Floor Statements

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 4: Page 18, after line 20, insert the

following new paragraph (and redesignate subsequent

paragraphs accordingly):

``(7) the potential effects of the covered transaction on

the efforts of the United States to curtail human smuggling

(and such term, for purposes of this paragraph, means any act

constituting a violation of section 274(a) of the Immigration

and Nationality Act) and to curtail drug smuggling with

regard to any country which is not described in paragraphs

(1) and (2) of section 1003(a) of the Controlled Substances

Import and Export Act.''.

Mr. Speaker, I very much thank the senior and esteemed leader, Mr. King from New York, for yielding to me.

I want to start a point here, Mr. Speaker, that I would ask all Members to focus on to understand where we really sit in history, in this course of history. If you would go back to the most successful military known in history for the longest period of time, spanning centuries, it was the Roman legions. And the Romans had a statement called ``nosce hostem,'' which, of course, is Latin for ``know thine enemy.'' We need to do that here in this Congress. We are part of this effort, of course. Know thine enemy. Von Clausewitz wrote the book on war, his treatise on war, that everyone goes to because he boiled it down to understandable principles, certainly ``know thine enemy,'' but his point was the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war.

Now, if you know your enemy and you are going to destroy their will and ability to conduct war, you wouldn't just go after their ability, you would go after their will as well. So that has been true throughout history. And if you were charged with the task of defeating the preeminent world's Superpower in, say, about the year 1963 under President Kennedy, ``How do you defeat undefeated America?'' was the question that was presented to the Vietnamese.

Enter General Vo Nguyen Giap. He was the general that orchestrated the Vietnamese effort throughout the war in Vietnam. He certainly understood history. He understood the Roman legions. He understood nosce hostem. He also understood that you had to defeat the will and the ability of the United States if you were going to defeat them. He knew that he couldn't defeat our ability. He had to attack our will. And that is what happened.

And he wrote the book. This is the primer, ``How Do You Defeat the United States of America?'' by General Vo Nguyen Giap. How We Won the War is the title of it. And in the primer he said, ``The beginning was when the United States failed to succeed in a complete victory in Korea, then we knew the will of the United States was weakened. On page 18 he talks about how they went after the will of the United States through public opinion, how they supported it and encouraged the antiwar activists because they knew they couldn't win militarily. So their front on the war that had the greatest chance for success was with the will of the American people. Here is the primer.

Our enemies read this primer, Mr. Speaker. They understand this. And one of our enemies over there is Moqtada al-Sadr, who laid it out for us when he said on June 11, 2004, and I saw this on al-Jazeera TV when I was in Kuwait, ``If we continue attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way that they left Vietnam, the same way that they left Lebanon, the same way that they left Mogadishu.''

Mr. Speaker, that is the message that his people heard. That is the message we should hear. I have heard it. I have put it on this floor many times. A couple nights ago I put Moqtada al-Sadr down here on the floor. In the night he went off to Iran to join up with the people who have been supporting him. He understands this.

I will tell you this. If this resolution passes and if Mr. Murtha and the people who are working with him are successful in a slow bleed of our resources, then what you will see, Mr. Speaker, is you will see Osama bin Laden say, If we keep attacking America they will leave Afghanistan the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu, and Iraq. That is what is coming. That is what is being perpetrated by the rhetoric here on this floor. That is what is being staged in appropriations bills that we will certainly see coming after this resolution.

The destiny of America is put at risk, Mr. Speaker, and this says to all of our enemies it is easy to take on the United States if you can just get Congress to lose their will, if you can get them to lose their spine.

So I would then simply close with the reiteration of a request made from a major from Kentucky whom I met with in my last trip over there in Iraq. He loves his kids and his cows and he loves God and I know he speaks the truth. He said, ``We have everything we need. So when you pray for us, pray for the American people. Pray they understand the threat and pray they do not lose their resolve. We will not lose ours.''

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this profound honor to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, the People's House.

I would reflect that all week long, starting really on Tuesday morning, we have had a series of marathon debates taking place here, Mr. Speaker, marathon debates that ranged in the area of 12 hours a day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday until after 1 a.m. this morning, taking up again this morning shortly after 8 o'clock, and then moving on until mid-afternoon, when we finally had a vote on the resolution, the resolution that was offered by the majority, the resolution that in one voice said, we honor the troops, and the

other voice said, but we are opposed to the reinforcements and opposed to the surge that the President had ordered, the surge that is already in motion, the troops, many of them have already been deployed, and it is not possible to back out of this.

So the voice that came, Mr. Speaker, to the people across this world was answered and was heard in a lot of different ways.

On one side of it, the antiwar movement within the United States, the activists, liberal left, the protesters that are, at least if not the people that were in the streets during Vietnam, were descendants of the people that were in the streets during Vietnam, philosophically, if not literally, and in many cases it was both. They heard a message, which is, at every cost, the Speaker's leadership is going to drag our military and pull our Commander in Chief back of their commitment to the Iraqi people in the Middle East.

And the other voice, a voice was heard by a number of American people, stalwart patriots, people who believe in the destiny of America and understand that there is a price to be paid by each succeeding generation because of the decisions that are made by the preceding generations. We are the recipients of the sacrifice of our Founders and of every generation's sacrifice, starting with the shaping of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, those veterans of the Revolutionary War, those who supported the effort in the Revolutionary War, those who shaped the Constitution, Mr. Speaker, those that built the economy, those that built the churches, those that built the schools, those that built the communities that link together, which is this greater American civilization, we are the beneficiaries.

The decisions that they made July 4, 1776, to pick a point we all understand, we benefitted from that decision. And it was a hard decision. And it wasn't a decision that was made without great concern or without great debate. There was. And there was dissension on both sides.

Some of the people that were opposed to freedom, a free nation, were identified as the Tories, the people that aligned with the British. They didn't think it was worth the price. They didn't want to risk the blood. They didn't want to risk the treasure. They thought that they could suffer the indignities and the injustices that were being poured upon them from the crown, and that was more tolerable than the price that would have to be paid for freedom.

But freedom won out. Freedom was established. And they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, and they did so knowing that they might very well lose their lives and their fortunes, but they would never lose their sacred honor. That was the creed that came from the Founding Fathers, and that was just the Revolutionary War. Of course, it was the biggest and most significant.

But, shortly after that, we had another conflict, and one of those conflicts, Mr. Speaker, was one that started out over in the Mediterranean. The hostilities between the United States and the British concluded in 1783. That was when the military victory was won by George Washington, and that was when, also, the protection of the Union Jack that flew over the seas and the oceans was removed from the protection of our Merchant Marine.

So 1783, our Merchant Marine, our ship sailing on the high seas, lost the Union Jack protection, the intimidation of the British Royal Navy, 1783. 1784, American ships were attacked and boarded and pirated, and our sailors were forced into slavery, and the cargos were sold, and the ships were put back into the fleets of the Barbary pirates, the Barbary pirates being the predecessors of the enemy that we have today.

And it is an interesting study in history, Mr. Speaker, to see what unfolded here in the history of the United States when we sent our best diplomats over to the Mediterranean to negotiate with the Barbary pirates. Those were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Now, I have here a copy, Mr. Speaker, this is of the papers of Thomas Jefferson, right here, volume nine. This is dated 1785, November 1, 1785 to 1786. This is the report that Thomas Jefferson returned upon his conclusion of his diplomat mission to the Tripoli pirates.

In a paragraph that he has written to the American commissioners and John Jay he says, soon after the arrival of Mr. Jay in London, we had a conference with the ambassador of Tripoli at his house. This ambassador of Tripoli was a representative of the Islamic Caliphate. And he says, he writes, ``We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury,'' meaning the United States of America, ``and observed that we consider all mankind as our friends, who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.''

In other words, the statement that came from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams was, to the ambassador from Tripoli, we consider you friends. We have had no hostilities toward you. We have not provoked you in any way. We are simply sailing our ships on the high seas and providing open commerce and trade like any country would do. Why do you attack us? Why do you kill us? Why do you press our sailors into slavery?

Jefferson answered, The ambassador from Tripoli answered us that it was founded on the laws of their prophet, that it was written in their Koran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, the authority of the Koran. I continue quoting, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.

That is from the negotiations that took place in 1786, and that is from Jefferson's report to John Jay.

Now, here we are, 2006. We are going through this debate, Mr. Speaker, and I am hearing over and over again there is a reason why they hate us. We should understand why they hate us. If we could figure that out, maybe we could change our ways and we could find a way to accommodate our disagreements, because surely there are two sides to every argument.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I am here to submit that Thomas Jefferson understood this thing clearly. He understood a principle that I laid out this afternoon in debate called nosce hostem, which is a Latin term. It comes from the Roman legions, and that is Latin for ``know thine enemy''.

The Romans understood, and they were the most successful long-term military legions in history all the time up to that point and maybe in all of history. They had to know their enemy, and they had to persevere, and that is where that term came, nosce hostem, know thine enemy.

Thomas Jefferson understood the same thing.

And, in fact, his curiosity and his compulsion to understand and know the enemy caused him to go out and buy a Koran, and that Koran was part of his opposition research, if you will. And Jefferson's being one of the most curious individuals as a figure in our history and maybe the most learned man of his time, he studied Greek so that he could read the Greek Bible and do the translation himself. He wasn't quite satisfied with just King James. He wanted to do that comparison because he was that much of an intellectual and he had that level of curiosity. He had the same level of intellectual curiosity in understanding our enemy the Barbary pirates; so his study of the Koran, I am confident, concurred with his report back to John Jay that was handed over to Congress, that report that says they believe their path to salvation is in killing us.

So Jefferson persevered in his endeavor to understand our enemy. He studied Koran, understood our enemy, put the report in place, and in that one simple paragraph is an explanation of our enemy today. And there is quote after quote after quote that have been brought forward here by my colleagues on this side of the aisle in the last several days that support that statement. Statements made by Osama bin Laden, statements made by Zawahiri, statements made by other leaders of al Qaeda where they say their religious duty, their responsibility, is to keep attacking infidels; infidels, being defined as unbelievers in their Koran; unbelievers, being those who have not sworn allegiance to Islam.

And you saw that in that quote where he said that they continued to attack us wherever we might be found until we either converted to Islam or pay homage or are beheaded. And historically looking back, most of us recognize when we say ``leathernecks,'' that means the Marine Corps today. That nickname came from the Barbary pirate wars when they went to the shores of Tripoli, and our Marine Corps wore heavy thick leather collars, Mr. Speaker. Those collars were worn to reduce the number of marines that would be beheaded by the swinging swords of the Barbary pirates.

The beheadings of today are not anything new. These are beheadings that go back throughout time, throughout the Crusades, clear back to a thousand years ago, Mr. Speaker. And our enemy believes they are fighting that same war. They carry that same grudge. But furthermore, it is a religious conviction on their part. It is not something that can be negotiated away. And to believe that we could resolve this conflict by negotiations is a myopic and naive position. We cannot. If that were the case, I am going to trust Jefferson would have found a way, Adams would have found a way, all of our negotiators in the past would have found a way. Some of them would have found a way at least.

But we fought the Barbary pirates, and it was a herky-jerky, hit-and- miss, not always successful effort. But we did occupy some land there, and we did force them into submission, and we did get a kind of an agreement to resolve the disputes. But the battles between Western civilization and the Barbary pirates and the radical world of Islam of that era really didn't end until 1830, and I am going to go on record here in the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, when the French culminated a military operation and occupied Algiers. When they did that in 1830, that was essentially, at least for modern times, the end of the violence. Scattered incidents to be sure, but for the majority the end of the violence between the radical Islamists who were the Barbary pirates of that era up until 1830 and then move us forward to about 1979 when these hostilities started again. They lay dormant. They were essentially in submission. They didn't have many tools to work with. Some of them had been colonized. And during that period of time, they didn't get ahold of governments. They didn't have a place to start. They didn't have an ability transportation-wise to come out here and attack the rest of the world.

But things happened and we moved into the modern world. And when the Cold War was over and there was no longer this titanic struggle between the world's two Superpowers and that power vacuum, in came al Qaeda. In came the Taliban. In came the radicals to fill that void. And the philosophical support became there. The funding was there from oil. The real oil wealth began to pour into those Islamic states in the 1970s. And if you remember the oil cartels of that era, the gas lines here, Jimmy Carter's legacy, the 444 days of 52 American hostages paraded in front of the television, and the only way they were going to be released was to elect a President that they were afraid of. So that is why you saw the split screen of Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office and those 52 hostages being released at the same time. But that became the beginning of this constant battle that we have now with the jihadists of today. And they have been empowered by oil wealth, families that are wealthy, by the religious network of radical Islam.

Now, to help explain this a little bit, Mr. Speaker, I use an analogy here that is something that I have not heard from anywhere else. I look around and I think how do I compare what is going on? How am I to stand up and say I am opposed to the radical Islam, these jihadists, without directly attacking Islam itself? Many times the President has made the statement that Islam is a ``religion of peace.'' I am looking for more evidence of that before I am going to step up and resoundingly endorse that statement, but I am not willing to indict them at this point, Mr. Speaker. I would rather compare it this way: I am going to say the radical Islam, the jihadists, are a parasite that lives on and within the host called Islam.

Now, Mr. Speaker, when you think about what that means, a parasite living on and within a host, a parasite will ride on a host, feed off a host, reproduce off a host, drop off and attack other species, but also attack the host species. This goes on over and over again. And I could take you down through some different species of parasites to make my case, but it remains a biological fact that that is what a parasite does.

A parasite doesn't respect its host to the point where it will refrain from killing the host. Sometimes the parasite will kill the host. Think in terms of a tapeworm that will draw all of the nutrients out of the host until the host becomes so scrawny and so disheveled and so weak that the host actually expires. That will happen. There are other parasites that will do the same thing, but there are many parasites that will attack more than one species.

This parasite called radical Islam, these jihadists, attack many species. They attack every species of Homo sapien, for that matter. They attack Jews as their preferred target. They attack Christians as a preferred target. They attack capitalists as a preferred target. And when they can do a two-fer, a Jewish capitalist, a Christian capitalist, a Western civilization representative, secular capitalist, they are all for doing that because they know that that destabilizes the civilization that they abhor.

This parasite called jihadists also attacks Islam itself. Moderate Muslims are killed in greater numbers than anybody else historically over the last 30 or so years because the destabilization that takes place is where they thrive. This parasite called jihad, the jihadist, lives and it grows and it thrives in an anarchy.

So they are seeking to create anarchy. They are attacking the host called Islam, but a host will always provide that food. It will provide the transportation. It provides a home for the parasite. The parasite jihadist, radical Islam, lives within Islam. And so radical Islam goes to the mosques where they preach their hatred and they help sort out those that are truly convicted on the jihad side. The most radical of those are identified by their response, their reaction, and they are connected to and recruited out of the mosques. Many people who go to the mosques are peaceful people. They all aren't. And that is a center where the communication comes through.

The language itself is another tool that helps this parasite called jihadists communicate. So the Arabic language itself is a conduit, Mr. Speaker; a common conduit through the language, a common conduit through the mosque system, a common conduit because of common nationalities and identification with each other. You tie that all together and then you pick the radicals out, and that is how you sort out the species of the parasite jihadists.

But the host hasn't done much to eradicate the parasite from its midst. I haven't seen Islam step up and decide that they are going to eradicate radical Islam from their midst. No. For a number of reasons. One, they are afraid to confront them. They don't know what the price will be. Another one is they are not quite sure they really want to side with the people that are on our side of this argument. Some of them are also dancing in the streets with their radical jihadists when something goes bad for the people on our side, this Western civilization, which I think encompasses the world that the jihadists are opposed to. Western civilization including Christians, Jews, the Judeo Christian ethic, the free market ethic, the liberal democracies that we have that provide freedom for people and give us this flexibility to define our own future. They hate freedom, as the President has said many times, and they attack freedom.

So, Mr. Speaker, this is a difficult nut to crack. And I would like to charge Islam with eradicating that parasite in their midst. I do think it is part their responsibility, but I am not hearing them step up to this task. So I am looking forward to the day that that happens, Mr. Speaker, but until it does, we have a war to fight.

We have a task ahead of us, and this task that is ahead of us is a great big, difficult task. And it is far more difficult today, Mr. Speaker, than it was a week ago because of the message that came out of this Chamber all week long, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,

and this morning up until mid-afternoon, and especially because of the vote; the vote that passed a resolution that said we support our troops and oppose their mission. I mean a third grader can figure out that that logic doesn't fit. You have got to do one or the other, and they are tied together. You don't send your military off and ask them to put their lives on the line for a mission that you don't believe in. And to say to them, ``I am all for you, buddy, but if you get shot over there, if you give your life over there, I can't say that you did it for a good cause because it is a bad cause.'' That is what got said over here.

This is a good cause. This is a just cause, Mr. Speaker. And our troops have been undermined today and yesterday and the day before and the day before that. And now they have got to carry out a mission, and it is a lot harder than it has ever been over there.

And our enemy has been encouraged, Mr. Speaker. They have got the words that have been said over here, these quotes put up. They have got to be all over al-Jazeera, over the Islamic blogosphere. There have got to be people dancing in the streets all over the land where they recruit our enemies because they know what this means. They know what it means because they study history.

And, Mr. Speaker, I have studied history as well. And part of that history is, first of all, the United States of America is a Nation that, up until the conclusion of the Korean War, had never lost a war. We had been successful in every conflict that we had engaged in. And I grew up under that. I grew up with a military father and military uncles on both sides of the family. They sat around a lot and talked. The United States of America, of all the Nations in the world, has never lost a war. And the reason we haven't lost a war is because we believe in freedom.

And you are a lucky young man, Steve King, for being born in the United States of America. You could have been born anywhere else, but you were born here. You are a recipient of that freedom that they fought for and each preceding generation had fought for. And I was extraordinarily blessed. I am, Mr. Speaker, but I was raised with a reverence for that freedom and the understanding of the price that was paid for it. And up until that time we had been successful in every conflict. They didn't quite define the Korean War except to say, well, we won that, but nobody talked about that very much.

I bring this up, Mr. Speaker, because I picked up a book a little while back. I had to do a little searching to find it. And the title of the book is How We Won the War. By General Vo Nguyen Giap. He was a Vietnamese general who commanded their troops throughout the entire period of time that they were in conflict with the United States of America in Vietnam. And his comment in there that caught my eye first was ``It all began when the United States failed to win a clear victory in Korea,'' Mr. Speaker.

If you remember, Korea was resolved in the early 1950s, I think 1952, but when it was resolved, it ended up being on the 38th parallel. We had pushed the Chinese back north of the 38th parallel. We had gone north to the 38th parallel with U.N. troops as well, and pushed back to the 38th. The resolution came, and we shut down the fight on that 38th parallel line, which is pretty much back to the same line before the invasion came from the North Koreans.

So it was fought essentially to a draw, and the line was the same line that the war began on. My father and their generation didn't acknowledge that we failed to win that war. They neither acknowledged or said or even implied that we lost it. I think we fought it to a draw.

But when General Giap took over in Vietnam, Dien Bien Phu came along in the mid-fifties and the French had lost, and President Kennedy ordered our troops into Vietnam in 1963, by my recollection, and the Vietnamese had to look at what was coming at them. This big industrial Nation, this sleeping giant, formerly sleeping giant, there was only about not even two decades after World War II, a huge, powerful industrial, military and economic force in the world, was coming into South Vietnam to help support the freedom fighting people in South Vietnam. He had to come to a conclusion on how they were going to fight so great a nation.

He had seen the French lose their resolve at Dien Bien Phu. They lost their resolve along the way. And he knew something Clausewitz had written about in his book on war years before, when Clausewitz said the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. Will and ability, two factors that are the targets of war.

Now, you can destroy the enemy's ability to conduct war. You can wipe out all their tanks and take all their guns. You can take their swords, knives and hatchets. They can be totally devoid of arms. But if they still have the will to fight, they are going to come at with you with sticks and clubs and fists and boots, if they still have the will. That is what Clausewitz understood. It is a two-section effort when you go to fight a war. You are going after the ability to conduct war, the enemy's ability to conduct war, and you are trying to destroy their will to conduct war.

So as Giap analyzed that, he realized he could never destroy our ability to conduct war. We could always pour more and more munitions into the fight. We could send our ships and planes over and we could always pour more bombs in there and always could bring more soldiers in.

So the strategy was how do you then attack, damage, weaken and destroy the United States' will to conduct war? And the North Vietnamese, General Giap in particular, recognized that their best ally in that war wasn't an AK-47 or a ChiCom grenade. What it was was the anti-war movement in the United States.

So they encouraged that movement, and nurtured it and negotiated with it. And they brought Jane Fonda over there and put her in a gun emplacement in Hanoi, and that encouraged the anti-war movement here in the United States. They sent the photo-op back. There were a number of photo-ops like that.

You heard from the great Sam Johnson at this very microphone earlier this afternoon, Mr. Speaker, when he talked about how the voices of the anti-war leaders in America were transmitted across loud speakers in the Hanoi Hilton where Sam spent far too many days, 2,500 days in captivity, and how those voices demoralized our POWs in Vietnam.

But General Giap understood, we are destroying the United States' will to conduct war. The frontal assault on the will of the American people was going on relentlessly and persistently, and it says in his book, their best ally was the anti-war movement here in the United States.

So here we are today, Mr. Speaker, and the enemy has been encouraged. There is nothing that came out of that side of the aisle that discouraged the enemy. I can't think of a single word, maybe one speaker, and that would have been a little bit qualified, that would have discouraged the enemy. Over on this side, just hearing Sam Johnson, if I were the enemy, my feet would tremble in my sandals.

We have to understand that there are two parts to this war, the ability to conduct war and the will to do so. And we don't conduct wars here in the United States any longer looking at that as two different things we need to assault. We are trying to fight a nicy-nice war with limited targets and rules of engagement that keep our military from doing the job that they could do.

There isn't a strategy to destroy the enemy's will to conduct war. It is just a strategy to destroy the enemy's ability, I should say limit their ability, try to shrink down the arms and funding they have coming in, and try to limit the transportation routes of the insurgents as they infiltrate into Iraq.

That is not enough, Mr. Speaker, but at least we are in a position where we can go forward and win this war if the will of the President and the will of our military can overcome the encouraged and supported will of our enemy, which has been encouraged and supported by many, many voices here on the floor of this Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I point out also the legacy of Korea and Vietnam. That legacy has already been reflected by one of the leaders of our enemy within Iraq, and this is Muqtada al-Sadr. He is the leader of the Madi militia, and he has been

a thorn in the side of the United States for a long time. I identified him as somebody that had to go a long time ago, at least as far back as early 2004.

I have to say in memory of Charlie Norwood, this man needs a dentist, and wherever he is going to go, Charlie is going to have no chance at him.

But this individual, Muqtada al-Sadr, said over Al-Jazeera TV on the evening of June 11, 2004--I was in Kuwait City waiting to go into Iraq the next day--Sadr came on Al-Jazeera TV and said in Arabic, with the English crawler underneath, 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.'' Muqtada al-Sadr, June 11, 2004, and that was Al-Jazeera TV.

That voice out of that man. And when I heard that, I concluded, he has read General Giap's book. He understands maybe not what happened in Korea, but he understands what happened in Vietnam. He understands that he has got to continue to fight, to break the will of the American people here, here in the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, because the last battle in this war, if the United States doesn't ultimately prevail, will be fought right on this blue carpet, right in this place right here. It won't be fought over there in Iraq, it won't be fought in the Middle East anywhere. It is here.

Here is where our vulnerability is, Mr. Speaker. Here is where the battle needs to be fought, and here is where the battle needs to be won, for our posterity and for the liberty and freedom we have been passed from our Founding Fathers. Sadr knows it.

I will submit this, Mr. Speaker: If we don't prevail in Iraq, and I believe that tactically we have every opportunity to do that, if we don't prevail in Iraq and Jack Murtha gets his way and troops come out of Iraq before there is a clear victory, then this man comes back into power. He is probably done talking about how to get Americans to leave Iraq.

But I can tell you Osama bin Laden will surface, or Zawahri will surface, and I will bring their picture down here to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and I will make a statement then. But I make the prediction now, you will see a picture of either Osama bin Laden or Zawahri or whoever the leader of al Qaeda is, and underneath it I will put the quote from them which will go something 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, the same way they left Iraq.

And every time we lose our resolve and the legacy becomes the legacy that has been stipulated to us by Muqtada al-Sadr, it gets harder and harder to win the next war, harder and harder to have the will to conduct war, harder and harder to destroy their will, when they know that there is a legacy of us losing our will, us losing our nerve, a legacy of Members of Congress demonstrating a lack of spine, a lack of understanding of history, a lack of commitment to the legacy that has been handed to them and handed to all of us by our founders, Mr. Speaker.

So, I would reiterate, nosce hostem, know thy enemy. War, according Clausewitz, the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. No one can destroy our ability, but we don't have the will to match our ability. And that was proven here today, Mr. Speaker.

And one of the members of the Democrat party said, and I applaud him for saying so, it does our military no good for the people on our side to sit in the corner and boo when they have been ordered into battle. We need to be on their side.

Who would go into the bleachers and boo their home team and think somehow the home team was going to perform better? Who would believe, when you hear the voices that came out of here for the last 4 days, Mr. Speaker, or I go back to the presidential campaign as it went through for 2004, where we heard continually ``wrong war, wrong place, wrong time.'' All we heard from another Senator in Massachusetts, it was all a war cooked up by oil people in Texas.

Voice after voice after voice of quasi-leaders of the United States have spoken, and it has undermined our troops and it has weakened their resolve, and it has empowered and emboldened our enemies. And when they are sitting in a hovel in Iraq making an IED and watching their Al- Jazeera TV, Mr. Speaker, and they hear the voices that came out from C- SPAN from the floor of this Congress, do you think that they make more bombs or less? Do you think they have more or less courage to plant them, more or less courage to attack Americans, more or less resolve to continue the fight, more or less perseverance because of the voices that came collectively from this side of the aisle and this Congress, Mr. Speaker?

We all know the answer to that. The answer is they have more resolve, more persistence; they will make more bombs, they will attack more Americans, and more Americans will die because the booing from this section has encouraged our enemy, and I got to bury some of those soldiers in my district, as do most of us. And that breaks my heart, because I understand it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be, Mr. Speaker. It didn't have to be and it doesn't have to be. And others will say, but it is. It is the price of a democratic system and a democratic process. And they say it is patriotic to speak about our disagreements.

So, if one yells fire in a crowded theater and 50 people are trampled to death on the way out and there was no fire, did they abuse their freedom of speech? And don't we know that there is a Supreme Court decision that says your freedom of speech doesn't extend to the right to yell fire in a crowded theater? Verbatim and specifically the answer to that, Mr. Speaker, is yes.

So how can we give a pass to people whose words cost more lives? And beyond the lives, people's whose words alter our national destiny and make us poorer for it and diminish our potential and affect our future and burden our children and put them at risk, Mr. Speaker? I can't tolerate that.

As I travel over to the Middle East and settle in and talk to the soldiers there on the ground, and I like to do that more than anything else over there, Mr. Speaker. I will walk into a room, maybe a mess hall, climb aboard a C-130. I will say, anybody over here from Iowa? There have been a couple of times there hasn't been. Most of the time there is somebody there from Iowa.

I will sit down, and it is our immediate bond, and I will ask them what is going on here on the ground? What do I need to know? What do you want me to know? And please rest assured I will not identify you or take that information to your officers. This is something for me, because it is my duty to do this kind of oversight.

And I hear continually, I am proud to fight for freedom, I am proud to serve my country, Congressman, but why do we have to fight the United States news media too? Why is there a conflicting message coming out of Congress? Why do we have to take on that part of this battle? We are fighting the enemy over here. We need to know that Congress is behind us.

One of the lieutenant colonels that I travelled over there with made a statement to me in one of those late evenings as we were talking this over deeply and profoundly. I will not use his name either because I have not asked him that I could do so, but I will use the quote.

And he said, Do not save me, pacifists; do not save me. I volunteered for this. I want to be over here fighting for freedom and liberty because I know the world will be a safer place. I want to take this battle on for my children so they do not have to live in fear and they do not have to carry on this fight.

They are all volunteers, and they say do not save me. I will take my chances. I volunteered for this war. I want to save my children from this burden.

Who are we? Who are we to micromanage a war and try to pull our troops out after all that blood and treasure has been invested in freeing Iraq and giving them an opportunity for freedom? Who are we?

I had gold star parents, Mr. Speaker, come into my office a week before I last went to the Middle East. So this would have been the third week in November, and several families had lost a son or a daughter in combat over in Iraq or Afghanistan.

We had a lot of profound discussions in there, and I listened to them. They

had travelled over to Iraq themselves and taken on the risk to go there. They had met with Iraqis. They had been welcomed into the homes of the Iraqis, and the Iraqi people showered them with gratitude for the measure of freedom they have today, even with the insecurities that are part of that, the gratitude for the sacrifice that Americans have given, their lives for Iraqi freedom and American safety and world safety.

And of all the things that were said, one that struck me the most, Mr. Speaker, was a father who had lost his son from California. His name is John. I have forgotten his last name, if I actually ever heard it, and he said, It is different now. You cannot pull out of Iraq. Our sons died there. They gave their lives for the freedom of the Iraqi people, and we are going to have more safety in America because of it? You cannot pull out of there. It is different. That soil is sanctified with the blood of our children.

Mr. Speaker, I challenge anyone to look that man or a father in the eye and say I think I know better, I think we ought to concede, I think we ought to admit and pull out and declare defeat like somebody said this war cannot be won, cannot be won, cannot be won. If I put a word search on there, ``cannot be won'' over and over again, hundreds of times it got said here in the last 4 to 5 days.

Mr. Speaker, I point out that Iraq, 80 percent of the violence is confined within 30 miles of Baghdad. You just look at the area that is there, Baghdad standing kind of alone in the middle. I checked this all out in the World Factbook just because that is where we go for information. Baghdad represents 1/2500th of the land area of Iraq, and we are saying we cannot prevail because 1/2500th of the land area has some people in there that are battling us? 1/2500th, one day of the life of Sam Johnson when he was in the Hanoi Hilton, one out of his 25 days, 1/2500th of the land area of Iraq, and we want to say we do not have the will. Every ability in the world, but we want to say we do not have the will to persevere, even though that soil is sanctified with the blood of our sons and daughters.

It will be a disgrace here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Sali) who I am sure came down here with his heart full and look forward to whatever he might have to say.

I thank the gentleman from Idaho, and I appreciate him coming down here and adding to this dialogue.

I had a chance to collect my thoughts a little bit during that, too, and a number of points that I did not make here.

First, I would like to say the argument is it is a civil war and we should not be involved in a civil war. We have been involved in a number of civil wars, and we will be involved in more civil wars. The same people who say we cannot be involved in a civil war say go into Darfur. Well, that is a civil war.

The same people said we should have gone to Rwanda. I am one of them that thought we should have gone to Rwanda. It was horrible. We could have done something about it, but it was a civil war.

And that list goes on and on, but let me define a civil war so it is a little more clear, Mr. Speaker, to the people that care, and that is, that you will be able to identify a civil war in Iraq when you see the Iraqi military and the Iraqi police force line up and choose up sides and decide they are going to start shooting at each other. They are not doing that. They are keeping order all that they can. They march forward in uniform. They stay together, and that is one thing that says it is not a civil war.

Another one seems to me to be the most obvious and that has not been brought up here, and that is, I know of no entity of the five to eight competing factions within Baghdad that is trying to unseat the elected government of Iraq. It is accepted. The people went to the polls and voted in greater numbers percentage-wise than we do here in the United States, and they elected their leaders. They ratified their Constitution. They elected their leaders, seated their prime minister.

So Iraq is a country that is a sovereign country. No one is trying to unseat the government. It is not a civil war. Yes, there is sectarian strife, but it is not so much to do with religion as it is so much the power vacuum that is going on. It is not a civil war.

We cannot constitutionally micromanage a war. The precedents for that are utterly weak throughout history, even though there was some struggle with that a number of times. But the precedent that remains was here in 1973, after Richard Nixon finished the Vietnamization process, moved our troops out of Vietnam, then a wounded President during the Watergate era was forced into a situation where this Congress shut off all funds from going to Vietnam, and that was on the land of Vietnam, in the skies over Vietnam and the seas offshore Vietnam.

The bill, and I just looked at it again yesterday and I read it a number of times, the bill said none of these funds or any funds heretofore appropriated shall be used on Vietnam, over Vietnam or offshore in Vietnam, which kept all of our military from supporting the South Vietnamese Army which was defending itself after the Treaty of Paris and the resolution of that issue.

Now the North Vietnamese broke the treaty. The South Vietnamese did not have support. They did not have munitions, which we promised them. They did not have air cover, which we promised them. We could not even do a naval bombardment to support them from the seas because this Congress jerked the rug out from underneath that. And the disgrace lies yet in our history books.

Sam Johnson also went back to Saigon here just not too long ago, within the last number of weeks, and laid a wreath at the U.S. embassy where we lost 10 to 12 Marines as you saw them being air lifted off the top of the U.S. embassy. Ten to 12 marines does not sound like much. That was the cry and the agony of a Nation, but those 10 to 12 Marines, think in terms of the millions of skulls that are piled in southeast Asia that came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the human tragedy.

I would say, Mr. Speaker, that none of us could pick up one of those skulls in The Killing Fields, and say this was

a Cambodian skull or a Vietnamese skull or an American skull. And I can tell you, God does not draw the distinction, but he understands what goes on in a conscience of humanity and the conscience of a Nation.

One would think that this Congress, Mr. Speaker, would have learned from that colossal error and be able to stand and have enough resolve when we are in a situation where Baghdad is surrounded, and by the way, Baghdad is not a stronghold. I asked a commanding general at the time of our ground forces within Baghdad, and I said, What is this about a stronghold? Are there places you cannot go? He said we go everywhere we want to go. We go when we want to go there. Sometimes we do not want to squabble. Sometimes we go in there because we want to pick a fight, but there is no such thing as a stronghold. So that resolves that.

I wrote an editorial a while back, Mr. Speaker, and released about December 20 because December 22 was the anniversary of General McAuliff's retort to the Nazis at the battle of Bastone. History will record, and you will remember, Mr. Speaker, the 101st Airborne in World War II was surrounded in Bastone. Bastone, a city that had seven highways coming to it, it was the confluence of the transportation and a critical area that had to be held and controlled for whichever side was going to be successful in the Battle of the Bulge.

When the Nazis surrounded the 101st at Bastone and were mercilessly shelling them, they sent a message in that demanded our surrender. General McAuliff's response was, ``Nuts.'' Nuts, Mr. Speaker. Nuts, Nazis. They had to go all kinds of linguists and ask what does this mean? How do you translate this into German? It did not translate very well into German because that was the American spirit that echoed through that word, ``nuts.'' Nuts, we have got you right where we want you. We are going to stay and hold our ground.

They did so, and to this day, the 101st will tell you, they did not really need Patton to relieve them, they would have won anyway. But Patton did come, history shows. They held their ground. Bastone was held. The Battle of the Bulge was turned back and the Nazi regime was destroyed forever because of American courage and American guts and an America that said ``nuts'' when they were surrounded in Bastone.

Mr. Speaker, today, 2,499 parts of 2,500 parts of Iraq are essentially pacified, and are there under our control. Parts of Baghdad essentially are all that is left.

Baghdad surrounded, it is not a stronghold. And if we pull out of there, history will rule us as nuts. Nuts, a weak nation, a weak nation that didn't have the resolve, Mr. Speaker.

I will put one more point in here, and hopefully I can get this done within the time that I have, and that is the straddle that is taking place with this resolution, Mr. Speaker. The straddle that gives the majority side of this thing an argument that they are right, no matter what the results are in Iraq. And that is, the way the resolution reads, they support the troops but oppose the mission.

Then they go on and say, we are going to do a slow bleed. Jack Murtha says we are going to do a slow bleed and we are going to eliminate the President's ability to conduct these operations in Iraq.

Well, all right. So if the President's plan succeeds and Baghdad is pacified and the government of Iraq grows stronger and more stable, you will hear from over this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, over and over again, ``See,'' they are going to say, ``we were right. It took us to encourage the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military to step up to the plate and do the job. If we hadn't done that, the Americans would have held their hand and been their training wheels forever. They never would have learned to defend their country.'' That will come out of that side if history makes it clear that we are successful in Iraq.

And if we deploy out of there and Iraq turns into what I believe will be a disastrous chaos and cede the Shi'a region of the Iraq to the Iranians, who essentially have significant influence in there now, that would be 70 to 80 percent of Iraq's oil as well. It would give Iran control of the global export quantity of the oil. Iran would then have control of 42.6 percent of the oil that would go on the market, which is absolutely enough to control the market and enrich them fantastically and let them buy their nuclear capability and intimidate everyone in the Middle East and everyone in Europe and intimidate the United States as well. They would not be limited.

That is what happens if we pull out and the catastrophe, not to mention the human catastrophe, not to mention all the skulls that will be stacked up in Iraq like they were stacked up in Southeast Asia to the numbers of 3 million. That is the catastrophe there, Mr. Speaker.

But I am going to compare this. There was only one country that was guaranteed to be on the winning side in World War II, and that was France, because they were on both sides, Mr. Speaker. They were on both sides because you had Charles de Gaulle's freedom fighters, and they had gone into exile into Great Britain and continued their ``Free France'' battle going on. That was part of the effort, and we supported and helped them.

But you also remember there was the Vichy French. The Vichy French jumped right into bed with the Nazis and they staked their claim there, and that was Marshall Petain. And the French, not much of their country was destroyed really in World War II. Paris certainly held together pretty good, and I am glad it did.

But if the Nazis had won and prevailed, the Vichy French would have emerged to the top. And then the French would have said, see, we got on the right side of this war, we avoided a lot of conflict, and Marshall Petain now is our president who is cutting a deal with Hitler. Or, as it turned out, it turned out to be Charles de Gaulle instead.

Straddle the issue, go right down the middle, prepare yourself to be on the victorious or at least be right, no matter what the results.

That is what this resolution does, Mr. Speaker. It allows the majority party and those that voted for this resolution to make the claim that they are right, no matter what happens. And they brought not one word of strategic plan to resolve this issue in Iraq. Not one. In 4 days of debates, not a single plan came out of that side of the aisle, not one.

None came out in the campaigns, either. They never stepped up and said, ``This is what I would do.'' Except some said, ``I would cut and run. I just wouldn't call it that.'' Some of that went on. But, beyond that, there was nothing, except they said we need a strategic plan, we need a better plan.

And one of them came here to the floor and said, ``I used to command a carrier task force offshore of Afghanistan,'' which would be by my look of the map the Arabian Sea. And he says, ``My job now is to come here and plan a strategy to resolve the issue in Iraq.''

And I reflected, Judge Louie Gohmert found himself wanting to legislate from the bench in Texas, so he ran for Congress because he knew constitutionally this was the place to legislate.

But that Member, Mr. Speaker, if he wanted to micromanage a war, should have kept command of his task force and the Arabian Sea. This is no place, Mr. Speaker, to micromanage a war. Our job constitutionally is to fund it, and the Commander in Chief's job is to run it, and we have endorsed his authority to do that.

As these amendments come and these appropriations bills come, one after another in this slow bleed that has been promised, we will know that the constitutional authority doesn't exist to do that. The President has the authority to take the money that has been appropriated and to do intradepartmental transfers and I will say interdepartmental transfers as well to fund the military however he sees fit to protect this Nation.

And if this party sees fit to starve our military and put them at risk, then woe are we. But they have also taken responsibility for the results of this war by this.

So I will say, Mr. Speaker, this resolution that passed here on the floor today, it assists our enemy. It assists our enemy. It assuages our enemy. It

encourages our adversaries. It provides benefit for our enemies. It encourages the bad guys. It provides comfort and charity to the criminals. It encourages and exhilarates our enemy. It provides favor and gifts to the enemy, our foe. It is a handout. It is help to the insurgents. It is relief and reward for the opposition. It is salvation and succor for terrorists. It emboldens and encourages.

This day on this floor of the United States Congress will live in infamy, and I pray it may not be a precedent for the future of America and for our national destiny.

Mr. Speaker, I would make another point, and that is I have decided I will follow General Petraeus, and you have decided you will follow General Pelosi.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today, I move that the House do now adjourn.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in profound sorrow and gratitude for the life of Charlie Norwood. I believe I had known Charlie long before I came here to meet him in person. I got to know him through C-SPAN and through the media. When I met him personally, he had matched up identically with the person that I saw through the television screen. Charlie had that light within him, as John Shadegg said.

I look back at a time when Charlie was not feeling well. He came here whenever it was physically possible for him to do that, and I remember a day when he looked poor, but when he spoke in that microphone right there, that light came back on again and the real Charlie Norwood again blessed this Chamber with his presence.

America will always be grateful. Gloria, Marilyn and I want you to know that you and your family are in our prayers. We will always look over to this place on this floor where Charlie always sat and recognize that as Charlie's seat in the people's Chamber.

I thank the gentlelady for yielding this time, and I appreciate very much the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and the message that is coming, at least from our side of the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, I take us back to how do we identify this enemy that we are fighting? So I looked back through some of the history. In 1783, we made peace with Great Britain. The Revolutionary War, for combat purposes, was over. 1784, American merchant marines were being attacked in the Mediterranean by Barbary pirates.

In 1786, two diplomats, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, went over there to meet with them, and their idea was, we will be able to talk them into peace. Well, they talked to them all right, and the representative of the Barbary pirates, Mr. Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, responded to them, and this is in the Congressional Record from Thomas Jefferson's report.

He asked him, why do you fight us, why do you attack us, why do you kill us? We have done nothing hostile towards you. His answer was, It is founded on the laws of our Prophet. It was written in the Koran. All nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could not take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

I take you back to today. We call our marines leathernecks. The reason for that is they wore a heavy leather collar to diminish the odds that they would be beheaded by this enemy who has, to this day, at least fairly recently, is still beheading marines. That is how this started.

Now, we are in a war. Von Clauswitz wrote that the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. That means take away their munitions, take care of their armies, destroy them if you can. But in the end, whatever you might do doesn't break their will. You have to destroy their will. There is nothing going on on this side of the aisle that is diminishing the will of our enemy.

I will tell you, they will interpret it as encouraging the will of the enemy. I would point out this quote from Moqtada al Sadr. I heard this over al Jazeera TV when I was in the Middle East, actually in Kuwait City, waiting to go into Iraq the following morning, June 11, 2004. 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.''

June 11. Where does he get this from? Well, he gets part of it from General Jeaps' book in Vietnam, the successful general there. They understand, as I heard to my own shock and sorrow, a World War II veteran said to me on one of the days we were honoring him, We haven't really won a war since World War II.

Think about what that means. Think about what that means to our enemies who are encouraged by this kind of debate and this kind of behavior. We must have the resolve. I point out also our casualties. We have lost 2,534 brave, patriotic Americans in hostile action. We have lost 591 to accidents within that theater.

The loss in American lives as a price to be ready between Desert Storm 1 and the beginnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that 10 years, was a little over 5,000, averaging 505 a year. There is a price to be ready, and they pay that price. Those lost lives are every bit as precious to us.

I listened to the debate over on this side of the aisle. A brave American, former admiral from Pennsylvania, stated that he believes his job now is to come in and help manage a successful conclusion to the war.

Well, I want to compliment Judge Louie Gohmert, who had the urge from the bench, to legislate from the bench, and realized that his constitutional responsibility, if he wants to legislate, is to run for Congress. So now we have Representative Gohmert in Congress actually legislating instead of legislating from the bench.

I would submit my question to the gentleman from Pennsylvania: Do you really think your job is to come here and micromanage the war? Do you really think that is constitutional? Regardless of that question, do you think it is wise?

How would you like it if Congress made a decision that you really only needed one destroyer in your task force, or you get along without the submarine or maybe you only needed half the supplies on your supply ship?

That would be micromanagement that I think he would raise a powerful objection to. And so I would point out that here on the floor of this Congress when we had Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, speaking from that very podium behind me, July 26, 2006, a short half a year ago, he said, ``The fate of our country and yours is tied. Should democracy be allowed to fail in Iraq and terror permitted to triumph, then the war on terror will never be won elsewhere.''

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

First I want to state that I appreciate this open rule and this open dialogue and debate that we have here on the floor of the United States Congress today. It is a healthy process that we are going through, and it is a process that, of course, is designed to perfect legislation or allow that perfect legislation to have an opportunity to be vetted and rise as a perfect piece.

And as I look at this overall proposal to authorize $10 million to develop an additive so that we can put renewable fuels and particularly ethanol down through the pipeline, Mr. Chairman, I can't help but reflect back upon the beginnings of renewable fuels in the United States of America.

As most people know, I represent the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. And there, of all the 435 congressional districts, we are number two in ethanol production. By the end of this year, we will be number one in ethanol production. We are number one in biodiesel production of all 435 districts. And also with renewable energy, we are today tied for fourth and will this year be tied at least for second and perhaps first in the electrical generation by wind. That puts us, Mr. Chairman, within the grasp of winning the renewable energy triple crown: ethanol, biodiesel, and wind all tied up in one congressional district.

Now, I raise this issue because I have the great privilege of having grown up and having developed my business and my life and my experience in the epicenter of renewable fuels. And that perspective is so utterly valuable, at least for me. And when I go back to Iowa and have the opportunity to visit the Iowa Senate where I formerly served, I am always proud to shake the hand of State Senator Thurman Gaskill of Corwith, Iowa, who pumped that first gallon of ethanol back in 1978. And from that first gallon, we are here today on the floor of the United States Congress talking about a problem of how to transport all of these billions of gallons of ethanol that we are producing. It is a fantastic transformation that we have taken from 1978 to today. It hasn't been without work, it hasn't been without risk, and it hasn't been without its failures along the way. But it is a glorious success.

And I appreciate the gentleman from Illinois coming forward. And here we are, Iowa is the number one ethanol-producing State in the Union as well, and it produces 26 percent of the ethanol in the country. And it is important to know that the United States has surpassed Brazil in overall ethanol production.

So we have an industry here that is growing. We have an infrastructure that is being established and founded, and we are to this point now where we have so much fuel that we are producing. Not nearly enough, I want to add that. We have to find a transportation way to resolve that issue.

I want to point out also, Mr. Chairman, that of these difficulties that we have had in the past, we have put some tax credits in place, and the private sector has been magnificent in finding solutions. For example, the increase in the production of ethanol out of every gallon of corn has come from a lot of industry-driven solutions, and this transportation problem also can come from industry-driven solutions.

So I want to watch this authorization as it moves through. The private sector has been very, very effective. And yet we will be producing more and more ethanol as the years go by and blending it in. And as we move to cellulosic, of course, this becomes more and more important.

One of the difficulties with this bill also, though, is the component of ultra-low sulfur fuels and the burden that it puts on our jobbers, on our fuel distributors, that they will have one truck and they will have to haul a load of low-sulfur fuel and then turn around and load that up and haul a load of ultra-low sulfur fuel.

As that unfolds, they are going to find themselves in a situation where they will be vulnerable to regulations without any means to determine whether their load actually meets that very tight standard on ultra-low sulfur fuel.

So as this process moves forward, I would remind this body and ask the Department of Energy and the EPA to pay very close attention to finding a way to develop an economic testing system that will allow these jobbers to be in compliance.

So, overall, we have gone by leaps and bounds from that first gallon of ethanol that was pumped back in 1978, and here we are the number one ethanol-producing nation in the world. We have far eclipsed Brazil. Our technology is far ahead of theirs. And this is not just an ability to produce ethanol, but the intellectual property that grows from having done this.

We have the science down and we have the research and development in place and that is growing and multiplying, and as that happens we build more and more expertise. That expertise grows from the epicenter of these renewable fuels out into the regions of the country.

So I would say we will see ethanol flow out to the limits of the corn belt, biodiesel to the limits of the soybean area. We will see the cellulosics fill in the gaps. And we are going to see the markets drive this and tax structure be supportive of it.

I am supportive conceptually of this legislation that is before us, and I thank the gentleman for bringing this legislation.

Amendment Offered by Mr. Rogers of Michigan

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I rise in support of the Cantor amendment, and I thank the gentleman from Virginia for bringing this amendment.

As we look at the overall atmosphere that is here, and not just the atmosphere in this Congress, Mr. Chairman, but in the atmosphere up above and on this Earth, and we see the effort that is coming, this strong effort, to address global warming.

Now, I am not one of those strong proponents of those kinds of efforts; I want to make that clear. I do not think the science is there, but I do look at how this Congress has started, how it was going to be the most open Congress in history, and it has now been opened up today, and I appreciate that.

We understand the issue that had to do with minimum wage and the Tunagate issue, and now here we are a judgment issue, a judgment issue of the small plane that Speaker Hastert had was plenty big enough for a very big man and the entourage that he needed to provide his security, and yet now here we have a request for a plane that I see is 42 business class seats, 16 staff people that consumes $300,000 for a round trip.

The statistics that I have are $22,000 an hour, $22,000 an hour. Mr. Chairman, that is more money than many of my constituent families make in a year. Well, let us just say that $22,000 an hour is that amount. Then how many people, how many families does it take to earn enough to pay for a year of this plane flying back and forth from Washington to the west coast every single week? So I use 50 weeks, added the math up, its overall costs by those numbers is $15 million annually for this big plane to bounce back and forth and to be able to load all of the family and the supporters, the staff, perhaps other Members, constituents, who knows who might be on that plane, $15 million.

Now, how hard is it to pay $15 million out of the Federal Treasury? Well, if we took all of the revenue of the income of those families that I reference, Mr. Chairman, those families at $22,000 a year, it would take 682 families to earn enough revenue just to pay to fly the Speaker back and forth so she could be with her family on the weekends in San Francisco.

That lays out what is happening here in my mind, and I take us back to that place near enough to Hollywood that I can reference it. Many of the people in Hollywood that have been flying around on private jets and driving around in big SUVs have been called to task for their positions promoting an effort to stop global warming, but the hypocrisy of riding in those SUVs and flying in private jet planes. Now, the pressure has gotten great enough that I do not know that Hollywood has actually seen the conflict between their public position on policy and their actual practice when they climb in the SUV or get on their private jet.

But the public does know that Prince Charles of Great Britain has recognized the conflict, and he has been flying in private jets for years; but this year, he is taking the step that he is flying commercial, not because he is not a very intense individual that is a high-risk target.

I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman and my statement then would be, I also offer that same invitation.

I would say if it is good enough for Prince Charles, it should be good enough for the imperial Pelosi regime.

Madam Speaker, I hope the gentleman from Missouri would just suspend a moment before he leaves the floor.

I would like to have the privilege to address the subject matter that he raised and the issue of the Iraq Study Group. And it is somewhat of a long book to read through, but I had a conversation this afternoon with the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), and I have lifted some things out of the Iraq Study Group's report that are clearly part of the President's agenda in Iraq, ``The New Way Forward,'' and Mr. Wolf assures me that the entire strategy in Iraq is right from the Iraq Study Group.

So I point out to the gentleman from Missouri, and I would be happy to yield to him if he had a response, that the plan and the strategy of the President's for a new way forward in Iraq is not flying in the face of the Iraq Study Group. In fact, it follows directly down the path of the Iraq Study Group. If the gentleman from Missouri would care to engage, I would certainly be willing to yield.

I came here to talk about that subject matter, in fact, Madam Speaker. And as I listened to my colleagues in preparation for this 60- minute Special Order, I will just take from the top some of the notes that come to mind.

And one is, from the beginning, the gentleman from New Jersey spoke about ExxonMobil's highest corporate profits, the highest corporate profits, perhaps, ever in the history of the country, and the promise by this Pelosi Congress to provide energy independence. And then the gentlewoman from Ohio also spoke about ExxonMobil's profits, and the details of that were such that they have $40 billion in profits. Did they lower prices at the pump?

Well, yes. Prices at the pump are a dollar a gallon cheaper than they were when oil prices were up to $75 a barrel. In fact, the prices at the pump almost directly reflect the lowering of the prices and the cost of the barrels of crude oil.

And then, of course, the argument that there was a class action lawsuit against them for $3.5 billion. And one might take that as a concern until one sees that that, Madam Speaker, is Alabama. Well, Alabama is a venue shoppers' State of choice. Someone who has a lawsuit, and the attorneys across this country know this, when they want to bring a class action lawsuit, they look around and they say what State has favorable laws; what State produces favorable juries. Where is the class envy so focused and where they have a belief that you can put 12 men and women on a jury and they would lay out a punitive case against a company because they see a company as somehow or another an evil Big Brother.

That is how you end up with these $3.5 billion or maybe $9 billion punitive damages in a class action lawsuit.

We have dealt with this, Madam Speaker, in the Judiciary Committee in the years that I have been in this Congress, and we passed legislation out of the House, and not successful in the Senate, that would allow a company that operates in multiple States, in fact, maybe internationally, to be able to ask that a case that has been venue shopped and taken to a State where there is a minimal amount of economic activity but a maximum amount of punitive damages offered by the juries there, a State that has that kind of reputation, we have passed legislation here in the House that would allow

that to be changed to a Federal venue rather than a State venue so that we can eliminate some of this ghastly profiteering that is taking place and the punishment of some of our best corporate citizens that we have in America.

And I sat here tonight and listened to a handful of speakers, and two of them turned their focus on ExxonMobil, and they can't seem to understand that because we have large and successful oil companies in America that they are continuing to invest those profits into research and development and exploration.

The gentlewoman from Ohio lamented that they bought back $10 billion worth of their stock. Can she speculate that perhaps that gives them enough control now that they can invest more of their profits in exploration? And if they invest more in exploration, that means there will be more oil on the market, which means then, of course, this law of supply and demand, which I believe in, which everyone on the Republican side of the aisle believes in, which some of the people on the other side of the aisle believe in, that supply and demand will drive down our prices. And that is exactly what has been happening, Madam Speaker.

So I have to rise in defense of the companies that have provided cheap gas in this country, cheap oil in this country, and even still, whatever the price of gas is, milk is still more expensive. But not only that, the product that has been free all of my life, that product called ``drinking water'' and, in fact, now bottled water, is more expensive in the machine at the gas station per gallon than a gallon of gas is coming out of the pump right next to it by far. In fact, the last time I calculated that, it was a little over $9 a gallon to get your bottled water out of the machine at the gas station where gas was selling for about $2.15.

So we need to keep this in perspective. We cannot be punishing those companies that are out there exploring and putting this oil on the market so that we have the convenience of relatively cheap fuel and the mobile society that we have. If we did not have these companies and you pulled their expertise and their capital and their reserves off the market, we would be far, far more dependent upon Middle Eastern oil and much, much more of America's economy and the profits that we have would be skimmed off to go to the Middle East to fund the people who are lined up against us militarily and philosophically.

We are trying to get to energy independence. The Pelosi plan doesn't take us to energy independence. In the first 100 hours, one of those first six pieces of legislation, H.R. 1 through 6, pick your number, the one that addressed energy, went out and punished oil companies. It said, if you have leases, and particularly some leases that were perhaps profitable in the gulf coast, if you have leases that are deemed by the government to be profitable, we are going to require you, as a company, to renegotiate those leases. If you don't renegotiate, then we are going to forbid you, ban you, blackball you, black list you from a company that can negotiate future leases offshore, like, actually, I believe, domestically in shore on land and in the United States.

Now, what kind of a deal is it when you have a deal, and the Congress comes here and passes legislation that says a deal is not a deal. Yes, you had a deal. We signed it all in good faith, but we found out it was a good deal. So now we are going to take some of that profit ourselves. I have spent my life in the contracting business, and I have invested a little bit of capital, and I was able to add a little more to it and roll a little back in and work hard and take some chances and work smart.

Over a period of time, I was able to build a little capital up and get to the point where we could bid some projects that had some significant value. I have seen this kind of envy rise up when someone looks over and sees the industrious nature of their neighbor and decides they want some of that hard-earned profit. I have had it happen to me when I had a contract that I had significant profit in.

I can think of one in particular where I was able to purchase some materials because I negotiated. I played my cards right, I went and built those relationships with all the people that were involved. It was a string of people through bankruptcy and banks. In the process of doing that, everything had to come together just right. The timing had to be just right. I was at great risk if I was not successful in putting that all together so that I could buy a large quantity of dirt for a reasonable price and it was handy.

In fact, when I first talked to the banker about that piece of land, he said it would take $25,000 just to retain an attorney to represent me in negotiating the purchase of that. That gives you a measure of how difficult it was. But, in fact, I was successful purchasing that earth on that farm for the purposes of taking it into a project we were building, and, of course, I made some money.

If I had been wrong, if I hadn't been able to complete that purchase, then it would have cost me a lot of money. But when the time came, the owners sat me down, and the engineers sat me down, and they said, well, we see that you are making money here, and now we would like you to discount the work you are doing because we think you can afford to do that.

I looked them in the face, and I thought, well, why are you asking me to give some of my profit over to the owners? Isn't it all justly earned? And isn't it ethical, and didn't I bid this for a price, and was not it low bid? Not a no bid, but a low-bid contract? They said, well, yes, but we think that you have some to give, and so we are asking you to discount your work, do it more cleanly, because we think you can afford to.

Well, what principle are you basing that judgment on because someone can't afford to discount something? How can you ask them to do that in a free enterprise society? I asked that question of the engineers, and they said, well, again, we they think that you can afford to do that.

So let me ask you a question. If I had lost my shirt on this job, which I likely could have done, and maybe even lost my business, would you have stepped up and said things didn't go so well for you, here is some extra? They just smiled and snickered a little bit because they knew it was ludicrous to think that when things go bad that there is going to be anybody in there holding my hand or ExxonMobil's hands or Shell's or Chevron's or anybody else's. They suffer all of their losses, and they have to have a margin in the work that they do.

We must have successful companies here operating out of the United States, and especially developing our domestic supplies of energy. If we fail to do that, then we are absolutely dependent upon middle eastern oil. If we are up to that 60 percent or so of our oil that is imported now, think what it would be like, Madam Speaker, if it was 100 percent.

So this effort to go down here and argue that we will see energy dependence under Pelosi's term here in Congress, I would submit that they have done anything but. They have changed the deal and said the Federal Government's word is not good, we want a tax, windfall profits. If we can find a way where we are jealous of your profit, we will find a way where we can take it and put it into the government coffers.

A company that will look at that is going to take their profits and decide why do I want to invest my profits in further exploration if the Federal Government is going to come in and cancel the deal, which they have done. I will submit that, perhaps, $40 million that may be available, and it is probably a lot more than that is available for exploration, that will continue to put oil supply on the market.

I would submit that it is more likely that exploration investment will go overseas to foreign countries, and perhaps even into the Middle East and places where we don't have such a stable environment, while we sit on massive supplies and energy here in the United States, not because the oil is not there, not because the natural gas isn't there, but because this Congress has become a jealous Congress. This Congress has become a vindictive Congress. This Congress has become a Congress that has decided that they are going to play legislative corporate class envy against companies that are providing an economic supply of energy to this country.

I have always had the view that if I didn't like the way someone was doing business, if I thought they were making too much profit, then that should say to the whole world, well, there is opportunity there. If Exxon is making all of this profit, and it has made so many people irate that out of six or eight speakers two of them come to the floor to speak about that very thing, then I would submit, go out and start your own oil company.

That is the American way. You have a chance to do whatever you want to do in this country. Go ahead and get an investor's group together, or go buy up a group of oil companies, put them together and go out there, and invest your capital, see how you do.

In fact, I welcome that. I think we need a lot of competition, and we need a lot of exploration, and we need to be developing our oil supplies more now than we ever have before. This is the time to push, because perhaps a generation from now we will have transitioned into a lot of other kinds of fuel and gas and oil will not be so important and will not be so relevant any longer. It isn't just the gas and the oil and the fuel that comes from our crude oil, but it is all the other energy supplies out there.

Now, I understand that the other side of the aisle and the Pelosi plan is going to include some things like conservation, and I suspect reasonable conservation measures. I think it is awfully hard to legislate. I think the markets do more for that than we could probably do with legislation. Conservation is a component. But I would ask to put in your mind's eye the idea that I call the energy pie. The energy pie, shaped like a clock, for example, but slices of that pie, pieces of the pie, or the components of it would come from all of the areas where we get energy.

So I would submit that a certain percentage of our overall BTU consumption in America is gasoline. Some is diesel fuel. Some is fuel oil. Then those hydrocarbons that come from crude oil, and then, in addition to that, we have a lot of our electricity, significant amount comes from hydroelectric and nuclear and coal fired, especially clean coal fired, and we also, then, out of that energy, then, in addition to that, we have our ethanol, our biodiesel. We have hydrogen. There is a whole list of sources for energy in America, and we need to look at that, like all the BTUs consumed in America, a big energy pie, and then reprioritize that. Let us change the size of the pieces and grow the size of the energy pie.

I want more BTUs on the market. I want a lot more energy on the market. I want to go everywhere we can to get that energy and pour it into the marketplace and do it so that we can supply more BTUs than we are using.

If we can do that, we can drive down the cost of all energy. We need to do that by adding it by component by component. The ethanol, the biodiesel, more coal, more wind, I left that out, the hydrogen, on the horizon, the cellulosic ethanol that is coming, piece after piece of this energy pie needs to be added together. Then we change the proportion of the pieces so that gasoline from middle eastern oil becomes a smaller piece, and diesel fuel from middle eastern oil becomes a smaller piece.

Ethanol becomes a larger piece. Biodiesel becomes a larger piece. Cellulosic down the line a half a decade from now can really start to take hold, and we can replace some of the electricity that is being generated by the natural gas with wind energy, and that is an environmentally friendly and conservation approach that is good for our environment.

All of these tools are at our disposal, but one of the tools we seem to use is we want to punish the corporations that are busily contributing to growing the size of the energy pie, and also diversifying some of their investments so they aren't just locked into the petroleum but adding the diversification out there, so that they can contribute also to adjusting the size of the pieces in this larger growing energy pie.

That is how this needs to be done. We need to be doing it by complimenting the companies that are competing in the open market, not by punishing them, not by defying the rules of free enterprise with Congressional action, not by changing the deal, not by jerking the rug out from underneath. I would suggest that there is a Chevron find in the Gulf of Mexico, I understand it is about 265 miles southwest of New Orleans, that may add as much as a 50 percent more to the overall reserves or the overall production of oil in the United States.

With that field opening up, and the necessity to open up in ANWR, we can, if we are aggressive, we can reduce dramatically our dependency on foreign oil, and then, of course, we add to that the renewable energies that I have talked about. We can get there. We will not get there if we scare our companies off, if we punish them for doing good and doing the right thing.

So I will move from that energy discussion and move to the discussion by the gentleman, Mr. Andrews, on Iran. I want to compliment him for the tone and the thoughtfulness and the constitutional discussion that he brought here to the floor. I have no doubt that he understands the Constitution, and he is correct when he says the power to declare a war is with this Congress constitutionally.

But, also, the commander in chief of our military is the President of the United States, and that is clear, and that is a constitutional principle that should not be challenged by this Congress. He is the commander in chief.

There is nothing in the Constitution that says Congress shall have the authority to declare a war and then micromanage every little operation of that war. Simply when Congress declares war, they say we send a message to all sovereign nations in the world that we are at war with whichever sovereign nations may be the subject of that declaration.

That declaration shows the commitment of Congress to support our troops and their mission. I will say that again, to support our troops and their mission, and the lead troop is the commander in chief, the President of the United States, George W. Bush, who does call these shots.

Our founding fathers understood you cannot fight a war by committee, and you can't put your finger into the wind and ask the public to poll and ask how you should go about fighting a war. If we are going to sit here and say, well, the public polls say that the support for the operations in Iraq, the battleground of Iraq, which is a battleground in the broader global war on terror, if we are going to take the position that this Congress can steal the polls and make military recommendations or pass edicts here or take the budget and squeeze down our support for our troops or shut it off like they did at the end of the Vietnam War, that we can micromanage a war from the floor of the Congress?

It is a ridiculous concept, and it was a ridiculous concept for the President of the United States during the Vietnam War, to micromanage that war. President Johnson should have turned that over to his military personnel at the joint chiefs of staffs, who would have relied upon their commanders in the field. If they were not satisfied with those results, they would have changed them. It is the prerogative of the President to remove generals and appoint new generals.

Of course, the Senate confirms those higher appointments, as we saw happen a little over a week ago, with the confirmation of General David Petraeus.

Now, we find ourselves in this odd dichotomy here, this odd contradiction, where Congress has, and I am speaking, I should say specifically, the Senate has unanimously endorsed the President's choice to be the commander of all operations in Iraq, General David Petraeus.

Personally, I would put into the Record that he is the singular most impressive individual that I have met in a military uniform in my lifetime. I do not believe that there could be another choice. I do not believe that there could be a better choice to head up these operations in this new way forward in Iraq than General David Petraeus.

Not only does he understand the overall strategy, he has written the book on counterinsurgencies. He spent years in Iraq. I first met him over there in October of 2003 where he commanded the 101st Airborne that had gone in and liberated the region about three provinces and in the region of Mosul. And there, as I sat and received a briefing from him, I will tell this little anecdote about General Petraeus, that is, he started to give a briefing.

And it was in a way, a classical Powerpoint slide show, but a slide show of pictures, the reality of what had taken place there. And he had a cordless microphone.

Now I do not get very many briefings that last an hour and a half, unless I happen to be the one that is delivering them. But General Petraeus spoke for about an hour or a little more, and the battery went dead on his microphone. The moment before the battery went dead, he had picked up another microphone that was laying there, and without even breaking stride, laid the one down, picked the microphone up with the fresh battery in it, and proceeded to complete that briefing that lasted about 90 minutes.

He had the solution sitting there waiting for the problem. He used every single minute of the 90 minutes extraordinarily effectively. Not only did he talk about politics and tactics and the military deployment that they had there, the difficulties that they had faced, he talked about how he had called for elections in Mosul.

Mosul was liberated in late March 2003. They had elections there in May of 2003. And at the table later on the next day, I met with the new governor of Mosul and the vice-governor of Moss, one a Shiia, one a Kurd. One might have been a Sunni and the other was a Kurd. But regardless, he had representatives from two different sectarian factions there, and then a business leader at the table who was proficient in English.

You could tell by the eye contact of those three men, they were a team that was working together. General Petraeus understood the military and the tactics, understands them better today than he did then, and he understood them very well then. He understands the politics. He understands the economics. And he studied this. It has been his focus, it has been his life. He loves his soldiers. I am looking forward to a completion of this mission in Iraq that will be I believe a successful mission.

Mr. Andrews spoke about Iran. I digressed a bit before I get to that point. I support his constitutional conclusion that Congress alone declares war. But I would submit, in addition to that statement, that the Commander in Chief calls the shots. We declare war, if that is what the situation calls for.

And then Congress shall not get in the way and micromanage the operations. No war by committee, Madam Speaker, and no interference here on the part of these Members of Congress, except if they have an issue then they can do, behind-the-doors oversight. They can have those conversations. The President's door is open to the leadership of this Congress. We know that.

If they have those kind of issues, they want to discuss, we have classified briefings here. There are plenty of opportunities for oversight. If not, you can ask for opportunities for oversight. But to set up this Congress and to use the committees and use the committee chairs and the ranking members to somehow configure a away to bring in motions and micromanage a war is a guaranteed military debacle. There has never been a successful committee operation fighting a war in history, and there is no way that you can set a precedent here out of this Congress, especially as divided and as defeatist as it is on the majority side of the aisle.

It seems to me that the will to win this war runs a successful clear distinct victory that would be written by the historians as a distant victory, is not really something that is loved and anticipated by the people on the other side of the aisle. And this is not a stretch that comes out of my imagination, Madam Speaker. But it is simply an observation from in this Chamber, when the Commander in Chief gave his State of the Union Address last month, now when he spoke about committing to victory in Iraq, one-half of this Chamber stood in a thunderous standing ovation, and the other half of the Chamber, Madam Speaker, sat on their hands in silence, disgraceful silence.

Could they not know that our troops in the field have televisions in real time over there in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in other parts where our troops are today, supporting our troops that are in the front lines? Could they not know that our commanders all the way down the line to the privates are watching this disgraceful lack of support? Their lives are on the line, and they will hear Members from this side of the aisle to a man and to a woman say, I support the troops. I support the troops. I support the troops.

And the question to follow is, what about their mission? Do you support their mission? And that is when you cannot get a question answer from hardly anybody on the Democratic side of the aisle. In fact, the Speaker herself declined to say yes to that point blank question sometime in December of last year.

She said it was not a matter of victory, it was a matter of managing. Well, they want to manage their way out of there, and I will submit that the rule of warfare is, victory goes to the side that is occupying the territory at the end of the war. You cannot lift people off with helicopters off a U.S. embassy in places like Saigon, and say, well, we really won the war, we tactically won the war, we did not lose a battle, we won, we left because we wanted to, it was kind of an asterisk that those things happened down there.

We tactically did win every battle. And our U.S. military performed courageously, heroically, and gloriously. And they need to be honored by every generation from here on out. But we did not win the battle of who stood on the terrain at the end.

And these enemies that we have in the Middle East are a philosophical enemy that goes deep back into history. And before I go deep back into history, I will speak again to the Iranian issue of Mr. Andrews, which is, he criticized the regime of Iran. I agree with him. It is an unstable leader that they have. And they have some mullahs that seem to be directing the action of that unstable leader. So that cabal in the middle appears to me to be, from our view, from our Western civilization view, an irrational group of leaders.

He said the regime must never have a nuclear weapon. I agree, Mr. Andrews, 100 percent, they must never have a nuclear weapon. And yet we cannot go forward. He said we cannot go for a reckless premature action against Iran. I agree with that as well. It cannot be reckless, it cannot be premature.

But does anybody really think that we can make nice enough, talk nice enough, be reasonable enough and take our case to the Iranians and say somehow can we just put out an olive branch here, and have an open discussion and find out what our disagreements. Does anybody really think that Ahmadinejad or the mullahs would just then peacefully come to the table, and they could be reasoned into a position of giving up their nuclear weapons?

I mean, they came out yesterday, and their announcement was that they will continue to develop their nuclear weapons, and they say they have a right to do so. But does anybody believe that they can be talked out of them? I am wondering what it is about human nature that I see this so clearly that they have gone down this path, they will not let go, they will not give up.

Why does anybody on that side of the aisle, Madam Speaker, think that they can debate Ahmadinejad into giving up his nuclear missiles and his nuclear technology and ability, when I would ask them, how long has it been since you have seen anybody in this Congress change their mind because of the shear force of a debate?

I mean, these are not so momentous a decision that we make, but we come down here on the floor. And how often can anyone point to a single time that they have said something that was so profound, so honest, so insightful that another Member said, I did not know that. I am on your side, I will switch my position, change my vote, I will be with you because you made sense.

It is so utterly rare in this Congress, why would the gentleman believe that we could send negotiators over to Iran, and they would say, well, it makes sense to me. We will just demolish all of that nuclear capability. We want to sign a peace treaty with you all. We will start trading and it will be a wonderful world again.

The reason that we have a problem there is because we have a fundamental philosophical disagreement and misunderstanding. This began in Iran when President Jimmy Carter's belief in supporting religious fundamentalists caused him to support the return of the Ayatollah and the demise of the Shaw in Iran.

And when that happened in 1979, that was the beginning of the hostile Iran. And it did not take very long before we saw 444 days, 52 American hostages paraded regularly in front of our television trying to humiliate the United States. And some believe that Ahmadinejad was part of that group, they think they have pictures that show him there, a kidnapper of American diplomats.

I do not know. I do not know if that is true or if it is not true. But he certainly was not opposed to that that we know. He is for the annihilation of Israel, the annihilation of the United States, these dictators tell us what they think, and often they follow through on the those actions.

And so, no, I do not trust the Iranian leadership, I do trust a lot of the Iranian people. And I would trust the Iranian people to capture their freedom if given the chance. I would paint this image in the mind's eye, Mr. Speaker, of all who might be contemplating this.

In the map you will see Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east. And right in the middle, linked together bordering the two countries is Iran.

Now, I will argue that Afghanistan today is a free country. And our troops were on the ground guarding the polling places. The first time ever in the history of the world that since Adam that there had been any votes that took place on that soil.

Today it is a fledgling democracy. It has its problems. Certainly it will. We had our problems in the early years. We have our problems today. It is never pretty. It is always difficult. But it is always worth the effort. But Afghanistan is a free country. Iraq is technically a free country today.

The part that diminishes that freedom is the 80 percent of the violence that takes place in Baghdad and within 30 miles of Baghdad. But Iraq, much of Iraq is peaceful, it is pacified and it is becoming prosperous. I went over there the last time, over the last Thanksgiving, I actually spent my Thanksgiving Day eating dinner with a good number of wounded troops in Landstuhl, Germany, at the hospital, and encouraged by their courage.

That was the most monumental and profound Thanksgiving that I have ever had or ever hope or expect to have. And from there, I traveled over to Iraq where I did spend a couple of days in the Baghdad area, and then I went to a camp, a forward operating base just out of Baghdad, and then on up into Erbil in the north, in the Kurdish area in the north.

I have been to most corners of Iraq over the last few years. I try to get there as often as I can to get a feel for what is going on. I do not think it is possible to understand that operation over there without going there. I was encouraged by the level of peace and the growing prosperity, especially that that I saw in Erbil and up in the Kurdish area.

You get out of the plane there, take off your flack jacket, toss your helmet in the back, and walk across to the parliament. I sat down with some members of parliament there. And then they cooked also a turkey Thanksgiving dinner that was something that I have not seen done as well in this country. Gregarious hosts and wonderful people. That is how I find most of the Iraqi people.

I do not accept a 60-percent number that was delivered here by the gentleman from Georgia, that 60 percent of the Iraqis believe it is good or okay to be attacking Americans. I do not know where that poll would come from. Maybe if you polled the terrorists you would get a number like that.

But I do not believe, Madam Speaker, that that is the sentiment of the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people are grateful that the United States has stepped in to liberate them. There is a bit of a power vacuum, especially in Baghdad.

The President's plan is to go in and fill that power vacuum. Muqtada al-Sadr has done a job in filling that power vacuum. And he has been supported and funded and armed by Ahmadinejad's people in Iran. Iran is fighting a proxy war against the United States within Iraq.

You also have Syria fighting a lesser effective but to a lesser degree a proxy war against the United States in Iraq. When the President came out shortly after September 11, he said if you harbor terrorists, fund terrorists, train terrorists, you are a terrorist and we will treat you as a terrorist state.

Iran is one of those countries. Syria is one of those countries. I know of no example in the history of the world where an insurgency that could go back and hide and have sanctuary in a sovereign state has ever been defeated. You have to take your battle where the insurgency is. And if they have got a sanctuary you have to go to their sanctuary.

That doesn't mean that we need to take on Iran. It means that we have got to eliminate sanctuaries. And we cannot delude ourselves into believing that we can negotiate a nuclear capability away from Iran. It would be just utterly ineffective because they have a goal and they have a vision.

And from that point I would submit that the background here of United States history, American history, instructs us on what has been historically, and is relevant to today. Madam Speaker, I would submit that back in 1783 would be the period of time when the new United States made peace with Great Britain. And at that time, we had an American Merchant Marine that was sailing the world and trading. We have always been a very effective seafaring nation. And as our American Merchant Marine sailed and traded to the world and they went into the Mediterranean, up until 1783 they had the protection of the British Navy because we were, up until 1776, at least a colony of the British, and so we are now rectified of their Navy.

But when we were recognized by Britain and began to fly the American flag, and were not under the protection of the Union Jack, 1783, America made peace with Britain; and then, 1784, the first American ship was captured by pirates from Morocco. Thus began the Barbary wars where we took on the Barbary pirates. From 1784 and on up until about 1815, the United States was engaged sporadically and periodically, but actually almost continually in a war again the Barbary pirates along the Barbary Coast.

And before I go into that, Madam Speaker, I need to give a little bit more of the history of that region. Barbary pirates in that region had been raiding the Mediterranean shoreline, especially the European side of that, for years. And I will submit that they had been raiding the shoreline for almost 300 years at that point in 1784 when they captured the first American vessel.

Beginning about 1500, 1502, 1503 is when the Barbary pirates began an active and aggressive pirating of merchant marines that were sailing into the Mediterranean. And their goal was, capture the ship and the cargo and the crew. And the most valuable portion of that was all too often the crew, because they were pressed into slavery, Madam Speaker. And they brought back European slaves to the Barbary Coast where they pressed them into slavery.

And they built many of the edifices that you see there today, the old architecture from the 1500 era and on, clear on into the early 1800s, about 1830; much of that work was done by Christian slaves that were pressed into slavery by Muslim masters. And, in fact, there is a book written by a professor at Ohio State University called Christian Slaves and Muslim Masters. And he has gone back and studied the coastline, the European coastline of the Mediterranean and old church records and other family records and old family Bibles and put together a credible history of the slave trade by the Barbary pirates as they moved in with their corsairs and took over the merchant marine, the merchant ships from Europe.

The Barbary pirates raided the shoreline all around Greece and Italy and France and Spain and all the way up the coastline of France and the Atlantic into England and on over as far north as Iceland. In fact, there is a fairly detailed commentary about 400 Icelanders who were pulled from their beds at night just near the shore of Iceland, pressed into slavery and sailed back down to the Barbary Coast on the north shore of Africa.

And of all of the slaves that were captured along all of that coastline, from Greece all the way up to Iceland, these Icelanders survived the least, and they perished the most. They got the least amount of work out of them and they died the most quickly. And that happens to be some remarks that are written into the historical documents.

Some say it had to do with the climate change. Some say it had to do with the work they pressed them in. Some say it had to do with their hearts being utterly broken that they were pressed into slavery, and they just lost their will to live. But there is very little, if any, genetic remnant of those slaves today because the men that were pressed into slavery, and it was almost all men, they were never allowed an opportunity to do anything but walk in their chains and row the corsairs, or else do their slave labor, building the buildings and doing the kind of construction work that built those cities.

They didn't have an opportunity to procreate, so you don't see their genetics in the faces of the people that live on that part of the continent today. Occasionally, I am told that there are some blue eyes that pop up that look like they might be the descendants of the women who were captured aboard ship or offshore, who were pressed into, I will say concubinery.

And so there are some descendants from that, but it is very little, from remnants. But all together, Professor Davis documents about 1.25 million Christian slaves that were pressed into slavery by the Barbary pirates, and this period of time would be from about 1500 on to about 1583.

Well, it continued from that point forward, and Europe built a practice of paying tribute to the pirates and seeking to purchase back their most valuable citizens. And it would be those men and women of substance. If they had a wealthy family, then they would try to go and pay tribute to get that member of the family back. That went on for hundreds of years.

There was a pattern there. It was a business that was being run. And when the United States found themselves sucked into that in 1784 when our first ship was captured by the pirates from Morocco, that began the long conflict that lasted until at least 1815.

And one will remember that the United States took a posture eventually; we paid tribute here, Madam Speaker, out of this Congress to the Barbary pirates. And some of those line items that I have seen were as high as $250,000 to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates, but that would be just one line item. And, in fact, that was a line item that was refused. But we paid more than that on an annual basis, and that tribute, that bribery got so high that it became as high as 20 percent of the entire Federal budget to pay off the pirates in the Barbary Coast.

And so we decided that we couldn't afford this any longer, and we had two alternatives. One was to outfit a Navy and a Marine Corps and send them over there to punish the Barbary pirates and get them to back off of any vessel that flew the Stars and Stripes. So we sent our best diplomats over there to negotiate with the Barbary pirates; and I don't know that we have diplomats of that standing today, but historically they will stand very high in the mind's eye of Americans, Madam Speaker.

And so in 1786 Thomas Jefferson, who was then the ambassador to France, and John Adams, who was the ambassador to Britain, met in London with, and I don't have this name memorized, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain from Tripoli. Our American ambassadors, Jefferson and Adams, ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, asked Adja why his government was hostile to American ships, that even though there had been no provocation, his government was hostile to American ships. The ambassador's response was reported to the Continental Congress, and is a part of the permanent record today that can be reviewed over in the Library of Congress.

The response from Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain from Tripoli, I will repeat, was this, and I quote, ``It was founded on the laws of their prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman,'' and that is the term for a Muslim today, ``who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.''

Sound familiar, Madam Speaker, to some of the things that we hear today?

And Jefferson's analysis, his comments upon that valiant effort at diplomacy, an effort that has been suggested by Mr. Andrews here this evening, Jefferson's analysis was this, and I will paraphrase and summarize and not quote, but it is hard to reach common ground, it is hard to negotiate with people whose profound religious belief is that their salvation is from killing you.

1786; 2006-2007. We think we have come a long way; we may have not gained a single inch in this disagreement, just had some interim conflicts and relative periods of peace. I think the American people need to understand this.

And so out of the failure of that diplomatic effort, that valiant diplomatic effort, the United States Navy was born, March 1794. The Marine Corps joined with the Navy and they went to the shores of Tripoli. And that is today in the Marine Corps anthem, ``From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.''

And our Navy was fitted, and they designed frigates for Americans, and these frigates had superior speed and superior maneuverability, very much an American thing. That was the first time that Americans went to war after the ratification of their Constitution, and they went to war with the most modern frigates that had a tactical advantage because the technology that was developed by the innovative nature and the inventiveness of American shipbuilders. And today we are off in space with that same kind of innovation.

The Marines, when they went to the shores of Tripoli, they knew what they were up against to some degree.

And Madam Speaker, we have all heard Marines called Leathernecks. Most don't recall, Marines got the nickname Leathernecks because they put leather collars around their neck, thick leather collars when they went into battle to reduce the chance that they would be beheaded by the enemy. That is how Marines got the nickname Leathernecks. They got that nickname over 200 years ago, and it is part of their history and part of their lore. And the shores of Tripoli are engraved on their Iwo Jima monument over across the Potomac River.

And so we need to go back and revisit history, Madam Speaker, and understand that this enemy is driven by the same philosophy. They still believe their path to salvation is in killing us. There are passages in the Koran that support this almost verbatim that I have happened to have read.

Thomas Jefferson had a Koran. I understand that Koran came to this Congress to be used in a swearing-in ceremony. Some say that he leaned towards Islam because he owned a Koran. I will submit that Thomas Jefferson also studied Greek, and he had a Greek Bible; he wanted to be able to understand the passages in the Bible from the perspective of the Greek, rather than relying on the translations from Greek into an English version.

Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the preeminent scholar of his time, maybe the preeminent scholar in our history. He took his work seriously. Of course he needed to understand ``nosce hostem,'' which is Latin for ``know thy enemy.'' And that would absolutely be the reason why Thomas Jefferson acquired a Koran, so he could understand that enemy that said that it is written in their Koran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.

What a promise to make. And when that is a profound religion, it is impossible to negotiate with. So what we did, we went to war against them, and over time put them in a position where they needed to sue for peace.

And I will submit also that Algiers came under attack from the British twice and the French once. And they didn't cease their attacks on Western Europe--I will say Western civilization and the shipping industry within the Mediterranean as a piracy approach, as a government policy. They didn't cease those attacks until 1830 when the French went in and occupied Algiers.

And so here we are today with an enemy, globally, in the world, which is a segment of Islam. And I certainly respect and appreciate moderate Islam. I

ask them to step forward and be our allies. I believe they are a peaceful people and a good-hearted people. And the more I travel and the more people I meet, the greater my respect and admiration for the goodness of humanity is.

But there is an element within Islam that is radical Islam, the jihadists, the Islamists, as Daniel Pipes has named them. That element is a significantly large element and there are maybe 1.2 to 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. And according to Daniel Pipes, our Benazir Bhutto, 10 percent, and according to Pipes, perhaps as many as 15 percent, are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda.

Now, if it is 10 percent you are looking at 130 million. If it is 15 percent, add half again to that. That is a huge number of people who philosophically believe that their path to salvation is in killing us, and that they don't really take a risk with their destiny when they attack us because if they are killed in the process, they will surely go to paradise.

That is the enemy that we are against, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have left?

And so here we are today with a Congress that wants to micromanage a war, and a resolution or two or three over in the Senate that undermine our troops, and a resolution promise to come to the floor of this House next week that undermines our troops. As I have submitted, you cannot win a war by committee. You cannot fight a war by committee, but you can undermine the mission and you can put your troops at risk by doing so.

We have top-notch commanders in the field, Madam Speaker. They have demonstrated their ability. We have the best military ever put into the field. Their morale is strong, their technology is there, their training is high. Their sense of mission and duty and sacrifice is strong and is profound. They want to complete their mission.

I traveled over there with a lieutenant colonel who said to me, Don't pull us out of this. Don't save me. Don't save me. I volunteered. I am willing to take this risk. I want to take this burden off of my children. That is my duty to my country and to my family. I want to take this burden off my children. Don't try to save me.

I had some Gold Star families in my office a couple of months ago, shortly before I went to Iraq, Gold Star families who have lost a son or a daughter in combat over in either Afghanistan or Iraq. As I listened to them, they just intensely pleaded with me, Do everything you can to promote a successful mission. We have heard much of the dialogue, but to look them in the eye and understand that intensity. And then, one of the bereaved fathers from California, his first name was John, said to me, It's different now. Our children have gone over there and fought and died on that soil. The soil in Iraq is sanctified by their blood. They paid their price for the freedom of the Iraqi people. You cannot walk away and leave that now. That is the vision of the Gold Star families. That is the commitment of our military.

I can't find people in uniform in Iraq that don't support the mission, that aren't committed to the cause. But they ask me, why do we have to fight the enemy over here, the news media over in the United States, and the people that are undermining us in the United States Congress? It is an undermining. And I will make this prediction, Madam Speaker, that before this 110th Congress is adjourned, there will be an amendment or a bill that comes to this floor that seeks to unfund our military, one that is written off the pattern of the one at the end of Vietnam. And if that amendment comes and it is successful and it shuts off funding and our troops are forced by a defeatist attitude in Congress to pull out of Iraq, you will see a human suffering like this world has not seen since World War II.

The price for failing to succeed will be cataclysmic. I don't have enough minutes to go into the description of all of that.

But I will submit that we either succeed victoriously and leave Iraq a free democratic Iraq that can stand on its own two feet and defend itself and be represented by its people, we either do that, or the last battle in Iraq won't be fought over there, Madam Speaker. It will be fought here on the floor of this Congress through an appropriations bill that will seek to jerk the rug out from underneath our sacrificing military. And it would put this country in utter disgrace if that were to happen.

So I have introduced a resolution, a resolution that supports and endorses our troops, one that recognizes the circumstances that we are in, the constitutional power and authority of our Commander in Chief, and stands up and defends our troops and our military all the way down the line. It says, in fact, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group says on page 73 that it could support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad or to speed up the training and equipping mission if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective.

General Petraeus has written the plan. He has determined it would be effective; it is consistent with the Iraq Study Group, page 73. Look it up. General Petraeus has endorsed the plan, as I said. And on top of that, the cochair of the Iraq Study Group, former Secretary of State James Baker III, came back to this Congress and said: The President's plan ought to be given a chance. He wants us to support the Iraq Study Group, and that is the President's plan. That means a free and liberated Iraq, not a cut and run.

Honor the troops for their service and honor their mission, and in fact honor their sacrifice. And I will fight this battle here where it is at greatest risk, Madam Speaker. And I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I look forward to the debate next week and the open dialogue, and I hope that there is a rule that is offered here under the promise of this new and open Congress that would allow for amendments to be brought to the floor so that resolutions of this type actually have an opportunity to be debated in this Congress.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 53 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the

House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, February 9, 2007, at 2 p.m.

Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Campbell for yielding to me, and I appreciate Mr. Ryan sticking around after the Special Order and the work that you have done. Over the last 2-plus years, we spent a lot of hours here on the floor together. It occurred to me as I arrived on the floor--

I would concede that point that not necessarily together, but on the floor. We have been together in some other things as well.

But the point that occurred to me as I arrived here on the floor this afternoon is we often do not commingle our policies. We have an argument that is set separate on this side and on that side, and it occurred to me that Lincoln and Douglas had some effective debates that were very, very instructive, and it helped the people understand the distinctions between the policies.

So as I mull this around in my mind, it occurs to me to offer an invitation that if our side could set aside an hour Special Order, and if your side would be interested in setting aside an hour Special Order, we could merge those together and then perhaps three from your side, three from our side, and we could spend 2 hours with an open debate type of a format so that we could have a free exchange with the best of attitude and comity. I think that would be a very good thing to do for the people across this country as they review what is going on here on the floor.

I would ask your opinion on that.

Reclaiming my time.

Reclaiming my time. If the gentleman would be interested, I would suggest you take it up above that pay grade and see if you come back with a positive response. I didn't check with anybody above me. I happened to be able to claim some time on the floor and make that decision.

I offer that openly with the best intentions. I think 2 hours would be a very good thing for all of us to have that discussion. The offer is there. I leave it on the table, and I thank the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I would point out that, as we have had exchanges here during special orders, I am one who has yielded, especially to Uncle Bill from Massachusetts. I would point that out. That is a matter of record. We can continue in that vein, I would hope.

Thank you very much, Mr. Ryan.

I yield back to the gentleman from California.

I thank the gentleman from California for yielding to me both times here this afternoon.

Mr. Speaker, taking up the issue of the budget that is coming before us and this sense of responsibility and debates that I have had this year and debates that I recall I had in the national media that I had with members of the other party, and some of them took the oath that they would be willing to support a balanced budget without raising taxes; I don't hear any of that talk here on the Democrat side of the aisle. Nobody is stepping forward, and saying, yes, I remember what I said, I didn't mean it, or even, I remember what I said. They seem to have forgotten what they said.

They do say they want to balance the budget. But we also know from listening to Mr. Rangel, there isn't any one of the Bush tax cuts that he would not want to eliminate, which would result in a tax increase.

Yet we have the strongest economy that we have had in my lifetime, the most consecutive quarters of growth. We have a very healthy unemployment rating of about 4.5 percent, and that has been staying low. Inflation has been staying low. Interest has been staying low. Every economic indicator that is low when it is good is low. Every economic indicator that is high when it is good, it is high. The stock market has reached any number of all-time highs.

These Bush tax cuts, the 2001 cuts and the 2003 cuts were essential and necessary to keep us out of a depression and a recession at a time when the dot.com bubble had burst, when our financial centers were attacked on September 11, and we had to go to war and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect the American people, of which there has been no significant attack against Americans by terrorists in our country since that time.

Who would believe that our economy would be this strong, our safety would be this good, that there are so many things sitting where they are today? But we need to step forward and make progress. I can tell you frankly that I was not thrilled by the proposal here several years ago, 3 years ago, that we were going to cut the deficit in half in 5 years. That was not enough for me.

Now, I believe that President Bush has offered a budget, and I think that we will see the House Republicans offer a budget that will reach balance within 5 years. That is a balance without dynamic scoring, and the increase that we are seeing in the revenue because of this dynamic economy indicates that could well happen within the next 3 years. I expect it will happen in the next 3 years.

I am an individual, though, who would be willing to sign on to a budget

that would balance the budget this year. I will not go very far into that for these purposes, because I recognize, practically speaking, there aren't enough votes to pass a budget like that. It would be a bit too Draconian.

But had we have been able to slow some of this growth, we could be at balance today, except that we have been facing the war, and we took the hit from the burst in the dot.com bubble. So we are pulled together here now, and the principle needs to be, slow this growth in discretionary, nondefense discretionary spending. We are doing that, and we have effectively done that. We have kept it at below the rate of inflation or at the rate of inflation.

The biggest problem we have is the constant growth in entitlements called Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid to a lesser degree, and, of course, the interest that goes up on that. You will see a budget comes from Republicans that gets us to a balanced budget within 5 years. I am grateful that that is coming out.

But, again, I believe that if we can give the investors the confidence that we can continue the Bush tax cuts, the 2001 and the 2003 tax cuts, then I think that you will see this economy continue to grow, and you will see the budget balanced before the 5 years are up.

But if we turn this over to the other side, if we turn it over to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who wants to see the end of all of those tax cuts, we will see the goose that lays the golden egg slaughtered and on the field of class warfare.

Now, we know that what you tax you get less of. The Federal Government has the first lien on all taxation in America. We tax everything that moves, that produces. We tax labor. We tax interest, investment, dividends capital gains, you name it, all the way down the line. Then the alternative minimum tax sits there and sneaks up on people and grabs people, and it is creeping down into the lower brackets over and over again.

So to make this call, I would say this, extend those tax cuts. The American people need to clamor in order to extend the Bush tax cuts. If that can happen, the confidence in this economy will continue. We will get this budget balanced.

The other side wants a balanced budget, too, because they called for one. But they want to raise your taxes to do it. I guarantee you, that is the only way that they can balance this budget, and that is the effort that they are down on. I stand with the remarks made by the gentleman from California, and I appreciate very much him taking the leadership to come to the floor and yielding to me.

It is interesting to me, the statistics that you put out on that data, that if you believe in a free market economy, you understand that description intuitively. You understand there is going to be dynamic growth that is stimulated because there is a return on investment.

If you don't believe in the free market economy, then you think somehow that people that make money and create jobs are evil, and they should be punished for their productivity. When you punish productivity and tax it, you get less of it. That was another Reagan statement. What you tax you get less of. What you subsidize you get more of.

We are going to see productivity more highly taxed. We get less productivity, and this economy will slow down.

I point also that if we could freeze our spending at current levels, sometime in the middle of fiscal year 2010 we would be looking at a surplus. That is something else to consider.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the presenters of the previous hour that have come down here, especially my friend, Mr. Ryan from Ohio. They have been persistent and they have been relentless.

At some point I think it would be very engaging for us to be able to actually share an hour and do that kind of point, counterpoint that can bring these issues to the top for the American people. And I want to say again, my highest compliment is for persistence. I am going to make some comments here on accuracy and on perspective.

I think we need to take us back. Since we have gone back to the future in this last hour, Madam Speaker, I would take us back to where we were here in the United States of America on the date, and I will call it September 10, 2001.

That was the date on which we were in the middle of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the day before the September 11 attacks on our financial centers, the Pentagon and in the fields of Pennsylvania, which may have been the White House or this Capitol building itself, Madam Speaker.

On that day, the American people were just beginning to understand what had happened to our economy. We had this growing economy that has been credited over here many, many times over to President Clinton. I want to tell you that the Republican Congress balanced the budget through the 1990s. And they might have done so because they did not approve of the Clinton policies. There might have been a measure of spite. But they balanced the budget.

And the reason I will give that credit to the Republican majority in this Congress is because Bill Clinton vetoed

their budget several times. That kept us from having a balanced budget until finally they had to reach a compromise, and those balanced budgets flowed forward.

This economy grew, and it grew out beyond expectations. And the biggest reason, Madam Speaker, that it grew was because we had this economic phenomenon called the dot-com bubble. Well the dot-com bubble was that we had discovered in our research, in our technology and science and in information, that the microchip and the configuration of the microchip and the configurations of the software and our infrastructure that allowed us to put that all together, we found out in the middle 1990s that we could store and transfer information more quickly than ever before in all of history.

And when that happened, there were companies that looked around and said, voila, we have a microchip. We can find a way to do something with that. Let's start up a dot-com company and we will go public and we will sell shares on our ability to store and transfer information more efficiently than ever before, Madam Speaker.

And so those companies lit up and did that. And the stock market grew and grew and grew and grew. And there was a return on those investments, not because the companies were making money, but on the speculative value, Madam Speaker, on the ability to store and transfer information faster than ever before.

That went through the 1990s and into the year 2000. And in the year 2000, President Bush was elected. And about that time, sometime about the beginning actually of the year 2000, the market, the stock market began to understand that this dot-com bubble, which was this growth in the values of their shares on the New York Stock Exchange was really based upon the speculation that we could store and transfer information more quickly than ever before, and not based upon the economic value of the ability to be able to store and transfer information more quickly than ever before.

And so the adjustments began to be made in that stock market. And when they were made, it took it down to, what is this information worth? Just because we can store and transfer it more quickly does not mean it has more value, it has to add efficiency to the productivity of companies, or it has got to have a marketable value to people that will say pay a higher price for a higher speed Internet, not just for their business reasons, that is legitimate, but also for their recreational reasons.

Only two reasons this information age that had blossomed and grown, Madam Speaker, only had value because it added efficiency to the companies that we had and those that would be developed and grown, or that ability to store and transfer information could be marketed for recreational purposes.

Well, about the year 2000 the market began making those adjustments. And the market decided there is too much capital invested in this. There is too much speculation invested in this. We really cannot turn out the kind of productivity that is necessary to justify the capital investment that had grown this dot-com bubble in our marketplace.

And so astute investors began to divest themselves of their investments within those dot-com companies, some of them not all of them. Those that had the highest promise, at least on the measure of the capital invested, the money stayed with them. Those that had the least promise the money left them.

As the market adjusted, we had this thing we called the bursting of the dot-com bubble. That took place in about the year 2000, 2000, 2001, as President Bush was being sworn in out here on the west portico of the Capitol for his first term in January of 2001, the bursting of the dot-com bubble was almost audible at that point.

Well, as that bubble slowly burst and flowed across the year 2001, Madam Speaker, it took us up to September 11 of 2001, when, as we know, the planes went crashing into the Twin Towers and into the Pentagon, into the field in Pennsylvania.

And the attack on our financial centers, and an attack on our strategic center over here at the Pentagon, of our military strategic center, was devastating. It was designed to take the financial center of the United States of America to its knees.

Well, that did shut down our financial center the rest of that week. We were open for business, might have actually been on the following Friday, but we were at least open for business the following Monday after September 11. But we got our stock market up and going again, our financial centers started going again. We patched things in. We rigged them up so that we could work and we could trade. As we began to trade, the markets began to adjust the impact on them.

That blow to our financial centers on September 11, on top of the bursting of the dot-com bubble where there were two devastating hits on our economy, yes we were cruising along, Madam Speaker, with anticipated balanced budgets as far as the eye could see. But those balanced budgets did not anticipate the bursting of the dot-com bubble, nor did they anticipate the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City.

And so we began to make our adjustments. And then following that, the obvious result was, that we had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect us from the terrorists who were attacking the United States of America and western civilization itself.

That took money, Madam Speaker. And this Congress pulled together in bipartisan effort, Democrats over here, Republicans over here, came together and said we are one people. We are the United States of America and our number one most responsible Constitutional position is to protect the American people.

And so we set forth here in this Congress to protect the American people. And some of the things that we did were to provide that our military could, number one, go over to Afghanistan and into the mountains in Pakistan and go take out those al-Qaeda centers where they had been strategizing and planning these terrorist attacks on the United States.

And in the process it was necessary to liberate Afghanistan and set up a government in Afghanistan that reflected the will of the people, a government of, by and for the people of Afghanistan. We did that within 2 to 2\1/2\ months of the September 11 attacks in 2001, at the cost of billions of dollars, Madam Speaker.

Now here we are, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the attacks on the Twin Towers, our financial centers, and the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and the necessity to engage in military conflict clear across the globe over in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which our glorious United States military did so successfully, and took out the Taliban and liberated the Afghani people. The Afghan people went to the polls there in that country for the first time in the history of the world. A magnanimous thing, all at great cost for a great cause.

These three things that I have talked about, Madam Speaker, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which brought our stock market down, the attacks on our financial centers at the Twin Towers took it down further, and the cost of supporting and maintaining and equipping our military to liberate the Afghan people all three things hit this budget hard.

Now, I do not think there was anyone on that side of the aisle that made the argument then that we should have only done these things within the confines of a balanced budget. I did not hear them say that. I did not hear anybody say that. I did not even read an editorial that said, well, you know, it is a pretty responsible thing that we have to do here, we have to recover from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, we have got to recover from the attack on the Twin Towers, and we have to spend tens of billions, in fact more than a hundred billion dollars going into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban and al-Qaeda and free the Afghan people, but we should only do so within the confines of a balanced budget.

No, nobody said that, Madam Speaker. Nobody on that side said that. Nobody on this side said that. We were unanimous in our judgment that we needed to protect the American people at whatever cost. And so our military went forth, under the command and order of our commander in chief and carried out their duty and liberated the Afghan people and took out the Taliban and took out al-Qaeda in the mountains in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

They did their job. We all knew that we would be deficit spending here in this Congress to protect the American people because the decision of balancing the budget in a time of great national peril was not a hard decision. When you are in great national peril you go into debt.

Can anyone imagine fighting World War II when we spent 38 percent of our gross domestic product on our military, fighting that war without going into debt? We sold war bonds over and over and over again. We ginned up Hollywood. Hollywood started running movies to raise the morale of the American people and to keep us together as one people. And strategy after strategy was designed here out of Washington and from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to pull us together as a people, to not be divisive, to unify in our efforts against the Nazis to our east and the imperialist Japanese to our west. That was the strategy of the United States, and we pulled together as one people, Madam Speaker. And we spent 38 percent of our gross domestic product in those years of World War II.

And the zero unemployment that we have today at about 4.6 percent during World War II went to 1.3. That is closer to a full employment economy. It is still not a full employment economy, but that is a lot closer.

And we sit here today, and I am hearing the argument that somehow we should have walked through this whole thing with a balanced budget. You know, if we had done that, there is something my friends on the other side of the aisle that know to be fact and, in fact, I think they are whistling through the graveyard crossing their fingers behind their back saying I wish that that had been the case. They know that if we had done so and balanced the budget then we would have gone into a tailspin recession, if not a hard core depression.

But what happened throughout that, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the attacks on the twin towers, the liberation of Afghanistan and subsequently the liberation of the Iraqi people, what happened, was our Commander in Chief, who also is the President of the United States, George W. Bush, came to this Congress with two financial proposals, two tax cut proposals, one in 2001 and one in 2003. And the vision was this, if we don't reduce taxes and stimulate this economy, the burden of this bursting of the dot-com bubble and the attack on the twin towers and the necessity to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, the burden of all of that will fall on this economy, and the United States of America would certainly, and I don't mean, Madam Speaker, almost certainly, I mean the burden certainly would have fallen on this economy and it certainly would have put us in a recession, and perhaps a severe depression.

Now, Madam Speaker, I would submit that if we were to consider what this country would have been like if we had not cut taxes, if we had not reduced capital gains, if we had not reduced dividend taxes, if we hadn't let people keep more of the money that they earn and allow them to reinvest it and get a return on that investment, if we hadn't made those changes in the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, this economy would have slowed to a crawl. It would have tail spun into a recession, perhaps a depression.

But the President knew, and this Congress knew, and the Republican majority knew, and I thank you all of my colleagues for being part of that, knew that if we could cut taxes we could stimulate economic growth. If we can stimulate economic growth, we can grow our way out of this deficit spending that is necessary at this time of great national peril. And that is what we did. We did follow the leadership of the White House and President Bush. We did cut taxes in 2001. We did cut taxes in 2003. And the economy responded in kind. And there is no logical argument that the cutting of taxes did not stimulate the economy.

If anybody over on this side has a disagreement, I would be happy to yield some time. But it did stimulate the economy, and this economy grew. And quarter after quarter after quarter, we saw the longest period of economic growth in the history of the United States of America flow forth through this economy, quarter after quarter. And most of those quarters were over 3 percent growth. And I would quote it all back to you but it has been so good that I have lost track the last two or three quarters, so I can't tell you exactly what those numbers are. But I know there have many, many quarters that this economy has grown and grown significantly, perhaps grown dramatically. But this is a stable, long term growth just the kind you want if you draw it up on the chart.

And so here we are. After a political campaign, November 7 election, after I have heard over here this economy is bad and it is not providing jobs for people, well, when has it been better? If anybody on that side of the aisle has an answer to that, I would be happy to yield to you. Just stand up. I would be happy to yield to you. When has the economy been better than it is now? When has it grown more consistently? When has it provided more jobs? When has the private sector had more stimulation than it has now? Not in my lifetime, Madam Speaker. This is the best economy that we have ever seen.

And here we are, it is stimulated by the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, and we are faced with, now, a Democrat majority that wants to increase taxes. So I have a few charts here to help people out, Madam Speaker. And this chart says, having called the tax cuts beyond irresponsible, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee said, he cannot think of one of George Bush's first term tax cuts that merit renewal.

Well, those first term tax cuts include all of the Bush tax cuts, as my recollection is. So if he can't think of one that merits renewal, Madam Speaker, I would point out, I can't think of one that does not merit renewal, that this economic growth and this economic recovery has been almost a historical miracle.

But for the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to not acknowledge an economic fact, Madam Speaker, is an astonishing thing. And as I listen to the debate here on the floor tonight, and as I listen to my colleagues here deliver their view and their opinion, which they are entirely welcome to, and I respect that, it occurs to me that their probably isn't one shred of empirical data that would pry them off of their political position.

But I will say that we have the ability over here on this side of the aisle to deductively reason, and we know that there are incentives for people, and when there is profit involved, people produce more. When there is less profit involved they will produce less. And if there is no profit involved, even if they want to produce, they won't last long. Their business will go under and they will go broke.

So in a free market economy, you have to have people that can make a little bit of money. And if they can make a little money, they are going to like it and they will make a little more money. And when you have a tax and a regulatory structure that allows for people to have some profit, they will continue to produce. And our gross domestic product goes up and the number of jobs go up and the wages that they can afford to pay go up and the benefits that they pay go up, which means the families are better off, that is more money, Madam Speaker, in the pockets of the families of the American people. And then we become a better place to live.

And these Bush tax cuts have not reduced the revenue stream into this country. They have increased it by every measure imaginable. And it might be possible to do a static kind of a calculation that says, well, yes, if we just increase taxes 50 percent we will get 50 percent more revenue. Madam Speaker, I won't disagree with that. You can do that static calculation, and you may actually even get 50 percent more revenue the very first quarter that you increase taxes by 50 percent.

But human nature has got to play into that equation too, and human nature says, well, taxes were too high. I don't think I really want to work those extra overtime hours. I don't want to do 60 hours a week. I am going to be happy with 40 because Uncle Sam takes too big of a cut. The taxes are too high. I am not going to sit there and make those extra sales phone calls at night. I am going to go home and see my family. I am going to settle for less income. Or the business owner that says well, the taxes are too high. I was going to add an extra line on to my

manufacturing plant here and hire an extra hundred people, but, no, taxes are too high. The regulations are too high. I am going to be just satisfied with what I have. Or maybe shrink it down a little bit and maximize my profits and just stay here, hold the status quo.

That is what goes on in the minds of the people who are creating the jobs in America, especially America's small business people. For when they hear over here, Madam Speaker, that they want to increase taxes and punish the producers in America, the producers aren't stupid. They are going to decide I can take so much punishment but I can't take that much punishment; so I am going to back up a little bit and I am going to back off. I am going to quit creating jobs and probably lay a few people off. I am going to consolidate my business, and maybe I will just coast out the rest of my life. And you have lost that business owner for the rest of their life. And you have got to then rely on some young entrepreneur to come in and light this thing up. But why will they if you take away, in your perverse way, taxing the incentives of the entrepreneurs of America, which is a life blood of who we are as a people?

So the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, having called the tax cuts beyond irresponsible, the chairman said he cannot think of one of George Bush's first-term tax cuts that merits renewal. Astonishing. Would you really want to back up and give up on the longest period of growth in history, and I have to be careful of that, at least in my history? And I know of no time in the history of the United States of America where we had more growth.

Well, it is one thing, Madam Speaker, to take the position that the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee cannot think of one that merits renewal, but here is a statement that comes from the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and that is September 26 of 2006, where he vowed to put all of President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts on the chopping block.

Why? Why in the world, Madam Speaker, would you take something that has proven success, this long period of growth that has run 3 percent and more for most of the last dozen quarters or more, dozen and a half quarters at least, and put them all on the chopping block and chop them off and let them go? Why? Why would that be the case? Aren't we looking forward to a chairman of the Ways and Means Committee that maybe is an economist or at least a well-versed, well-read amateur economist, and wouldn't an economist who is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee want to have reasonable growth, maybe even dynamic growth, here in the United States of America? What would be the merit in trying to kill the economy of the country that you have sworn to defend and that you love, and, in fact, in his case, has stood up and put his life on the line and defended, to his credit?

It can only be one thing. I do not think he really wants to destroy the economy of the United States of America, but I think there is a political agenda, Madam Speaker. And this will be devastating to the economy of the United States if these tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 are put on the chopping block. And it isn't that they have to be put on the block and voted down. These tax cuts sunset. They will need action in the House and the Senate to be renewed. And they need to be renewed because we know what kind of growth they have stimulated.

In fact, last September, and I believe the date was September 15, under these Bush tax cuts, the Federal Government collected more money on that day than any other day in the history of the United States of America. September 15, 2006. That would be the last time that happened under the Rangel plan.

So, Madam Speaker, I would submit that these tax cuts do have a sunset and that sunset for them, the date that they expire, is 1,426 days from now; 1,426 from now, Madam Speaker, and if this Congress does nothing, they expire.

Now, I would ask why would it be that the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Speaker Pelosi, and the leadership on the Democrat side of the aisle would want to see the Bush tax cuts expire. Well, it is because if that does not happen, they cannot balance their budget. They can't balance their budget without an increase in taxes. And this brings about, when those dates expire, a real increase in taxes. Regardless of how it is voted, regardless of how the bill is brought forward, regardless of what might be amended, in the end if these tax cuts are not extended, the result is a tax increase. A tax increase will temporarily fund their spending increases, and they will be able to claim that they have a balanced budget for a little while.

But that won't last long, Madam Speaker. But the temporary timing of this comes together in such a way that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 1,426 days is nice and handy because they can use that to claim that they are complying with PAYGO, the pay-as-you-go plan, the not- going-to-spend-any-more-money-than-you-have-coming-in plan, the plan that says if we want to spend more money, we will just increase taxes on the backs of the American people, the hardworking American people. And I believe the government takes enough out of their paychecks, Madam Speaker.

I believe we have hardworking Americans who are still working hard and struggling to make ends meet. They have to have a budget. The American people have to meet that budget. When they look at what they need to do in order to live within their means, they make those decisions, Madam Speaker. And they don't have the option to decide in 1,426 days I am going to raise taxes. I am going to kick that up to the point where now I can raise spending.

No. The American people have to be responsible. They have to look at the paycheck they have coming in and make decisions on what they can afford, what standard of living they can afford to have. And so they will decide if they can have that cabin at the lake or that new SUV or that boat or whether they are going to plastic their windows and try to keep their heat bill down so that they can live within their means. We all have to make those kinds of decisions to live within our means, and when a decision is made to take money out of the pockets of the American people, those people that are out there putting plastic over their windows in one of the coldest winters that we have had in a long, long time, Madam Speaker, and we are taxing them, raising their taxes so that this government can spend more money to buy more votes and influence more people across this country, it is a travesty of justice.

I have been with some of the Democrats, Madam Speaker, and some of them said they want to balance the budget. And when they say that, you can't get them to admit that they want to increase taxes to balance the budget. Some of the Blue Dogs will say they want to balance the budget in a responsible way. I can't get them to say they would do so without increasing taxes. In fact, whenever they have offered a balanced budget here on the floor, it always has had an increase in taxes as part of their balanced budget.

So I have taken a look at our budget, Madam Speaker, and decided what needs to happen. If we are going to balance the budget, the American people ought to know what it takes to balance the budget here in the United States of America. About $2.8 trillion is our budget, and we have a lot of revenue coming in, and the revenue increase has been double digits the last 2 to 3 years because this economy has been so strong and the unemployment has been so low and the new jobs created have been so dynamic. All of this seems to be a secret to the American people, but that is all fact, Madam Speaker. But still we have this growth in entitlements. The entitlements of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and you add to that the cost of interest that is going up, and as interest goes up, of course, the more national debt that we have. No one in this Congress aside from myself, Madam Speaker, is talking about how do you balance the budget, how do you balance the budget without increasing taxes.

I want this dynamic economy. I want to see double-digit increase in our revenue stream. I don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The people on this side of the aisle, Madam Speaker, have a belief that there is something evil about that goose that lays the golden egg, and they want to

kill that goose by increasing taxes. But as for me, I will submit that I am willing to cut some spending. Let us take this on down to the point where we can balance this budget and then balance the budget without increasing taxes, Madam Speaker.

And I have done a little calculation on this, and this is nothing but a little napkin calculation with a calculator off of my belt, and the final numbers will be coming in in the next couple of days, and if all goes well, I will be able to introduce a bill and we can have a debate on this floor on a real balanced budget, Madam Speaker.

But if we were to hold defense spending harmless, let defense spending grow the way it needs to, because we have to protect the American people, set that part aside, and then put into it non-defense discretionary spending, that is the spending that is not including the entitlements, being Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, also the necessity to pay for the interest on the national debt, those things all tied together, plus non-defense discretionary, all of that together, if we would look at the 2007 fiscal year budget and make adjustments in that for 2008, it would be necessary for us to cut about 8 percent across-the-board in all of those categories if we were going to balance the budget.

So when the American people clamor for a balanced budget, they need to understand what they are talking about. They need to understand the impact on their own budget, what happens to their Social Security benefits, their Medicaid and Medicaid benefits, and, of course, we have to pay the interest bill, and then how we have to shrink down some of the discretionary spending in this Federal budget.

All of that can happen with the support of the American people. An 8 percent cut seems to me to be a bit Draconian. But if we had frozen our Federal spending when I came to this Congress in 2003, we would have a balanced budget today, Madam Speaker, with a minimal amount of pain, and we would be able to have a debate for the American people that would be focused on what is the future of this country going to be?

We can't make these adjustments to Social Security if we are not willing to make those changes that were called for by President Bush with personal retirement accounts. If we can't give people a percentage of their Social Security that they are contributing into their own control so that they can have some investment in their own destiny, while we guarantee those benefits to our seniors, if we can't make those changes, the inevitable result is, Madam Speaker, we will have to cut the benefits to our seniors.

I want to keep that pledge to our seniors. Because of that, I want to configure a kind of Social Security reform that will allow for a measure of that to go into personal retirement accounts so that we can get people with their own accounts down the road a ways that can be independent and stand up and take care of their own retirement. That an essential component of this.

If we don't do that, we are going to have to look the American people in the eye and say we didn't have the will to do the right thing. Now we are going to have to do the necessary thing. The necessary thing then would be to reduce benefits or increase contributions. In either case, increasing contributions at a time when we have fewer people working and more people collecting, as the baby-boomers come on line, and I am one, Madam Speaker, it is no time to put more burden on the workers in America. That will be the inevitable result if we are not able to bring reform to the Social Security plan.

So, 8 percent across-the-board, holding defense spending harmless, that will get us pretty close to a balanced budget. That is 8 percent plus or minus about half a percent. Closer numbers are coming in in the next few days.

Now, the question is, over here as I listen to the people on the other side of the aisle, they don't seem to trust the free markets. In fact, I don't know that they understand the free markets. But the question for the American people, Madam Speaker, is do you trust government or do you trust free markets? Do you trust them when it comes to who is going to do the best job of managing and controlling your money?

I will submit that the people that earn the money ought to have control of the money, and they will spend it better than government spends it almost every time. When it comes to health care, they need control of their own health care. They have to be able to control their own destiny, to have the freedom of choice to decide where they want to invest their health care dollars.

I appreciate the President coming here to this floor and speaking from the location where you are, Madam Speaker, about the need to provide for full deductibility for health insurance premiums, at least for those with under $15,000 in health insurance premiums.

We have had a pretty good and healthy history with employer-based health care plans, but it is not enough. We have too many American people that are not insured for health care. If we can give them full deductibility of their health care benefits so they can make that deduction and make the calculation on their bottom line and determine it is better for them to be insured than not be insured, we will have, instead of having 47 million people uninsured, we will have far less uninsured, and this country is better off and people will be making more decisions individually between them and their doctor.

I want the American people to negotiate with their doctor, every individual American to have that personal relationship and be able to control that account and have an insurance policy that they know and understand and one that is fully deductible and one that is portable; one that even though the employer may contribute to the premium, they can take it with them when they go from job to job, which there is more job moving now than in the history of this country.

I want the American people to have a Health Savings Account, Madam Speaker, that they can invest money in; that goes in tax-free, and then as the money rolls out that is spent back into premiums, in major medical health care and having regular annual tests to monitor their health situation, so that we have a healthy America with all the right incentives that are set up, rather than the perverse incentives being set up.

Then one day, having those Americans that are young today, they could put a little over $5,000 into their Health Savings Account annually and manage their health care and get the tests done, watch their weight, exercise, abstain from tobacco, minimize their alcohol use and have a healthy lifestyle, those Americans will arrive at retirement with six figures times something in their Health Savings Account.

Madam Speaker, it is my view and my vision that that day will come when there are hundreds of thousands of dollars wrapped up in individual Health Savings Accounts that haven't been used because they have a healthy lifestyle, and they have been insured for catastrophic insurance and had enough money to take care of the deductible in order to do that, and saved hundreds and thousands of dollars in their health insurance premiums. When they arrive at 65 and qualify for Medicare, we can look at them and say, well, Joe and Sally, you have done pretty well. You have taken care of your health and you have got this nice nest egg in your Health Savings Account. And let's just say it is half a million dollars, just to put a big number up there on the board, and let's just say at age 65 they can negotiate for a paid up health insurance plan, Madam Speaker, for the balance of their life that would substitute for Medicare.

Let's just say the Federal Government can step in there and say, you know what we are going to help subsidize that? We would like to buy you down on that. We can get together on that. Out of your $500,000 and our Federal Treasury, we will put together some money so that we can provide a paid health insurance plan, and that paid up health insurance plan would substitute for Medicare, and the rest of your life you would be covered under that, kind of like an annuity that takes care of your health care.

Then, let's just say that that takes $250,000 out of the $500,000 that happens to be in the Health Savings Account by the time Joe and Sally, who are now at the young age, arrive at 65 and qualify for Medicare, now they have a quarter of a million dollars left over. What we

would they do that? My answer would be whatever you so choose. You have managed your lives well. You have been fortunate. You have a strong Health Savings Account. You provided a paid up health insurance plan for the rest of your life, you and our Medicare funding has supplemented to create that. Now we want to reward you and let you take the money out of your Health Savings Account, travel the world, will it to your kids, do whatever you would like to do.

Madam Speaker, who could be opposed to such a thing? I would submit there will be many on this side of the aisle that will be opposed to such a thing because they don't want independence for the American people. They don't have confidence in the judgment of the American people. They want dependence for the American people. They want the American people to be dependent so they can come back to Congress and say I need you. Set me up a health care plan and tax my neighbor, tax that rich person, punish them for their productivity. Give me some of the benefits of that. They set up this class warfare which empowers them politically. That is the side of the aisle, the psychology that comes there.

Then, Madam Speaker, as I watch this clock tick down, there are a few other pieces of subject matter that need to be addressed. One of them was brought up by our group here in the previous hour, and that was the issue of energy.

I know that we have disagreed consistently on what we should do to develop American energy sources. My view is we need to develop our American energy sources. Every place where we can legitimately do so in an environmentally friendly fashion, we should open up American energy.

We have at least 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore, and most of that is offshore around Florida and some in the gulf that is not Florida. 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas; and yet we sit here, and last fall, last minute in our lame duck session we opened up a tiny little sliver of offshore drilling.

We have mineral rights out to 200 miles, and yet the idea is if we would put a gas well down at 199 miles out, somebody that was planning on going to Florida to sit on the beach would hear about that and decide, well, I know I can't see 199 miles out offshore, but somehow I would know that was out there so I don't want to sit on a beach that has somebody drawing natural gas off a platform that is invisible to me and environmentally friendly.

And, by the way, there has been no gas well that has ever polluted anything anytime. If there has ever been a gas well eruption, it went off into the atmosphere. And so it is not an environmental issue; and because they are out so far from the shoreline it is not a scenery issue, which is no excuse anyway, Madam Speaker. It is a political issue.

Here in this country we have people who are environmentalists who jump on the environmental band wagon and then they oppose anything that they decide could have an argument that would be against the environment, and they do so so they can raise political money and they can support political candidates, and they do so in defiance of rationale and they do so in defiance of logic.

Again, they have set aside this Western Civilization tenet of the age of reason, deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning says, well, if you have a lot of natural gas offshore in Florida and if you can only see about 12 miles offshore, and even if you could see those rigs out there, it doesn't matter to me, I could sit on the beach with a rig out there, it is something to look at. But it is beyond where they could see.

Would you not in a deductively reasoning way, Madam Speaker, go in there and explore for that oil and the gas and open that up and bring that natural gas into the United States and produce all the things we do, plastics and fertilizer? I mean, the cost of our fertilizer is the cost of our food. The nitrogen fertilizer that goes in, 90 percent of the input comes from natural gas. So you can't grow anything without nitrogen. And our corn that produces our ethanol is founded in a nitrogen base.

So if we are going to be able to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, we have got to have more natural gas to produce the fertilizer. And we can go out there and explore for that and have American energy coming up out of the bottom of the ocean and pumping it into the United States and turning it into fertilizer and heating our homes and our factories and using it to produce all kinds of a myriad of products. But somehow the environmentalists have blocked that all down, not because it is rational, not because they can deductively reason that it makes sense, but simply because there is some visceral instinct that says we think we can raise some campaign dollars and we can get some people to oppose that.

And, by the way, if we are emotional about it, they won't even stop and think. Which is the truth, Madam Speaker. They didn't stop and think about ANWR, either. And I did. And I thought, well, if this is perhaps today's largest energy reserve that the United States of America has, and if I am seeing commercials that show the Sierra Club and they put out this commercial that shows this pristine alpine forest and they say don't go up there and explore in ANWR because you will be destroying this pristine alpine forest, and I looked at that and I thought some of that doesn't add up so good for me, Madam Speaker.

So I went up there to ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR, traveled all over it, flew over it, down low, looked for everything, looked for wildlife, hours in the air at the lowest altitude they let us fly looking out the windows trying to find massive caribou herd or maybe reindeer herd or a lot of polar bears or maybe some seals swimming around out there. And in all of that flight back and forth and looking down and all of us looking out the windows, Madam Speaker, we saw two white birds and four musk oxen. And those four musk oxen were standing there with their heads down doing nothing, of course it was cold, and they weren't disturbed by anything going on.

Madam Speaker, I would submit that some of the environmentalists on the other side of the aisle, and one comes to mind would perhaps be my friend Dennis Kucinich from Ohio, go up there with me sometime and let's look out the window of the plane and fly along and see if you can point out the oil fields that are there in the North Slope, the North Slope that went through all the court action back in the early 1970s, the beginning of the Alaska pipeline, and point out there on the North Slope where are these oil wells; where is this desecration to our environment; where is the desecration to the scenery. Show it to me.

I will fly you over the whole thing, Madam Speaker, and look down. And I can point them out now because I have been there and I have been to school, and I will tell you there is not a single derrick sticking out of the air like you imagine, no Texas oil rig from the 1930s. There is not a single pump jack sitting there cranking out the oil out of the ground and leaking a little oil back into the ground. It doesn't exist. The only thing you will see, and now I will tip you off if you want to go, you might be able to see it as I tell you what you are going to be looking for, and that is a rock workover pad maybe 50 feet wide by 100 feet long, maybe a little longer, that sits up about 3 feet above the arctic tundra, white stone like limestone, probably is, a pad that you can bring a workover rig on if you need to work the well in the wintertime.

And as they come in to work those wells, they will come in on ice roads, ice roads that will melt in the summertime that don't damage the tundra, and they will set the rig up. And the pumps are all submersible. You can't see the well, you can't see the casing, you can't see the pump, and you can't see the collection tubes.

That is all out of the sights and minds of the people that are up there because this is an environmentally friendly development of the North Slope.

Madam Speaker, we can do better in the development, even better in the development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We have technology to do directional drilling, and that will reduce our footprint considerably.

So why would we, the American people, insist upon going over to the Middle East and buying oil from, some are

friends, many are enemies, enriching them, making us more dependent on Middle Eastern oil while we have these massive supplies of energy within our own country? Why would we not, Madam Speaker, develop American energy supplies. Why would we not go down into the Gulf of Mexico and open up the Chevron fields down there that have been found that might increase the supply of our energy by 50 percent, just what is found offshore in the gulf south and west of New Orleans, the Chevron fields. Why would we not do that?

Why would this Congress, Madam Speaker, pass legislation that would change the deal that these companies have with the United States of America and say to our best friend oil companies who are developing this energy: we are going to have to renegotiate your leases. We thought it was a good deal when we made it, but now we know something that we didn't know then. So we want to scrap and tear up the leases that you had, the ones that gave you enough profit that you put some incentive into research and development and the exploration, and we want that money, we want that profit. We as a Federal Government want to tax your income more. And then if you don't do that, then we are not going to let you ever sign another lease with the Federal Government or the United States.

What are you going to do, Madam Speaker, if you are Chevron or if you are Exxon or if you are Shell or any other company that is one of those great oil companies here in the United States if you get that kind of message from this Congress? I will submit, Madam Speaker, that what you would do is you would take your investments over to foreign countries. You would go offshore in Australia, you would go somewhere else, you would go up in the North Sea, you would go somewhere offshore in West Africa and put your investments there where they are safer. They might be nationalized by some tyrannical government, but they are probably not going to come in and change the deal. They are probably not going to come in and confiscate your investment like this legislation that passed off the floor of this Congress last week or the week before. When the United States of America makes a deal, Madam Speaker, they have got to keep the deal.

We saw oil prices go up, we saw barrel price go up to $75 a barrel. We watched it now drop down to the low $50 a barrel. The reason for that is because the supply has gotten greater on the marketplace. The biggest reasons for that is because there was profit in it, that companies that were making money were reinvesting that profit in research and development and producing more oil and putting more of it on the market. We need to thank those companies that have provided this supply for the United States, not punish them for the extra taxes, because these American companies have made us less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, not more dependent. And the actions of this Congress in this past month have made the United States of America more dependent on Middle Eastern oil, not less dependent on Middle Eastern oil. And that is the difference.

What we have passed has hurt America's economy, and what we need to do is allow the companies that invest in research and development to make some profit so they will do more of the same. And if there is more energy on the market, then energy will be cheaper.

So I will submit, Madam Speaker, that we need more BTUs in the marketplace; we need to grow the size of the energy pie. The more energy there is in the marketplace, the cheaper it all will be. And we have to have incentives for business to step in and do the right thing. That is the natural part that we should understand when we understand free enterprise capitalism.

If anybody has a little difficulty handling that, they should pick up a copy of ``Wealth of Nations'' written by Adam Smith published in 1776. He was an economist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and he laid out the principles of free enterprise capitalism, free market economics, and he understood human nature. And all of those things have to be tied together to make these work. We can't defy human nature, Madam Speaker. We must respect and honor human nature.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, February 6, 2007, at 10:30 a.m., for morning hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and the honor of being recognized to address you on the floor of the House of the United States House of Representatives, the people's House, this people's House and this new day, this new dawn that was pledged to come to this 110th Congress.

As you may or may not know, Mr. Speaker, I spend many hours here on the floor in these Special Orders and in debate on bills and in 1- minutes and in 5-minutes as we engage in this dialogue and raise the issue of what is good for America.

One of the very important things about determining what's good for America is to have a process for America that is conducive to the right result, and the right result in most cases, we will agree, I believe, would be the will of the people: the will of the people properly informed, the will of people properly educated, and the will of the people that have access through the first amendment rights to all the information and all the knowledge possible.

But, then, I would point out that we do not live in a democracy. As much as I have said about the reflection of the voice or the people here in the people's House, each one of us does have an obligation to listen carefully and attentively to our constituents, to the people in this country, and not just confined within our districts, but to listen to the Nation as a whole and focus on the interests of our district. But sometimes we have to put the Nation ahead of, sometimes, the will of our district.

But this is a constitutional Republic that we serve in, not a democracy. I point out that our Founding Fathers had a significant concern, and I will say even a literal fear of democracies.

On one of my earlier trips out here to Washington, DC, quite some years ago, I visited the National Archives on my first visit. As I waited in line to go around and be able to stand there and gaze upon the Declaration of Independence, upon the Constitution, upon the Bill of Rights in their original form, the original documents that our Founding Fathers placed their hands to and pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, as I waited to view that for the first time, on display at the National Archives was a display of Greek artifacts.

The Greek artifacts that had come from 2- to 3,000 years ago in the era where the closest thing that there has been to a pure democracy from the standpoint of the Greek city-states, where of-age males would gather together, and they would debate; they would debate the issues of the day. They had a number of things they put in place for stopgap. One of the things they found out was, you will recognize the term ``demagogue.''

``Demagogue'' is a term that we use occasionally in our vernacular, perhaps here on the floor reluctantly, but also throughout our dialogue across the country. There is not a lot of history on demagogues. It is hard to Google demagogue and to become an expert, to look under amazon.com and to come up with real books that are written on real facts that identify demagogues in the Greek era. They are almost nonexistent in this Nation's literature, at least so far as I have been able to identify.

But what the Founders knew and what young Americans growing up today and, really, all of its citizens should have an understanding of is that in that purer form of democracy in the Greek-city state, they had Greek demagogues who had such an oratorical skill that they could stand up in front of that small coliseum, so to speak, and make their pitch in such a passionate, logical and rational way that it would move the emotions of the Greeks within that city.

They would not necessarily analyze the information behind that debate. They would not necessarily analyze the data, the calculations. They maybe were not even thinking for themselves. But what they would do is, they would

listen to the demagogue that had that ability to move the masses with their dialogue. That, sometimes, in fact, often, took the Greeks off on a path that was not necessarily the best path for them, because they didn't stop, step back and think about where they were going. They were moved by the emotion.

So a demagogue would be someone, then, who had that ability and that skill. When they were identified as detrimental to the best interests of the city-state, then they had a blackball system. That blackball system, again, as I recall it, was that they would each go through, and there would be a, let us call it a black marble and a white marble, and there would be one large gourd to drop the voting marble in and then one to discard your empty in. So each voting member of a city-state got two, a black marble and a white marble.

As they went through there and as they dropped that marble in, they said, I want to keep this individual here in the city-state because I like his position, or he is good for us, or he helps out with the knowledge he has, whatever the reason might be, the same way we vote for or against Presidential candidates in a lot of ways. They would drop a white ball if they wanted to keep him, into the voting.

It would actually be a piece of pottery, a smaller-necked piece of pottery, actually. Then they would discard the black ball in another piece of pottery. So no one knew how they voted; it was a secret ballot.

But if that demagogue received three black balls dropped down in the voting piece of pottery, then that would be all that was required from the entire city to banish that demagogue from the city for 7 years. That was one of the ways they protected themselves from the emotions of a democracy.

Mr. Speaker, I bring this up because quite often, I think, in the classrooms of America, it is taught consistently and continuously that this is a democracy. We toss the term around, we are in a democracy. This is a democracy that goes on over and over and over again, and I always argue, no, this is a constitutional Republic.

Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it. That is why we are a constitutional Republic. That is why we are called Representatives here in the United States Congress, because we each represent about 600,000 people.

It isn't the 600,000 people, those that are qualified and registered, those that go to vote will select each one of us, and then it is our job to be their voice here. But the first thing that we owe our constituents is not to put our finger in the wind and listen to the polls. It isn't our job necessarily to put our ear to the ground and try to stay ahead of the moving public opinion, but it is our job to listen to that public opinion.

It is also our job to be involved in all of the dialogue here and have access to all this information that is available to us here in this capital city, the information center of the world, from my experience. We owe our constituents and all American people our best judgment as we serve in this constitutional Republic.

The voice of these Members here in Congress is essential. It is essential for the functionality of a republic, and it is essential for the functionality of this great Nation. In this system of government that we have now shaped, a tried and true system for more than 200 years, we found a way to use this process of gathering the information and the data and the input from our constituents who come through my office every day. And I sit down with them every day that we are open for business here, and it is for me to gather that kind of input and information. Then I exchange back with them the things that I know about policy from sitting here.

Then we have discussions about, well, here is our budget, these are our limitations, these are the policy questions. Here is the legality, here are some of the constitutional constraints that we have, and your needs are this. So how do we shape this together so that we can come forward with a proposal that meets the needs of my constituents or anyone's constituents, stays within the framework of our budget and the Constitution and moves this Nation forward to our destiny?

Those are the questions that we are obligated to struggle to resolve here in this Congress, and we have developed a process by which we have many, many public hearings. We bring forward in the public hearings witnesses that testify into the record under oath, so that we can rely on the accuracy and the honesty and the veracity of their statements. That is some of the information.

A lot of the other government reports and other data that come from nongovernmental organizations and individual citizens and the letters that come every day and the e-mails that come every day and the phone calls that come every day, we put that all together. We sort that. We synthesize that. We go to the subcommittee or the full committee for the hearings. We ask the appropriate questions so that we can probe into these issues to represent our constituents.

Then, after the hearing process is done, then a bill comes forward, a bill comes out through the subcommittee process for a markup, and that markup always must allow legitimate germane amendments in order. It is not just a theory; it is a tried and true proven fact. The reason for amendments is to improve the legislation.

The first term that you run into, as any, one step forward, to become a legislator, whatever level of government might be, whatever political subdivision it might be, is the law of unintended consequences. That is what happens when any of us, most often in our youthful idealism, come charging into the legislative process. We say, I have a law I want to pass, this is what I want it to be.

You write that down, put it into the right format, and you submit that into the process, and immediately the wake-up call is, well, what about this implication and that? What happens when you unfund this side of it. What happens when you don't have law enforcement on the other side? What happens when you punish more people than you were trying to help because you didn't think of all the aspects?

Well, that is the law of unintended consequences. That is what happens when you have a legislative process that circumvents or usurps this tried and true, more than two-centuries-old process that we have here in the United States Congress.

This constitutional Republic cannot sustain itself if we do not have a regular order of doing business that guarantees the rights of each Member to be heard, for each Member to bring their judgment to the hearing process, to probe the witnesses, to put into the record the background that they want to gather from the witnesses they choose, as well, to offer amendments at committee and subcommittee level and at the level up at the Rules Committee.

This is all a process to perfect legislation, to reduce, and, ideally, eliminate that Murphy's Law of unintended consequences, and also to improve the quality of the legislation so that it is far more effective than it may be as if just one person with their limited vision, their limited knowledge, limited background and limited understanding could bring to this legislative body.

I have to point out, the system and the process that I have described here is anything, but what has been taking place in this 110th Congress. This is the 110th Congress that was promised to be the most open and the term, I believe, was ``democratic Congress in history.'' The leadership was going to set up a system that had rules, that allowed for amendments at every level, that allowed for open dialogue, that allowed for open hearings. In fact, the Speaker of the House is clearly on record time after time after time, making those kinds of pledges.

Well, I will point out that has not been the case. I will get back to the facts of that here in a moment.

What I would like to do is illustrate this poster that tells us what has been going on here in this new 110th Congress, which began on the 4th day of January when we organized and first brought forth the rules.

The opinion that this Congress had to live by was the promise, campaign promise, and they won the majority. In the first 100 hours, six pieces of legislation shall pass; we will do this for the American people, was the argument.

So we have two different ways of keeping time. The American people would wonder, well, the first 100 hours, if that promise of doing these six pieces of legislation in the first 100 hours is so sacrosanct that you have to suspend, maybe temporarily, and maybe not temporarily, the regular order that we call it here. This really is the entire process that I have described: the suspension of hearings, subcommittee meetings, full committee meetings, rules, consideration of amendments, and amendments being allowed on the floor, being debated, so the American people can understand what this body is doing.

That entire process has been suspended, and it has been suspended because the argument was made by the incoming leadership that those six pieces of legislation couldn't be passed within the first 100 hours if we went to a regular order and allowed any Member to have any voice in trying to improve any piece of that legislation.

So here we are this first 100 hours. I thought, well, all right, if the promise of 100 hours is sacrosanct, and it is so important that this legislation that has never been done in the history of America has to be done in the first 100 hours, if that is so important, then we ought to know at least what the criteria are for turning it on and turning it off. We ought to be able to know when that 100 hours is over, when we will go back to regular order, and the people who have campaigned and been elected to legitimately represent their 600,000 people will have a choice in this Congress to improve and perfect legislation.

So I started the clock, and I have kept this clock from the beginning. You know, there are only two legitimate ways to count time. One of them would be the 110th Congress began when we gaveled in here on the 4th day of January. You could just let the clock run all through the day, the night, the next day, and it will just essentially tick when we get sine die, gavel out of the 110th Congress roughly 2 years from now.

I don't think that is necessarily a fair and legitimate way, that keeping track of 100 hours is sacrosanct. We may give them a little bit different way to do that. Let us make it the legitimate way of keeping time, was my proposal.

Fairly simply, when the gavel comes in here in the morning, and we gavel in to start our day, and we start with the prayer and the pledge, that is the beginning of this congressional day. When we finish these Special Orders and there is a motion to adjourn, and you adjourn this Chamber, click, with the stopwatch, time is over, that is how many hours it is for that day.

Well, the Pelosi clock has a different way of keeping time. But just by comparison--and first I want to point out that those six pieces of legislation were passed not in the form I thought they were going to come to the floor in, probably not the form that the American people thought that they would be passed in, but a form that had those six titles of that legislation that came to this floor, passed within the first real 100 hours of legislation.

And that ended on a Friday at 11:44 a.m. when the real clock ticked over at 100 hours. But the Pelosi clock which was on the Web page, that was put up so that they would have all the time that they wanted to have to get this legislation done, and we just took a little picture of that. That clock went to 42 hours and 25 minutes. That is how much, Mr. Speaker, had been expired on the Pelosi clock.

So one can only presume that this clock was a slow clock. The Pelosi office refuses to grant us any criteria as to when they turn their clock on and when they turn their clock off. The only thing we know is this clock was not going to run up to 100 hours until those six pieces of legislation were passed. So it is kind of a backwards figuring thing, but now it has been pulled down from the Web site of the Speaker, but that was the end of the game.

So when that 100 hours is over, the request was give us some time, give us some patience. We need to have the suspension of our rules. We are going to have to go to this draconian process that no Member has a voice in anything until these six pieces of legislation are passed. We are going to have to go to that to get our six pieces passed in the first 100 hours.

Well, the six pieces are passed. The 100 hours now, it is about 148- point-something actually, where it is going to be 149 when we finish this up. That is how many hours that we have invested here in this 110th Congress. But we are still under draconian martial law in this Congress.

We are bringing to the floor of the United States Congress tomorrow, and I don't mean me, but the leadership on the other side of the aisle is bringing an omnibus spending bill. That omnibus spending bill is coming to the floor, $463 billion, without a single hearing, without a single subcommittee or committee meeting, without a markup, without an amendment; and we are going to spend $463 billion out of here tomorrow on 30 minutes of debate from the dissenting side and 30 minutes of debate from the proponents' side, and the taxpayers are going to take the hit.

And I feel sorry, Mr. Speaker, for the American people. And I feel really sorry for the freshmen that came to this Congress, especially the large class of Democrats who no doubt said, I will be your voice in Congress. I promise you that you haven't been represented well. I will be effective. When I go there, I will be heard. I am going to delve into all of this policy and I will be there. You will see that come out in the language. It will go into law.

But to this day come to the floor and I will yield to anyone, any freshman especially, who could come down here and say, I went to a hearing and I offered an amendment in a subcommittee markup or in a full committee or I am going to be allowed to offer an amendment here on the floor and it is going to improve some legislation.

I think there was a freshman that ran some legislation here last week. I just don't know if she ever got to see the language before she came to the floor to be the sitting duck for the criticism, for the narrow debate that we had.

That is the tone of where we are. The American people are being cheated by this process. And I will be very happy to yield to the man who is a judge of that, Judge Louie Gohmert from Texas.

I am going to have to guess. I am going to turn this back to you for a definitive answer. My speculation would be, Mr. Gohmert, that Duma probably didn't see it and maybe we get to see it for a pro forma vote, or am I wrong?

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas for that insightful input. In other words, he is so gentle and subtle when he said the Soviets kept their promise because they didn't make one.

And the thing that I am addressing here, Mr. Speaker, is that there were a lot of promises made, and the integrity in this system, that is what you have to function in this body. We have to give our word and we have got to keep our word. And when we do that, this system functions. When you give your word and you don't keep your word, the system breaks down. And the people that pay the price for that are the American people.

So I would submit that all of that whole series of promises were subordinated to the 100 hours' promise, which turned out to be 42 hours and 25 minutes. Fine. I am going to grant that that stuff got done in 100 real hours.

Actually, it got done just underneath the 100 real hours. But the clock has ticked over by anybody's measure. It is over 100 hours. And there was never a justification for it anyway. I mean, I want to be on record in this Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. There is not a justification for expediting the process at the expense of the voice of the people.

But that is what has been done. Well, it has been done at least under the promise that when the 100 hours is up and the six pieces of legislation are passed, we are going to then try to keep our promise on the most open Congress in history. As we know, you cannot expedite legislation very well in the process that we have now and be able to improve it.

So what they have done is they have brought this 150-or-more-page bill that was just first available last night at 11:03 p.m. on the Internet. Some of our staff had actually quit work by that time and gone home to bed; so some of them didn't find that until this morning. But of those 150 or 160 pages, in there is 463-point-something billion dollars of spending and it has changed a fair amount of line items, and what it does is it increases the spending from the Republican plan by $7 billion, Mr. Speaker. Seven billion. And it changes the resources that are committed. They go back to the districts in some places.

We even have some locations, in our short little time of looking at this, where we believe that because they have underfunded and this budget has gone on now for almost half a year that there will be some agencies that may well have to pay back because of this omnibus spending bill. And they will come, Mr. Speaker, to the floor tomorrow, and they will say, Well, this is a CR. This is a continuing resolution. And a continuing resolution being that you pass a resolution that says we are going to keep funding government at the current level and all of its line item appropriations until such time as we can get the Senate to act.

And I have to say that the Senate needs to act. We passed nearly every single one of the appropriation bills last year, sent them over to the Senate, where they sat. And so that is one of the reasons that we end up with this ugly monstrosity of an omnibus spending bill.

But it would be one thing to pass a continuing resolution and say that stuff has been through the subcommittee, committee, the markup process, been to the floor, at Appropriations. We had worked our will on all of that. It is a different Congress, but we had worked our will in the 109th Congress. It would be one thing to pass a continuing resolution to meet those standards because that has been due diligence at least. It is quite another to take all of these dollars, roll them all up, package them up, rewrite them, and then throw them out here on the narrowest of notice, $463 billion, and then say, well, there won't be any input and there won't be any amendments and it is going to be strictly an up-or-down vote, and you get 30 minutes to tell us why it is a bad idea and try to convince our people whose arms are twisted up behind their shoulder blades that they are going to have to vote for it.

And there they sit with a large class of freshmen. Some of them served in State legislatures. In fact, I would speculate that most of them have. And I would also speculate that not a single one of them has experienced a process that was so closed in its loop, that was so narrow in its scope, that was so draconian that the collective wisdom of 435 Members of Congress and all the staff and all the constituents and all the media input all goes for naught.

I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia, and I will pick up whenever I need to. Thank you, Mr. Gingrey.

Mr. Speaker how much time do I have left?

I thank the esteemed gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Phil, for his input. I did not mean to imply that I was short of time to deal with it. So if you feel the urge a little later as well, Mr. Gingrey, I am open to whatever dialogue you may have to bring to this floor. I appreciate that input.

We are here to represent the American people. We each represent roughly 600,000, for each of us 435 Members here in the United States Congress. There is not anybody in this Congress that would concede a point that there is anybody's constituents that deserve more representation than theirs.

I will just say it this way. There are no one's constituents in America that deserve more representation than my constituents. And, conversely, there are no constituents out there in America that deserve less. That means you have got to have an open process that provides for open dialogue, that provides for opportunities along the way to perfect legislation to avoid unintended consequences and to improve legislation to perfection if we possibly can.

That is the process that is absolutely missing. It has been totally usurped. It has been a rug jerked out from underneath this entire Congress. And the promise of an open process is a broken promise. The 100 hours are up, and no one knows that better than Mr. Feeney from Florida. I yield to Mr. Feeney.

Mr. Speaker, just an inquiry then. What are the odds of the people within your stadiums in Florida with 60,000 or more people in them, what are the odds of them paying Federal taxes compared to that of American Samoa?

Thank you, Mr. Feeney, for adding the clarity to this issue and putting the numbers down and for also listing into the Congressional Record the seven points, any one of which qualifies as an earmark, all of which will be breaking the promise tomorrow, and 2,000 times larger than that large earmark that 80-some percent of America understands as the Bridge to Nowhere.

I would point out that there is a way to address this. And I have not been necessarily a critic of well-managed earmarks, as long as they are within the budget and as long as it is a Member initiative that actually is researched and debated, and it is open and it is public, there is an opportunity to go in and strike it out.

But the problem with the earmarks has been, they show up after it is too late, and the bill comes to the floor, and there is not time to read the bill, and not time to prepare amendments; or they come up in a conference, and then here comes the conference report with a whole stack of earmarks in there that are agreed to by the conference committee, but not aware, not made aware to the rest of the Members, and no access to it.

So I looked at this. And I thought, how can we fix this? And we have done some things with earmarks. But last year, in the middle of this, about this time a year ago, I began grinding and churning my way through and created an act called the Cut Act. And I have drafted and filed that information; I believe that both gentlemen here on the floor are cosponsors of that Cut Act.

But what that Act does, Mr. Speaker, is it recognizes that there will be legislation passed off the floor of this Congress, and that Members will not have an opportunity to act on that legislation, on that appropriation, and that there will be earmarks in there that are either identified or may be not identified, but maybe they are objectionable to the American people.

And it recognizes, Mr. Speaker, that this is an instantaneous Information Age if we give access on the Internet to the people in this country, all of whom have access to the Internet in one form or another.

We have not done that. We need to put sunlight on everything that we do. We need to let them have real-time bloggers be able to access all of the bills that are filed, all of the amendments that are filed. They need to be able to track this whole process. But then once we get that system set up and we provide sunlight, the Cut Act allows, recognizes that those appropriations bills will find their way over to the President's desk, and he will sign them to keep this government running.

And this is that there will be a whole collection of objectionable, irresponsible spending to projects that comes to mind. The bridge was referenced by Mr. Feeney. The Cowgirl Hall of Fame strikes me as something that could be privately funded if we need one. There are a number of others out there that are objectionable earmarks. But if we pass the CUT Act, and the President signs the appropriation bill and the bloggers light up and they start sending this in and it becomes a national issue, or even just a tip that goes to a certain Member of Congress, like Mr. Gingrey for example, we could, under the CUT Act, once each quarter, four times a year, provide under the rule so that a bill would be brought to the floor that would allow for the rescission of any one of those individual line items.

So the Shell bill might come to the floor. Any Member would bring an amendment that would say I want to eliminate the funding for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. We put it up here on the board. We vote it up or down. We do that to every single line item if we chose to do that, and it might take a long time to debate that first bill.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Well, again I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) for reminding me about some of the earmarks that we have out there. And the list is long. And my point on this is the American people can make that list a lot longer. And at least in theory, any piece of appropriation that comes across this floor that makes it through the process should have the majority support of the House of Representatives. It ought to have the majority support of the United States Senate. We ought to agree on that number, and it should go to the President for his signature. That is the process that is structured within our constitution. That is the process as the American people envision it. That is the process that we are struggling to attain here, that will not be, even presumed to be happening tomorrow when this--not a CR, but this omnibus spending bill which is a catch-all for every single appropriation that goes into discretionary spending for the rest of--until the first day of October is when this is over.

And, again, I am so sorry for the freshmen who come here that right now don't know any better, and they

aren't even outraged. They have been led, taken by the hand and led down the primrose path. And I have offered them time and again, come down here. I would be happy to yield. Tell me what legislation you have had a voice in. What have you made a difference in? Did you make the promise to represent your constituents or didn't you? Yes, you did. Obviously everybody makes that promise. So didn't you have some high and shining ideals? When you see the flag go up over the Capitol doesn't that make your heart beat a little faster? Don't you get that feeling in your stomach and that swelling sense of pride when you look up at the dome and that you are here to represent the American people of the United States Congress?

But my news to you is you are not representing them. You are not being allowed to represent them. You aren't even a voice. You haven't been heard. Your input is not there. The expertise that you bring with your background, whatever it might be, has no value in this place. It is just a handful of people in the cabal that decide what is coming down here, the same ones that make the promise that there is going to be that opportunity, freshman, for you to be able to have that kind of input.

So, Mr. Speaker, I illustrate that and the absence of rebuttal here on this floor is confirmation of my statement of my position and that of Mr. Gingrey and that of Mr. Feeney here this afternoon. The absence of rebuttal speaks loudly and it echoes in my ears.

But on the earmark part of this, that is why I drafted the CUT Act, so that this Congress could be able to eliminate any line item that did not have the majority support of the House and the Senate and the President, and it recognizes that the President would sign an appropriations bill and that money would get off his desk and go to the agencies, wherever it might be, and it takes them sometimes the whole year to spend the last dollar. And at any point where we rescinded that funding, it would go to reduce the national debt automatically, and then that fund would no longer be available to whatever entity was about to receive it.

That is one way that gives Congress, the CUT Act gives Congress a line item veto. And that is the piece of policy that we need to get resolved here in this Congress, along with many others. But the open process, and this is going to be and has been so far, Mr. Speaker, a very closed process, a process so closed that I will point out that, not just a matter of information, I mean, I have sent my staff down to the majority leader's office to try to find out what the criteria was for the clock, or what is the criteria for providing and offering amendments; when is this draconian martial-law going to be lifted, this open process that is promised.

And I want to point out, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper) was doing a national television program here on the news, the beginning of the 110th Congress, a couple of days before we gaveled in. And they said to him, but you are going to suspend all the rules and you are going to drive all this legislation through without input from Members on either side. And he got kind of a funny look on his face and he said, well, just please, will you give us a little patience. Have some patience and let us get through this process. And once we get these six bills passed, you are going to see the most open, democratic Congress in history.

Mr. Cooper, I am waiting for you, too. I would be very happy to yield.

That is not the case today. The hundred hours is clearly up. The process is not open, and the American people are not being heard. They didn't decide they were going to anoint some people with a royalty position, whether they allege that they are the most powerful woman in the world or not. This is a government that rules by the consent of the people. And the people did not give their consent to a process that is not an open process, a process that muzzles 99 percent of the Members in this Congress.

And clearly, they are not here to speak up because they know they don't have a voice and they don't have an argument. And so we are going to continue to push on this process. We are going to go before the Rules Committee. I took an amendment up before the Rules Committee, and there were a number of us that did. We all know the results of that, the charade in the Rules Committee, which is, bring your amendment up. You can offer your amendment up here, but before you come up here, we are going to tell you we are not going to accept a single one, even if it is some kind of revelation. If it is an epiphany that just fixes the whole thing, we are not going to consider it because the meat cleaver has come down.

So we are going through a charade. No amendments, but come here and argue them anyway if you want to and we will sit through this and we will put one or two people up there and we will rotate and we will get through this process. And then we will say, why are you complaining? We had a rules process. You just didn't have any amendments with any merit. Oh, really? No amendments with any merit is the same result as no input into the process, Mr. Speaker. This government cannot function with that.

And I will also point out that the House of Representatives is where all the appropriations has to start. That is what the Constitution says and that is what we need to follow. But this bill, this omnibus bill, is going to go over to the Senate, over to those 100 Senators over there, and you can bet that they are going to be offering amendments and they are going to be improving this omnibus spending bill, and they are going to be fixing this all the way through their process. So their voice will be heard. And then we will get an amended omnibus bill back here again, and I would submit this question, will then, Mr. Speaker, will it come to the floor again with no opportunity for amendments again? And if that is the case, why have we ceded the improvement process to the United States Senate?

We are the hot cup of coffee here, and they are the saucer to cool it in. We are supposed to be the quick reaction force that has the elections every 2 years, so that vigor that comes with a new freshman class and that risk of being up for re-election every 2 years, it keeps us tuned in with our fingers on the pulse of the American people who can be heard in the legislative process.

The hot cup of coffee, the quick reaction force, the storm troops that are going to come in and fix things quickly, especially in the change-over of a majority, Mr. Speaker, is just what our Founding Fathers envisioned when they drafted our Constitution and set up this miraculous system of government that we have. But the leadership in this House of Representatives has handed over the amendment process to the United States Senate which they have a legitimate claim to their version of it, we also have a legitimate claim to ours and a constitutional duty to do so that has been usurped by this decision to make a promise and have that promise of 100 hours be sacrosanct and then like that draconian approach so much of not being challenged that they go ahead and shut the clock off at 42 hours and 25 minutes.

And we could go on in perpetuity until the American people revolt at the polls. That is what is coming. You are going to see mistake after mistake after mistake. One of those examples would be the Minimum Wage Act, American Samoa, and being exempted from the Minimum Wage Act of all of The states and territories of the United States of America, one place on the map with 60,000 people, we find out after the fact, after the minimum wage bill is passed, is exempted from the minimum wage. Well, if you can legislate wages to go up and help people, which is the argument that came out of this side of the aisle continually, Mr. Speaker, then why can't you do so in American Samoa? What is wrong with them that they don't deserve a raise like everybody else got in America that was working for a minimum wage? And the answer that I get back is, well, we had to do that because the tuna market there won't sustain this. The international competition won't sustain higher wages, so we would lose that to Asia or maybe South American companies that can produce that tuna cheaper than they can in the American Samoa.

Well, that is called competition. And how is it that Democrats can understand the effect of competition and the deleterious effect of minimum wage on a small business, large business in a small microcosm of a location like American Samoa? They can understand

it when it is a microcosm, but they can't understand it when it is 300 million people in a macrocosm. It is the same principle that applies, Mr. Speaker. But that is a fatal flaw of this approach of a closed process rather than an open process. That is what happens, Mr. Speaker, when we don't allow for amendments. And then things start to smell fishy.

What was the reason?

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey). And I will say that my sympathy and heart goes out to especially freshmen Members of Congress when they go back home to their town hall meetings, and I would just ask you, out there, and Mr. Speaker, I convey that message to the people in America, that when these freshman especially show up for their first town hall meeting, I would say to the citizens, stand up and ask them, what has been your input? What has been your impact? How have you kept your promise so far? What do you think of the process? What has been your involvement? Have you produced any amendments? Have you done anything to impact this process whatsoever? And their answer is going to be ``no.'' You need to challenge them, Mr. Speaker, to come back here and open up this process.

Mr. Speaker, as always, I am profoundly pleased and honored to have the privilege to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives here in the United States Congress.

I have had the interesting observation here as I listened to the speakers that come from the other side of the aisle that there is another story, the rest of the story is out there, and a number of things need to be discussed, and one of them is what did we actually do here in the first 100 hours, as was referenced by at least three of the speakers.

In the first 100 hours, the point was made that they kept all of their promises that they would keep within the first 100 hours. We are going to disagree as to how we define that and what the results of it were, and I think it is appropriate in this democratic process that we have that is framed under this constitutional republic that we are, that we talk about and have open dialogue and debate. And that was one of the casualties, I would point out, Mr. Speaker, to this accelerated 100-hour process.

The 100-hour promise was something that sounded good politically. It had a nice ring to it. The bell tolled 100 hours, so therefore the image of accomplishing these things for America was going to get done in 100 hours.

Well, 100 hours can be counted a lot of different ways, and some people would have thought that at midnight, December 31, when you heard the band strike up Auld Lang Syne, then the 100 hours would begin and this harder working than ever Congress and more ethical than ever Congress and more open and more democratic than ever Congress was going to go to work, and in the first 4 days and 4 hours would accomplish these things.

No, I did not actually make that point either, Mr. Speaker. I think it is appropriate for us to have a real legitimate method of keeping track of the 100 hours. If that is going to be the one

promise that is sacrosanct, to accomplish these six things in the first 100 hours, then a legitimate clock is a good way to measure that.

So I put up a legitimate clock and kept track of the first 100 hours. And I am going to make this concession at this point, Mr. Speaker, that these six bills, H.R. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, were passed off the floor of this Congress within the first 100 hours of a legitimate clock.

My legitimate clock, and I am going to post this up here for the benefit of the people who are observing this process on the floor, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that a legitimate clock would be a clock that calculated from the moment we gavel in, the gavel in in the morning, the opening prayer, the pledge, and off into this process of floor action, until we gavel out in the evening; set your stop watch, click it on in the morning when the gavel gavels us in, shut it off in the evening when we gavel out, and then keep track of the hours.

If the 100 hours is sacrosanct, if all of the other promises were subordinated to this one, 100-hour promise trumps all, then let's watch that clock closely, because everybody is eager to get to an open process in this Congress.

And I point out also, Mr. Speaker, this first 100 hours has not been an open process. There has not been a legitimate hearing. There has not been a legitimate subcommittee meeting. There hasn't been a legitimate full committee meeting. There hasn't been an amendment accepted. There have been requests to offer amendments. There hasn't been an amendment that has been considered in this Congress. And there has not been a legitimate Rules Committee process that would set the parameters as to what amendments might be considered on this floor, how this debate might move forward.

So the open dialogue and debate, especially my sadness goes out to the freshmen who haven't had a voice in this process. That has all been subordinated to this 100-hour promise, get these things done in the first 100 hours and then give us a little break, Mr. Cooper from Tennessee says. Cut us a little slack on that one. We are going to get around to be an open process. We are going to get around to be a more fair, a more Democratic Congress than we have been.

Well, there is nothing that can be done about it, so I am going to take the gentleman from Tennessee at his word, and many other gentlemen and gentleladies from across the majority party, including the Speaker, at her word. Now, there are some reasons not to take her at her word, but I am going to take her at her word on this 100 hours.

So the clock has now ticked, Mr. Speaker, and I have had the stopwatch on it all along, from gavel in the 110th Congress to gavel out, a real legitimate means of checking the time, and it turns out to be this. Real clock, 100 hours ticked over at 11:44 a.m. today Eastern Standard Time. That was when the 100 hours was up. I would have liked to have heard a bell or whistle or maybe a cannon go off that says now, let's deploy out to our hearings and committee rooms and subcommittee rooms and let's start to consider bills and amendments and let's start having an open debate process and let's start to bring the brains of all of the people that have been elected by the 300 million Americans to bear here so that we can use the resources of the knowledge and the information base from all of our districts to improve legislation. Because if you don't do that, then there is this thing that always shows up in legislation called unintended consequences.

One of the unintended consequences has emerged here easily, and that was the unintended consequence of the political price, at least, that had to be paid for exempting American Samoa from the minimum wage. $3.26 an hour is something that has been labeled sweatshop labor by many people on the other side of the aisle as they demagogued the issue when they were advocating for an increase in the minimum wage. But when it came time to actually put it into play, there was an exemption for American Samoa.

I happen to have a soft spot in my heart for American Samoa. My father spent some time there 60-some years ago during the Second World War and spoke fondly of American Samoans, the people, their heart, their happy spirit, and I appreciate the gentleman who represents American Samoa here on the floor of Congress. But that was an unintended consequence, I believe, that they had to pay politically, because we didn't have an open committee process.

But the real 100 hours clicked over at 11:44 a.m. Now we are at about 102 hours, as I check this clock, Mr. Speaker. But the odd part of it is that there is real time, and then there is Pelosi time, Mr. Speaker. And her clock has only clicked over to 42 hours as of 11:44 this morning. I don't know if she shut it off or not. I don't know how they are actually keeping hours.

We have been checking with her hours on a regular basis throughout the work here in this 110th Congress to try to understand what their rationale is for when they turn their clock on and when they turn their clock off. And they refuse to give us a single criteria of what that measure might be.

So, Mr. Speaker, I can only conclude that this 100-hour clock was if things got bogged down here, was going to have to be a clock that would run out of time when the six pieces of legislation, H.R. 1 through 5, were passed, if they needed to stretch it that far, and that the rules could be changed along the way and when the clock was clicked on and off. I have tried my best to divine the rationale that only gets you to 42 hours, when we have gaveled in and gaveled out now to about 102 hours.

But I do know this: This is going to be the hardest working Congress in history. That was a point also, Mr. Speaker, and at least a harder working Congress than the 109th. And you are going to measure that by being here more days. We are going to do 5 days instead of 2 or 3 days. Actually, I am thankful, Mr. Speaker, because I wanted to do 5 days here.

I would like to do 5 or 6 days here, and I would like to do it for 2 or 3 weeks in a row, hard and intense. I want Members in this town so that I can network with Members of Congress and that my staff can network with their staff and we can get things done.

I will point out that the individual Members are far more representative of their district if they have access to other Members of Congress and more days to carry on that kind of network and dialogue and debate and deliberation and information sharing than if there is only going to be a gavel in here for 2 days or perhaps for three. No matter how busy we are back in the district Members of Congress are more effective when they have longer periods of time here, and I would submit give us some time, Mr. Speaker, to go back to the district so that we do not lose touch with the soul of the people in our district.

We have got to have the feel of the rhythm. We have got to know what the economy is doing. We have got to know the rhythm of the issues that come up. We have got to have town meetings so that people can stand up and have their voice represented here in Washington.

So I am glad we are here more time, but the way it is calculated out by the Pelosi clock is this hardest working Congress may be hardest one in history, actually has only by the Pelosi clock worked 4.2 hours a day. Now from an administration that ran on a campaign of harder working, these are days that we have gaveled in. This is not any kind of stretch. We were here for 10, 11 days actually pounding this out of actually being in session, Pelosi clock only clicks over 4.2 hours. That is not a lot of time, and there are not too many folks in my district that can work 4.2 hours a day on a 5-day week or a 2-day week or a 7-day week and still feed their family.

So what is the measure going to be? I have said often the people in the district need to measure this by going to the polls.

But what got accomplished in these 100 hours that are, gavel in to gavel out, real clock or the 42 hours of Pelosi time, what got accomplished? Six pieces of legislation. She met that goal within a legitimate clock. Should have just had a legitimate clock. It all would have looked even better, but here is the cost to the country as this points out.

This is my infinity piece, Mr. Speaker, in that we cannot quite measure this cost to the country because it has

gone on too far and it has been too much.

H.R. 1, cost to the taxpayers of about $6 billion, and this is the cost of some of the changes that were passed that were the 9/11 commission's recommendation, not the promise of all of the changes recommended, but some of the changes recommended, and most of this is the additional cost of examining every piece of freight that comes in from overseas. But it does not include the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to set up a committee that is going to bring all of our homeland security appropriations process under one set of scrutiny. That was a recommendation, too, of the 9/11 Commission. That one was ignored.

So all of the recommendations? No. That was a promise. The reality was spend more money, $6 billion, on something that is right now impossible to achieve, and we have set up a system that has done a very good job to inspect these freight-sealed containers in foreign ports before they are loaded on ships so we know what is coming here.

Second item, H.R. 2 was the minimum wage passage. 25.8 million small business owners in America who create three out of every four new jobs are now being told you are going to have to give a $2.10 raise to all of your employees, and I have been an employer for over 28 years. I have met payroll for over 1,400 consecutive weeks. I have never paid anybody minimum wage, but I met the payroll, and I know this, that we pay on merit. So we have different levels of our wages depending upon the job they do and the level of their efficiency and their proficiency within the job. But my lowest person on the totem level, the one who is entry-level wages, if I give him a $2.00 an hour raise or a $2.10 an hour raise, I guarantee you every employee is lined up outside my office wanting their wages to go up $2 an hour, too, all the way up to the top of the chain, including everybody but the CEO who has to then take it out of whatever your net profits are.

So you make a decision. Do I have as many people? Do I go buy a machine to replace some of these laborers? I am going to be innovative here. I cannot afford to give this raise to everybody because I cannot compete with my competition and sometimes my competition is illegal labor which makes it all the harder because there is not going to be a limitation on wages paid to illegal workers. 25.8 million small businesses punished in that.

Meanwhile, the representative from American Samoa stands over here at this microphone within the last hour and a half and makes the argument that the economy in American Samoa cannot sustain the minimum wage. Now, why is it that Democrats can understand supply and demand and the empirical rule of supply and demand in minimum wage law that if you raise wages it will cost jobs? Why is it they can understand it when they have got it in a microcosm of American Samoa, about 60,000 people there, but they cannot understand it when it is infused out across an economy of the United States of America that is 300 million people? You take it out of that 300 million people and take it over here and say here is what happens in American Samoa, what is the impact? The impact is 5,000 more jobs lost in American Samoa by some allegations. Could understand that in a microcosm, but not in a broader sense of the overall economy.

That is a scary thing to think about people in charge that do not understand the basic elements of free enterprise and supply and demand and the market system.

H.R. 3 forces taxpayers to pay up to $135 million to fund research that takes innocent human lives, the embryonic stem cell research mandate. Right now there is no prohibition in America against doing embryonic stem cell research with private dollars or with public dollars of any kind out there. We just were not going to appropriate your Federal tax dollars to do this. So, Mr. Speaker, I believe it is immoral to compel taxpayers to fund scientific operation that ends innocent human life for the sake of someplace down the road 50 years speculating that someone's life would be improved.

There is not a sound basis for this science. This turned into a political argument. It is not a scientific debate. This has already been lost by that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, long ago, within the last year or two, with more mountains of real scientific evidence building up that cord blood stem cell research, or that also amniotic stem cell research, much of that far more promising. If embryonic stem cell research had merit, it would attract private investment dollars. It is not. That is why they have got to come here. They have turned it into a political argument, not a scientific argument and refuse to debate the science of it. That is the cost of $135 million to taxpayers that will be spent to take innocent human life.

I have, Mr. Speaker, held those little snowflake babies in my arm. I looked Sam and Ben in the eye and I looked David in the eye here a year ago, giggly, laughing, bubbly little children that were for 9 years frozen, and now they are happy, human lives that are enriching the lives of everyone around them. Parents who could not have children are now parents of real children they nurture and love. These are also adoptable embryos.

Next, H.R. 4, Part D, the prescription drug that commands the Federal Government to negotiate the value of prescription drugs. There is nothing government can do to improve Part D that was passed here a couple or 3 years ago. The cost of that has gone down. It was projected to be $43 billion a year on average. Now, it is down to $30 billion a year on average. We would have never passed a Medicare policy without including prescription drugs if we had anything more than aspirin so awful back in 1965, but because there has been profit in the prescription drug industry, we now have a broad array of innovative new drugs that save thousands and thousands of American lives and improve the American lives. That is because of research and development that has been invested.

This will shut down some of the research and development, and it is a mandate that puts the Federal Government in the business of these negotiations. The Federal Government does a lousy job of that. I mean, look at the price of hammers and toilet seats. You can look for the same kind of thing to be what you get with prescription drugs. Only research and development slows down, gets shut down, and that means the progress in health is diminished.

H.R. 5, cost to taxpayers, $7.1 billion, and it will not help 84 million Americans with current student loans. $7.1 billion. But that $7.1 billion translates into higher tuition rates, Mr. Speaker, higher costs for education. When I have high school students who will say to me in an auditorium what are you going to do to lower my tuition costs, I ask them, what are you doing to shop for the best bang for your tuition dollar? Are you looking at the cost of the richest institution versus the private school versus the community college? Are you paying attention to take some college courses while you are in high school so you can shorten up that window of time to get your 4-year degree? A lot of them will look at me and say, well, I never thought of that; I never thought I had to be the invisible hand of the consumer when I went to college.

It never occurs to them they can have more to say about the cost of tuition increase if they are smart consumers of that education and higher education. So this will raise the price of tuition, and ultimately, it does not help the problem. It makes it worse because everybody will pay more tuition, and some, a few, a small few will get a short break for a narrow window that looks to me like it is about 6 months over a 6-year period of time.

H.R. 6 increases our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and hurts families and seniors with higher energy prices. We finally after years of struggle, Mr. Speaker, last year marginally opened up some of our drilling offshore in the 181 area down off of the Florida panhandle coast. We have 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the outer continental shelf known reserve. That is just the stuff we know, and we have not been able to drill and explore to the fashion we need to.

We have a lot of oil on the outer continental shelf as well. The political barrier to going into that natural resource has been foreboding because there is an environmental political caucus over here that if anything comes up and they say, oh, that is a green issue, their brain shuts off, the

curtains come down over their eyeballs. You cannot talk to them anymore because it is a green issue, and they are going to vote green.

For example, a lot of them belief that ANWR is this pristine, arctic wilderness that somehow or another if we go up there and drill an environmentally friendly well will be destroyed forever and the tourism dollars for the Eskimos would never show up. Well, truthfully, and they know they have to live there, tourism is never going to be their salvation. What if we drilled an environmentally friendly well in ANWR of Alaska and no one came there to see it, then my question is, like when a tree falls in the forest, if no one hears a noise, did it make a sound? Well, if you drill an environmentally friendly well in ANWR and no one looks at it, did it damage the scenery? Not if nobody's looking, Mr. Speaker.

But even if someone is looking, even if thousands are looking, no, it does not damage the scenery. I have challenged the greenies on this side of the aisle. We can fly you over the north slope of Alaska today and challenge you to point out the oil fields. I can fly you over them at 4,000 feet, and you can look down there, and unless somebody is giving you a crib sheet, you are never going to know it because these are not derricks sticking up in the sky. These are not pump jacks pumping oil out of the ground, leaking oil and spilling it into the soil, that idea of the old wildcat days you see in the movies from 80 years ago in Texas.

No, these are well casings that have submersible pumps in them. You do not even see their collector pipes that go on off over to their refinery. This is as an environmentally friendly as it gets. We need to open up all of these resources, and instead, this energy initiative that passed here, H.R. 6, cuts down on the amount of energy available to Americans that can do no other, and it changes the deal, Mr. Speaker. It changes the deal.

Where I come from, if you are going to put your capital on the line, a deal has to be a deal. When you look somebody in the eye, whether or not you shake their hand and you say I will do that for X money, that is a deal. We buy cattle out of the window of the pickup on main street of our towns, two or three pot loads of cattle. Yeah, that is fine, I will take these because I trust you. You keep your word; you will bring me what I want.

We should do the same thing out of this Congress, but the system that is set up out there and the conditions by which some of the findings that are off in the gulf coast, and I am thinking of Chevron that has that field, appears to be something that will increase U.S. domestic oil supply by 50 percent, when that finding is opened up, those kind of deals now are no longer a deal with this piece of legislation because it directs a renegotiation of those leases to punish the very people that are producing the supply of oil that is driving down the price, that has taken us from $75 a barrel down to $53 a barrel. The more that is on the market, the lower the price gets.

Now a deal is not a deal out there in the gulf coast, Mr. Speaker. A deal gets changed, and H.R. 6 says to government, go force, I say this force, renegotiation of those leases because the hook in that is that if you do not renegotiate then you will not be eligible for new leases in areas that might be the most massive oil find in the history of America.

This is debilitating, and the argument was made a little bit ago that they have reduced the dependence on foreign oil. Good night, Mr. Speaker. It couldn't be any more off than 180 degrees by our measure. It has increased our dependency on Middle Eastern oil and it has reduced our availability of oil and gas onto the domestic market, when we can be pumping it out right between us and Hugo Chavez. It is going to slow down that development.

And that is just some of the things on my mind as this 100 hours concludes. I hope the Speaker keeps her promise now and we can come back to work, I think on Monday, and we can gavel in here, and some of these freshmen can have a voice in this process. Not a single freshman has introduced a single amendment. They have not had a bit of impact on one word of all of this legislation that has come through. No freshman has changed one word in anything that has been passed in these first real 100 hours or the 42 hours by the Pelosi clock.

I know there is a lot in the gentleman from New Mexico, and I am very interested in hearing it emerge here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker. So I would be very pleased to yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Mexico. And I would point out that we are splitting the time between now and 2:00.

I thank the gentleman from New Mexico for bringing his expertise to the floor. I listened with fascination to the Russian narrative. That is one I wasn't aware of. I look forward to looking into that in further detail in the future.

I see we have some freshmen who have come to the floor, apparently poised to proceed with a Special Order over the next 60 minutes. I trust this is in a great celebration of the first 100 hours and the accomplishment of the 100 hours now being in the Congressional Record, and you are here to celebrate you are finally going to have a voice in this process. Maybe next week one of you can offer an amendment and go to a subcommittee meeting and go to a hearing or do a markup, and you can get into the Congressional Record some of the things you promised your voters you were going to do.

I have to believe you didn't think you would be muzzled for the first 100 hours, and you thought there would be a process for you to be allowed to offer amendments, engage in debate, go to subcommittee and committee meetings, and maybe even go before the Rules Committee and make a request and have it granted that you could bring your pet issue to this floor of Congress and actually accomplish the things that you pledged you would do.

If any of you have had any of that voice up to this point, I think it would be interesting to hear that. I suspect, no, you are full of frustration, quietly, and now we are going to hear your voices, full throated, maybe in the next hour, hopefully next week. Pelosi time only says 42 hours. I am not sure if you are going to give that chance.

Please make that request so we can go to real-time. Congratulations, you got it all done in the first real 100 hours. You didn't need Pelosi time. I want to hear your voice in the amendment process. Welcome to Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this great honor to speak to you this afternoon. I also thank the gentleman from New Mexico.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 6 for a whole series of reasons. The gentleman addressed Vladimir Putin, who just nationalized $20 billion worth of Shell Oil Company's investment. You get a sense of what we have when you have those countries taking over the private investment.

I, for one, don't object to profits that go into companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, companies that take their profits and reinvest them back into research and development and exploration. That is why oil went from $75 a barrel down to $53 a barrel, and the trend is on back down.

This bill sends it the other way. I happen to represent Iowa, and Iowa produced 26 percent of the ethanol in the United States of America. That is number one of the States in the United States. We have a Nation that eclipsed Brazil in ethanol production. We have over $1 billion in private capital investment just in my congressional district for the 2006 construction season for renewable energies.

That tells me that research and development is coming in the private sector. They are producing enzymes in the private sector. They will catch up, and they will take care of the cellulosic ethanol. The government does a poor job of investing those dollars.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition of H.R. 6, the CLEAN Energy Act. We need a balanced energy policy in this country. This bill hurts agriculture and renewable fuels, small petroleum companies and well as the energy sector. This bill that affects every man, woman and child in America was not even given committee consideration. I guess an iron fisted rule from the Democrats is what we have come to expect.

Mr. Speaker, the liquid hydrocarbon sector supplies more then 99 percent of fuel used by Americans for transportation and operation of businesses. They produce the diesel fuel used by farmers in my district to run their tractors and combines. These are tractors and combines that plant and harvest our food in America. Natural gas is also the major cost in Nitrogen fertilizer farmers in my district use to grow corn. Corn, Mr. Speaker, is the major feedstock for ethanol in this country followed only by natural gas. This bill will hurt America's farmers by making them pay more for fuel to grow food and more for fertilizer to grow more ethanol. One last point, asphalt is made from petroleum. Asphalt is used for roads. Roads are used to transport grain to market and children to school.

I wonder if the Democrats realize they will be putting additional strain on local and State governments, the largest buyers of asphalt, who will then have to raise taxes to cover their cost. To recap, this bill raises operational costs of farming in my district by making fuel and fertilizer more expensive. In addition, farmers will get hit by increased taxes from their local and country governments.

While recovering royalties from the 98-99 lease issue seems like a politically friendly catch phrase, I would like to make two points on this issue. Recently, Russia forced Shell to hand over a $20 billion project. The Democrat plan to force producers to renegotiate their lease royalties or be barred from future leases is blackmail of American oil companies. This blackmail stems from a mistake from a Democrat administration. Maybe the Democrats are taking a page from Putin's energy policy playbook. They make American petroleum companies fear blackmail on two continents.

Have the Democrats given any consideration to what this legislation will do to small business? Large companies are somewhat cushioned against these types of blows. Small independent oil producers are not.

If they are forced into bankruptcy or mergers, all the Democrats have done is to consolidate petroleum production into fewer hands.

Right now, America is importing a large sum of petroleum from unstable countries. By importing this petroleum, America is enriching her enemies. Importing oil is a fact of life right now. Since I have been in Congress, I have been saying that we need to produce more BTU's here in America. Section 345 of the 2005 Energy bill contained incentives for petroleum producers to venture into deep water. In September 2006 Chevron discovered an oil field 270 miles south-west of New Orleans. This field is projected to increase America's proven reserves by 50 percent. I don't know if Chevron took advantage of Section 345 but it sure would make it easier to convince the accountants of the need to head to deep water. H.R. 6 repeals section 345. The test-well that Chevron had to drill to find this new field cost them $100 million.

The Democrats will no doubt point out the revenues reported in the media as justification for this legislation. I'm curious if the Democrats will acknowledge that the media has reported the gross revenue of oil companies. Not the net profits, but the gross receipts.

As a former small business owner, I wish to remind my Democrat colleagues about simple economics about how to calculate how much profit is made. The GROSS revenue are profits before bills are paid. Once the bills are paid, the net revenues of oil companies are very much in line with other industries as stated by Congressman Cole earlier today.

Some of the debt that oil companies pay is to shareholders. With the recent run-up in oil prices, oil companies have been a profitable sector to invest. When Democrat's take a bite out of the oil companies, they are taking a bite out of 401(k) plans, retirement plans and pension funds. Any tax increase on oil companies will hurt retirees and stockholders. Right now over seventeen million people rely on those funds for their retirement security.

I realize that this bill contains a section that will use royalty money for renewable research. Yet, there is no provision that would prevent this account from being raided for other projects. Most of my colleagues know that Iowa is not only a consumer of energy, but a producer of energy. The Fifth District of Iowa is an energy export center, exporting ethanol and biodiesel all across this Nation. Rest assured the American consumer is driving renewable demand. It is also driving research. Ethanol is good to invest in. Ethanol companies realize that more investment means more money. Ethanol companies also realize that more ethanol means more money for investors. In order to maximize ethanol production companies are doing research to increase the yield of ethanol from feedstock. Rural investors raise money for new ethanol plants in days. Mr. Speaker, if the Democrats want research to happen for renewable energy, then clear the way of burdensome regulations.

Mr. Speaker as I conclude, I wish to reiterate, H.R. 6 sounds good, but it will do nothing but drive up energy prices for the American consumer. The American consumer, who drives to work, drives kids to wrestling practice, the independent truck driver driving more miles to make ends meet. It will make it harder for the American consumer living on a fixed income to make ends meet. I ask my colleagues to join with the American consumer and oppose H.R. 6, the CLEAN Energy Act of 2007.