Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, it's unethical to end one life in pursuit of helpIng others.

I am for stem-cell research. I am for scientifically sound, ethical, adult stem-cell research.

The failure of embryonic stem-cell experiments has dried up private research dollars. Consequently, proponents have no alternative but to pressure Congress for funding.

Today, the House of Representatives passed legislation that requires taxpayers to fund science that ends innocent human lives for the questionable potential of improving the lives of others.

This legislation would divert resources from truly promising treatments in favor of controversial research whose benefits remain speculative.

To conduct scientific research of this type, thousands of embryos, persons at the beginning of life, must be killed. The debate is about the inherent value of human life at its earliest stage. Supporters of embryonic stem-cell research will not take a position on when life begins. They know that if they do, they cannot sustain their argument.

Moral arguments aside, it is a fact that other forms of stem-cell research are resulting in treatments for people who suffer from debilitating diseases. Adult stem cells, which are extracted from umbilical-cord blood, placenta,

bone marrow, nasal mucosa, hair follicles and fact cells, are today successfully used in treating real people who suffer from at least 72 specific diseases. Successes include, among the 72 diseases, Parkinson's Disease, Crohn's Disease, diabetes, spinal-cord injury, strokes, arthritis and numerous cancers, including breast, brain and leukemia.

Conversely, proponents cannot name a single person with improved health due to embryonic stem-cell research. Embryonic stem cells may never produce a safe and effective treatment for any disease. The political hype declaring them a cure-all today cannot be sustained by the facts. If successful, however, the necessary next step must be to clone the cells. It is logistically impossible to provide enough embryonic stem cells without human cloning.

Another falsehood is the excuse that the embryos would otherwise be thrown away. None of the embryos were created for research. Every embryo was created for the sole purpose of giving parenthood to those who yearn for it. Over 90 percent of frozen embryos are now stored by their parents, who hope to have more children or to provide for embryo adoption to other couples. At least 500,000 couples are on waiting lists to adopt children. For each available embryo, 45 couples wait in line to adopt that child.

So far, more than 80 formerly frozen embryos have been adopted by families. Now these ``snowflake babies'' are giggle, screaming, playful children. It is a glorious miracle for couples who imagined they would never experience parenthood, much less pregnancy and childbirth. These ``snowflakes,'' some of whom were frozen for 9 years, are as worthy of our protection as every child. They are not medical waste.

Proponents of this research say they cannot look a paraplegic in the eye and say, ``We can't experiment on frozen embryos.'' I ask them, can you hold the ``snowflake babies'' in your arms and look their moms and dads in the eye and tell them, ``I wish we had experimented on your children before they learn to walk, to talk, to love, to laugh and play?''

The American medical community has many times refused the results of critical research because the findings were achieved unethically. International standards for Permissible Medical Experiments are clear. The subject must be a volunteer, there must be no alternative, results of animal experimentation must have been proven successful, they subject must be able to voluntarily end the experiment, there must be no possibility of injury, disability, or death, and the promise must outweigh the risk.

Embryonic stem-cell research violates each of these principles. Principles for Permissible Medical Experiments may be found in the military tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, October, 1946, Nuremberg.

Mr. Speaker, I oppose this legislation, because I believe it will make seniors pay higher prices for their drugs and will restrict their access to the drugs they need.

Earlier this week, I met with Dr. Mark McClellan, the former administrator for CMS. Dr. McClellan pointed out to me, while no program is perfect, Part D has proven to be very successful. Premiums seniors pay for the basic drug benefit have fallen over 40 percent from the expected premiums. CMS reports that, on average, beneficiaries are saving nearly $1,100 a year on their drug costs, with many seniors and their doctors having more drugs to choose from under Part D than they did before. Also, Part D cost nearly $13 billion less than expected in 2006, and 10-year costs have been lowered by approximately $180 billion.

In order to make drugs cheaper, the Secretary will have to refuse coverage for a number of drugs that are regularly prescribed to seniors. When Medicare's list of covered drugs is shortened, either doctors will be forced to choose cheap drugs which could hurt the welfare of their patients, or seniors will be forced to pay out-of- pocket for many of the important, life-saving medications they need.

I urge a ``no'' vote on this harmful legislation.

I thank the gentleman for yielding and appreciate the privilege to address this subject matter.

This motion to recommit is a motion about cloning. Many of the other civilized nations in the world have taken a position against cloning. This Congress has taken a position against cloning, but there isn't a way in the laboratory to move forward with these experiments on embryos without cloning.

We are asking for a moral standard here. The people say, on the one side of this argument, No, we're opposed to human cloning; we think that's abhorrent to us; that that is ethically something that we're opposed to. This motion to recommit allows a Member to take that stand and put that vote up and say, I'm opposed to cloning, whatever you believe about the research that is involved here.

I would yield.

Yesterday what happened in the minimum wage bill seemed to be discriminatory for some reasons that I think we all know. I am not aware that there is a political subdivision, a geographical area or even a subdivision of some university that might have assisted----

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

I would say that I am not aware of a circumstance like that, of whether there happens to be a geographical area or a political subdivision or an interest that might be from a university that could be part of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, it is always a profound honor to come to the floor of the people's House and vent what is on my mind. I would point out that your organization and timing is impeccable. I thank the gentlelady from the District for ending exactly on the hour, so it is easy to keep track of the time as we unfold the next 60 minutes.

I also appreciate her remarks with regard to Abraham Lincoln. He is a hero for America, for all people of all kinds, of all colors, of all places, and a man that demonstrated profound and tremendous leadership. As I listened to the gentlelady speak about Abraham Lincoln's leadership, I reflect upon a great example of leadership that I would like to share here this evening to start out this discussion.

I will say that I have been assured that this is a matter of historical fact by a Washington D.C. historian, and that is as far as I verified it, but I liked the story so much, that I would just as soon not know if it shouldn't happen to be true. But I believe it to be true, and at least its consistent with the leadership in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln.

That is, in 1863, as Abraham Lincoln was considering whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, it was not an issue that was totally in favor with the Republican Party at the time. But as he deliberated on this issue, he called his Cabinet in, and said, I want to hear from each of you on this Emancipation Proclamation that is here, and that I am considering signing.

So he started his Cabinet on his left, and all around the table, and they were all men at that time, as we know, and the ones that had the right to vote back then. The first one, the Cabinet member said, Mr. President, my advice to you is, no, don't sign the Emancipation Proclamation, because after all, the blacks that are north of the Mason-Dixon line are free today, and it doesn't help them.

So the next Cabinet member chimed in, and he said, Those south of the Mason-Dixon line, you can't free them because they are in the Confederacy, so your jurisdiction doesn't reach there today. It is a gesture and a gesture only.

The third Cabinet Member said, But it is, it is an empty gesture, because on the north side of the line and on the south side of line there isn't anybody that you can free with the Emancipation Proclamation. It is simply a symbolic act. As this went around the table, around the Cabinet room table, and each Cabinet member said to President Lincoln, Mr. President, my advice to you is, no, don't sign it, because among other things, you will alienate some of the people in the north that are pro-slavery that are still fighting under the blue uniform, or the Union.

There was reason after reason why President Lincoln shouldn't sign the Emancipation Proclamation and not a single reason given by any member of the Cabinet as to why he should sign the Emancipation Proclamation. So it was nay, nay, nay, nay, Mr. President, all the way around that table, his best advisors.

President Lincoln took ahold of his lapels, and he said, Well, gentleman, the aye has it. That story is a story of leadership, and it is a story that I hope goes down in history for a long time. So I appreciate the remarks of the gentlelady from the District and the spirit with which you deliver them. I appreciate you being here tonight.

I would like to take up the issue that we had a discussion on yesterday, and that would be the discussion of the minimum wage.

Now, on January 11, which was yesterday, the House passed H.R. 2, the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, Mr. Speaker. This bill would raise the Federal minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour, over about two or three increments in a period of 2 years and would arrive at $7.25 an hour. This bill specifically applies the minimum wage rate and hike to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

I bring this to the floor, because as I spoke here earlier on the embryonic stem cell research mandate that was passed out of this Congress this afternoon, there was a question and an inquiry, I was asked to yield by the gentleman from Florida, who asked if I knew if there were any geographical carveouts or any special political subdivision carveouts or any, perhaps, university or laboratory carveouts that

would show preference that we should shine some sunlight on before the vote rather than after the vote.

Of course, I know of none, asking out there if there are any, and we will be looking through the bill to see more closely, now that we have had a chance to scrutinize it, if there are any carveouts of that nature. But what prompted the gentleman from Florida's inquiry was, as I went back and dug in to find out, was that there is a carveout in the minimum wage legislation that was passed yesterday.

So one of the things that is specific is the application of the minimum wage to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, happens to be some islands that my father set foot on when he spent his 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific during World War II. So I paid a little bit of attention to that because that was part of the family lore as I grew up.

But the bill does nothing to foresee American Samoa to submit to the Federal minimum wage or this new hike. In fact, it specifically exempts the American Samoans from minimum wage. Now why would that be? The vote on this bill was 315-116, all Democrats voting ``aye'' and 116 Republicans voting ``no.''

But as reported in the Washington Times today that although the legislation specifically extends for the first time the Federal minimum wage to the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, it exempts American Samoa, which is another Pacific island territory that would become, the only U.S. territory not subjected to the Federal minimum wage laws. The only territory, the only location in the jurisdiction of the United States of America exempted from Federal minimum wage law would be American Samoans.

This loophole pleases the tuna corporations that employ thousands of Samoans in canneries at a rate of $3.26 an hour. It is an industry- specific rate that is set by the U.S. Department of Labor.

But the tuna industry has lobbied Congress for years arguing that imposing the Federal minimum wage on Samoa would cripple the economy by driving the canneries to poor countries that don't require a minimum wage.

Then one of the biggest opponents, though, of the U.S. minimum wage there is StarKist tuna, which owns one of the two packing plants that together employ more than 5,000 Samoans. Yet StarKist is about 75 percent of that, about 3,750 employees perhaps at StarKist. Chicken of the Sea would be the other 1,250 employees, totaling the 5,000. Chicken of the Sea is also California based.

But what is interesting, and I think what inspired the gentleman's inquiry this afternoon, was that StarKist's parent company, this company that has now an exemption from minimum wage law, their parent company is Del Monte Corporation, Del Monte Corporation, headquartered in San Francisco, which is the hometown, of course, of our new Speaker.

Now, a spokeswoman for the Speaker said yesterday that the Speaker had not been lobbied in any way by StarKist or Del Monte. That is interesting. I don't know that I could say that about any single company in my district, small company, large company. Trade associations represent multiple interests that might come into that. I am lobbied by individuals, I am lobbied by trade associations, I am lobbied by individual companies over and over again, hundreds and thousands of voices coming into my office.

I welcome them all, but I could not take an oath that there is a single company in my district that has not lobbied me in any way, or, let me expand that, even if that were true, there is no way I could take the oath that not a single company has lobbied any of my staff. There are decisions made by my staff that I take responsibility for. That reflects upon me.

So one could impute from this statement that the Speaker has not been lobbied in any way by StarKist or Del Monte. One can impute to that that also includes the Speaker's staff. I couldn't make that statement about a single company in my district, but this large company, larger than any company in my district, and domiciled in and headquartered in San Francisco, has had no contact with the Speaker's office or staff over any period of time, over, not just within the last week, but over the last 2 years, 4 years, 6 years or more? I think that deserves a little bit of scrutiny.

But as reported in The Washington Post on January 9, aides to the chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, the gentleman from California, and the sponsor of the bill said, and I quote, ``The Samoan economy does not have the diversity and vibrancy to handle the mainland's minimum wage, nor does the island have anything like the labor rights abuses that the chairman found in the Marianas.''

That is also interesting. It works good for a smokescreen for a short period of time, but here are the facts. In June of 2005, a U.S. court in Hawaii sentenced the owner of a sweatshop factory in American Samoa to 40 years in prison for what prosecutors called the biggest case ever of modern-day slavery. That isn't a small statement, and that is not a short sentence to prison, 40 years in prison for the biggest case ever of modern-day slavery in American Samoa.

The chairman, who has been tracking this research on the labor problems within the Marianas and presumably American Samoa, contends that he didn't find anything going on in American Samoa that would be comparable to the labor rights abuses found in the Marianas.

What would be worse than the biggest case ever of modern-day slavery of labor rights abuses? I don't know how you would define that. I will challenge the chairman, come up with those cases, explain to us how this one that was worthy of 40 years in prison, the biggest case ever of modern-day slavery, somehow or another pales in comparison to the transgressions of the Marianas, of which I don't have a single case before me.

That is the argument made to the chairman and why he wrote into the bill the exemption for American Samoa where they are paid $3.26 an hour, but in the Marianas, of course, they want to include them.

Well the difference is they have Republicans in the Marianas, and they have Democrats in American Samoa. But the individual in American Samoa, the labor right's abuser's name is Lee Soo-Kil, he held more than 300 victims as forced laborers in involuntary servitude at his garment factory in American Samoa.

He is accused of using arrests, forced deportations and brutal physical beatings to keep workers under control. The court was told, this is in the record of the court, that he ordered a worker to gouge the eye of another worker who dared to complain about her living and working conditions in the garment factory. That abuse would not be sufficient, apparently, in the judgment of the chairman to consider that it was something that should be brought underneath the minimum wage law and under some more scrutiny in American Samoa.

It is certainly an act that would exempt you from the minimum wage. Democrats said that their reign in the House would usher in a new era of transparency. Yet with the second bill they bring to the floor, eyebrows are raised at the thought of a lucrative carveout from a company with a parent company headquartered in the hometown of our new Speaker.

It didn't take very long for these things to start to pop up. Over and over again Democrats claim that the minimum wage needed to be raised as a matter of fairness and human decency. Yet, yet, apparently workers in American Samoa don't count in the Democrats' view.

Mr. Faleomavaega, who is a representative of American Samoa, has said he doesn't believe his island's economy could handle the Federal minimum wage because of competition in the tuna industry from South America and Asian canning interests, a place where they are paying as low as $.66 to $.67 cents an hour.

We are going to cater to and let competition be affected by that kind of sweatshop labor that is taking place in South America and Asian canneries. But apparently the Democrats are under the impression that the laws of economic competition are only applicable to American Samoa and have no bearing on the goods and the countless business manufacturers elsewhere in the United States, and that also includes the Marianas, which are geographically close, similarly situated,

but not specifically exempted like American Samoa.

The United States needs to be competitive and be able to sell abroad. But while the small businesses in my district, who often pay more than the federally mandated minimum page, I would say almost always pay more, they provide employment to countless hardworking Americans, and some of them struggle each month to make their payrolls.

Democrats have allowed employers in American Samoa to avoid this burdensome Federal mandate, but not those in the Marianas, not those anywhere else in the American territories, not anywhere under the jurisdiction of the United States of America, except American Samoa, where you have two large tuna companies, and one of them's parent company is domiciled in San Francisco.

I don't understand how Democrats see their economic principles make the minimum wage a bad idea for American Samoa, but not a bad thing for Main Street in small town USA. They pledge to bring transparency to the legislative process, and yet they refuse to submit their 100-hours legislation to the regular committee process. I may take that issue up a little bit later.

What I would very much like to do at this point in this conversation with you and the American people would be to yield to my friend, the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. McHenry, for his remarks on whatever issue he might have come to the floor to address.

As I am listening to this dialogue that we have going on here and I start to think about, you know, a lot of us see this broader economy, we see this multi-trillion GDP that we have, and we see the components of small businesses, large businesses, family farms, and these operations that are going on, the interrelationships of them. Some families run more than one business. And I have taken the position, and many of us have, that whenever you raise the minimum wage, ultimately you will lose jobs. We understand this, and we have made this argument and this debate, and we will continue to make this argument and this debate.

But I am going to say the people who voted for this minimum wage, at least the people who supported the idea of exempting American Samoa from the minimum wage, can only understand this law of supply and demand and this argument that is a fundamental, basic economic principle that when you mandate an increase in wages, the employer will have to make a decision as to whether to keep those employees or not or to lay them off and maybe move their operations elsewhere, or bring some machinery in to replace the labor. The inevitable result of raising a minimum wage is the loss of jobs.

But I am going to speculate this, Mr. McHenry. I am going to speculate that when it is addressed within the microcosm of a single business on a single island, then the chairman of the committee actually understood that equation and decided that he would draft in an exemption for American Samoa for that fishy business that you addressed. Because when it is a microcosm of a single island and a single company, maybe it was comprehensible the impact of a minimum wage there.

I pose a question back, and that is a statement has been released by a spokeswoman for the Speaker with regard to this, because this has been something that has been published across the country. And it says that the Speaker has not been lobbied in any way by StarKist or Del Monte.

Now, not lobbied in any way. That is a broad statement that a lawyer probably couldn't write it any more broadly than that. It may well have been a lawyer who said it. And I reflected moments ago about, I couldn't make that statement about a single company no matter how small in my district, because they either talk to me or my staff or maybe sent me a letter or called on the phone or sent me an e-mail, or maybe called in on a telephone while I was doing a talk radio show and I didn't know who they were. How could one make a statement that she hadn't been lobbied in any way? Could you make that statement about a single business in your district?

I would ask the gentleman if he could repeat his question.

In response to the gentleman from New Jersey, I would have to say that there is no other way I can analyze that.

There are actually only two arguments. One of them is the argument that is put forth by the representative from American Samoa who says that the tuna industry can't withstand the competition if they have to pay a minimum wage. So something more than $3.26 an hour would take those tuna companies out of business, and they would apparently leave the island. And they couldn't go to the Marianas because there is a minimum wage imposed there, so presumably they would go to South America or maybe Asia.

The other argument of course is this exemption will let those tuna companies that are there continue to make a lot of money off of cheap labor that is imposed there in American Samoa where it is exempted from, the only location in all of American territories and jurisdictions that is exempted from Federal law. That is what is in this legislation that is before us.

I yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I would take a stab at that and submit off of Mr. McHenry's remarks as well that when you have a closed process and in fact it is not necessarily a closed process; it is a no process, no process for hearings, no process for subcommittee, no process for full committee, no process for Rules Committee and no process on the floor that allows for any amendments, then there is no way to go back and really identify who is going to get the credit for this brilliant exemption that has been drafted into the minimum wage bill. So we can only then rely on the open press, the press accounts, and I am grateful that we do have a first amendment because they have gone back and reported and have publicly not been refuted remarks made by the chairman of the committee, who has gone to the Pacific and examined the labor circumstances there and found that the labor circumstances in American Samoa justify exemptions, but those in the Marianas do not justify exemptions, just to draw a real close comparison there, even though the worst example of a sweat shop that prosecutors had ever seen was the perpetrator that was sentenced to 40 years for abusing 300 employees in American Samoa. And so the exemption, then, is admitted publicly by the chairman of the committee as being drafted into the bill under his advice and his request, and that is the closest thing we have, but there is no opportunity to amend it in or out or to add to or detract from.

And the people I feel the most sorry for are not Mr. Garrett from New Jersey or Mr. McHenry from North Carolina. My sympathy lies with the large number of freshmen Democrats who have arrived here in this Congress under the belief and having committed to their constituents that they are going to add to this cause, that they are going to add to this process, that their voice will be heard, that they will be bring representation from their district to Washington, D.C., where a lot of them allege they did not have representation, and they are the ones shut out of the process without a voice, without an opinion, without a forum, without an amendment, without any opportunity for amendment, after having made all those promises, shut out of this. All that wisdom shut out. A handful of people, maybe not even a handful of people, makes a decision like this. It is a closed process, and this is what you get with a closed process is an earmark, as Mr. McHenry said.

And if the gentleman from New Jersey has more to say, I would be happy to yield.

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. And it occurs to me that perhaps one's own house is not in order before the presentation of the legislation that seeks to put everyone else's house in order, and I am confident this will not be the last time that these circumstances are created here nor that they will exist when one finds themselves in a position of conflict of judgment. And these are the kinds of things that can be debated and discussed and deliberated if we have an open process.

But I would point out to the gentleman from New Jersey that we are closing in perhaps, perhaps, on an open process. When we gaveled in here this morning, this 100 hours pledge was that this legislation, about six pieces of legislation, was to be passed in the first 100 hours, and that became the promise that trumped all other promises. The promises of an open system, bipartisanship, dialogue, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history, all of these things, many of them have been compromised already because you can't have an open Congress and get these things done, apparently, in the first 100 hours. So the 100-hour promise is the one that is sacrosanct, and the rest of their promises are being broken in an attempt to try to pass this legislation in the first 100 hours.

Well, my report tonight, Mr. Speaker, is to bring everyone up to date on

how far we are. And we have tried objectively to produce a legitimate 100-hour clock. And I know there is from, the other side of the aisle, a stopwatch put on that. Well, we don't want to count, after we gavel in for the 110th Congress, the time that it takes to swear in because that is not really legislative time, and we don't want to count the time it takes to vote for the Speaker, Mr. Speaker, because that takes also away from our legislative time. We really only want to start this 100-hour clock when it is convenient to do so, and we are going to count time in our own way, and the 100 hours is not going to be up until we get this legislation that we promised we would do in the 100 hours. That is the measure. So keep changing the definition on what the 100 hours is until you get things accomplished. Then you say, yes, we did. We kept our promise.

Well, this was a promise that was purely a political promise. The American people have waited for this legislation for over 200 years. To hurry up and rush it through and set aside an open dialogue, set aside the amendment process, shut down and not allow subcommittee, committee or Rules Committee or floor amendments, do all of that so you can keep a 100-hours promise. So, anyway, the least we can do is have a legitimate clock on the 100 hours. I produced this legitimate clock, Mr. Speaker, and this morning when we gaveled in with an opening prayer and a pledge, when we did so this morning, we were sitting at 42 real hours. This is the hours here on the floor from the time we gavel in until the time we gavel out. How could anyone argue that that is not legitimate? We are not counting 24 hours a day. We are counting the real time that there is someone sitting in the Speaker's chair and the clock is ticking.

So to bring you up to date, we are now at 52 hours when this began. It will be 53 hours here in about 18 minutes. Now we are halfway. We have been further than we have to go, and my recommendation would be just throw this idea away. Suspend this idea of 100 hours because it is what is usurping the open dialogue, the appropriate process, the most ethical Congress in history, the most sunlight on everything we are doing.

As I listened to the news over the weekend, the gentleman from Tennessee, when asked the question, Mr. Speaker, about the 100 hours, he said: Well, no, we really can't comply with the open bipartisanship. Just give us a little break on that. Let us get our 100 hours done, and when the 100 hours is over, I believe we are going to go to this open process, this bipartisanship, and actually use the committees and the expertise of the Members here, hopefully the freshmen, especially the Democrat freshmen, giving them a chance, Mr. Speaker. So that was his plea. Give us a break and let us go ahead, and we will go, not in regular order, but we will go in a special order so that we can get done in the first 100 hours.

Well, I do not agree with that. I think we ought to set this argument aside. But at least we can suspend, then, this suspension of open dialogue when the 100 hours is up. We are at 52. We will soon be at 53. It also says the cost to the country. Well, I have not done very well, Mr. Speaker, because I do not have a staff that can keep up with the cost to the country or maybe I do not have an adding machine that allows for that. And as I look at the legislation that has passed through piece after piece, some of it just can't be calculated. I didn't have a symbol on the word processor to go to infinity, so we just kind of stuck a bunch of dollar signs in here because the cost to the country is impossible to calculate.

It is impossible to calculate when you pass legislation, for example, to inspect every piece of cargo that comes into our ports and the authorization becomes, and I quote from the legislation, ``such sums as may be necessary.'' Well, when we are doing legislation with authorization of ``such sums as may be necessary,'' that is more money than we can calculate. We can't put a dollar figure on that. That goes on piece after piece. How much does it cost to raise the minimum wage? How many jobs are lost? How much of our production goes oversees? What is the real effect on the American economy when and if that happens, when and if the Senate takes it up? It can't be calculated, but it is a lot of money. We will soon be at 53 hours and counting. That will take us down to 47. We have been further than we have to go. We are over the top. We are going to narrow this thing down. And when we get to the 100 hours, the real 100 hours, I am hopeful that this Congress will then wake up and say, we have another promise we want to keep rather than one we want to break, and that is going to be to bring the freshmen into this process.

We will give the freshmen an opportunity to go to a subcommittee and sit down at a hearing and begin to get informed so they can make informed decisions on behalf of their constituents. We need that kind of process. The Constitution envisions that kind of process. In fact, it requires it.

I am for an open system, and I am for sunlight on all of this. I am for sunlight even on StarKist, and even on Chicken of the Sea and even on San Francisco and even on American Samoa. And I am for sunlight on the Marianas as well. I am for sunlight on everything that we can provide, and I am for real-time reporting.

Every American has access to the Internet today. Whether they own a computer at home or go to the library, they can sit down to a computer. And I believe all of the records, the records of the lobbyists' contributions to Members of Congress, maybe contributions that came from Del Monte or StarKist or Chicken of the Sea, we can look where those contributions went and be able to track that.

If we had an open system here, if those Federal election campaign dollars were real-time reported and available on the Internet so that they were downloadable in a searchable and sortable format, we would have somebody right now sitting at home in America who would have flicked those keys and zeroed in on that and they would have by now probably e-mailed my office a summary of, a detailed list of all those campaign contributions. Probably the bloggers out there would have sleuthed out why it is that American Samoa is exempted from this minimum wage law. We know if you track the money, you can find a pretty good motivation.

I didn't hear from Mr. McHenry that he could name a business in his district that had not lobbied him during his time here. I know that Mr. Garrett has been here a good 4 years and starting on the fifth year. I didn't ask that specific question, but I would ask you to respond.

Mr. Garrett, is there a single business in your district that you could swear an oath had not lobbied you or your staff in any way, any form of communication that might have influenced your judgment or decision?

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey.

I wanted to make a few remarks about the minimum wage itself and just to go on record. We need to understand something. This is a free enterprise economy. What has made America great is because if you go back 150 years, we had a dream called manifest destiny. We had a continent that needed to be settled and developed. Individual personal capital was invested. Banks grew because they could make money off loaning, and entrepreneurs could borrow money.

They were going into an environment within the continent, within the borders of the United States, in a low-tax and sometimes a no-tax environment and often no regulation, but certainly a low-regulation environment. So they invested their money.

This country was settled and developed in lightning speed by historical standards because we had a very positive environment here for economic growth.

Then as this society began to get a little older and began to develop, they began to take protection. So the older we get, someone would decide that they needed to have some influence and so they would want to advocate in Congress and in the State legislatures for taxes and more taxes and regulation and more regulations. That is how this

has grown into this situation. But a prosperous, dynamic economy has got to be one with the least amount of regulations possible and the lowest amount of taxation necessary to keep a government functioning to provide the necessary services.

I thank the gentleman.

As I listened to that discussion, it brings to mind some of my history. I recall I started back working for 75 cents an hour helping a farmer in the neighborhood. I think he would have paid me a dollar, but I didn't think I was worth more than 75 cents an hour. If you were to ask him today, he would probably say that would be right, you were not, Steve.

I did that and I learned about machinery and the work that we were doing that was different from my home. After that I went to work in a grocery store, and there the wage was $1.20. And I stocked shelves and carried out groceries and learned about the grocery trade. So I worked there when school was out, and then it was summertime. I realized that the butcher was making pretty good money. That was before we had the kind of packing plants that we have today. So there was more demand for people who could cut meat.

I thought I might as well learn a trade. First I talked to the butcher, and he said he would take me on. And then I went to the manager and asked the manager. The manager said, yes, you can work in the meat department but that is not where I need you, so I can't pay you. Well, I want to learn a trade. Fine, you can go back there and work. And so I agreed to work in the meat department for nothing. So I would work 40 hours a week in the grocery store, and then I would work 20 to 40 hours a week in the meat department with no pay.

It would have been in violation of this minimum wage law, but I did it for no pay because I wanted to learn a trade. And I did learn a trade. It is not one I have ever been paid a dollar to do. In fact, it puts me into the business sometimes of being the one who does cut up the meat at whatever family gathering we have.

But that is the kind of thing that used to happen on a regular basis. I am not an odd thing. I am not an anomaly when it comes to that.

But it is a subject that each time the government interferes, whenever the government passes some of these child labor laws that say that, well, if you are 17 years and 364 days old and you would like to work in the gas station, you can run the cash register, but you cannot cut the grass on the riding lawn mower until you are 18. That is an example of a child labor law.

Another example is you cannot wash the pizza dough maker or you can't make french fries. All of these things you can do at home, a lot of these things we allow younger people to do at home, a 17-year-364-day- old person cannot because of our child labor laws.

You couple that with minimum wage laws and ask the question is there any place in your community where, let's just say an older lady who doesn't get around very well can pull her car into the gas station and be confident that the windshield will be washed and the oil will be checked and her gas tank will be filled, and somebody will bring her credit card in and out and make sure that all she has to do is sit there and wait for that service. Where does that happen in America? Some places, not many. And the biggest reasons are minimum wage laws and child labor laws.

So instead, we give them the keys to a car that goes 140 miles an hour and they can drive on the highway. It is safe enough for them to drive a car at 16, 14 with an adult with them, but not safe enough for them to ride a riding lawn mower around a gas station.

This is what happens when decisions don't get opened up to public scrutiny, and not opened up for debate and opportunity for amendments to be offered.

So here we are with this fishy thing going on in American Samoa where they are the only territory in all of the territories of the United States of America by this legislation that has passed the House that would be exempted from minimum wage laws. And I have to believe that is not for the people of American Samoa; it is for the people making profit off the sweat of their brows.

And if it is good enough for the goose for the rest of America, it is good enough for the gander in American Samoa.

I yield to the gentleman.

As I conclude here, Mr. Speaker, no one has come to the floor to defend a position like that. It was not part of the dialogue, the debate and the discussion.

While we have taken the floor here an hour ago, there were 52 hours used up of the 110th Congress of the 100. Now 53 hours. So 47 hours are left, Mr. Speaker.

And when that time comes, it will be time to open up so that we don't have these kinds of circumstances. It needs to be open to the public.

I appreciate the privilege to address you tonight, Mr. Speaker.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, January 12, 2007, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you and of course all the Members here on this floor of the United States Congress. I would point out here in the beginning that it is about 8:15 here this evening, and the President will be giving his major address on Iraq at about 9:01 and so I intend to be asking for an adjournment just right before 9:00 so there is an opportunity to do that transition and that the President does have an opportunity to use this channel to speak to the American people.

To begin this presentation this evening, and we listened to the members on the other side of the aisle talk about supporting the 100- hour agenda, Mr. Speaker, I point out that this 100-hour agenda was a number just kind of picked out of the air or off the wall and it turned into a promise. And inside of that promise of 100 hours and to accomplish these five or six things within 100 hours are a whole series of other promises, and it appears as though the most important promise of all is we are going to do all this in 100 hours. The 100-hour promise. And not the promise for bipartisanship and not the promise for the most open Congress in history, and probably not the promise for the most ethical Congress in history. The jury is still out on that, Mr. Speaker, but this thing that preempts all, that trumps all is this idea of 100 hours.

Well, 100 hours to the American people might mean at midnight on December 31 when the ball dropped and hit the bottom in Times Square, the clock might start to tick on the 100 hours here in 2007, the new 110th Congress. But I don't take that position necessarily, Mr. Speaker. I take the position that when we gaveled in and went to work here, if you want to count 100 hours, that is fine; if you want to make a promise to get something done in 100 hours, that is also fine. But that 100 hours didn't start for the first week. It didn't start for the first week because we were voting on things other than the six things on the agenda to be accomplished in the 100 hours.

And so then the promise that it was going to be bipartisan and an open process, we found out, I guess after Congress began, this 110th Congress, that this open process couldn't be opened up until the 100 hours were over, or otherwise they couldn't get everything accomplished in the first 100 hours. So bipartisanship went out the window a victim of the 100-hour promise, and so did the open kind of a system. The bills didn't go through subcommittee. They didn't go through committee. They didn't go through rules. No amendments are allowed. And yet that was all decided before the 100-hour clock began.

So we set up a clock, a legitimate clock, one that actually keeps the time here that Congress is in session. From when we gaveled in this 110th Congress, we gavel in the morning, open with a prayer and the pledge, and we gavel out in the evening. That clock has got a tick on that. We are paying people here to work around this Capitol the whole time the 100 hours is moving.

So I set up this clock so the American people can keep track of what the hours are, and I point out this: When we started this morning, we were at 31 hours that ticked away since. And these are just business hours. It is not a stretch; it is not 24 hours a day. It is the hours that this floor is in operation. In fact, yesterday, it was scheduled to be at 10:00, so a lot of people made their plans to be here at 10:00. It didn't work on Monday because of the football game. And I will just reserve my opinion of that tonight, Mr. Speaker. But the 10:00 time to start got moved back to 10:30, got moved back to noon and then got moved back to first votes at 5:30 yesterday afternoon. So some of that is not taken into account here, but as of about now, this 100 hours has clicked up to 42 hours, Mr. Speaker, have ticked away. And there have been a couple of things that have been passed, and some will claim that to be an accomplishment. And I don't intend to take up that issue either tonight, Mr. Speaker. But I would point out to the American people that we are at 42 hours and counting.

If you can't count time, you also can't count dollars or people. And it is important to understand the cost to the United States of America and the taxpayers that fund it. And we will be doing some of these tallies after hours tonight to come back with some better numbers tomorrow, and I will bring this chart then to the floor every day until the 100 hours ticks over, and we can make this 100-hour promise something that goes into the dust bin of history.

But this 100-hour promise has trumped the other promises. It has been more important than an open system of government. It has been more important than allowing anyone to offer a single amendment to any bill that has come forward here, and each one of those bills are going to change the destiny of America. Maybe a little bit, maybe a lot. But each one will change the destiny of America some. And the people I feel sorry for, all of those new freshmen Democrats, the ones that were elected to office having promised that they were going to represent their constituents here, they would have a voice, they would be effective. They bring with them the vitality of America. They bring the new ideas into this Congress, the fresh blood. The best responsiveness to constituents that you ever will see on average comes with the freshmen. We are glad when they come here every new Congress because it adds new vitality.

But that large crop of Democrat freshmen and that smaller crop of Republican freshmen I think have gotten their eyes opened up a little bit. I think they believed they would come here and they would be able to come to

a subcommittee and do a markup on a bill and offer an amendment to improve the bill and see it go over to full committee, offer an amendment, improve the bill and bring it to the floor, where amendments would be offered and the bill would be improved and perhaps perfected and passed out of this Chamber, on over the Senate, where we would have negotiations working with them and they would have done the same thing.

The sad news for those freshmen is that they don't have a voice in this process. Not a single freshman had an opportunity to offer amendment to engage in debate in a subcommittee, to engage in debate in a committee; didn't have an opportunity to go before the Rules Committee and make their argument as to why their amendments should be made in order. None of that was allowed to the freshmen. And, in fact, the small little group of people that put together this policy didn't consider the wisdom of Congress; they considered the wisdom of the people within that room, and I guarantee you, Mr. Speaker, that didn't include the freshmen, either the Democrats or the Republicans, who now have to reassess what kind of a system they thought they had gotten elected to.

And I hope this 100 hours ticks away, and I hope it can be put away into the dust bin of history, and I hope those other promises can be rejuvenated and brought back to life, those promises about having an open system, a system that is bipartisan and a system that allows for amendments so that we can improve the legislation that comes.

We are at 42 hours, Mr. Speaker, and the clock will start again. Actually, it will shut off when we adjourn here about 9:00 and it will take up again tomorrow morning when we gavel back in.

But, Mr. Speaker, I come here to talk about a big subject. It is a subject that has been consuming the thoughts and the prayers of the American people since September 11, 2001, and that subject is a subject the President will take up here in a little more than 35 minutes. It is the subject of this global war on terror, and primarily the battleground, the main battleground, which is Iraq, in this global war on terror.

I have certainly been involved in this since the beginning of the operations in Iraq. I have been over there four times. I have traveled into Afghanistan as well. Each time I go over there, I always stop at Landstuhl in Germany and visit our wounded troops there. And the last time I was over was over Thanksgiving, just a little over a month ago, when I ate Thanksgiving dinner with wounded troops in Landstuhl at the hospital in Germany, and that was the most meaningful Thanksgiving I have ever had in my life. I don't expect to ever top that for a moving Thanksgiving where one can really be in awe of true courage, true patriotism and true sacrifice.

And I believe we are going to hear a speech from the President in a few minutes from now that is going to be, I think the tone of it could have been written by those people that have sacrificed the most, our soldiers and Marines and airmen that have perhaps given a limb, perhaps been wounded and crippled for life. I have not yet met a wounded soldier who said to me, ``This is a lost cause.'' They believe in the cause. They want to get back to the fight. They want to get back to the people they feel responsible for, and they want to complete the mission.

The wounded troops will stand with the President in the speech he is about to give and the families of those who have given the ultimate sacrifice, the Gold Star families, the families that have traveled across America and been here in Washington, D.C., a number of times and were in my office a week before I went over to Iraq. Some of those Gold Star families, those that have lost a son or a daughter over in Iraq or Afghanistan, some of them have also traveled over to the Middle East, also traveled into Iraq and got to visit the Iraqi people. And one of the fathers who lost his son killed over there in Iraq said to me: ``We cannot pull out of there. It is different now. We are committed to that cause. Lives have been lost. The soil in Iraq is now sanctified with American blood. It is not so simple that we could just walk away. We cannot. We must stay. We must prevail. We made the commitment to go there; we are invested in it; we must prevail.''

As I looked him in the eye, I know what kind of pain he has been through, that soaked in with me, Mr. Speaker. And so I traveled over there in the aftermath of their trip, and as I went alone this time, I didn't go with a congressional delegation, I just went alone, and I had an opportunity to sit down with General Abizaid and close the door and talk and ask questions and probe a line of reasoning and then take on another line of reasoning. I had the opportunity to do the same thing with General Casey, although staff was in the room for that one. I also sat down with General Corelli and did the same thing. I had two meetings with Ambassador Khalilzad. And then each time I walked into a mess hall, or I would just holler out, ``Is anybody here from Iowa?'' And invariably there would be Iowans there. And there is an instant connection between you and someone from your State. You know where they are from. You know what they believe in. You have an understanding about their background and where they come from. You know what sports teams they support, or at least you can find out quickly, and we have those little arguments, Mr. Speaker. But when I index the things that I hear from our top officers that are in the field and what I hear from the people on the ground, and as I talk to people through all ranks and travel across Iraq and also Afghanistan in this last trip, put back together a kind of strategy and come to a conclusion as to where we need to go and what we need to do.

And let's look at this thing, Mr. Speaker, from two broad perspectives. One of them is the idea that I am hearing over here on this side of the aisle, and this is not a new idea from the people on that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker; they slipped language into the Department of Defense appropriations bill that would have by now prohibited all operations in Iraq. And that was Mr. Murtha's language that went in there that prohibited any basing rights negotiations in Iraq, which would have meant, had that language prevailed that when our agreement on any of our bases in Iraq had expired, we couldn't negotiate a new one. So, over time, we would have had to give up base after base after base until we had to pull our troops completely out of Iraq.

That is not a lot different than the amendment that came out of an appropriations bill on this floor, Mr. Speaker, back in 1975 when a large Democrat majority took over and decided that they would take us out of the operations in Vietnam, and they introduced legislation successfully that forbid a single dollar from being used to support the South Vietnamese military. Not a dollar that can go for a bullet, for food, for a helmet, for a pair of khaki uniforms, no air cover, and nothing could go on offshore in South Vietnam either. So they shut down their operations in South Vietnam. And the South Vietnamese had defended their own country for 3 years, but when their resources dried up, their military collapsed.

Some of those things are being maneuvered right now, and I can hear this come out of the debate on the other side of the aisle.

But here are the scenarios: One scenario is listen to the people over here, Mr. Speaker, who would say, well, let's unfund this operation. Let's bring our troops home now. Let's get out of there because it is sectarian strife and you can't resolve a civil war and it is just brother fighting against brother and why do we want to get involved in a family feud? All of that that substitutes for rationale.

But what they are really looking at is if they get their way, the reality in Iraq is different than their perception, I believe, and I would like to have them pay a little more attention, maybe go over there with a real intention to learn.

But a year ago in Iraq there was violence over most of the entire country scattered around. And the argument I heard from this side of the aisle over here was, well, let's get out of there right now, get the Americans out because, after all, they are the targets and Iraqis just want to have their own country. They object to Americans walking on their soil. So if we would leave, there would be nobody for them to shoot at, and then peace would

break out all over Iraq, and the government would take over, and everything would be peaceful and fine. That was their argument then. Well, it was flawed, of course. But there was violence over most of Iraq.

A year later, now, most of the violence is confined to Baghdad. Eighty percent of the violence is in the Baghdad area. So peace has broken out over most of Iraq. And if you talk to the soldiers that have been over there that are running missions and convoys and doing patrols, they will tell you that most of Iraq seems very, very normal, that you go down the street and off on the road and the Iraqi kids come out and wave and the Iraqi people are open and friendly. The men are open and friendly. The women are a little more shy and a little demure. That is their culture. But they travel where they want to go, and the only thing that makes them realize that there is a war is when an IED goes off. So we are getting there, and the Baghdad area is the area that needs to be controlled and pacified. The rest of the country is pretty good.

If we pulled out now or if we pulled out in the near future, the involvement and the interference that comes from Iran would be imposed on the Shiia section of Iraq, which is actually a little more than the southern area of Iraq, which has got most of the oil in it. It would be Baghdad and some of the areas to the north of there and all the way south down to Basra, into the hands of the influence of the Iranian Shiia, who are right now funding and training, equipping and arming terrorists in Iran and sending them into Iraq and supporting some of the militia personnel there like Muqtada al Sadr.

I happen to have his picture here. This fellow has been a nemesis for a long time. And I put the date down here. That was the date that I was sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City watching Al Jazeera TV. Muqtada al Sadr, the head of the Mahdi militia, came on Al Jazeera TV, and as I watched that he said in Arabic with the English crawler underneath: ``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.

Now here he is being supported by the Iranians, funding his militia, helping to train his militia, and paying some of them to plant IEDs and attack Americans. Iran is conducting a proxy war against the United States from the sanctuary of their sovereign nation of Iran and sending in the munitions and the militia and the insurgents to attack Americans there, and this man is their surrogate, and he must go.

It is more complicated than the people on the other side of the aisle would say. They would argue that it is just Shiia and Sunni that are fighting each other. There are six to eight different factions fighting each other there. Sadr is one. The Badr Brigade is another. Al Qaeda is another. There are Sunni criminal groups that are fighting. There are other groups, the former Baathists, that are fighting.

You can add these pieces up, Mr. Speaker, but in the end it is more complicated than just simple sectarian strife. It is a power struggle, a power to provide security and safety within some areas of the community, the effort on the part of Muqtada al Sadr and others to drive some of the Sunnis out of Sunni sections of Baghdad so that they can have their internal hegemony within the city of Baghdad.

But this all happened because there was somewhat of a vacuum there and we didn't go in and take this man out when we needed to do that. And he has been to some degree protected by Prime Minister Maliki, who this afternoon made a statement that essentially puts Muqtada al Sadr on notice. He tells the Shiite militias to give up.

``Prime Minister al-Maliki has told everyone that there will be no escape from attack,'' said a senior legislator who is close to Maliki. ``The government has told the Sadrists,'' Muqtada al Sadrists, `` `if we want to build a state, we have no other choice but to attack armed groups,' '' this being the armed groups, Mr. Speaker.

So I will say there are two main points that I want to hear the President address tonight, and one of them is militias must be taken on and taken out and they are getting an opportunity to surrender right now because Prime Minister Maliki has put them on notice. They must be taken on and taken out if they don't surrender. This is the lead that has got to go.

The second one is Iran must cease and desist from their proxy war against the United States from the sanctuary of the sovereign nation of Iran by sending in insurgents who are trained, equipped, funded, and armed by the Iranians.

And, by the way, IEDs that are being detonated that are blowing up Americans and killing Americans are being made in Iran and smuggled into Iraq. If we pull out of Iraq now without a successful safe country there, the result will be Iran will control the Shiia section of Iraq. They will control most of the oil in Iraq. They control the Straits of Hormuz now. They would control the outlet, the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates River, the Umm Qasr ports, the export area for Iraq's oil. They would have a stranglehold on 40 percent of the world's oil, which is a death grip on the world economy.

They would be in a position to continue to enrich themselves, and their money chest would be pouring over. They could then accelerate their nuclear weapons development. They could either build more and build them faster or buy them where they could get them, perhaps from North Korea, and you would see Iran much more quickly become a dominant nuclear power with an ability not just to put a nuclear missile into Tel Aviv but the ability to do so into Western Europe and within just a few years the ability to do so clear into the United States of America with a death grip on the oil and the world, 40 percent of the oil, which controls the market, Mr. Speaker.

That is what we are looking at if we pull out of there. The stakes are too high, and that is why the President rejected, I will say politely ignored, the Iraq Study Group's recommendations.

But we should keep in mind, Mr. Speaker, that there was a million dollar appropriation here that went to the United States Institute for Peace and out of that came the Iraq Study Group. Now, why, if we wanted to figure out how to win a war, would we go to the United States Institute for Peace and ask them to give us some advice? That makes about as much sense as going to the Syrians or going to the Iranians and saying, can you help us solve this problem? Why don't you give us some constructive recommendations?

It is not in their interest to give us constructive recommendations. It is in the interest of the Iranians and the Syrians to undermine our effort there so that they can get us out of the Middle East and they can impose their influence on Iraq, not the other way around. We will not get constructive advice from Iran or from Syria any more than we got advice on how to win a war from the Iraq Study Group because I believe that they thought that their charge was how do we get out of this? Let's figure out how to get out of this. Not how do we win?

But the President, to his credit, went to the Pentagon and said, I don't want to hear from you how we get out of Iraq. I want to see a strategy for victory.

I wish he had done that a couple years ago, but I am glad he did it now. I am looking forward to his speech; and, as I said, I will be sure we adjourn here before the President's speech that will happen right at 9 o'clock.

But, at this moment, I would very much like to yield to my friend from Tennessee, Mr. Zach Wamp.

I thank the gentleman from Tennessee for his commitment to this country and the passion that he brings to everything he does. I point out, that meeting in Africa, we arrived from different locations and almost by coincidence, by providence, we arrived at the same location to address the things we were concerned about in South Africa at the time. I also note that Mr. Wamp shows up to address these issues spontaneously on occasion. I very much appreciate your leadership, Zach.

As we sit here tonight, I will review some of the things that Mr. Wamp addressed. He listed a number of books that he recommended that we read.

Among them was the book ``While Europe Slept'' by Bruce Bawer, and that is, I think, one of the most profound reads I have ever gone through. It tells the story how the author has traveled from New York City into Holland to make his life there, and realized he could never become a Dutchman in Holland the same way you can become an American in the United States. So he moved to Norway to become a Norwegian and found out that although he could develop his language skills and understood the culture and history of Norway, he would never be a Norwegian because they don't have a system of assimilation that we have or at least had in the United States.

So he traveled throughout the countries in Europe and gathered anecdotes and data and studies and compiled an understanding of what is happening with the ethnic enclaves that have been created in Europe, those enclaves that are Muslim enclaves.

Our idea has been in this country to promote assimilation. Everybody can become an American. That, we have considered to be multiculturalism. But the multiculturalism in Europe is different. That is, let us create an ethnic enclave here, and look at us. We are no longer this blue-eyed, blond society, or whatever it happens to be in the Scandinavian north or whatever the complexion might be in some of the other areas in Europe. We now have multiculturalism by ethnic enclave, and the ethnic enclaves being primarily Muslim have not integrated into the rest of society, and they have brought more and more from their home country and grown their enclaves to the point where Bruce Bawer's analysis comes down to that skepticism that France will ever be French again within the next generation, and that the takeover that takes place without the assimilation by rejecting the host country's culture and importing the culture of the newly arriving immigrants transforms these countries and explains why you can see second generation British of Pakistani descent setting off bombs in the subways in London.

It explains that, and it shows what is happening to the culture in Europe because they have opened up their borders and not promoted assimilation. When it is done, Bruce Bawer's analysis comes down to the choice for Europe will be either one of two things: total capitulation or mass expulsion. That is what Europe is faced with, and I am not optimistic that Europe will recover and come back to being a partner for the free world again because the people that are in those countries that are slowly by birth rate taking over don't believe in the freedoms that we believe in, Mr. Speaker. They reject them. They reject Western civilization and our Christian culture. The reject the Judeo-Christian belief system. The wahabists that Mr. Wamp talked about, they believe they have an obligation or at least a right to annihilate those who don't believe like they do.

That is the enemy that we are up against. And this geopolitical dynamic needs to be understood by the Members of this Congress, and I am thinking the best way they can understand it is when the American people study it and get their voice into the ears of their representatives, the 435 here in the U.S. States House of Representatives.

But to take on a little more of this, I would point out that a major question needs to be asked and answered, and I hope the President has asked the question and I hope he has answered the question, and that is: Can we live with, here in the United States, a nuclear armed Iran? That is part of this overall equation. It isn't just confined to Iraq.

As I spoke earlier, Iran is conducting a proxy war against the United States in Iraq by training and funding and harboring terrorists and sending them munitions and equipping them and also making IEDs and other munitions that go into Iraq that are being used against Iraqis of all stripes and being used against Americans. That has to stop.

But can we tolerate a nuclear-powered Iran, an irrational nuclear- powered Iran that has Ahmadinejad who is fuming and making allegations about the annihilation of Israel and the annihilation of the United States.

All we have to do is listen to these tyrants and believe what they say. Every action that they make makes it clear that they will develop a nuclear bomb. They will develop more than one. They are developing the means to deliver it now, as they are developing a bomb now. Why would we disbelieve them? Why would we think that we could talk them out of it? When you go into negotiations, you never get something for nothing. You have to have something to offer.

I ask the President, and I hope he will tell us tonight, that he has put the cross hairs on Iran, and directly on their nuclear capability and sent through a back-channel message to Ahmadinejad and the mullahs that run him that Iran's nuclear days are numbered and that there is a decision that has already been made that they will not have a nuclear capability. And if they cease and desist from their proxy war against the United States that they are conducting within Iraq, then they will be allowed, perhaps, enough negotiation time that they can save some face before they dismantle their nuclear endeavor.

Should they proceed, then the decision needs to be made whether to take out Iran's nuclear capability. We saw 4 days ago, there was intelligence or I will say a press leak that came out of Israel that they have a contingency plan to take out Iran's nuclear capability with limited tactical nuclear weapons. If they have to do that, I am afraid there is an all-out conflagration in the Middle East, and all Arab countries will descend upon Israel. If somebody has to do it, it is better if we do it. It is better if Ahmadinejad dismantles his nuclear capability.

That is where I would start: Cross hairs on Ahmadinejad, put the cross hairs on their nuclear capability, and then if they back out of Iraq, then we can have a peaceful Iraq. We still have to remove Muqtada al-Sadr and some other militia leaders. If those two things happen, that shuts off the money, the munitions and the operations of violence that are there. As long as there is money there, somebody is going to set an IED. I can see that. But most is controllable by the Iraqis.

I have watched as thousands of Iraqi troops have been trained, lined up in ranks. I first saw them and reviewed those troops in October 2003. Those troops were trained by General David Petraeus. He headed up the Iraqi military training operations when he was over there during the last deployment, and now he has been appointed to command all military operations within Iraq. He is the most impressive military person I have met in my life. If anyone can run this operation in Iraq successfully, it is David Petraeus. He has the love and respect of many of the Iraqis, the Kurds and Sunnis and Shias. And in Mosul, where the 101st Airborne, which he commanded when they went in to liberate Iraq, there in Mosul, they went in and liberated Mosul in the latter part of March 2003. By the end of May 2003, General Petraeus had held open elections in Mosul in those three provinces there, and elected a governor and a vice governor, and I also recall a business representative at the table in those discussions that we had. That was an impressive means to win the hearts and minds of the people, and also from a military tactical perspective.

But to give you an understanding of how effective General Petraeus has been, there is a sign, and I have a picture of it as a street sign on a broad street in the city of Mosul in Iraq, and it said: 101st Airborne Division. They misspelled ``airborne'' and ``division'' so I was pretty sure that it was a sign put up by the Iraqi people in appreciation for the 101st Airborne led then by General Petraeus who will be taking over and commanding all military forces within Iraq.

We can win this. We must win this. We do not have a tactical threat against us. We can and will prevail. The American people need to stand together. Mr. Wamp said that, and I agree with him.

We need to stand with our Commander in Chief. It isn't really up to the President to convince the American people that we should move forward on this, but it is up to us to support our military. And if we are going to support our military, we must support their mission, Mr. Speaker.

So I look forward to the President's speech. It is a pleasure for me to have the honor and privilege to turn over, I will say this network, to the President of the United States as he lays out a

plan for victory in the battlefield of Iraq, which will take us on to a final victory in the overall global war on terror.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), who was the distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 1 minute p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, January 11, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. McHenry's input into this dialogue that we have here is essential. I look forward to the pugnacious Mr. McHenry's deliveries on this floor and in committee and before the media over the next 2 years of the new 110th Congress.

As always, Mr. Speaker, it is a profound honor and privilege to address you on the floor in the United States House of Representatives, the people's House. As I bring up this subject matter that is here before us, I have a series of things, random thoughts on the passing scene, focused on current events will be my message here today.

There are mistakes that are made and there are things said and done in political campaigns that don't always reflect the wishes or the policy, but things are said sometimes to win elections and then you have to follow through on that.

We have had some standards to look back on. The first 100 days of the presidency, many Presidents have made their pledge that in the first 100 days they are going to move pieces of policy, and they have endeavored to keep those pledges.

When the Republicans took over the majority in 1994, they also made a pledge in the first 100 days that they would bring, at least bring to a vote a series of reform changes called ``Contract With America.'' Looking back on that, and it depends on your analysis and definition, but something like two-thirds of that agenda was passed into law. I believe all of it was voted on in this Congress. But yet it was done under a regular order. It was done under an open process, and it was done by bringing the legislation of the Contract With America, which I am comparing now to this first 100 hours of the new majority's agenda, comparing those two initiatives that were brought up in the campaign and the pledges that were made. But they were brought through in regular order in the Contract With America in 1994.

Regular order meaning that the bills were introduced and they were brought to subcommittee where they had a full subcommittee hearing and there was open debate and there was an opportunity for Democrats and Republicans to offer their amendments into the subcommittee on each of those pieces of legislation. As it came out of subcommittee, it went to full committee where there was an opportunity for the full committee members to weigh in. As we know, the committees are where we have established and developed expertise. If you look at the chairs and also the seasoned veterans on committees, both Republicans and Democrats, and I look at the Judiciary Committee where there is a tremendous amount of seniority, and I have the honor to serve on the House Judiciary Committee, there is a replete, not necessarily complete but a very replete body of knowledge within the minds of the members of the committee and the staff. And of course the history and the resources that are there.

That is why we put legislation through the subcommittee and committee processes so we can weigh in with our judgment and bring our individual expertise to bear, and we have an opportunity to hear from our constituents because they will read the language and they will parse the words and let us know where the flaws are.

Mr. Speaker, my first step into public life was going from the private sector, being a construction company founder, owner and manager into the legislative arena as an Iowa senator. And the first thing I learned was the law of unintended consequences.

In other words, you can have a good idea and it sounds perfect to you from your limited perspective. You can put that down into the form of a law, and if I were king for a day as a younger man, I might have offered some of those ideas I had earlier in my political career as an edict that I believed should have been the law of the land and lay that out there and give a bob of my scepter and declare that to be law. But my mistakes would have been as a younger, less experienced man, and sometimes still today those mistakes, I didn't understand the law of unintended consequences. I didn't understand that my ideas needed to be vetted across the spectrum of the other people that I served in the State legislature with, and I carry that experience with me into this Congress. I didn't understanding that I needed to float those ideas out to the various constituency groups that are there to be voices of individuals, and I didn't understand that I needed to float those out to individuals and get those ideas out in the press and publish my bills so that people that are interested can look in and weigh in and make phone calls, send e-mails and write letters, come and visit and lobby as individuals or join up with their various constituency groups that are out there to be able to analyze and be a louder voice as members of a group so that all of the expertise that America has to offer can come to bear on the judgments and decisions that we make here in this Congress.

But that whole process that I have described, the process utilized in 1994 with the Contract With America, that entire open, bipartisan process has been usurped by this rules package that has been brought here to the floor of this Congress. We learned essentially a new term. I don't know if anybody in this Congress understood it at the time. Some did, I imagine, because they came up with the effort on the rules.

I came down here to put up my first vote on a motion to commit. Now I have voted many times on motions to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, if I may describe that. A motion to recommit is a motion that says if you bring a bill to the floor and then it gets debated here on the floor, the motion to recommit says we want to recommit it back to committee and sometimes recommit it with instructions back to committee because there are Members here in the full House that didn't have an opportunity to weigh in on that bill as it came through committee. They didn't sit on the appropriate committee, for example. So they had a viewpoint that needed to be considered. And if a motion to recommit is successful here on the floor, that says a majority of the Members of the full House of Representatives have concluded that there are other ideas that needed to be considered, send it back to committee with instructions so those other ideas can be considered. That is a motion to recommit.

But we voted on a motion to commit, not recommit, a motion to commit. A motion to commit is send it to committee. And the reason it is a motion to commit rather than a motion to recommit is this legislation has not gone through committee. It has not gone through the subcommittee process or the committee process. It simply then is legislation that was held very tight. I don't know if it was in a locked briefcase, but it was something that the public and press didn't have access to. Members of Congress didn't have access to it. In fact, I believe many of the lower ranking Members of the majority party didn't have access to this legislation. It was secret legislation that was thrust upon us and the only opportunity that we have is a nondebatable motion to commit to committee for the first time because it didn't go through the committee process.

I submit, Mr. Speaker, that is inconsistent with the pledge that was made throughout the election process and throughout the campaign process.

There are a number of quotes that were identified, and I have some of them. I don't have all of them. One of them by now-Speaker Pelosi was this, and this was on CNN on November 9, so 2 days after the election. That would have been Thursday. She said, ``Democrats are ready to lead, prepared to govern.'' I don't quibble with that part of the statement. But the completion of the sentence is, ``ready to lead, prepared to govern, and absolutely willing to work in a bipartisan way.''

Mr. Speaker, there is no definition of bipartisanship that I can apply to this process unless many of the Members of the majority party were as shut out of this process as the entire minority party was. I suspect that is the case. I don't want to parse the language in there, I just want to say that the spirit and intent of that statement, ``willing to work in a bipartisan way'' has been violated here, but maybe not the technical definition of that. We can expect these things because we have a house full of lawyers that are good with language and they will find a way to convolute this language to be able to defend themselves.

So I point out this process. Motion to commit, nondebatable motion. All you can do is plead for a recorded vote, and that is the only opportunity to voice objection, but there is not an opportunity to improve the legislation. And that is really what we need to do, always, all of us in a bipartisan way, at least provide an opportunity for amendments in the process. That means in the subcommittee process and in the full committee process, and then here on the floor of the House of Representatives in open debate so the public can evaluate this process, not a secret or closed process, but an open process to the public. We owe you that, America. We owe you an open and clean process and we owe you an open dialogue and an open debate.

If we don't do that, you will be drawing conclusions such as they don't believe in what they are doing enough to be able to have an open debate. What kind of work is being done here that we are not able to have it withstand the scrutiny and the criticism that might come from the public if it were an open process.

So I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that promises get made during campaigns. There were many promises made during the last campaign that will not be kept by the new majority party. But the promise that seems to be the one that is sacrosanct is the promise that in the first 100 hours we will do these things. In order to accomplish these promises of achievement within the first 100 hours, which is comparable to the first 100 days in presidential promises or the promise of the 1994 new majority, in order to achieve those goals and keep those promises, the promise we will do it within the first 100 hours, the only way to meet that was to take this bipartisanship and set it aside and suspend it at least temporarily, if not permanently, for the 110th Congress, and to set aside the subcommittee process and set aside the committee process.

We have one more avenue here that there can be an open forum, and that is the rules process. At least a member can bring an amendment to the Rules Committee, explain their amendment in open forum and ask for a vote on their amendment as to whether that amendment can be allowed to be considered here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I was astonished there were this many amendments when I came here as a freshman a couple of Congresses ago. I was astonished that there were so many amendments that were turned down, that did not see the light of day. But there was an opportunity to present them to the Rules Committee, and I did that many times and I got turned down many times as a member of the majority party. But we don't even have a rules process that is open enough that you can present your amendments to the Rules Committee.

In fact, I believe the Rules Committee, as an example already, will not be meeting, it will simply be a decision that is made by the leadership of the majority party, and the recorded votes of the Rules Committee will be secret. That is part of this package, as I understand it, too, Mr. Speaker.

So of all of the promises that will be broken, the one that should be broken is the one that is sacrosanct, the promise of accomplishment in the first 100 hours. If we could just look at that and say we understand your motive, but this is not conducive to bipartisanship or open process; in fact, it is not conducive to good legislation because the good ideas of Democrats and Republicans are shut out of this process.

I will just ask this of now-Speaker Pelosi: Why don't you just break one promise instead of a series that will ultimately be broken, and break that promise about 100 hours so that you can keep your promise about bipartisanship, and keep your promises about an open process and ethical process. That is far more important to the American people than a promise to accomplish certain legislative endeavors within the first 100 hours.

This 100 hours is meaningless to the American people. All of this has to go over to the Senate. The Senate has to be willing to take it up. The Senate has to be able to vote cloture on some of this, and I think it will be filibustered, and it has to get to the President for signature. Timing is not as essential, it is the policy that is important. It is important to have an open process, it is important that we weigh in and that amendments be allowed to be offered and that they be considered and that they be voted on so the American people can have confidence in this process.

And sometimes, sometimes, this body, this great deliberative body of the people's House, will reach the right decisions. In fact, I believe often we will. When we do so with public debate and an open process, we reach the right decision for the right policy for America and we also reach it by using the right reasons, the reasons of open dialogue that allow people's positions and their knowledge to come to that debate.

Sometimes we will make the wrong decision, and when we do that, if we have open dialogue and open debate, then at least it is arguable that we have arrived at the wrong decision, but at least we followed the right process, and we can't fault the reasoning on how we get there.

I would compare Gerald R. Ford, and may he rest in peace, Gerald R. Ford, whom we said good-bye to within this past week, the man who came to the Presidency after having served 25 years here, Mr. Speaker, in the House of Representatives, a man who was almost without guile as President. A President who made decisions at a time when we

needed someone who had absolute integrity. The person who had confidence, the confidence and the endorsement of Democrats and Republicans at the time, Mr. Speaker. And with Gerald R. Ford as President, when he made a decision, when I agreed with him and he laid out his reasoning and his rationale, when he made the right decision, he made it for the right reason.

He thoughtfully deliberated on the components of the information, the interactivity of them and what the result would be and what the constitutional foundation was on that decision. And he made his decision, and he told us why. And that established confidence in the integrity and the judgment, in the intellect, and the character and in the faith of Gerald R. Ford.

When he made the wrong decision, and I will just say when I disagreed with him would be my definition of the wrong decision, he still laid out his argument. And when he laid out his argument, I could not fault him for using the wrong criteria. It was well thought out. He made his arguments well. When we disagreed, I would have a different argument.

But those kinds of debates that he had within himself, he earned that respect of us for President Ford. That kind of deliberation, that kind of integrity so far in the 110th Congress is nonexistent because there hasn't been an opportunity to have that debate on any of this that has come to this at this point and the rules deny there be that kind of debate and deliberation in the future.

So I talked about the new motion, still it was in the rules, but a motion to commit. New to use. You will hear a discussion, Mr. Speaker, about PAYGO. PAYGO means pay as you go. It means something different to Democrats than it does to Republicans. And I will say that when Republicans talk about PAYGO, we mean we want to pay as we go, as do Democrats, but we believe we should constrain spending and slow the growth in government and we should find ways for reconciliation and maybe do a rescissions package so that we can rachet this spending down to keep it within the revenue stream.

We believe that the Bush tax cuts have absolutely flat out been proven to stimulate this economy. Revenue is up. Revenue has increased significantly since the Bush tax cuts were put in place. That is why our deficit has been reduced. It is because revenue has gone beyond our expectations. But the PAYGO argument for me is I want to slow this growth in spending so that we can get the size of our Federal Government back in line with the size of our revenue stream.

For example, last year there were mistakes made by the majority party in the last couple, three Congresses. I believe that there was too much money that was spent, Mr. Speaker, and I think that we should have shut that down earlier. I was surprised when I came to this Congress as a freshman in January of 2003 that there wasn't a balanced budget that I could simply endorse, jump on, and go to work with. It was a condition where we were dealing with the reality of the politics rather than the necessity of balancing the budget.

And in order to produce a balanced budget, I would have had to create my own with my new staff, who didn't really have that time and understanding of this overall 2.7 or $2.8 trillion national budget. But things crept away from a balanced budget, and we know why. We know there was the bursting of the dot-com bubble that took place and it was necessary, and I could go into that perhaps on another date, Mr. Speaker.

And we also know that we faced an attack on September 11 that shut down our financial industry and that the effort was to turn our United States economy into a tailspin. It needed to be brought out of that nosedive, and the tax cuts that we passed brought it back up out of that nosedive. We knew that we had to engage in a global war on terror and it was going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars to be able to defend Americans that had been killed in greater numbers on our soil than ever at any time in history, and we set about to do that.

So three big things sent us into a deficit: the bursting of the dot- com bubble, the attack on September 11, and the necessity to fund the effort in a global war on terror. Those three things. And as the stimulants took place on the tax cuts, it has taken a little while to get them to take hold, but there is no argument that this economy is the strongest and most powerful economy that I have experienced in my lifetime, and it is measurable by a lot of different ways. Anything that goes up and is good for the economy is up. Anything that goes down that is good for the economy is down, and the opposite is also true.

This has been a powerfully strong economy with growth in something like 18 of 19 previous quarters, and all of that growth has been up around the 3 percent level. So this economy has been powerful, and this growth has been really a great position to be in to be able to say let us let the economy grow us out of this. Let us slow this growth of balance. Let us balance this budget.

But let us not balance it, Mr. Speaker, with tax increases. That is what PAYGO means to Democrats. The tax cuts have provided the growth in our revenue stream. Tax increases will diminish the growth in our revenue stream. But their idea of pay-as-you-go is to increase taxes and increase spending, as we heard Mr. McHenry say, to the tune of $800 million in this package. That $800 million won't be paid for by cuts in other line items in any significant way. That, in their mind, is paid for by tax increases.

As has been stipulated by the new incoming chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel of New York, none of the Bush tax cuts he would say he would support or endorse. And as you listened to him respond across the media airwaves, it always came back to the only way that you could characterize his position was we are going to increase taxes.

When you increase taxes, you slow this economy. Ronald Reagan once said what you tax you get less of. What you tax you get less of, and what you subsidize you get more of. But I want to talk about the what- you-tax-you-get-less-of component of that, a very wise statement of President Reagan's, and that is in our infinite lack of wisdom here in the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, we tax all productivity in America.

In fact, the Federal Government has the first lien on all productivity in America. And you can measure that by personal income tax, corporate income tax, capital gains, taxes on interest income, taxes on dividend income, taxes on your pension, taxes on your Social Security. I am forgetting some of those taxes. How about your savings and investment? Any way you can describe productivity, the Federal Government is there to tax it; so we get less productivity because we tax our productivity in America, and Democrats are poised to increase the taxes on our productivity. What you tax you get less of.

If you are paying a 10 percent income tax and you are making $50,000 a year and they want to raise that tax up to let's just say 50 percent, why in the world would you try to increase your revenue stream by 50 percent if your taxes are going to go up by the average of 50 percent and 10 percent, say, roughly 30 percent on average? That will not happen in the minds of the American people. That is why organized economies never work. That is why Marxism has failed. That is why socialized economies, managed economies, have always failed. Free enterprise has been the thing that has provided incentives so that people could produce all they could produce and they had an incentive to be able to keep the max amount possible and still be able to provide the services that are necessary to hold our sovereign state together.

Democrats want to raise taxes to balance the budget. Republicans want to cut spending to balance the budget.

So last year I put together the formula that would get us to a balanced budget. And if we just wanted to do it all at once, we need to be looking at what that balanced budget was to do that all at once. And we say, first of all, there is nondiscretionary spending. This is the kind of spending that is already in the formula, that is, what it is going to cost for Social Security, what it is going to cost for Medicaid, what it is going to cost for Medicare. That is most of them, those formulas that are automatic transfer payments that are

already set up in the equation. That is nondiscretionary spending. Many people think you can't affect that. That we shouldn't change it, maybe adjust the rules in such a way that there would be fewer recipients or fewer dollars of Medicaid, for example.

That needs to be addressed, and we have tried to address entitlement spending. That is that nondiscretionary spending and the other phrase for it: you are entitled to Social Security. You are entitled to Medicare. You are entitled to Medicaid. But the rules of those entitlements are in the code today, and those rules are something that can be changed and adjusted. And I am not here to talk about how to do that specifically, although I do have some ideas on how to approach that, but we need to address entitlement spending.

That was the President's effort when he came out right after his second inaugural address and traveled the countryside and spoke about reforming Social Security. That operation will collapse at some point unless we have the political courage to touch that third rail and fix it. That is an entitlement.

Another one is Medicare. Being from the State that is last in the Nation in Medicare receipts on a per capita basis, there is much that must be done to help our people out who are on the short end of that stick. But entitlement spending is a component of this. They want to increase taxes rather than adjust entitlement spending. And the more they can grow entitlement spending, the more they can take us into socialism. And I don't want to have a managed economy. I want to have a free enterprise market economy. That is what I came here to promote and defend.

PAYGO for Democrats is raise taxes; PAYGO for Republicans is cut spending. And last year for the 2007 fiscal year, which much of that is still ahead of us, we could have left entitlements in place. We could have left defense spending in place at the appropriated levels that we have now and done nondefense discretionary spending. That is the rest of the budget that I haven't mentioned.

Mr. Speaker, nondefense discretionary spending could have been appropriated at the term of 95 percent of what it was for the 2006 fiscal year and we would have had a balanced budget.

Some of the Democrats have pledged to support a balanced budget that does not include increasing taxes, that does include reduction of spending in nondefense discretionary, that discretionary spending that doesn't put our Nation at risk. Ninety-five percent of the 2006 fiscal year, that doesn't mean an increase. That actually means a decrease of 5 percent in funding.

Well, if I have a family budget and all of a sudden I look around and I think I am going into debt here and I guess I am not going to be in a position to pass that debt along to my children, and we should not be, then we need to be willing to live within our means. And whatever your means are, most of us, if we had to look back and think we can have a balanced family budget if we would just reduce our overall spending down to 95 percent of what it was last year, we would willingly make that adjustment, recognizing that we haven't been as responsible as we should have been, and made the budget adjustment.

That is the kind of PAYGO we need to do in this Congress. We need a balanced budget here, yes, Mr. Speaker, but not PAYGO with tax increases. Pay as you go without tax increases. That is the Steve King position, and I believe that will be a core position on the part of many of the Republicans.

Another way that we can adjust, address spending, is the earmark reform. I have been in strong support of earmark reform. I have stepped in and voted for 16 of the 17 that Congressman Flake brought to the floor of this Congress in the 109th Congress, but I don't think that really does the job. They are pieces that I agree with.

But I want to do some real reform here, Mr. Speaker, and I am prepared to introduce a bill. It is a bill that I introduced last year.

The problem is this, we talk about giving the President a line item veto, so that when there is spending that comes out, and maybe you want to talk about the Bridge to Nowhere, that is one of those issues that has been raised up as a earmark. Well, if the Bridge to Nowhere comes up, or the Cowgirl Hall of Fame comes up or some of these other earmarks that have been rather notorious in the media, we would ask the President, under a presidential line item veto to veto that, take it out of the budget, save that $273 million or whatever the number might be for any of those items, or $1 million line item veto to maybe study the nocturnal habits of the salamander, or whatever it might be. You know some of those, Mr. Speaker, they have been out in the news.

These are earmarks that get slipped in, generally at the committee level, as the bill is being drafted. It comes out here. No Member of Congress has an opportunity to evaluate those earmarks, nor an opportunity to bring an amendment that could strike those earmarks from the bill. They arrive in a compromised fashion often as a conference committee report that comes back in the negotiations between the House and the Senate.

It comes to the floor. We have got to vote on it to move to keep the government operating, and what happens is, there are line items in there that have been earmarked by people who are inside that conference committee, and these Members of Congress here, Democrats and Republicans, are held accountable for voting ``yes'' or ``no'' on pork projects that they didn't know was in the bill.

I would illustrate it this way, when I first came to this Congress, there was a 3,600 page omnibus spending bill. I was only here about 3 days, or maybe even two, and that bill came to the floor of this Congress, and 20 minutes after it was made available to my staff to evaluate, the final vote went up here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

That process meant that I was accountable for all of those earmarks that were in that omnibus spending bill, those 3,600 pages. It is one thing to try to evaluate a bill and read what's in it, it is not possible within the time we had, but it is at least possible to evaluate something that is in the bill.

Try and find, Mr. Speaker, something that is not in the bill. Try and look through 3,600 pages to determine that there are omissions as well as the issues, the earmarks that are in the bill.

This process does need to be more open, so I have drafted the CUT Act, and it is cut unnecessary tab, and the tab references, if you have a tab in an eating or drinking establishment, we want to cut this tab.

I believe this, that Members of Congress need to have a legitimate opportunity to have their own line item veto. I think every Member of this Congress should be able to offer an amendment to a bill that strikes out the line items of their choice under an open rule.

So the CUT Act does this, Mr. Speaker, it allows once a quarter, four times a year, for a bill to come to the floor under an open rule, and it may just be a shell bill, it may not have a single line item strike in it, but it allows under an open rule any and every Member to bring forth their list of objectionable spending, objectionable earmarks, and have them offer those earmark strikes.

All it would do is be a rescissions bill that reduces spending, and the reduction in that spending goes to address the deficit. When the deficit is addressed, then it goes back into the general fund, which ultimately reduces our national debt, gives every Member of this Congress an opportunity to have a line item veto of their own offered to all Members of Congress.

So let us say there is a crazy appropriation out here that got slipped into a bill. It will surely happen, Mr. Speaker, it will happen hundreds and perhaps thousands of times. Let us just say that the blogosphere out there is lit up, that people go to their Web pages, and they scrutinize the work that we do. We need to give them a lot of access to do that because they are the next watch dogs on this Congress.

It used to be that the watch dogs sat in this gallery, and many do, and I am glad they are here, but then as those watch dogs were also up here in the press corps, and then the press wrote, and it got into the newspapers, and sometimes, weeks later, had got out into the press in the corners of the United States of America

Well, now we are real-time. We are real-time, and it has been press real-time for a long time, but it is even better now because we have an Internet, we have a blogosphere. Let us just say that there is a completely objectionable earmark that has been slipped in by a committee chairman, or maybe an agreement with a ranking member, that comes out of a conference committee, and it comes down to the floor of this Congress.

Let us just pick the nocturnal habits of salamanders for $10 million, to have a subject here that we can talk about and understand. Well, we don't really need to understand the nocturnal habits of salamanders, at least at that kind of experience to the taxpayers. But whatever the motivation was that put it in there, we will not see it. We will not have time to read the bill. But that bill then, once it passes a conference report, goes to the President, and he will sign that bill, because there are many things in there that we must have to keep the government operating, and now we have got $10 million wasted on the nocturnal habits of salamanders.

There is nothing Congress can do about it, we have done it. We have been complicit, our rules have been complicit in allowing these things to happen, not just with this earmark, Mr. Speaker, but hundreds and even thousands of them. My CUT Act allows this, it allows a Member to stand up on the first day of the quarter, hopefully it will be the leader and the leaders, and they will say, I have a bill at the desk made in order under the rule, and this bill is the CUT Act bill, then that allows the shell bill to come up like an appropriations bill, only this is a deappropriations bill, a rescissions bill, that every amendment that strikes spending by line item is in order, and the Members can flock over here to the Capitol, and being responsive to their constituents, being responsive to their constituency groups, being responsive to the bloggers out there, that have gone down through this legislation, have read every single line item, have read the details and the nuances of it, read every details and the nuances of it; and then, these Members of Congress can come here, offer their amendments to strike the $10 million that would be spent for the nocturnal habits of salamanders, and you can add line after item after line item, strike after strike to that.

When that happens, we will have an open process, a process that will allow for the people of the United States of America to weigh in on our appropriations that we are doing here.

That, Mr. Speaker, is a description of how the CUT Act works. A lot of us would like to see the President with a legitimate and effective line item veto. But I believe this Congress deserves a legitimate and an effective line item veto. It is why I put a lot of research into this, I have examined it, I have floated it out to the various constituency groups. I have asked them for their input because I don't want to have unintended consequences. I want to be able to provide a process here that is good for the future of America, an open process, a process that gives everybody in this Congress a line item veto, at least to offer the amendment.

When that bill passes off this floor, and I don't envision just eliminating $10 million on the nocturnal habits of salamanders, I envision there to be 25 or 50 or 100 or 300 or more line items that are accumulated into that bill that are struck. Because individually, they will not be able to withstand the scrutiny of the majority of the Members of Congress, because you, the people of America, and the American people, I should say, actually, Mr. Speaker, will insist that we be fiscally responsible and that we not waste money.

So let us just say that there are now 100 line items strikes, each one of them representing an amendment to the CUT Act bill that is in order, and that $10 million to the nocturnal habits of salamanders is the first one, and that saves the taxpayers $10 million. We go right down the list of those things that you know about, Mr. Speaker, those things that are in the media, strike after strike after strike, and we have now accumulated 100 different strikes, line item vetoes, and out of those 100, there is in there, perhaps, let us pick a round number, $1 billion. Now this bill, then, passes off this House of Representatives, and it goes over to the Senate, where we ask them to take it up.

We cannot write their rules, Mr. Speaker, but we can ask them to take up a bill that we pass here, a rescissions package that has the full support of the American people that cuts $1 billion out of our spending that reduces our deficit and when, successfully, we are at the balanced budget level, pays down the national debt.

That is the CUT Act, Mr. Speaker. That is a line item veto for Members of Congress. That is Congressional accountability. That is the kinds of things that we need to have an opportunity to debate here on the floor of this Congress when we kick off this 110th. That is the kind of amendment that has been shut out of this process, not just out of the process of subcommittee and committee, but shut out of even being presented at the Rules Committee so that there can be access to the media for the debate, the deliberation, and so that there will be people that can be held accountable for their vote when they decide they don't want this kind of an open process.

I submit that there is no desire for this open process on the part of the majority. I believe that I need to continue to beat this drum, and I will.

To package the PAYGO argument up and move on to the next component of this, PAYGO, for Republicans is, control and constrain spending to achieve a balanced you budget, no new taxes, less spending, balanced budget, fiscally responsible, PAYGO for Democrats is buy what you need to, spend what you need to pass by your Members, raise taxes, so that you can say that you balanced the budget.

That will work until you kill the goose that lays the golden egg, what you tax you will get less of. We will get less tax gas production in America as taxes increase. That means then that there will be less revenue coming in, coming off of the production in America, and eventually this economy will be constrained It will shrink, and we will have, we will finally kill the goose that lays the golden egg. We will have to come back around, reduce tax again, stimulate again, do what we did in the aftermath of September 11 to reduce tax, do it in the Reagan way, do it in the John F. Kennedy way, the Reagan way, the George W. Bush way, those things, those tax reductions have always increased and stimulated our economy. That doesn't seem to be something that is within the scope of understanding on the other side, because there is a different agenda. It is a socialization agenda.

So, that is the description of PAYGO, Mr. Speaker. Now, the next component that I want to talk about within this rules package is the idea of ethics reform. Ethics reform, I agree, we needed to reform some ethics. We didn't do enough in the 109th Congress to reform ethics. We did things that were, I thought, window dressing.

My view on ethics is that, I mentioned the bloggers a little bit earlier. We need to give the American people sunlight. They have got to have sunlight on this process. That means that we should not have rules that are written and reports that are written in such a way that the information is difficult to access, or difficult to understand, or impossible to legitimately analyze and draw real black and white conclusions.

But in truth, that is the system that we have today, and it is the system that has been improved some over the years, but it has got a ways to go. The system that I would submit is under a package that I have offered called the Sunlight bill. That means that I want a light on the things that we do.

I think that we live in a fishbowl anyway, all 435 of us, we are scrutinized by the press whenever we show up in public, we are recognized, and that is great, it is flattering. It is a tremendous honor to be able to represent the people here in the United States House of Representatives. The trade-off for that is you don't get a lot of privacy. The requirement for that is that you report your finances, for example, and that we report our campaign finances, as well as our personal finances, and we report our financial dealings. That includes real estate transactions, purchases.

But we have a system that is not open. We have a system that is not accessible. We have a system that is not really sortable, and it is vague enough

that you can't draw clear conclusions from that reporting system that we have. I have offered the Sunlight Act to fix all of that and to make it more, and I am going to say far more, accessible to the American people.

First and the easiest one to deal with is the Federal Election Commission reporting. Now, all of us have to go out and raise money in order to get elected to this Congress. Money is a necessity for the people to express their freedom of speech. If we don't raise the money, eventually someone will spend a lot of money. No matter what our level of integrity is, you cannot sustain a seat in the House of Representatives if you are not willing to go out and raise some money and be able to advertise on a political campaign.

It is unfortunate. I don't know that it was envisioned by our Founding Fathers, but it is necessary. Mr. Speaker, if we concede the point that money has to be raised by Members of Congress, and it does, then we also need to discuss, and I believe, concede the point that we should have full reporting of our campaign finances, and we do have a law that requires full reporting, and I don't want to imply that that doesn't exist, it is just that the reporting isn't necessarily in real- time.

It isn't necessarily in a format that is accessible. So if it is not accessible, easily accessible, then it is not as full as the reporting should be. The Sunlight Act asks this, that the Federal Election Commission reporting, our campaign finances, be reported in real-time. And it sets up some parameters on how much time you have if you receive some revenue from an individual or from a PAC, the timing of that is a little looser until you get down to the last 30 days of a campaign. In the last 30 days the Sunlight Act requires that you file those campaign contributions every 24 hours, every single day, the last 30 days, you file those campaign revenues. Somebody hands you a check, that gets deposited, but it gets reported the same business day. That is not too much to ask when you have that kind of flurry going on. We have to do a lot of things on a real-time basis, and that is one of them.

But that is only, but to report that, to report it to the FEC and have the FEC bring that report out in their own good time, in a time that it is not possible for the public to understand where the monies come from, and we agree, I believe, that utilization of funds to advance a candidacy or to advance a cause are political speech, but free speech.

So if funds are speech, and the reporting of those funds is an open process, it needs to be in a timely fashion. So say if there were, what if there happened to be an entity out there that was one who was rejected by Democrats and Republicans but put a lot of money in a campaign and that didn't show up until after the election, Madam Speaker. But the public, had they known that, might have voted for the candidate who didn't receive those funds. That is my argument as to why we need to have real-time reporting.

But I want to take this back to the blogosphere. We have people out there that have their blogs and they are watching the mainstream news media. They are interacting with other blogs. They have their information conduits that come from whatever their access points are. Maybe they happen to be in politics, or maybe they are just a pundit that is well wired and well connected. And they might see information that the rest of the country doesn't see. That is how news is gathered. So the bloggers are gathering the news and they are writing their opinions and sometimes they are taking information and then sorting it in a fashion that people can use it and they can understand it.

I submit that we should submit ourselves, Madam Speaker, to the scrutiny of the blogosphere; that we should have FEC reporting, campaign finance reporting in real-time in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format that will allow anyone out there in America that has access to a computer or to the Internet to go click on that information, if they want to know where Steve King's revenue stream came from, download that into a database that you can sort.

If you want to sort it alphabetically, sort it alphabetically. If you want to sort it by dollars, biggest contribution down to smallest, do that. If you want to sort it by date, do that. If you want to sort it by name, do that. But we should put that information out to the public so that you can scrutinize, in the public, where our campaign funds come from, so that you can evaluate sometimes the positions that we take. Because if they can be indexed to the influence of money, you need to hold us accountable. We owe you our best judgment.

We don't owe the public a vote that is a bought vote. And the public needs to have an opportunity to identify if there is someone who is influenced too much by money, and it needs to happen in real-time. It needs to happen every single day 30 days prior to an election. That is part of the Sunlight Act, to shed light on our Federal Election Commission reporting, real-time, Internet accessible, downloadable, searchable, sortable database so that the American public has access.

Now, Madam Speaker, that would take care of the reporting on our FEC documents. Essential open process, put me in the fish bowl, make it real-time. I am already in the fish bowl. Let's be honest and open about it and we will get these adjustments made, and they will be made by the people out there in the country, and that is where it should be.

The next part of this that needs reform even more, Madam Speaker, is our personal financial reporting from an ethics perspective. And I will reiterate that when a Member of Congress files a financial disclosure form and files it under the ethics rules that are there, they sign that document and pledge that it is true and accurate and done so within the rules and the guidelines of ethics. And to violate that, to willfully violate that and falsely report is a felony. It is a felony. It is worse to report wrong data on your ethics than it is to come into the United States illegally. It is a felony to report inaccurate information willfully on our financial disclosure forms.

But we have ranges of financial reporting, ranges that, not all of them committed to memory, and I didn't come down here prepared to go through them component by component. But I can just give some examples off the top of my head, Madam Speaker. And it works kind of this way. If you have liabilities, I am speaking again in general terms, not to the specific numbers within their financial reporting. If you have liabilities, perhaps between zero and $100,000, you put a little X in that column on this little kind of little spread sheet but it is a paper spread sheet. So you put an X in there and say, well, I owe somewhere between zero and $100,000. Or maybe you say I have no liabilities. And if you have assets that might be within $250,000 and $750,000, you put a little X in that box.

Well, then if you want to analyze what somebody is worth, you might have $100,000 worth of debt and they might have no more than $250,000 worth of assets, but you can't determine if they have no liability or $100,000 worth of liability and you can't determine whether they have $250,000 worth of assets or $750,000 worth of assets. And so as people go up the line in their reporting, the difference, the dollars in disparity get greater and greater and greater to the extent that, Madam Speaker, we have a Member seated in this Congress who reported low six digits in net worth assets 5 years earlier, and then 5 years later, showed up with somewhere between $6.4 million and $25 million in net worth. How does a person make $6 million in assets or, excuse me, in net worth value over a period of 5 years on the salary of a Member of Congress? How could a person expand that from $6.4 million on up to $25 million. Those questions cannot be legitimately answered without the Department of Justice and search warrants and Ryder trucks and filing cabinets loaded up to take into the investigation and computers being picked up and brought in and a massive financial analysis to figure out what really was going on. Were there taxpayer dollars that were pouring into this? Was there a Member of Congress that was enriching himself at the expense of the taxpayers? That is why we have the reporting of our finances.

But the ranges that are in there don't allow for the public to see that early enough to be able to call that question, get it into the media and bring that

Member into bay so that it doesn't get completely out of hand. This one, from my viewpoint, looks like it is completely out of hand, and I think it is going to take more tha months yet for Justice to be able to do complete scrutiny of this and find out what really happened.

But if that Member that I am referencing, and if every Member, and I am speaking about every Member in this Congress, were required to put down exactly the dollar amount of their liabilities and exactly the dollar amounts of their assets so that you could look at their net worth, and understand that there is an amount of appreciation that might come with real estate investment. There might be an amount of appreciation that comes with stock options and investments. That needs to be reported. That should be traceable and trackable, and we should be required to put down exact dollar amounts, not ranges. Not a range of $5 to $25 million. If I were in that range, it is a lot of difference between being worth $5 million and $25 million. Where did the money come from is the reason that we have to report our finances.

The American people, Madam Speaker, do not have access to that information. That allows unethical Members of Congress to hide the worth that they may have been gathering in a fashion that is less than ethical. I believe we need to have sunlight on all of the financial proceedings, not just our Federal Election Commission reporting, not just our campaign side, but on our personal side as we are required today, but not in a range, not in a range of $5 to $25 million, not in a range of zero to $100 now, or $250,000 to $750,000, but in a range that is to the nearest dollar.

Exact reporting, and, Madam Speaker, do so in real-time. Do so in a downloadable, searchable, sortable database format, so that the bloggers out there, or anyone who has access to the Internet, be it a public library or their laptop on the bus or whether it is their hard- wired computer that sits in their basement, can sit down and say, I think I have been watching somebody here that is my Member of Congress. I don't know how they are doing so well. I am hearing rumors out here. Let's see what's really happened and go look and see, if we are going to be an open process, let's be an open process. Let's put sunlight on everything that we do in this Congress, Madam Speaker.

Let's put real-time reporting, downloadable, searchable, sortable formats on our FEC reporting for our campaign funds. Let's do that same thing for our personal finances. Let's open this up to the American people. Let them scrutinize our finances and the movement of our finances so that if some Member can be in here in the year 2000 with a net worth of perhaps $100,000, and in the year 2005 have a net worth of $6.4 million, or more, the American public can ask the question, why. Why did that take that kind of jump? It is not something that can be analyzed or justified unless there are special conditions. Those conditions, those circumstances have not been addressed at this point. I believe we need sunlight on everything that we do, sunlight on our campaign stream, sunlight on our personal finances.

And while we are shedding light on what is going on here in the Chamber, Madam Speaker, it is a bit of a surprise to many of us who come into this Congress to walk down here on the floor of Congress and hear a debate going on and it doesn't seem to be fitting with the debate we were watching on C-SPAN on the television in our office in the 5-minute walk over here. Things have changed. And you can walk on the floor of this Congress and thinking you are coming to weigh in on the debate of H. Res. 5 and find out you are debating H.R. 3495.

Now, neither one of those bills has a name in my mind. But we have names for these bills too that help describe what it is we are debating. And we are sitting in this technological era, where I have just called for real-time access for financial reporting of the Members of Congress, but the people that are sitting in the gallery here in this House of Representatives, Madam Speaker, unless they have got some kind of ear piece in them or some kind of a BlackBerry that they are allowed to have and I don't know that they are, that can tell them what is going on here on the floor of Congress they will not know when they walk in this Chamber what this debate is all about.

They will not know the bill that is before us. They will not know the amendment we are discussing. They will not know why some of the rhetoric doesn't match the language of the bill and the intent of the subject we are talking about. They can't know, Madam Speaker, because there isn't a single sign around this Chamber that tells the people that come into the gallery to witness the people's House what it is we are actually talking about. And if a Member of Congress walks in and they have been 1 minute or 5 minutes or 10 minutes out of the loop in their walk from their office and their watching their C-SPAN camera to come over here, the bill may have changed or a bill may have been temporarily deferred. It might be a different one that is taken up. And in that transfer of that subject matter, they can't know unless they walk over here and interrupt the person or the staff and ask what are we discussing, what are we debating. What is happening. I thought I came over here to talk on H.R. 6, and instead I am over here on H.R. 3094.

The reason that we don't know that is because we don't use the simplest of technology, a technology that at least when we vote puts the number of the bill up here on either end of the Chamber, illuminates it on the wooden panels so that you can see the vote that comes up. There is no technological reason, there is no procedural reason why we can't just ask for the sunlight bill on finances, why we can't just shine the light up on the wall, a subject matter that is being debated, the number of the bill that is being debated and the name and perhaps the number of the amendment that is also under discussion at the moment. That would allow anyone who comes in off the street to witness the debate and deliberation of the people's House to immediately sit down and understand what the debate is all about and understand what the amendment is and who has got the amendment up, and they will figure out then instantly who is the proponent, who is the opponent, and the process becomes more open.

The simplest thing that should be nonpartisan, this very simple idea is not just my idea but an idea that is supported and endorsed by many. I would ask if we could submit this idea to the freshmen that have come in. Those who have come out of State legislatures understand that the technology is there and has been there for years in State legislatures. When you walk into the chamber of a State House or a State Senate almost anywhere in the country, the subject of the bill is illuminated on the wall, the bill number is illuminated on the wall, the name of the person offering the amendment and the number of the amendment is offered on the wall with a short description of the bill, the amendment, so that the public can easily see what is going on, so that the members who are elected can walk in the room and instantaneously understand the process that they have walked into and be able to pick up immediately and engage in the process.

That is part of the light that needs to be shined on this process, Madam Speaker. And I raise this issue up with this particular discussion because it happens to be something that is almost without cost. It should be absolutely bipartisan. In fact, it should be nonpartisan in its nature. Everyone who serves here should be interested in being able to have easy access to the process and the procedure we happen to be under. And it is something that allows the people in the gallery to understand what is happening.

Right now, it could have ``Special Order by King'' on there. They could have a little clock on there to tell me how much time I have left before the gavel drops and my time has run and expired.

But at this point I would ask the Speaker how much time I have remaining.

Oh, boy. The gentleman will then immediately conclude my discussion, and I really appreciate that I have been able to bring it to that conclusion in exactly the 60 minutes that have been allowed. I appreciate

also the privilege in speaking to you, Madam Speaker.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I do have to speak up for Iowa, although I wish Iowa was playing in the national championships coming up.

Mr. Speaker, not long ago, Members and leaders of the current majority party of the House spent countless hours attempting to draw the attention of the American people to what they defined as a culture of corruption here in Congress. Hoping to use this, they wanted to turn this phrase, usher in a new Democratic majority. That was their wish on election night that Members of the new majority stood in this Chamber prior to that, and on numerous soap boxes across the country and promised that if the American people gave them the chance to run things here on Capitol Hill, they would do things differently.

Mr. Speaker, I agree that things should be done differently here in this body. Last year in the 109th Congress, I introduced H.R. 4967, the Sunlight Act, and that was of 2006. This bill would have, on a number of things, required that bills, conference reports, joint resolutions and amendments be available to the public on the Internet in a searchable format before a bill could be voted on.

It also would have required and will require, if passed, privately funded travel be approved in advance by the Rules Committee with the costs being fully disclosed in 5 days. It would require that Members report exact assets and liability values on their financial disclosures instead of vague ranges, vague ranges that allow a Member to report between $5 million and $25 million in assets. That is too broad a range.

A $20 million range would require the subject of debate to be projected on the wall so it is visible to Members and people that are in the gallery. It would require that donations to political campaigns be reported in a searchable, sortable format on the Internet and have that within the last 30 days each day, within each 24 hours a report be filed.

I believe that passage of my Sunlight Act would do much to raise the levels of transparency in the affairs of this body, and it would also restore the public's confidence in our Members. It is disingenuous for the majority claim that they want to change things when they don't want to give a consideration of commonsense reforms like those outlined in this bill.

Yet this bill, as I worked it hard last year, could not earn one signature from a single Democrat as a co-sponsor. Now, I am refused the opportunity to even offer this as a bill. This is my only opportunity to even make the argument.

So I would make this argument, Mr. Speaker, that there were a lot of campaign promises that were made. It seems to me that the one that is the most obstructive to all of us is the promise to accomplish this series of things in the first 100 hours. The first 100 hours has been redefined. Many of these promises will be also given up on, and it will be difficult, and in many cases, impossible to keep those promises.

Mr. Speaker, why don't we just waive this promise of accomplishing all these things in the first 100 hours so the people of America can be heard on the floor of the Congress.

Madam Speaker, I rise to express concerns about the budget items in the Democrat Rules package.

I believe that we can do better and this proposal does not go far enough. I am committed to curtailing special-interest, pork-barrel spending and reforming earmarks.

While on the face it appears Democrats are concerned about reducing the deficit because they mention Reconciliation. This is only smoke and mirrors. Simply put, the language in their rules package makes it easy to raise taxes and difficult to reduce them. The language allows the use of expedited procedures (budget reconciliation) to raise taxes. At the same time, the language prohibits using reconciliation for tax relief.

We need transparency, accountability, and better control for the federal spending process. Earmark Reform and Reconciliation are baseless without a Rescission process for cutting spending.

Businesses and families often review their planned budget with actual spending on a monthly basis to spot and eliminate unnecessary spending. While common sense would lead taxpayers to believe that similar oversight exists for our federal budget, this would be wrong. Congress has no formal process that allows members to force votes to trim wasteful spending at any time after federal spending gets signed into law.

Soon I plan to introduce my legislation, the Cut the Unnecessary Tab (CUT) resolution, that would make any unspent federal funding vulnerable to a recorded vote for cuts at the beginning of each fiscal quarter. Any Member of the House could offer an amendment to these quarterly bills to cut spending.

Under my bill, Members of Congress will have four opportunities every year to propose elimination of programs that are superfluous or incompetent. This gives Congress a tool that individual Members can use to bring the chamber into commonsense spending cuts. No longer would any Member of Congress have the excuse that one individual acting alone would not have a way to reform the Federal Government's spending.

It is my hope that the Democrats live up to their promise for no new deficit spending. However, I fear that it's a plan to raise taxes. The resolution allows Democrats to increase spending as much as they like-- as long as they ``pay for'' it by cutting other spending or--more likely--by chasing that spending with ever-higher taxes. This watered down PAYGO proposal does not reduce current spending--it stops tax cuts. This PAYGO applies only to NEW spending. All previous PAYGO versions were enforced by across-the-board spending cuts--that's what created the incentive to control spending. But the Democrats' PAYGO is enforced only by a point of order--which they can easily waive for their pet spending increases.

Congress can and must do better. The easiest and best way to stop the growth of federal spending and let American families keep more of their hard earned taxpayer dollars is to make these tough decisions now.

I thank the gentlewoman for recognizing me and yielding time to me. And I particularly want to take an opportunity here to thank Congressman Jim Leach for his years of service to this country and this Congress, and to the thoughtful process that he has brought. There is a legacy left with my friend Jim Leach here as well as a legacy from Norman Borlaug, and all of us are justifiably proud to be from a State that can produce these kind of people, both Jim Leach and Norman Borlaug.

I wanted to point out that the work that Norman Borlaug has done to alleviate starvation in the world has put to rest many of the Malthusian arguments that we have heard over the 40 or so years that I have paid attention in the debate and the deliberation in this country: What is the limitation on what we can do to raise food and fiber and energy now for people, not just in

America, but around the world. And I have had the privilege to travel into most of the continents and meet with the people that raise the food and the fiber, and, in our case, the energy in those places. And the fingerprints of Dr. Norman Borlaug are all over this planet, all over this globe, and on the dinner table of everyone with the 6-plus billion people that now inhabit this Earth. We don't know what that limitation might be for the population, but we know it is far greater because of Dr. Norman Borlaug.

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

As always, I consider it a privilege to address this body and address you, Mr. Speaker. Especially I consider it a privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker.

I come to the floor to stand in support of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. It is a bit of bizarre debate from my perspective. I believe the debate should be on what instant life begins rather than how we might kill an unborn baby and especially on how we would avoid perhaps inflicting pain on an unborn baby that is about to be killed, and I am talking about 20 to 22 weeks and beyond.

We have a law in this country called the Humane Slaughter Act, which says that an animal cannot be slaughtered unless it is rendered unconscious in a rather painless way. We also have a law called the Animal Welfare Act, which gives the Secretary of Agriculture authority to regulate how laboratory animals might be euthanized in a compassionate, humane fashion. And we can't raise up an unborn baby to this level?

It is astonishing to me that we are here and that there are people that oppose this bill. It is high time it has been brought to the floor. It is a baby step, if you will, Mr. Speaker. And I applaud the gentleman from New Jersey for being the lead on the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for 6 powerful years leading the Judiciary Committee.

The Supreme Court created a mess and hurt the Global War on Terror with its unnecessary and unconstitutional opinion in the Hamdan case. The Supreme Court had no authority to hear the Hamdan case. The Detainee Treatment Act gave the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit exclusive jurisdiction over the validity of any final decision of an enemy combatant status review tribunal. The Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ignored the provision of the DTA and a longstanding line of its own precedents which stood for the principle that Congress can limit jurisdiction in pending as well as future cases.

The DTA provided that: no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay.

The plain language of this statute clearly applies to cases pending at the date of enactment. The Supreme Court should have reached this conclusion, relying on their own precedent, but they failed to do so. In response, this legislation, H.R. 6166, has been carefully drafted so that the Court can fully understand that it applies to both pending and later filed cases. It was not necessary for Congress to be so specific, but in order that the Court will not make the same mistake twice, Congress has carefully chosen the language ``pending on or filed after the date of enactment'' in section 5 of this legislation.

In his dissent in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Justice Scalia reminded the majority that they failed to cite a single case where such a jurisdiction limitation provision was denied immediate effect in pending cases. I agree with his opinion that the cases granting such immediate effect are legion.

The Court's opinion has had yet another fatal flaw. In order to apply the Geneva Conventions, the Court decided on its own that the Global War on Terror was not of international character. I cannot imagine that even the majority on the Court believed their own opinion. The Global War on Terror can in no way be characterized as a mere civil war. It is a war between Western Civilization and militant Islamic fascists from all around the world. It does not take place only in legislation.

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

It is a war between Western Civilization and militant Islamic fascists from all around the Muslim world. It does not take place only in one nation. Global is international.

The Court decided the conclusion they desired and then shoehorned their decision to fit a preferred result, substituting their judgment for the constitutional judgment of Congress and of our Commander in Chief. And that was during a time of war. By doing this, the Supreme Court's majority in Hamdan further undermined our Constitution which relies on the separation of powers.

The unconstitutional intervention by the Supreme Court in Hamdan could have been handled by Congress and the President in another way. Under article III, section 2, Congress could have reasserted our clearly defined authority to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and to grant jurisdiction to any inferior court of our choosing, as expressed in the very plain language of the Detainee Treatment Act.

If we had not been a Nation at war, a Nation urgently concerned about protecting our citizens from attack, Congress may well have advised the Court of their unconstitutional intervention and the Court's obstruction of the ability of the Commander in Chief to protect America from our enemies and ignored the Court's decision. The necessities of war won out over the separation of powers, and for the first time the Supreme Court has engaged in setting parameters in war fighting beyond our national borders.

Because of our national security, Congress and the President jumped through a series of hoops set by the Court, rather than carry on a protracted power struggle over the Constitution with the Court. But, Mr. Speaker, Congress concedes no power to the Court not defined in the Constitution or specified by statute.

Mr. Speaker, I urge support for H.R. 2679, the ``Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005.'' This bill prevents American taxpayers from having to subsidize judicial activism, encouraged by liberal groups bringing establishment clause cases. Today, taxpayers are being forced to pay for the lawyers of the ACLU who demand the removal of religious text and imagery from the public square. These organizations attempt to make public policy through the courts, instead of Congress where such actions belong.

How many times will we stand silent as intolerant organizations such as the ACLU strong-arm the American people into removing cherished symbols of our Nation's heritage and faith? These actions are not compelled by the Constitution or supported by the will of the people. ``To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.'' Thomas Jefferson said that, and contrary to the ACLU, I believe that what our founding fathers believed in and stood for is still relevant today.

American taxpayers currently have to pay for ACLU ``victories.'' ACLU press releases, sadly I must say, tout quite a record. For example:

The County of Los Angeles was recently forced to remove a tiny cross from its official seal, symbolizing the founding of the city by missionaries. The removal of this cross is costing the county around $1 million, as it would entail changing the seal on some 90,000 uniforms, 6,000 buildings, and 12,000 county vehicles.

In San Diego, the ACLU forced the Boy Scouts out of Balboa Park because of the organization's religious beliefs, and taxpayers were required to pay $950,000 in legal fees and court costs to the ACLU.

In Barrow County, GA, the ACLU received $150,000 from taxpayers after a Federal judge ordered the county to remove a framed copy of the Ten Commandments from a hallway in the County Courthouse.

In Redlands, California, the city council was forced into changing its official seal but didn't have the funds to revise every symbol that contained the old seal. Now Redlands' residents see blue tape covering the tiny cross on city trucks, while some firefighters have taken drills to remove the cross from their badge.

These are just a few examples of the kinds of cases the American taxpayer is forced to

subsidize. Americans should not be compelled to pay the lawyers who remove historic American symbols. The Public Expression of Religion Act would stop this action. I am glad to be a co-sponsor of this bill, and I urge support for its passage.

I appreciate the gentleman's work on this bill and many bills throughout the years. I rise today in support of the Child Custody Protection Act because it returns the fundamental right of parenting back where it belongs: to parents.

Eight in 10 Americans favor parental notification laws. Forty-four States have recognized the important role of parents in a minor child's decision to have an abortion by enacting parental involvement statutes. Even so, many of these laws are being circumvented by individuals who simply transport girls across State lines to another State without parental notification laws. And, too often, these individuals are grown men who have sexually preyed on underaged girls and use abortions to cover up their crimes.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that a parent's right to control the care of their children is among the most the fundamental of all liberty interests. The Supreme Court has consistently recognized that parents have a legal right to be involved in their minor daughter's decision to seek medical care, including abortion.

The Supreme Court has also observed that, and I quote, ``the medical, emotional, and psychological consequences of an abortion are serious and can be lasting. It seems unlikely that the minor will obtain adequate counsel and support from the attending physician at an abortion clinic where the abortions for pregnant minors frequently take place.''

The Supreme Court has also stated that, and I quote, ``minors often lack the experience, perspective, and judgment to recognize and avoid choices that could be detrimental to them.''

Mr. Speaker, no one has a child's best interest at heart more than their parents. Minors have to have parental permission to be given an aspirin by the school nurse. Twenty-six States have laws requiring parental consent before minors can get body piercings or tattoos. Parents must be able to play a role when their minor daughter is contemplating such an important decision as what to do with an unplanned pregnancy.

Please join me in supporting the Child Custody Protection Act.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Immigration Law Enforcement Act of 2006. This bill reaffirms the inherent authority of State and local law enforcement to voluntarily investigate, identify, apprehend, arrest, detain and transfer to federal custody aliens in the U.S. in order to assist in the enforcement of the immigration laws.

Presently, many cities are enacting so-called ``sanctuary'' policies, which prohibit local police from asking about a person's immigration status or reporting illegal aliens who commit crimes to immigration authorities for deportation. Passed in 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act forbids localities from preventing their police officers from asking for or reporting immigration information to the Federal Government. Existing federal law says:

Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State or

local law, a Federal, State, or local government entity or

official may not prohibit or in any way restrict any

government entity or official from sending to or receiving

information regarding the citizenship or immigration status,

lawful or unlawful, of any individual.

Despite this ban, some cities continue to prohibit their officers from asking about immigration status or providing information to the Federal Government. Make no mistake about it: This is a situation of local governments blatantly violating Federal law.

As a result, U.S. taxpayers pay to incarcerate illegal alien prisoners who are later released back onto the streets. Sanctuary policies tie the hands of local law enforcement officers and keep illegal aliens who commit crimes in our country, rather than deporting criminals according to U.S. law. These sanctuary policies have disastrous consequences.

Our State and local governments serve as the front line of defense against terrorism and criminal aliens. Every murder, every rape, every violent gang crime committed against Americans by illegal aliens is an utterly preventable crime. If we better enforce our immigration laws to keep criminals out, we will save lives. We must use the law enforcement resources we have, at every level, to enforce our laws, with the end result of making our Nation a safer place for our grandchildren to grow up in.