some point last month, Congressman Duncan Hunter, who is the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee and former chairman, and a real leader on this fence on the border, and I and several others, did a press conference. Actually, it was Duncan Hunter and myself on that particular press conference. And we talked about how this fence will be built and needs to be built and must be built, and it is a congressional mandate.

And I pointed to the line item in the appropriations bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security, and their overall appropriation is 34 point something billion dollars. And in that 34 point something billion dollars is a line item for double fence and wall and the technology that goes with it, the interlocking cameras and the other devices, and some of them now are ground based radar, funding for all of that to the tune of $1,187,000,000 and change.

Now, that is the line item that has been appropriated. That money goes to only one thing, and that is securing our border with either technology or fence, and then the necessary support that it takes to get that done.

We followed through, we mandated 854 miles of fence and wall, double, and we have appropriated $1,187,000,000. Now that is probably not enough to complete the whole 854 miles, but, Madam Speaker, it is a great start. And we have given a great start here in Congress and created this inertia and provided the mandate, and now the Department of Homeland Security working with the National Guard has got a beginning.

I won't say they have a great start or that they have even a good start, but they have a beginning. And it is great to have a beginning. We are able to do hands-on on the beginning. It is a triple fence there south of Yuma in San Luis.

So as I ask the question, Madam Speaker, of how effective are these barriers that we are putting here in place, the answer that I get back down there is: In that area they had interdicted 2 years ago 138,000 illegal border crossers in that area. And, since October, they had interdicted 15,000. Now, that is not quite apples to apples. You have to calculate it out so much per month, but you get the idea that it has been about two-thirds effective at this point. And as I ask the question, has anyone come through the area where we have this triple fence, this 12-foot high steel wall made out of landing mat steel, the 16-foot high steel mesh wall. And that is about 100 feet apart, and then as you come into the United States going north, then there is a 10-foot high chain-link fence like a school playground fence with about three or four bars on top, barbwire. Shorthand in Iowa as barbs.

And there, they said that maybe about three people had gotten through that area. And upon further questioning, one or two through the waterway, one or so around the end. Had anybody defeated the area where it is triple fencing? And the answer was, they will defeat anything we build. They will find a way to get over, under, or through it. And, of course, then the follow-up question is: Has anyone defeated it yet, this fence we are looking at? And the answer is no. To date, no one has gone over, under, or through the triple fencing that is constructed there south of Yuma at San Luis.

Now, I would like to hold that record intact. I don't know that we will be able to hold it intact, but I think it is important to note that that fencing has not been defeated yet. And, that as long as illegal border crossers have an option to go someplace else to go around, they are not going to try to go over, under, or through. And that will be the case as long as we have a fence that doesn't extend the full length of the border. Now, it is possible for us to supplement those areas where there isn't a lot of concentration of pressure on the border with technology, with ground-based radar, with interlocking cameras, with a quick response force, with teams that can go out and pick people up in the deserts that have 25 miles to walk to get anywhere where they can pick up any transportation mode once they get across the border. So we can use some of those kinds of methods, too, until it becomes inefficient in that approach and we have to go back to extending the fence, extend the wall, give the people on the ground some tools to work with.

But continually, Madam Speaker, I get this answer when I ask our Border Patrol about the effectiveness of structures like fences and walls, and that they need more boots on the ground. And the answer is always: Whatever you will do to fencing, there are places where we need to do it in urban areas. We don't need to do it in rural areas. This is their answer. And, we always need more boots on the ground. That is the answer. The answer really isn't to build structure or to build wall.

Well, I take issue with that philosophy, and I do so because of looking at it from a bit of a different perspective. That bit of a different perspective comes along like this. If we were to award contracts to companies and pay them according to the level of efficiency of being able to stop all human traffic coming across their sector of the border, stop all contraband from coming across their sector of the border, force all products, all contraband, all people, legal or illegal, through the ports of entry, that is our objective. That is what the laws that are established here in this Congress are about is forcing all that traffic through the ports of entry.

In fact, that is what the law presumes that they go through a port of entry. So anything we do to direct traffic through the port of entry is the right thing to do. It has been a piece of wisdom for this country for a long, long time, well over 100 years. Yet we have people that argue well, no, we should just leave the border open, leave it unmarked. I plead sometimes, can't we at least string up a number 9 wire and mark the border, so if you are out in the desert you don't wander across into another country.

There are miles and miles and miles of our southern border that are not marked in any way whatsoever, not a wire, not a post, not a fence are not a road, not a wall, certainly, and not a double fence, and not a virtual fence, virtually nothing is there. In fact, literally nothing is there.

If you go into some areas of New Mexico, when they laid out the border, the border is marked by a concrete pylon that is about 5 feet high, poured on a base, about this big square, 5 feet high, tapers up, and has a little insignia on it that says this is a border. That concrete pylon will be standing on a ridge line, and then if you look way down the border, you probably cannot see it from the naked eye, miles away. Over on the next ridge line will be another concrete pylon, and that is another mark for the border.

I will say that I think many people have crossed through that area and never known that there was a mark for the border because they didn't know where too look. These pylons, these markers were set up back in those old days with an old brass transit, with whatever power they had to set the cross hairs up, dial it in and look down range and then give the motion to the fellow on the other end, who did not have a walkie-talkie, did not have much optical equipment, but simply hand signals.

Go ahead, drive your stake in here. We will put the pylon there. That is good enough for this border. But that is all we marked it with, is just concrete pylons from ridge line to ridge line, and there is not a barrier, obviously.

So, if I were a contractor, and I were given the job to, say, guard 10 miles of border, and if the benchmark are for the amount of money that I would be paid for that job would be the amount that we are spending on the border today, that being $8 billion to protect our southern border, and that amounts to $4 million a mile, let's just say I were in the business of guaranteeing border security for 10 miles across the desert, and I went in and bid that at the going rate of $4 million a mile.

Well, that would mean the Federal Government would pay me $40 million a year to guard that 10 miles of border. Now, what would a rational person do if that were their job to get 100 percent efficiency? If they had a contract, the

amount of that contract would be deducted by the number of failures that you have?

Let's just say the average crossing of interdictions last year across our southern border, 1,188,000. I mean, that was the number reported by the Border Patrol of border interdictions, that many fingerprinted and returned back to their home countries. Perhaps 155,000 of them were other than Mexicans. Most of the rest were returned back to Mexico.

That many fingerprinted, you could divide that out, and I have not done the math. But you could figure out how many came through each mile on average, and then determine that if your mile was successful, we are going to pay you at your $4 million. Or if your 10 miles were successful, we will pay you at your $4 million a mile. If you didn't let anybody through, you are going to get to keep the whole $40 million, this year, next year, every year that you have the contract.

We would be getting far more for our money than we are getting today for the $4 million a mile that we are paying and the $8 billion that it costs us to guard that southern border. I can tell you that I would go down, and I would bid my 10 miles or whatever link it was that I thought I could manage and handle.

Then I would look at my contract for $40 million, and I would think, you know, for about $1.2 million a mile, I could build a concrete wall on here. I could put double fencing in. Maybe by the time I added interlocking cameras and some sensors and some interlocking ground radar, I may be even up to even $2 million a mile to build my double- wall fence with interlocking cameras and sensors. Now what do I have to do to make sure that no one gets through my 10 miles of border?

I would simply have to sit back and watch my monitors, have somebody that is out there ready to respond if anybody does get through, but monitor the situation, and we can monitor into Mexico. We can monitor when they get over, if they should get over the wall, in the United States, and do a quick response and interdiction.

I don't think you are going to spend a lot of money out of the remaining $30-some million. I may have to back up here, for 10 miles, if you built 10 miles, and you invest it all together up to $2 million a mile, then you have $20 million invested in that 10 miles. But you have a $40 million contract every year.

Then you have got $20 million to work with in order to hire personnel to drive around in Humvees and react, respond, interdict. I would submit that you could hire a helicopter for that 10 miles and do that if you needed to guard it that way. There is plenty of money left over to apply the labor and the patrolling and the maintenance for the fencing that would be necessary.

In fact, it would be minimal. It would be minimal. It would take far less labor, far less manpower, far less equipment, to monitor a border that has sealed barriers, barriers. Some of those barriers, to date, have not been breached by anyone.

That is far more effective than simply an open desert that will allow people to run through, drive through, ride through on a motorcycle or a horse or a donkey or a Humvee or an ATV or walk or run, daylight or dark, winter, well, not much winter down there, but in rain, when it rains, or in a sandstorm when the wind blows. I will be far more effective to put the barrier in place.

Yet when I ask the question of the Border Patrol, be it the union or be it the representatives of the Border Patrol and the administration themselves, their answer always is, we can take some structures like some fences in urban areas, because that gives us more time to react when they jump the fence, but it is going to take more boots on the ground.

I have tried and tried in hearings to ask the question in a way that I can get an objective answer, what do we have to do so it takes fewer boots on the ground? I will pose this question this way, and that is, if we created an impermeable curtain that could not be cut, it could not be torn, it could not be penetrated, but a magic kryptonite impermeable curtain that would go from all the way up to the heavens all the way down to hell, and all the way, 2,000 miles from San Diego to Brownsville, if we could hang that there on the border, couldn't be penetrated, couldn't be cut, couldn't be gone over, and it couldn't be dug under, how many Border Patrol would it take then to patrol the border? I would submit that answer then becomes none except for any place where we would have ports of entry.

I hope I have illustrated the logic of why we need to build a fence and a wall. This Congress understands it. They voted overwhelmingly to support it here in the House of Representatives just a few months ago, and the Senate, as slow as they are, to be proactive. As much as they like to let the hot coffee cool in the saucer of the Senate, they also moved, and three times they had votes on the floor last year to put a fence on the southern border. My very liberal Iowa Senate counterpart three times voted to put a fence on the border, and that vote in the Senate was 80-19.

Yet I am watching the undermining that is taking place on the part of, to some degree, the administration. Also the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee is using his chairmanship to undermine current law. I am watching the undermining that goes on the part of some of the Democrat candidates for the presidency and people who essentially don't appear to believe in American sovereignty.

Well, something that we need to simply know in America is that you have to make a decision if you are going to be a nation. If you are going to be a nation, and I will submit that over the last 200 years, the most successful institution of government has been the nation state. Can you imagine going to something other than the nation state?

Can you imagine going to the city states that we had at the beginning of the industrial revolution when Machiavelli wrote his books, and when the cities became the center point of government and control, and everything revolved around the cities? What happened was that common languages sprung up, and they began to be formed and shaped by the people that had trade in commerce and travel in a common region. As the languages defined themselves, the borders of the nations also defined themselves along the lines of language.

There came from that, the nation states, a common belief, a common history, a common form of communications currency, language, tied people together. They voluntarily moved together and established the nation states. Of course, the nation states have changed and shifted over time.

We have tried to create unnatural nation states. Yet here in America, we came together in these 50 States of the Nation State of the United States of America, and we are unique in all of history. We are unique because what we have done is we have welcomed people from all over the world.

Let me point out that we continually hear the statement America is a nation of immigrants, and it is stated to us over and over again, as if because we are a nation of immigrants, then therefore we cannot have a rational immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of the United States of America.

No, we simply have to open our borders, because immigrants came here and helped build America. If some is good, more is better. If some from anywhere is good, more from anywhere is better. That seems to be the logic and the rationale.

I would submit there is a lot more to building an American exceptionalism than simply saying we are a nation of immigrants and that is all we need to know about this subject matter. No, this is a very deep, very complicated subject matter that ties together everything we know about history, everything we know about human nature, everything we know about sociology and biology, and the common sense of geographical origins that come along, and the commonalities of language, common interests, those things all tie us together.

But what we have done here in America, founded a nation upon the rule of law, perhaps I will get to that a little bit later.

But we are tied together by a common language. That is something that is not unique to the United States, a common language has defined nation states from the beginning. When we get

away from the common language that fractures the nation state, and you become squabbling minorities that are bickering against each other, forming and shaping ourselves in ethnic enclaves and pitted against each other because one side of this aisle believes in rights of group rights and victimhood.

The other side of the aisle over here believes in individual rights and personal responsibility and the commonalities of equal justice under the law.

But the things that tie us together are a common history, common experiences, common goals, a common cause. But we couldn't understand those things if we didn't have a common language. This great experiment of America has been founded upon a common language. This common language ties us together.

Then as we look across the vitality that we have within this country, this American exceptionalism that I mentioned a little bit earlier, you would be thinking in terms of where did this American exceptionalism come from? Why do we have it here, and why is that vitality nonexistent in many of the other countries that were donor countries to the United States in the form of the immigrants that they sent to us over the years, over the 200 to 300 years that we have received, accepted and welcomed immigrants into America?

I would look back at that and think about my oldest ancestor that we can trace back, at least on my mother's side of the family. One of them would have been a gentleman by the name of Samuel Powell who came here, and he was a Welshman who came over here in 1757 to become an indentured servant.

He landed in Baltimore. He had nothing. He pledged to work for 7 years to work off his passage to the United States. So he worked in the stables to work off his passage. This gentleman was kicked by a horse, crippled for life. We know that as there is a little hardbound book about it.

Still, through the course of his lifetime, he was the father of 17 children, and those descendents fanned out across the country, and they added to the vitality of America, as many of the children of immigrants and the children of immigrants have.

But there was something in the vitality of Samuel Powell, that vitality that is a component that exists within many, many of, and I will say most of, and perhaps almost all of those who come to America. That vitality gives them the courage and the confidence, the fortitude and the adventuresome spirit to get on a ship with everything that they have, mortgage their future for their passage, and come here to reach for their dreams in the United States of America.

That vitality that gave them that courage and that confidence, that boldness of spirit was like a filter that skimmed the vitality off of the other civilizations and cultures around the world. As they got out of Ireland and Sweden and out of Germany and out of Italy, and as they came from other places around the globe and came here, and certainly out of Scotland and England as well, and this goes back to our history 100 years ago, as they came over here, they brought that vitality with them. Often we saw that vitality within them, and we identified that as a national characteristic that came from the country that they came from.

One of the questions that I ask in my district, I have a wonderful Dutch region in the northwestern part of my district there in Iowa, and it is idyllic communities that are the best combination that anyone could ask for, the absolutely ideal combination of churches to banks to bars in a community. Plenty of churches and a lot of capital in the banks and just a few bars, not hardly any. And their quality of life, and it is strong, and the young children grow up and they expect to build their future in those communities. They are not taking that diploma and going somewhere else in the world to cash it in for the biggest paycheck they can get. Some do. Many come home. Many stay home, rebuild and build their lives there and have their children there, raise their parents' grandchildren right there within the same neighborhood. That is an ideal circumstance that they have.

And I ask them, how is it that you have got such ideal communities here in the Dutch areas of Iowa, and I go over to Holland, and there they have abortion on demand, euthanasia, they have prostitution, they have legalized drugs. They have one of the most liberal countries in the world, one of the most permissive, but yet one of the most closed societies in the world where you could never go over there and become a Dutchman. And yet so many things that they do permit in that very liberal society are things that we would reject in our communities, and I have listed some of them. Why is it then that we have such a wholesome, rich community in an area that I have described in western Iowa, and we have the different environment in Holland entirely, and especially in the communities like Amsterdam? And their answer to me, with only a little bit of sense of irony is, well, the good Dutch came here.

And, Mr. Speaker, I tell this story because it identifies the source of American exceptionalism. The good Dutch came here. So did the good English, so did the good Spanish, so did the good French, so did the good Norwegians and Swedes and Germans and Irish and all the way down the line. Western Europe were the first big donors to this American society that we have here. And we have also picked up a significant amount of exceptionalism and vitality from our neighbors to the south.

And so I want to point this out and emphasize in a very serious way how important it is that we be smart and we be careful with our immigration policy and understand that we are defining an immigration policy that should enhance our economic, our social and our cultural well-being here in the United States of America in a selfish way. Any nation state should have that kind of an immigration policy. It should be promoting them. They should be building their future, whatever country they might be.

We need to do it here. We need to set this American destiny on a glide path that soars way beyond the aspirations that I hear here in this place and that I even hear out in the streets of America where there is more optimism than there is here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. We need to set our destiny and control it from here, and we have got to have a vision, we have got to have a dream, and we need to understand the foundations of what has made us great as a Nation. And we need to be looking for new things, new principles, new ideas, new tools that might, just might, supplement the time-honored tradition and principles and tools that were gifted to us from God through our Founding Fathers that are the foundation of this great Nation.

But American exceptionalism is one of them. The foundation of the rule of law is another one, Mr. Speaker. And in spite of all of the things that we read about in our history and so much of the glorious past and some of the marginal, shameful events that took place in our history, this Nation has been a Nation that has been grounded on, built upon, rooted in and a pillar of which is the rule of law. The rule of law is sacrosanct in America. And when we set aside the rule of law, it diminishes us all. It erodes everyone's constitutional rights when someone else is given a pass by the law. And so if we are allowed to drive down the highway at 70 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone, and if we pass the Highway Patrol, and even if they happen to pull us over and they say, well, you know, everybody breaks the law, so I am not going to write you up on this 70 in a 55 zone, then pretty soon everybody drives 70, and they will push it up to 75. If they don't get a ticket at 75, then they may go 80. They will drive as fast as they can until they get scared. Then they will slow down a little. That is human nature, and we have known that from the studies on our highways. But too low a speed limit breeds contempt for the rule of law, but enforcement of any speed limit breeds respect for the rule of law.

The same is so with our immigration laws, Mr. Speaker, if we have immigration laws that are not enforced, or the foundation of this rule of law is it applies to everyone equally. So if our immigration laws are not enforced equally to all people in this country, then also it breeds contempt for the law. And if we allow the contempt for the law to be bred, then it undermines the

rule of law, it undermines this Constitution, and it weakens the rights of individuals.

This Constitution I carry in my pocket all days. I have sworn to uphold this Constitution, and I will do so. It is an oath that I take seriously, and, in fact, in spite of some of the news that has come down here, that we don't swear in to the new Congress on the Bible, some of us do bring our Bible down here and do swear in on the Bible, and we take that seriously, as did George Washington. And some of us, in fact, all of us, should add ``so help me God'' when we take that oath.

But this Constitution is the foundation for our law. And, in fact, it is the descendant of the Declaration of Independence, the foundation for our law. It is the framework of justice in America writ large. It is the framework of government in America writ large. And we need to adhere to the language that is here and the intent that is here and the original text that is here in this Constitution, Mr. Speaker.

And I continue to intend to do that, and I am sworn to uphold this rule of law. And so when I go back to my district, and we have had a finally, at long last, a Department of Homeland Security raid on some of the meat packing around my neighborhood, within the adjoining States and within the State of Iowa, and about 1,282 individuals were picked up and loaded up, and charges were brought against many of them for immigration violations and also for fraudulent documents and document theft. When that happens, and there were truckloads of hogs that were stacked up waiting to go into the packing plant, and there wasn't enough labor there, and actually the plants were temporarily shut down. The hogs had to stay on the trucks. There were a few that were lost. Most were not so badly treated. That is one of the elements we don't talk about so much. But also families were affected, children were affected, and we have debated across that.

But when I go before the pork producers and they say, we need to have people in these packing plants to process our livestock, we have got to have a market for the livestock that we raise, we have got to make sure that they can harvest on the days they are supposed to be, and that meat can be processed, packaged and delivered to the meat case so we have got a continuous supply and a continuous flow of our product, however urgent they sense that to be, however focused they are on the problem that is in front of them, and remember, people have a tendency to look at the world through their straw. It is rare for us to step back and look at the big picture and try to add up all the components, or look at the world through somebody else's eyes, let alone look at the world through everybody else's eyes if we would could possibly do that. And that is partly my job is to ask people to look at the world through somebody else's eyes.

And so as they say, we need that labor, we can't be shutting down plants because of illegal labor, we have got to find another solution, that is no solution. I ask them, point blank, I understand how important this is to your industry, but are you willing to sacrifice the rule of law in America to be sure that it is convenient, and that you don't have to go out and recruit for labor someplace other than outside the United States for people that will come into the plant?

Wouldn't you rather maybe pay a couple bucks more an hour and hire people that are already here, hire some of the 30 percent of America that are high school dropouts; hire some of the 69 million people in America that are simply not in the workforce, but are of working age?

We only have about 6.9 million working illegals in America, Mr. Speaker, and we have 69 million nonworking, not in the workforce, Americans. So wouldn't a logical Nation just look around and say, well, let's try and hire? First we would go hire some of those folks that are on unemployment. And we are not at a historically low unemployment level. That was 1.3 during World War II. And I recognize that was all hands on deck. But still we have quite a ways to go, and we can drop more than 3 points before we get down to the levels of unemployment that we had during World War II. But that is not enough to fill the gap. And if we take the people that are on welfare now and that are hirable, and maybe if that is half, and that might be a lot, you put those together with those that are unemployed. If you take the 4.4 percent unemployment and take that down to 1.3 percent, World War II levels, and then reach in and hire half of those that are on welfare and put them to work, you still don't have enough people there to replace the 6.9 million working illegal immigrants in the American workforce. But where you can find them is to go into the 69 million nonworking Americans that are not in the workforce, many of whom are presumably healthy and can be hired.

And the answer that I get when I propose that is, well, they aren't in the right place. They don't live where we need them. They are not sitting there next to the job. And so therefore, we should what? Let's go 2,000 or 3,000 miles away and go get some people out of a different country and bring them here, against the law, to replace the need for a workforce that you could replace if you just simply went someplace else in America and put some people in a car, on a bus, on a plane or on Amtrak and send them down there.

I mean, I can give you an example, Mr. Speaker. When the raid came in on the Swift and Company at Marshalltown, Iowa, and they picked up about 90 workers there, so presumably there were 90 jobs that were open at that moment, there was a couple, an African American couple, from down in the Dallas area that loaded up and drove from Texas all the way up to Marshalltown, Iowa, went to the H.R. office at Swift and Company and said, we would like to have a job working here processing this meat. We drove a long ways to get here, and now we would like to resettle to Texas, to Marshalltown, middle of the winter, Texas to Marshalltown for those jobs.

That kind of answers the questions that there are jobs that Americans won't do. At least there is a personalized example of it, Mr. Speaker. And statistically there are many. But the argument that the people aren't in the right place doesn't hold up. In fact, the Okies weren't in the right place in the '30s, and they loaded up the things that they had, like the Clampetts in a way, and went on off to California and built the economy out there, and they must have been pretty good because the economy blossomed in California after the arrival of the Okies. And so people can be transferred for labor.

There was a mass migration from the American South to the industrial areas in the Northern States that took place also about that era. And I recall that as that migration took place, we saw concentrations of African Americans moving into the industrial cities. Detroit would be a good example of that. Cleveland would be another good example of that. They came and they took the jobs and went to work. They were good- paying jobs. They did their jobs, and they raised their families there. And some of those young people went off to college, became professionals and moved off. Others went back and went to work in the same plants that their parents did.

But I recall, Mr. Speaker, reading an article in the Des Moines Register some years ago. They had gone into Milwaukee and picked a 36- square-block neighborhood in Milwaukee, and it was a neighborhood that was totally inhabited by people or descendants of that migration from the gulf coast Mississippi area that came up into Milwaukee to take the brewery jobs that were good-paying jobs then. Now, that was back in the '30s, and now, by this time, oh, about the turn of the last millennia, I will say, maybe 1998 or '99, they surveyed those, every house in that 36-square-block area. There wasn't a single working head of household in all homes in that 36-block area. And the article was full of lament as to why government couldn't figure out a way to move some jobs up there to Milwaukee and establish those jobs close enough to the people that lived there that didn't have work that they could then have jobs again.

Well, how did government fail the people that are sitting in that 36- square-block area, 6 blocks by 6 blocks in Milwaukee? How did government fail was the focus of the article. And, Mr. Speaker, I will point out that government didn't fail. It never was government's job. It wasn't government that moved them from the gulf coast

up to Milwaukee in the '30s, and it wasn't government that moved the Okies from Oklahoma to California in the '30s. It was the promise of jobs that relocated people. They did it on their own.

I mean, after all, that is how the illegal immigrants got here, wasn't it? Billboards in Mexico. People migrated up and took the jobs. People move for jobs. I have done it. Many of us have done it. In fact, most of us have done it. And to imagine that Americans can't relocate to take a job is a pretty weak position to take if you are going to set the direction for the destiny of America.

But the rule of law, the rule of law is a pillar, it is a foundation, it is essential. And we are embroiled in a central debate here in America on this rule of law.

Now, the Senate will be introducing legislation next week that will be comprehensive immigration reform. That is White House language for we are going to take some people that are here, and we are going to give them the path to citizenship. And you are going to hear an argument and a debate about what is the right, the just, the true, the appropriate path for us as a Nation, a compassionate Nation, yes, a Nation that cares about all people, not just within the borders of the sovereign State of the United States of America. We care about the well-being of people all over the globe.

No Nation has been generous as the United States of America has been. We have provided more resources for more people. We have sacrificed more lives for liberty and freedom. We have poured more treasure out to the rest of the world than any nation in history by any model or comparison that anyone can create or come up with or convolute, for that matter. And yet we are being accused of being a cold hearted, unkind Nation because we have an obligation to control our borders so we can define ourselves as a Nation.

And I will argue that if we give amnesty to the people that have broken our laws and who are in violation of our laws and unlawfully present here on the soil of the United States, if we grant them amnesty, we have kicked aside the rule of law. We have knocked the pillar out, the foundational pillar, from underneath this great citadel of the United States of America. And if the rule of law is gone, what then holds up our values here?

What then supports this Constitution that I have put back in my pocket, Mr. Speaker? How do we argue ever again that there is a foundation that exists that we should adhere to the rule of law, that we should respect and protect and defend it, how could we, if this Congress granted amnesty to law breakers in America, gave them a free pass at the encouragement and behest of the White House and the administration, who are focused on this, at the encouragement of the left wing liberals in the United States Senate that are advocating for open borders because they know they can count the masses of illegals whether they are here legally or not, whether they are ever allowed to vote or not, they know that it provides representation here on the floor of the United States Congress.

There are Members of this Congress that won't need more than 30,000 votes to be re-elected or elected to this Congress. They are the ones that represent districts that are full of illegal immigrants that are counted in the census for reapportionment purposes. So my 600,000 people, where it takes over 100,000 votes to get re-elected in my district even in a nonpresidential year, has less representation per capita, the citizens in my district have less representation per capita than the citizens in the districts that have high concentrations of illegal immigrant population, because we draw the lines around about 600,000 people.

And if there are 400,000 illegals in a single district, that means there are only 200,000 citizens. And if they go to the polls and register and vote, that means there might only be 50,000 of them that will actually vote that are of the age to vote and that will take the trouble to do so. That is a gross distortion of the intent of our Framers, and it is clearly a distortion of the concept of our Constitution and it is a distortion of the understanding of equal representation that the taxpayers and the citizens of America expect from us. We need to address that. But before we do that, we are going to need to address this amnesty issue, this amnesty question, that will be before the Senate shortly and expecting to come over here to the House some weeks or months after that.

What is amnesty, Mr. Speaker? Well, it is a simple question for a person from my perspective. If you have a law and the law exists and someone breaks that law, if you reduce or eliminate the penalty for the law that they have broken after the fact, you have provided them amnesty, whether you do it en masse in a group or whether you do it as an individual. I guess as an individual you could call it a pardon. I will say amnesty is a mass pardon for people who have violated an existing law for which there is an existing penalty, and if that penalty is eliminated or reduced, then that is amnesty.

Now, that is not a hard concept to understand. Something that I think the vast majority of the American people will understand. I am very confident that Ronald Reagan would have understood. He signed an amnesty bill in 1986. It was one of only about two or three times that that great man let me down. But at least he had the clarity and the conscience to say this is an amnesty bill. He called it an amnesty bill. He signed it, and he also said, and we expected, that there would be enforcement of existing laws. And what happened from 1986 was the enforcement of existing laws diminished gradually over time to the point where in 2005 only three employers were sanctioned for hiring illegal employees. Only three.

Now, in this virtual world, I call that virtually no enforcement in the workplace. Virtually none. In fact, when I went down and welded on the fence, I really wanted a virtual welder and a virtual welding rod and a virtual hood so that I could weld some of that virtual fence that I think will only virtually stop people in the end if we don't have the manpower in there to do the job. And I think we have to put up literal barriers to get this done and we can't rely on virtual anything because we will virtually go through a lot of semantics, linguistic semantics, to be able to reach our political goals, but the subject matter and the efficiency is what we need to be after here, the rule of law.

Amnesty. There can be no amnesty, and that is where this fight will turn. That is where this debate will turn. That is where it is going to turn in the Senate, and I said last year that those that supported an amnesty bill will be marked with the scarlet letter ``A'' for ``amnesty,'' and they will be held accountable by the voters in the ballot box. And the House and the Senate heard that call and the threat and the danger of those that came close to losing their jobs over there and the ones that are worried about it in 2008. And yet I heard we lost people here because they were for border control, and it is interesting to me that those couple of Members, only two that I can think of, were very strong on border security lost elections last fall. Their opponents, the ones who defeated them, also were advocating for strong border enforcement and employment enforcement in the workplace.

So I don't think there is a case that anyone lost an election because they were for border security. I think there were those that were jeopardized because they came late to the subject or they didn't understand the conviction of it. But most, if not all, made some commitment at some level that they are going to support it. Stop the bleeding at the border. Get it under control. Push all traffic through the ports of entry; all human traffic, legal and illegal; all product, both contraband and legal product, through the ports of entry we should support that in this Congress unequivocally.

There should be no effort to undermine that and there should be no effort to create a scenario by which we can turn a blind eye to illegal crossings on the border. That is something that is sacrosanct that all of us should agreed to. And I would challenge anyone to stand up now or later, and I would be happy to yield: Do you oppose the idea that we secure our borders and seal them so that all traffic will go through the ports of entry? If anybody wants to oppose that, I will be happy to yield. I don't think that is going to happen. That is number one.

Number two means we have got to enforce our employer sanctions, and employers have to understand that if they are going to knowingly and willfully hire illegals, then we are going to have to knowingly and willfully, with our enforcement mechanisms, go in there and punish the employers that have a business plan that is premised upon the hiring of illegal labor. And that happens all over this country.

I am watching it happen and it is permeating us more and more, and our resistance is breaking it down more and more. Do we have an amnesty plan for employers that are paying corporate income tax off the profits that they made off the backs of cheap labor at the expense of America's middle class? This middle class is forever shrinking because we are growing an upper class. The elitists believe they have a right to cheap labor, the servant class, as they see it, whether they admit it or not, and the growth of this lower class, this servant class that is coming.

No nation ever failed because of a lack of cheap labor. Can anybody look back at history and name a single nation that didn't have enough cheap labor; so their economy collapsed? I would say none. It has never happened in all of history. But many nations have descended into a squabbling cacophony of minorities that couldn't get along, that didn't have a sense of nationhood, didn't have a sense of common history, didn't have a common language, didn't have literacy skills or job skills but simply pulled the whole system down and put pressure on the social services.

The wait that is there, we are growing our lower class, that class that the elitists see as a servant class, and we are growing our upper class because of the prosperity that comes really from the Bush tax cuts that we have had for 2001 and 2003. And as this growth continues, the upper class grows, they think it is all to their credit. Now, they earned a lot of it. They got their education. They invested their money wisely. They worked hard and smart and they made money, and I am glad they are building their million dollar mansions. Maybe one day an older used one will be a good place for me to spend my retirement. I am happy for them.

And they will move out of a modest home so someone with a more modest income can move in there. It is a natural progression. But they have no right and essentially have no birth right to cheap labor to enrich them.

America has been about expanding the middle class, making it broader and making it more prosperous. And this immigration policy, or, I should say, a lack of enforcement on this immigration policy, is shrinking the middle class, compressing them so they can't make the upward mobility, and it is narrowing the middle class because these 30 percent of the high school dropouts that don't have a high school education and a greater percentage that don't have a college education as a cumulative total at least, those people are dropping off into the lower class too.

And where are their opportunities, Mr. Speaker? Where do they go to get a job? How does someone with, say, my background, only the age of 17 or 18 or 19 or 20, get started in where my life has been, in the construction business? If I had walked out on the pipeline at age 19 and asked for a job to swamp on the bending crew so I could run 10 miles a day in the dust with a hard hat on my head and get thrown around on the end of a piece of pipe in August going through the cornfields, they wouldn't give a job to a kid today, some blue-eyed white kid that walked up there and wanted a job, because there would already be some people there who had arrived in the United States that were cheap illegal labor that would work cheaper and give them less trouble and those that wouldn't have a workers' comp claim because they would be afraid they would be deported. There wouldn't be an unemployment claim. They wouldn't be any unemployment, any workers' comp. There wouldn't be any lawsuits. They would either show up on time or somebody else would show up to take the job.

It is a lot less trouble to work with people that are living in the shadows because they are afraid that the spotlight will come on them. And so you have a meek, docile labor force, and an employer that is making a rational decision with his capital is going to go that route. And we have enabled it here in the United States of America, and now we have become dependent upon a pretty good size supply of illegal labor. And every day that goes by, another person, another company figures out a way to make some profit off of the illegal population that is here in the United States.

And I feel a little guilty that I sold my construction business to my oldest son because he has to compete against competitors who will be knowingly and willfully finding that avenue to hire that cheap illegal labor, and he has to find a way to be more efficient so he can compete against them because he is going to follow the law. I know he will follow the law. That is the way he is raised, that is the way he believes, and that is his conviction. Those that follow the law are at a disadvantage today because they are being undermined by people who premise their business on hiring illegal labor.

And here we come to the financial institutions that are issuing credit cards to people that don't have a Social Security number. What an outrageous thing, to see large banking companies decide they can find a way to turn a profit and undermine our immigration laws in the United States and essentially provide another avenue that is going to encourage people to continue to break the law, come here, stay here.

But amnesty, Mr. Speaker, is a central question that is before us. Will we uphold the rule of law or will we kick the pillar out from underneath the United States of America? Will we stand on the principle of no amnesty no time for people who have come in here illegally that we will uphold the rule of law, we will enforce it? And the people who are going to advocate for amnesty, and it will be coming out of the Senate and it is coming to this floor in here in the House of Representatives sometime within the next few months, that path to amnesty needs to be a trail of tears.

And that is a trail of tears that needs to be created by people on the streets of America, in the homes, in the backyards, in the schools, in the churches, in the workplaces. They need to get on their phones. They need to get on their e-mail. They need to call their Members of Congress. They need to write letters to the editor. They need to call the talk radio shows, write articles and get them printed. They need to gin up their neighbors. They need to come to the streets and stand up for the rule of law and oppose amnesty and put that scarlet letter ``A'' for ``amnesty'' and brand those that stand up for amnesty here because if you stand for amnesty, you are opposed to the rule of law, and there is no other way to measure this.

And you can't say to someone you are going to go to the back of the line. They are not going to send them to the back of the line. That is not in the heart or the head of the White House. It is not going to happen. Those that are here illegally, the only way they could go to the back of the line would be to have to go back to their home country and get into the line behind the people that are legally in the line from their home country. No one has advocated that, Mr. Speaker. That is not going to happen. They don't want to disturb the lives of the people who came here to live in the shadows. They want to offer that they come out into the sunlight and grant them a path to citizenship. And if that isn't a blatant definition of amnesty, I have no idea what is.

But there is actual a serious discussion about we could make them pay a fine. We could penalize them by making them learn English.

Penalize them by making them learn English? I think that should be a privilege and a goal because that will give access to the American Dream. But if you are here as a criminal, and there is an objection to that term, but if people have come into the United States illegally, then they have violated a criminal misdemeanor for illegal border crossing, unlawful presence in the United States, and that is punishable by deportation. That is the punishment that needs to be there. There can't be anything less. And to have them pay a fine of $1,500 when a coyote is going to charge $2,000 to $3,000 for a trip into the United States just says, well, the path to citizenship is for sale for $1,500. If you can scratch up the scratch to do that, we can give you a path to citizenship.

And the United States Senate and a lot of the liberals here in the United States House would say, Fine. Here is your green card. Here is your path to citizenship. Forget about that part about breaking the law and getting your reward for breaking the law, but be a good citizen otherwise. How can anyone who is given a reward for breaking the law and gets to go to the front of the line, how can they respect the rule of law?

How can anyone who is given a reward for breaking the law and gets to go to the front of the line, how can they respect the rule of law? How can it be when you get stopped for speeding, if they give you a ticket to speed, or if you get arrested for robbing a bank and they say, well, okay, but we are going to give you amnesty, take the loot and go, be happy; but just forget that one time we didn't enforce the law on you, and so for now on respect the rule of law? Madam Speaker, it does not work that way. That is not the nature of humanity. Humanity is going to follow this path of least resistance; if they see an opening, they are going to go. And if they have an opportunity that we give them, that we grant them, they are going to take it.

And not only they will have contempt for the rule of law, a million back in 1986, that turned into 3 million because of the phony identification and the corruption in the Reagan amnesty, they and their descendants and their friends and their neighbors, almost all of them believe that amnesty is a good idea because they were the beneficiaries of amnesty; just like a bank robber that gets to keep the loot thinks robbing banks is a good idea and will go back and do it again if he runs out of money.

Now, think about doing that with 12 million or 20 million or, by the numbers that came out of the Senate the last time, 66.1 million would be legalized by the Senate version. That would be the cumulative total of all who were naturalized in the United States in all of our history.

I thank you for your focus, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I am privileged to be recognized by the gentleman from Eastern Iowa and privileged to have the opportunity and the honor to address you, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of the United States Congress.

A lot of things have transpired since we took the week off from this Congress for the Presidents' recess, we call it, which was really a work period back in the district. And our constituents and those in the State of Iowa and in some of the areas north and east of us went through a severe, severe ice storm that tens of thousands of them are without power as we speak. And I know that you and I have an eye on that very closely, and we do though have a great confidence in the resiliency of the human spirit back in the Midwest, and friends and neighbors will step forward to do all they can. And what is within human possibility will be done and things will be taken care of there, Mr. Speaker.

So having that off my mind, I take up the subject matter that I came to address this evening. And it has been some time since I stepped here on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, to talk about an issue that is the number one issue as I go around western Iowa and Iowa and other places in the country and have meetings with individuals, town hall-type meetings.

Whenever a group of people come together, if you ask questions, stand and listen, eventually the subject of immigration will come up. And it has been the most intensely watched subject and discussed subject perhaps over the last 3 years or a little more, Mr. Speaker.

I recall when President Bush gave his speech that laid out his vision on the immigration reform, and I believe the date was January 6 of 2004. I am not off by more than a day, if that. And that speech started us down this path and this Nation of having an open dialogue about what kind of a Nation we are and what kind of a Nation we are to become. And this is something that has embroiled most of the discussion across the country. Everybody has an opinion. It is a good thing, Mr. Speaker, a healthy debate.

I recall when Pat Buchanan ran for the Presidency back in 1966, he said: I will call for hearings. I will force a debate on this country. We have got to have a national debate so that we can come to a consensus and put this country down the path towards its future.

We have been intensively debating this issue of immigration for the last 3 years, and that would be all of 2004, 2005 and 2006 and we find ourselves now into 2007. So I would say we are about 38 months into this intense discussion, and the results we have from this are hard to measure at this point. One of the reasons is because it is a very convoluted and complicated issue.

We have a configuration here in America that doesn't necessarily promote the right kind of policy. I say that, I am cautious about how I address it, because first of all, I will recognize that there are employers who have premised their business plan on hiring illegal labor.

I can recall in an agricultural hearing that I attended in Stockton, California last year, there was a lady there, there was a witness, before our Agriculture Committee who ran, I believe it was organic, a truck farming operation where they raised peppers and those kinds of vegetables down south of Yuma near the border.

Her complaint was, well, we set up these farms in processing and we need over 900 people a day to operate the harvesting and the sorting and the packaging and the shipments of this crop every day. Now that we have done a better job of enforcing the border, then her lament was that they have a turnover of 9 percent per week, 9 percent of their labor supply per week, it is about 80, and they are having trouble filling their labor supply.

So I asked the question, where did you expect your labor supply to come from when you placed your business close to the border? And the answer was, of course, well we expected our labor to come over from Mexico and come work on our farms and then go back to their homes. Well, that would be illegal labor working on farms south of Yuma with the idea that was the plan from the beginning.

Now, the request was, come to Congress and ask us to legalize this illegal behavior. It was a planned strategy from the very beginning of the setup of the business operation.

I lay this out because this is not a unique circumstance across this country. In fact, it is becoming a standard practice. I am seeing it more and more again as businesses set up to run their operation, whether it is going to be food processing or farming or maybe a dairy operation, and they decide, we are going to need labor to do this.

We would like to go forward with our plan and put our infrastructure in place, invest our capital, buy our cows, get our equipment up and get an order in. We will have to hire some illegal labor to milk the cows.

I had a dairyman tell me a couple of weeks ago that 51 percent of the milk in this country are milked by people that don't speak English. That doesn't necessarily indicate they are illegal immigrants in America, but that would indicate that a significant percentage of them most likely are.

That is some of the scenario. Some of the scenario on the one side is business interests that can capitalize on cheap labor. Believe me, when you pour millions of people into a labor market that are illiterate and unskilled that will work cheaper than anybody else, you are going to drive that labor down.

There was a report that was issued here within the last few weeks that shows that the unskilled labor in America has lost 12 percent of its earning capacity because they are flooded. There was a report on Fox News about a month ago that we have a 30 percent high school dropout rate in America, 30 percent dropout rate.

So if the students in high schools are dropping out at a 30 percent rate, and we are bringing in illegal labor that will work for the cheapest price, it seemed to me, and we know this to be a fact, that the competition between our high school dropouts and the people that didn't go to school, many of

them, from foreign countries that come in, would be clashing in competition for those jobs that require a low education. Maybe they require a strong back and some resilience and persistence.

But the opportunity for undereducated, especially young people in America, those dropouts, those that go on to get a college education, those opportunities, are going to people that are living sometimes 22 or 30 to a house. They will work cheaper than anybody else.

What has happened is our young people that don't want to go off to college, maybe they are not blessed with the ability to do that, maybe they just decide, I want to punch a clock, I want to wear a blue collar, not a white collar. I am happy enough to go do some labor for my life, but leave me alone. Let me take care of my wife and my family. Let me go fishing once in a while, but I don't really want to go off to college and study. Those opportunities are diminishing significantly in America. What that spells is the narrowing of the middle class in America.

We are doing a good job of educating the people in the higher end, those that go off and get their master's and their doctorate. Those will become professional people that often start out at college at six figures and go up from there. That part, that percentage of our population is growing significantly. I am grateful that is the case. We have encouraged a lot of young people to move off into the professions, and they are doing that. That is to the credit of our educational system in this country.

So the upper class is expanding, and there is money being made. We have had unprecedented economic growth thanks to the Bush tax cuts, both rounds in 2001 and in 2003. We have had this unprecedented string of growth. That has helped lift investors up, lift entrepreneurs up, and, of course, the professionals have been lifted up also because there is more money in the market.

So the upper class of America is growing and expanding and prospering. The lower class in America, that unskilled cheap labor, is also growing in numbers, but not growing in prosperity.

As we see the stratification of this society, and think of it in terms of a healthy America that once had a growing ever-more-prosperous middle class is now becoming an America that has a growing, ever-more- prosperous upper class, a growing ever-more-prosperous lower class, and a shrinking more suppressed, more constrained middle class.

That is the scenario that is driven by illegal immigration in America, and illegal immigration in America keeps us from having a legitimate debate on the subject matter of how we might go about recruiting the best people we can find to come into the United States, those that will assimilate the most easily, those that bring their already trained skills, those that will be contributors instead of those that are drawing down off of the public system. Those will be contributors in the first day, the first week, the first month, the first year.

They are across this world with good educations, and they would love to come to America, and they fit into our economy. All you have to do is teach them their ZIP code and their area code and hand them a cell phone, and in a week you wouldn't know that they were not born here. They would assimilate into this culture and into this civilization.

But we can't carry on a reasonable discussion about how to skim the cream of the world off like we used to do, bring them into America so that we can enhance this American exceptionalism. We can't get there because the entire debate has clouded because we are not controlling our borders. We are not stopping the illegal traffic at our borders. We are not doing an adequate job of employer sanctions, although we have had some significant efforts of late, and that means that there is a magnet that draws people across the border. That is the issue that we are dealing with, and the price for Americans is horrendous.

I went back down to the border last week. I spent 2 days down there. I flew into Phoenix and then took a ride from Phoenix on down to Yuma. I joined Secretary Chertoff there at the Yuma station along with the chief of the Border Patrol, David Aguilar, and a number of Members of Congress and a couple of Senators. We went down south, just on the south edge of San Luis, which is the most southwesterly town in Arizona on the Mexican border.

There, for some time, they have had about a 12-foot high steel landing mat wall placed almost exactly on the border. That has been the only barrier that they have had between the two semiurban areas that are there.

Well, here in Congress, last fall, we passed the Secure Fence Act, and the Secure Fence Act mandates that the administration build not 700 miles of fence, but 854 miles of double fence/wall on our southern border in the most priority areas that are defined in the bill. Those priority areas, when you go back and you measure the distances there in the bill, it adds up to 854 miles. One of those priority areas is San Luis where we went to visit.

At that priority area, they are beginning to construct fencing there, and at least it is a start. I can't call it a great start or a good start, but at least it is a start. They have a start to building the kinds of structures we need to stop the illegal crossings that are taking place at our border.

There with about 12-foot high steel landing mat wall which each of us stopped and took a turn welding on there a little bit, I wish I could have stayed and gotten a little work done, it felt kind of good, but there we lent a hand to continuing construction of the wall on the border. Inside about 100 feet, they had constructed a 16-foot high steel mesh fence, and that has got a metal frame on top of it. The steel mesh is essentially impenetrable unless you take a torch or something to cut it with.

So from the steel wall on the border, 100 feet back, 16-foot high steel mesh fence or wall, and then another about 40 feet and there is about a 10-foot high chain link fence with three to four barbs on top, it looks like a playground fence, actually. As we discussed the effectiveness of the structures that they had put in place, and we are continuing to construct at San Luis, Arizona, I asked the question if anyone had made it through that area since they had gotten the triple fencing up.

The answer came back, well, we have had several that have made it through here; but 2 years ago, there were 138,000 illegal crossers who were interdicted by the Border Patrol in that area.

Since October of last year, until just last week, they were now down to 15,000 that had passed across the border. Now that is not a full year, obviously, so it is not quite apples to apples, but it is significantly fewer illegal crossings there.

But then I asked the specific question again, has anyone gone through this area where the triple fencing is? The answer is, well, we think, maybe, yes, three. How did they get through here? A couple of them perhaps went through the waterway and maybe one went around.

The next question, of course, was more finely tuned which is, has anyone defeated this triple fencing yet? The answer is, no, they have not defeated the triple fencing, but they said they will; all structures we put in place will be defeated. We have to work, we have to maintain them.

I have to agree. I think you have to maintain them. I think you have to patrol them. I think you need to put sensors on them so you can identify if somebody is trying to climb through over the top or under the bottom or cut through, and that, I believe, is in the mix.

So we did a driving tour on the border and from there, San Luis, drove along the east, along the border, and the triple fencing reduces down to double fencing. The 10-foot chain link doesn't go all that far yet. It is being extended. Then pretty soon the 16-foot high second layer of fence is under construction, but it is not there either.

You are just down to the steel wall, and not very long after that, the steel wall is gone, and you are left with the construction of the steel wall that is being put in place. It extends from San Luis off to the east. If I remember right, they were going to extend it about 19 miles to the east. We are a long ways to go on that yet.

But we got up, in a couple of Black Hawks, and flew the border then going east from there, in the southwest corner, all the way almost to Nogales and

then turned around and went on up to Tucson. As you fly along the border, you will see there are places the border isn't even marked. There is just sand, not a fence. There is a little trail on our side, and there is a Highway 2 on their side. But there is not a mark of where the border is in many of those locations.

It has been an easy prospect for people on the Mexican side of the border to drive along on Highway 2 in Mexico, decide they want to go to the United States, turn the steering wheel off of Highway 2, go out across the desert to the north, and end up on a road 10 or 20 miles to the north, driving through the desert and come out on that road, and, voila, they are home free in the United States of America.

That has been going on consistently and continually. It is being done by people smugglers; it is being done by drug smugglers. So along that stretch, they are constructing also a vehicle barrier. And this vehicle barrier exists of, I believe it is 5 inch by 5 inch steel tubing that is driven in on about 5 or 6 foot centers with that tubing welded to it at about bumper high on a vehicle or on a pickup truck, and then concrete poured inside those posts.

That does keep most of those vehicles from crashing through, so it makes pedestrians of people who want to come to the United States. It is a little slower way to travel through the desert. We happen to have discovered, I don't know, 25 or 50 miles east of San Luis, a group of about 20 illegals who were perhaps about half a mile into the United States, and they had clustered around the base of a mesquite tree. As we turned the helicopters around and we turned back to take a look, the rotor wash on a Black Hawk is pretty severe in the desert, and it was something that encouraged them to head south rather briskly. So they headed south towards the Mexican border, and we apparently called for backup and then moved on.

But there in broad daylight, a half a mile north of the border with traffic going back and forth on the Mexican highway on Highway 2, were a group of about 20 illegals, working their way across the desert. If we run across them with the type of, I will say, helicopter caravan we were in, then that was not an anomaly. That was something I would say would be standard practice that goes on a daily basis.

But most of the activity, Mr. Speaker, takes place at night. And I have gone down on the border at night and sat on the fence in the dark and listened, and just listened, not with night vision equipment but just listened. And over time, you hear vehicles come in from the Mexican side and drive with their lights off down through the mesquite brush, stop by a big mesquite tree about 150 yards south of the border, let their cargo out, which were people and packs and you can hear them get out. You can hear them drop their pack on the ground. Presumably they pick them back up again. There will be some hushed whispers and then, Mr. Speaker, they will, single file, come walk through the mesquite brush through the fence, and I am talking about a place further east in Arizona where there is a fence, and climb through the five barbed wire fence.

You can hear the fence kind of squeak and you see the shadows. You can't really count shadows, especially when you are sitting there in the dark. It is awfully hard to be certain of what you see, but it is not that hard to be certain of what you hear in an environment like that. So I will say dozens infiltrated around me the night that I sat down there, Mr. Speaker, and perhaps 20 there in broad daylight as we flew by with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Chief of the Border Patrol, and two Blackhawk helicopters that make a lot of noise, and you can hear them coming quite a long ways off, still didn't deter the daylight illegal crossings taking place.

And as I look at the numbers of those who are coming across that southern border, and I would direct anyone's attention to the testimony before the Immigration Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee in the 109th Congress, Mr. Speaker, and also in the 108th Congress, where we had a number of witnesses that testified for the Border Patrol or the Border Patrol Union when asked what level of interdiction do you have of those that are crossing the border illegally, what percentage are you able to arrest? And their answer has consistently been 25 to 30 percent is all that would be interdicted.

So, Mr. Speaker, their testimony also shows that last year, the Border Patrol on the southern border, the 2000 miles of our Mexican border, intercepted, 1,188,000 illegal immigrants who were seeking to cross our southern border. Intercepted, 1,188,000, and now we are to that point where we fingerprint them all, at least that is what the testimony says, and that their fingerprints go into the record so we can track them if their's are duplicate or triplicate or have been stopped a number of times at the border. And at some point we need to be running out of patience and bringing charges against them, lock them up, make them serve their time and then deport them. Some of that is happening, but our patience level is very high.

But of the 1,188,000, I don't have the precise numbers committed to memory, but as close as I can recall, it was about 742,000 that were first time crossers, and the balance of that, the difference between 1,188,000 and 742,000, that 400-some thousand number represents those who crossed the border illegally that year more than once, two times, three times, four times, seven, eight times on up to 17 times, would be one of the numbers that I have heard as they looked at those records, Mr. Speaker. This is something that we are spending $8 billion to protect our southern border. That is $4 million a mile.

And we are getting 25 percent to 33 percent efficiency out of that. And we are picking people up over and over again. And if they voluntarily deport, we simply take their fingerprints, identify them, take a digital photograph of them and take them back to the border and let them go back through the turnstile, say, at Nogales or Naco or San Luis or wherever there might be a port of entry. This enforcement at the border has been weak and it hasn't been relentless. The year before it was a 1,159,000. And this stopping one-third, one fourth to a third calculates out to be something like four million illegal border crossers a year. Four million. If you take the 1,188,000 and you say it is a fourth, multiply it times four and then just kind of round it back to four million, that four million illegal crossers turns out to be 11,000 a night, Mr. Speaker.

And we are in a discussion across this country today about 7,000 Iraqis that the administration wants to provide refuge in the United States for by doing background checks and clearing them and bringing them here so that they will not be under the gun, so to speak, in Iraq and they can be pulled away if they happen to be targeted by the insurgents and the enemy for helping the United States.

That concerns me that we would be bringing people out of Iraq when they need people there to help rebuild their country. And it concerns me that we would have a number that large, and I would seek to reduce that number, if we could, shrink it down as much as possible, do background checks as intensively as we can because I think it is a national security issue and how many al Qaeda could be infiltrated into that 7,000 Iraqis that would want to come in here that would be authorized by the administration, and how many more might there be if we open for 7,000.

But by the same token, the relative risk of having 7,000 Iraqis that we would have identified by name, by fingerprint and been able to at least verify some of their activities over the last 5 years or longer in Iraq, the relative danger to the United States pales in comparison to 11,000 illegal immigrants a night trickling, pouring, infiltrating across our southern border. 11,000. I mean, we are approaching twice, some nights it is twice as many as the 7,000 Iraqis. The 7,000 Iraqis are still a significantly sized number. But the southern border takes on a number approaching twice that many every single night, without any background check, without any check whatsoever, people coming into this country; some to come to work, some to pick lettuce, some to get jobs working in food processing and restaurants and hotels and motels and you name it across the country. It is still a violation of American law. It is still a crime, Mr. Speaker.

But the worst parts of this aren't rooted in individuals that are seeking a better life, although we must enforce our laws if we are going to be a Nation that has the rule of law. But what is really chilling is the elements that come with that mass of humanity, those elements that come in with that $65 billion worth of illegal drugs that comes across our Mexican border every year.

Mr. Speaker, I repeat, $65 billion, with a B, dollars worth of illegal drugs being brought into the United States across our southern border. And the drugs are, the four major drugs, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and marijuana. And the sources of them work out to be about like this, the methamphetamines, many of them manufactured in Mexico, from Chinese pseudoephedrine products. Now we have taken the Sudafed off the shelves here in the United States, most places in an effective way so that we have taken the local meth cooker pretty much out of business. And the meth that was coming into my part of the country in Iowa and your part, Mr. Speaker, was about 90 percent Mexican meth until we passed the law that took those pseudoephedrines off the shelf in our pharmacies and in our grocery stores, limited those quantities.

People can still have access in limited quantities. When we did that the DEA tells me now that the methamphetamines that are being sold in our part of the country, in Iowa, Nebraska and that Midwest area, it was 90 percent Mexican. Now it is 97 percent, and the balance of that trickles in from other places, maybe a California lab, maybe a few local labs, but not much. 97 percent now out of Mexico. We expected that. And we freed up a lot of officers time that are not having to clean up the dangerous meth labs, and put those officers in a better position to interdict the drug dealers. But the meth coming from Mexico, made from Chinese pseudo ephedrine that gets brought into Mexico in numbers way beyond the level of colds that they have down there for the number of people that they have, and that ought to set off some alarm bells. But that is being smuggled in. The meth is being smuggled across the border into the United States in massive supplies, numbers at least over 90 percent of the meth that is used in the United States now coming through, the raw product, the base product out of China to Mexico, manufactured in Mexico, shipped into the United States. That is the facts of methamphetamines. Much of the marijuana comes from any place south, a lot of it raised right in Mexico, and tons and tons of it hauled across the border. I happen to have been down there, it was in the middle part of last May when we interdicted a pickup truck that had about, let's see, it had about 200 pounds of marijuana packaged up in bales and sealed up in tape that was underneath a false floor in a pickup truck, Mr. Speaker.

That was just simply a decoy load that was designed to pull the enforcement off so the larger load could go through. I don't know if it actually made it through, but that is the kind of thing that is going on. Tons and tons of marijuana coming into the United States across the border, Mr. Speaker, a lot of it raised right in Mexico. And then we have the heroin that is smuggled in, and that heroin, a lot of it, also comes out of China.

And those of us that have visited over in Afghanistan in the poppy fields understand how that works. We have the Taliban that are engaged in the poppy and in the opium trade. They will front the crops in Pakistan, walk out into those farming areas along on the east side of Afghanistan that match up against the border with Pakistan, and pay for half of that crop upfront to the grower, to the farmer. It is a nice little crop agreement, and they pay for half the crop upfront. They come back when the harvest is done. They load up the poppy seeds/opium and pay for the other half of the crop. The farmer comes off fine because he doesn't have to haul any crop. He doesn't have to take anything to town. He gets paid upfront for his input costs and he gets paid for his harvest.

And off goes the opium then, hauled away by the Taliban, who sell it out of Pakistan into China and out of China over into Mexico and up into the United States. And, again, we are funding our enemies, Mr. Speaker. And the smuggling routes that go from Afghanistan through Pakistan through China and across into Mexico, up into the United States, are routes that are understood pretty well by our DEA.

And let me see. I left off one other drug, Mr. Speaker, and that is cocaine. And if one would notice, a lot of that cocaine was getting into the United States perhaps through our airports before 9/11. We shut that down and provided a significant amount of security at our airports after that. Drug dog sniffers, a lot more sophisticated screening process. When that happened, the Colombians had difficulty delivering their cocaine into the United States, and finally they cut a deal with the Mexicans so that they could use the distribution of the Mexican drug cartel families to flow their cocaine up into the United States.

So across our southern Border comes 90 percent of the illegal drugs that are used in the United States of America because those conduits that come out of Colombia, out of China, two different varieties out of China, and then the marijuana that is mostly raised in Mexico, all of that coming across the border, coming through illegal border crossings, coming across places where the border is not marked at all, and the drug cartel families that control those crossings fight for those. And the numbers that we have seen that have been killed in the drug wars in Mexico for 2006 exceed the number 2,000 deaths, the people that were murdered in the struggle for who is going to control the turf, who is going to control the profit. And the cities on the south side, Nuevo Laredo for one of those, that area has become a lawless land that is controlled by the drug cartels.

I will say that the new President of Mexico has stepped in to crack down on some of that. The jury is still out on how successful he might be. But these are important components here for us in the United States of America.

So here we are with this dynamic growing economy, the strongest economy we have seen in my lifetime. The continual growth quarter by quarter by quarter that is stimulated, of course, by having a competitive low tax environment. And with an economy that has this kind of dynamism, we are able to pay for two things that come from foreign countries that have hurt us greatly: one is the illegal drugs, the $65 billion worth coming across the Mexican border; and another one is paying for Middle Eastern oil and enriching the people over in that part of the world, many of whom are our sworn enemies, not our sworn friends. So we are funding our enemies by purchasing illegal drugs in America, and we are funding many of our enemies just simply because we are involved in purchasing oil to come into the United States. And we are more and more dependent on Middle Eastern oil, not less and less dependent.

But I am here to talk about the immigration issue, the illegal border crossing, Mr. Speaker, and the component of illegal drugs that are part of that. And I mentioned the 2,000 murder victims on the Mexican side of the border that were killed in the drug wars. And we will hear the testimony continually about how many people die in the Arizona desert trying to come into the United States. And as the weather warms up and we get into May, June, July, and August, the hotter and hotter it gets, the more victims there are in the desert. And it is sad and it is a tragedy, and we are doing some things to stop that. But I will argue that if we build some more fence, we build some more barrier, we can save some more lives down on that border. Those lives are a concern, Mr. Speaker, and we talk about them regularly and continually here in this Congress.

The lives that we don't talk about are the lives of the Americans who die at the hands of the criminal elements that come into the United States. And it has been politically incorrect to discuss such a thing as if we should just sit back and watch our citizens killed on a daily basis. Preventable crimes and we shouldn't utter a peep because somehow or another it might be interpreted as something that is based upon anything other than a love for the rule of law and the enforcement of law and the respect for the value of human life.

But I stand firmly in respect for the unique intrinsic value of human life, from conception, fertilization, to natural death. That is my record for more

than 10 years in public life, Mr. Speaker, and it is my stand today. It has not changed. It will not change. And I stand for the defense of the American people so that they can be safe in their homes, on the streets in their communities, in their schools, in their workplaces, in their churches, wherever they gather. The American people need to be safe.

So I began to ask the question, Mr. Speaker: How many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it across the border and across the desert? I didn't have a concept of what that number would be, Mr. Speaker, until such time as I asked the question in the immigration hearing. I asked it a number of times of different ranks of witnesses that were there. The question again was: How many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it across the desert?

And one of the witnesses, his answer was: ``I don't know the answer to that question, but I can tell you it would be in multiples of the victims of September 11.'' Now, that, Mr. Speaker, is a stopper when you think about such a concept. And when he uttered that concept, it started me thinking, and shortly thereafter I commissioned a GAO study, and the study was specifically designed to ask that question, how many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it illegally across the border? The study came back. It took about a year to get the study done. It wasn't quite apples to apples. That is the nature of things in government sometimes.

But it did put some facts in place that could be indexed to other existing studies and other existing data that the government has produced. So I shut myself up in the Library of Congress sometimes for several days to be able to concentrate hard enough to pull that data out of that report and use other reports and match them in so I would be able to compare apples to apples. And it comes down to something like this, Mr. Speaker: twenty-eight percent of the inmates in the prisons in the United States, Federal and State, are criminal aliens. Twenty-eight percent. Now, if you presume that those 28 percent are committing crimes in the same proportion of the rest of the inmates, since there are no records out there, you have to presume that 28 percent of the rape; 28 percent of the robberies; 28 percent of the grand theft auto; 28 percent of the first, second, and third degree murder, manslaughter, all of that is committed by criminal aliens. And there is no rationale that it could be anything else unless it would be more rather than less.

So I take that 28 percent, and I multiply it, and we have about 16,400 murders in the United States annually. And you take that times .28 and you come up with a number of something like 4,513, perhaps, would be the number of American murder victims representing that 28 percent, which is the population of our prisons that are criminal aliens. Now, that is a huge number and already that is more than the victims of September 11 on one day. But that would be an annual number.

And then if you look at some of the other fatalities out there, the highest group of fatalities are those victims of negligent homicide.

Most times, negligent homicide, Mr. Speaker, is the case of the victims of drunk drivers; not the drunks themselves, but the victims of the drunk drivers.

So as people come into the United States illegally, climb behind a steering wheel, drink and drive, often uninsured, not knowing our traffic laws, not having a sense of responsibility, but running into victims on the streets of America, that number is a number a little higher than the 4,500 or so that are victims of first and second degree murder and manslaughter. But the negligent homicide, mostly victims of drunk drivers, runs a little higher.

But it boils down to, when you do the math, shake it down to a day, about 12 Americans every day murdered at the hands of criminal aliens. Statistically, that is a solid number that has been tested across this country. I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, it is a number that the liberals hate to hear, but they have produced no competing data that can challenge this GAO study data that has been multiplied into other government data like crime rates to come up with these numbers: About 12 Americans a day, first and second degree murder victims or manslaughter victims, dead, buried; about 13 Americans a day die at the hands because of negligent homicide, most of them victims of drunk driving.

All of these crimes, Mr. Speaker, all of them are preventible if we enforce our immigration laws. If we would deport those people when they run afoul of the law, if we are able to control our borders, get operational control of our borders, force all traffic, all human traffic, all contraband, all cargo, everything that is coming across the border through the ports-of-entry, and then beef up the ports-of- entry, focus our surveillance there, probably have to widen them and put more personnel down so we are not backing traffic up, but if we could force all the traffic through the ports-of-entry and do a good job there, we would theoretically interdict all illegal human traffic, all illegal drug traffic.

We would also occasionally interdict a terrorist who is seeking to sneak into the United States. I happen to know of seven individuals who were persons of interest from nations of interest, which is a government euphemism, Mr. Speaker, for someone who is a likely terrorist who hails from a terrorist spawning or terrorist sponsoring country. I know of seven.

When they are identified, picked up by the Border Patrol or whatever the arresting officer happens to be, there is a little window there to find out about it. Then they are handed over to the FBI, which then makes that case classified. At that point those officers can't talk to me or anyone about it after that.

So if they told me about something that happened today and the FBI picks them up 5 minutes from now and takes them into custody and says this is now a classified case, 10 minutes from now they can no longer even repeat the things they said to me 10 minutes ago, because it is now formally a classified case. So I have a little 24 hour window to hear about this.

My network is not that good, but I know of seven. I don't know how many that is altogether. It might be 70. It is probably well more than 70 persons of interest from nations of interest, people who we think are at least likely terrorist suspects coming across our southern border, sneaking into the United States, wishing us ill will, ready to act on that ill will. That threat is there too.

The crime element, the drug element, the terrorist element, all of that is added to the depression of the value of our labor force here in the United States, in fact the lower skilled being pushed down by reducing their wages by 12 percent because of the millions who have been injected into that market. We have gotten dependent upon it over the years.

Mr. Speaker, this part about the violence perpetrated against Americans is something that I have given the broad statistics of 12 victims a day of murder, 13 of negligent homicide, 25 altogether. Almost every single day the casualties of Americans at the hands of criminal aliens, most of that preventible if we enforce our laws, those casualties are almost every day greater than the numbers of American casualties in Iraq. They absolutely total up to be something that are in multiples of the victims of September 11.

These are Americans that need to have their lives protected. We need to have our laws enforced, we need to get operational control of the border, we need to have cooperation at the local law enforcement level, Mr. Speaker.

To personalize this a little bit, statistics are one thing. We can talk about statistics. Some people understand the magnitude of that. Some people understand personal pain and evil people. So, I have picked a selection of evil people here, Mr. Speaker.

My number one evil person is this individual here. His name is Angel Maturino Resendiz. He is known as, and we will recognize his name, the Railroad Killer. This individual for nearly 2 years, a 39-year-old illegal alien from Mexico, literally followed America's railroad tracks to rape and kill unsuspecting victims.

Resendiz struck near the rail lines that he illegally rode and then he stowed away on the next freight train that came his way. He is responsible

for as many as 15 serial murders, and the victims' ages range from 16 to 81. He attacked his victims with rocks, sledgehammers, shotguns and tire irons, sometimes in their homes, and sometimes he stole money for alcohol or drugs. Most of these murders took place in central Texas, but it is suspected he killed as far north as Kentucky and Illinois.

He has been apprehended by the Border Patrol in Texas and New Mexico eight times within 18 months, and he had been, and I emphasize this, voluntarily returned to Mexico each of those eight times in those 18 months.

Eight times he volunteered to return to Mexico when he was stopped by the Border Patrol, and then he would come back into the United States, and sometimes it happened quite quickly, come back to kill again.

On June 1, 1999, there were State and Federal warrants outstanding for Resendiz and there were intensive efforts underway to arrest him. Border Patrol agents in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, apprehended Resendiz. He was illegally crossing the border again, and he voluntarily was returned to Mexico, even though there were outstanding warrants on him. The Border Patrol was unaware that there were warrants out, but he was on the FBI's top 10 list. Still, picked up as an illegal border crosser and voluntarily returned, self-deportation, so-to-speak, back to Mexico.

How does this happen, that an individual that is in the FBI's top 10 most wanted list, we have him in our hands eight times, and this time, on June 1, 1999, while there were outstanding Federal warrants, we couldn't index his fingerprints to that data there with the system we had in 1999 and put this man behind bars before he killed again? But we couldn't under those circumstances.

I am advised that today, everyone that is picked up is printed and their fingerprints are run through the database, Mr. Speaker, and presumably we would catch the next Resendiz perpetrator. It didn't happen in 1999.

So they released him, and Resendiz, after he had gone back to Mexico, immediately found his way back into the United States, where within 48 hours he killed four more innocent people.

He was finally traced and captured by a determined Texas ranger in July of 1999, and then he was ultimately executed at Huntsville, Texas, June 27, 2006.

This man here, Angel Maturino Resendiz, killed at least 15 people. Now he has been executed as of June 27, 2006. But it is something that could have been prevented, Mr. Speaker, if we had had an intense effort to enforce our border. When they come through the second time, if we are not willing to use the fullest extent of the law at that point and provide a deterrent, these kind of things happen.

What was he afraid of? He surely wasn't afraid to be picked up again on the border. He knew he would be returned back to Mexico again. Finally a determined Texas ranger hunted him down. Thank God for that kind of effort and that kind of man.

Now, that is Resendiz, Mr. Speaker. That is the face of evil. It is not the only face of evil, but that is a face of evil.

He is one of those who contributes to those thousands of Americans who have been victimized in the fashion I have described.

This is another one, Mr. Speaker, Raul Gomez-Garcia. Many of us know this story, and this will take us into the discussion of the situation that exists in Denver and in many of the cities across America that have established a sanctuary policy.

This case has been brought to a conclusion with a conviction and a sentencing, and I can talk straight up about it. Raul Gomez-Garcia, a cop killer. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison for second degree murder, not first degree murder. But as the police officers that were guarding a family celebration which I understand was Raul Gomez- Garcia's family celebration, I believe it was a christening or a baptism of a daughter of his, Raul Gomez-Garcia left the party and went to come back in and they would not let him back in because he didn't have identification or whatever the reason was. At any rate, Gomez- Garcia lost his temper and on May 8, 2005, ambushed two officers, Officer Donnie Young who was shot in the back of the neck, I believe, and killed, and Officer Jack Bishop, whose bulletproof vest saved him when he was shot in the back by Mr. Gomez-Garcia, and who immediately escaped to Mexico.

The way I recall this case, we knew he was heading that way. As he got into Mexico, he believed he had sanctuary there. The policy was Mexico wouldn't extradite murderers to the United States if they were faced with a death penalty, which would be the case here for this kind of a crime.

And then over time because the Mexican courts had ruled that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment and therefore they were not going to send their citizens to the United States to face a death penalty, no matter what kind of a crime they committed, and the disrespect for the laws here in the United States that come from the courts in Mexico I think cannot be overlooked, either, Mr. Speaker, but that was the position that the Mexican courts took, that the death penalty was cruel and unusual, and so they found some people that they wouldn't encourage to come to the United States. That was those people who were provided sanctuary within Mexico who hid behind the decisions made by the Mexican courts and Mexican laws.

Then over time the same court ruled that life in prison was also cruel and unusual punishment. So what would be appropriate punishment for an individual like this, Raul Gomez-Garcia, who shot two cops, killed one, the other one saved by his bulletproof vest, ripped Donnie Young out of his family's life, left a daughter without a father, and put all of that pain and agony on the community and on the family and the neighborhood and put a wound into this Nation, and absconded to Mexico and the Mexican courts say even life in prison is too cruel and unusual for someone who commit such a cruel and unusual act?

So the prosecuting attorney had to cut a deal. He had to lower the charge to second degree murder where the maximum sentence was 80 years in prison which Raul Gomez-Garcia received at his sentencing that took place last October 26 in Denver.

But the big problem with this is Raul Gomez-Garcia had been stopped a number of times by the Denver Police Department. The sanctuary laws that they have in Denver say that they can't inquire into the lawful presence or the immigration status of anyone that they stop. Therefore, Raul Gomez-Garcia was released each time he was stopped for his traffic violations, car accidents, whatever the incidents of confrontation might have been. Gomez-Garcia was allowed to go back on the streets, back behind the steering wheel, back behind a gun, back behind the backs of two police officers and shoot them in the back, killing Officer Donnie Young.

All of this could have been prevented if we sealed our borders, stopped the bleeding at the borders; and failing that, when Gomez- Garcia arrived in Denver with his first encounter with the Denver Police Department, he should have been picked up and deported back to Mexico on the spot. That is what the law says. But Denver says they are a sanctuary city, and that means they want to be a welcoming place for people who come here illegally.

The price that is paid is the life of Donnie Young. I think it is a tragedy and it is amazing to me that the citizens of Denver will put up with a policy that will protect murderers within their midst and not enforce our Federal law. And the very idea that because you are local law enforcement and you have a few city ordinances and speed limits and issues like that to enforce, the very idea that because you are a city police officer you don't cooperate or enforce Federal law is anathema to a Nation that is founded upon the rule of law.

I grew up in a law enforcement family, and there was no concept in those years that any law enforcement officer was absolved from enforcing any of our laws.

Can you imagine a Nation or a world where only Federal agents could enforce Federal laws, and only State agents could enforce State laws, and Highway Patrol officers could only enforce the State speeding laws, not the

local speed limits, and your city police officers could only enforce the city ordinances and the local traffic laws? And county officers, what are they going to do? They don't have enough ordinances to enforce anything. All they could do under this kind of rationale would be serve papers and keep the jail and maybe leave us otherwise alone. It is not conducive to a free state to have sanctuary policy or to live under the delusion that you don't have the responsibility to enforce immigration laws because you happen to be wearing a blue uniform of a Denver Police Department.

The result is Denver police officers, shot, killed by Gomez-Garcia, who had no business being in the United States and we had many opportunities to send him back to his own country and keep him there or incarcerate him here in the United States until he had paid the price for the others crimes he had committed.

Here is what is shocking to me, Mr. Speaker. Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman said the case, Gomez-Garcia, ``sends the message that Denver and its criminal justice system stand behind the police.'' How does that work? How can you stand behind the police when you have Gomez-Garcia standing behind the police and putting bullets into them, and you have picked up and turned the very man loose that you had the opportunity to stop before he took one of your fellow officers?

That is what happens with a sanctuary policy. Donnie Young was one of thousands. The face here is another face of evil, Mr. Speaker. And the face of the victims are not here on this floor tonight, but it is a tragedy just the same.

And I have another tragedy.

This is Jose Luis Rubi-Nava.

Now, this individual has been arrested and he has I believe been indicted on other charges, so we are going to say ``allegedly.'' I am going to put allegedly ahead of the things I say about this individual, understanding I don't believe he has been convicted at this point. He is innocent until proven guilty, but these are the news reports that I am referencing.

He was arrested in April 2006 for other crimes. He is an illegal immigrant. He could have been deported back to his home country. He could have been incarcerated for the other violations he had, but he was released back into the community, again because of a sanctuary policy, and again this is Denver, the suburbs of Denver.

So we have Jose Luis Rubi-Nava of Glendale, Colorado, who is charged with one of the most horrendous crimes that I have heard about in my years in dealing with these things, and that is the dragging death of a female whom we believe was perhaps his common-law wife, a live-in, or a romantic friend whom he allegedly tied a rope around her neck and drug her behind the car for over a mile and left her body about 20 feet outside a driveway in a suburban area, in a suburb of Denver.

In reading the report, the gory streaks on the street were more than a mile long and they had to wash the streets to clean things up after the perpetration of this horrible crime allegedly committed by Rubi- Nava.

This crime is just among the most horrible things that I have ever heard, and yet the Denver police persist. They buried one of their own, Donnie Young. The mayor's sanctuary policy is what they have to live by I recognize. I am not hearing from the police department that we should stop all of these sanctuary policies. Instead, I am hearing the police chiefs say we take care of our own; we enforce the law.

But I hear things like statements made in this case, Denver police have no reason to believe someone is in the country illegally; therefore, they do not contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. If they stop somebody, and any common-sense person, anyone with half a brain, could figure out that they had an illegal immigrant on their hands because of the identification, because of maybe a Mexican driver's license, maybe because of a matricula consular card, which is almost proof positive of unlawful presence in the United States. There is no reason to have a matricula consular card unless you are here illegally, Mr. Speaker.

No, the Denver police would argue we have no reason to believe he is here illegally, and therefore, we cannot take action; therefore, we will release an individual back on the streets again and hope he does not drag somebody to death or shoot somebody in the back or run over them as a drunken driver.

This kind of tragedy, this kind of evil, Mr. Speaker, has got to be stopped. I have laid out just three cases, and I have discussed perhaps about 17 murder victims in these three cases. That average, I do not know if it is high or low across the perpetrators of capital crime.

Mr. Speaker, I can tell you that if you are the family members of any of those victims, you are not thinking in terms of numbers or whether it is a high or a low number of people that were killed. You are thinking in terms of your loved one that you have lost, that devastating, wrenching that a family goes through and a that grief that goes on for a lifetime, that hole that is there for a lifetime, the hole that I talked about in the family of Donnie Young, that hole multiplied by thousands in this country because we do not have the will to enforce our immigration laws, because we do not have the will because we have people that see the massive numbers of low-income, cheap wages as a political power base. On the other side of that, we have people that are making a lot of money off of cheep labor, and they believe they have a right.

So, therefore, Mr. Speaker, I will continue this discussion in future evenings, and I appreciate the privilege to address you on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 43 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 28, 2007, at 10 a.m.