The Distinctions Between The Republicans And The Democrats
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized on the floor of the United States Congress again and the opportunity to share some of my thoughts and hopefully enlighten some folks as they listen in on our conversation here…
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized on the floor of the United States Congress again and the opportunity to share some of my thoughts and hopefully enlighten some folks as they listen in on our conversation here tonight, Mr. Speaker.
But as I listen to the previous conversation here on the floor, generally that will help or redirect the things I am about to say as I get down here, and perhaps I could just take a few of them from the bottom back towards the top.
One of the things I would point out as a distinction from my esteemed colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and I especially appreciate their continuing their dialogue here until such time as I arrived, but one of the things that was repeated over and over again
over the last hour was the ``rubber-stamp Congress,'' the ``rubber- stamp Congress.'' And we have to take that to mean exactly what it is intended to mean, as the allegation that this majority in Congress rubber stamps whatever it is that the President says that he wants.
And nothing could be further from the truth, Mr. Speaker. I would point out that if this is a rubber-stamp Congress, and, in fact, we should do it this way: when the President proposes an agenda, a piece of legislation, a piece of policy, if we need to endorse a piece of foreign policy, then we need to evaluate that to the fullest extent that we can. We need to bring the collective brains together in this place, and we need to have a vote in this Congress. We do that. We do that, Mr. Speaker.
In fact, we initiate all spending here in this House of Representatives. That is according to the Constitution. The deliberation comes from here. When the President has a budget request, he puts his budget together and offers it to the Congress. We evaluate that budget. We produce our own. In the time I have been here, we have not rubber-stamped the President's budget. We have produced our own. And we have had some struggles with the President on the things that we were not willing to fund and on some of the things that he wanted to and vice versa. That is as it should be. We are to put our collective brains together and come to a compromise conclusion so that we can get appropriations passed out of here.
That is not rubber stamp. That is hard-fought due diligence done not just in the Budget Committee that puts some limits on our appropriations, but done in every appropriations committee within the limits of the authorizations that are done by the standing committees, and in that process we are carrying out our constitutional obligation and doing due diligence, Mr. Speaker. Not a rubber stamp. And if it were a rubber stamp, the President's budget would get a rubber stamp. There wouldn't be deliberations here, and he would get his way. Sometimes he gets his way; sometimes he does not. Sometimes the Congress holds sway over the President. But it is far from a rubber stamp in that process.
Many of the initiatives that the President has brought forward have been denied by this Congress. And, in fact, the allegation that it is a rubber-stamp Congress fits right into the same breath as ``the President wants to privatize Social Security.'' Well, there are two things wrong with that statement. The President has never stated that he wanted to privatize Social Security and neither has anyone in Congress who I know of. In fact, I would challenge the minority to identify a public statement by any Member of Congress that they wanted to privatize Social Security. That is the mantra. That is the allegation. It is false. No one in this Republican majority has taken a position to privatize Social Security. Neither has the President, Mr. Speaker. The President has stepped forward and said, I want to reform Social Security.
Well, one of the promises that just got made by the other side was they would fix Social Security and they would balance the budget. We know that the only way, with the propensity for spending that comes from that side of the aisle, to balance the budget, would be if we raise taxes, raise taxes, raise taxes. And then it only lasts for a little while until business activity begins to shrink, shrink, shrink; and at that point you could either make a decision on whether you want to cut taxes to stimulate the economy or whether you want to continue to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Rubber-stamp Congress, Mr. Speaker? Rubber-stamp Congress? The President wanted Social Security reform. He went out in the cities of America before gathering after gathering, before the media, everywhere he could and invested a tremendous amount of political capital just in the aftermath of his fantastic second inaugural address that took place here on the west portico of the Capitol building. We left that address full of enthusiasm and optimism for the second term of President George W. Bush.
And the agenda that he drove was to reform Social Security, save it so it doesn't go bankrupt, save it so it can be there for the next generations, and preserve and protect and guarantee the sacred covenant we have with the senior citizens. We pledged that we will hold their benefits together, that we will not increase the funds that are paid into that. We will not increase the payroll tax. We will hold the benefits together for the senior citizens, and the President proposed an opportunity for young people to take a portion of their payroll tax Social Security contribution and put that into a personal retirement account, a limited retirement account. Not a wild investment kind of a venture capital thing but a controlled kind of investment that the Federal employees all have access to as part of their pension program that they have. Tried, true, very popular among Federal employees. Offer the same thing to young people in America and guaranteed to our seniors. The President invested a tremendous amount of political capital and a logical, rational solution for Social Security.
And what happened, Mr. Speaker, was the other side of the aisle demagogued the issue and over and over again stated, they want to privatize your Social Security. They want to turn it over into the markets. They want to dump it into Wall Street, and it is all going to blow up and the markets will crash and everybody will be broke and live in poverty forever after. That was the demagoguery that America was faced with, and that scared senior citizens off their support that was necessary to reform Social Security. That demagoguery costs Social Security reform. The very people that stood in the way of it are the ones that are now tonight saying, we will fix it.
But, you know, Mr. Speaker, they don't have the tools to do that. They demagogued the only tools that can fix Social Security unless you want to just raise the rates. And if you want to raise the rates, there is no sense in doing it next year because it is something that could be adjusted anytime along the way.
But the truth is that there is a surplus coming into Social Security right now, and that Social Security trust fund is a little over $1.7 trillion, and that is an IOU from the government to the government. They are actuall bonds printed on cheap copy paper, no more valuable than this piece of paper right here, Mr. Speaker. And those bonds are in a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, West Virginia, keeping track, stacking up, 3, 4, 5, $8 billion to a bond, an IOU from the government to the government.
And even when we use the resources from the year when this runs out, and this surplus runs out in about 2017, that is when the revenue stream goes negative. When the revenue stream goes negative, we are going to have to find some money because that $1.7 trillion is not money. It is IOUs from the government to the government. It is like writing yourself an IOU and then putting it in your pocket. Well, I am going to cash that IOU in on myself in about 2017.
But even if that money were there, over the period of time from 2017 until 2042, that fund of $1.7 trillion, which will have grown substantially by then, will diminish and reduce itself down to zero by 2042, Mr. Speaker.
So the reform that is promised here tonight on the other side of the aisle can only be, We will raise the rates and we will take it out of the pockets of the working people.
In fact, the working people of America pay the highest percentage of their revenue into payroll tax of anybody in the country. We look at a regressive tax, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but especially Social Security is a regressive tax. It is .0765, 15.3 percent altogether for the payroll tax. And that 15.3 percent, if you do that calculation, and I do not have the number in front of me, but it will be in the area of for the first $10,000 you earn, you will pay $1,500 in tax.
That becomes a 15 percent tax on the payroll of someone who is making only $10,000. And once you go up, that percentage rate you hit the trigger, the cap point, and then the percentage that you pay in a payroll tax goes down.
So this is a regressive tax that would be increased in order to, I suppose, keep a promise in the first 100 days that we would reform Social Security. But you are not told we are going to increase your payroll tax on the poorest
people in America, the highest percentage, the most regressive tax, we are going to increase it.
It is the only solution if you are not willing to allow young people to have a portion that they earn to invest so that they could have the same kind of benefits that our senior citizens have today, and the same kind of benefits that we guarantee to our people that are, say, 50 and above all over the United States today.
We will keep that sacred covenant with our seniors. And I stand here and say this, Mr. Speaker, and I am confident when I make this pledge, and I am confident that I represent perhaps the most senior congressional district in America.
The State of Iowa has the highest percentage of its population over the age of 85 of all of the States in the Union. And in the 99 counties in Iowa, of those 99 counties, I represent 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa. We are healthy. We get fresh air. We work. We get exercise. And we live longer in western Iowa than maybe anyplace else in America, for a congressional district.
But out of that 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa in the Fifth Congressional District, and Iowa being perhaps the most senior State in the Union, I believe I represent the most senior congressional district in America.
When I stand here, Mr. Speaker, and say, we will keep this sacred covenant with our seniors, we will not raise the rates on you, and we will not reduce the benefits, that is our pledge to you. You are the greatest generation. You have carried the torch for us ever since you cut your teeth on the Depression and fought and won World War II, carried us through the victory in the Cold War, and the transition into this time when we will keep our pledge.
The promise to reform Social Security in the face of that, I would be interested in the details of that plan, Mr. Speaker.
But a rubber-stamp Congress? Cannot possibly be. That argument cannot sustain itself at the same time that you demagogue the President's need and leadership to reform Social Security. You demagogue that issue and then say you are a rubber stamp. If this had been a rubber-stamp Congress, Mr. Speaker, the President would have by now had Social Security reform.
Most of us wanted to vote for it. We did not have the 218 votes or we would have passed it, and it would no longer be an issue. But it was killed by the other side. And now they say rubber-stamp Congress. The argument does not hold up. If you cannot pass the President's agenda, no matter how hard you try, you are not a rubber-stamp Congress.
And that is not the only thing, Mr. Speaker, but there are a series of those. And then the argument that things would get done within 100 days, does that include the Senate? We pass an awful lot of legislation out of this House of Representatives. This is no do-nothing House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. We have sent piece of legislation after piece of legislation over to the Senate, where it goes over there to die a death of asphyxiation because they cannot crack the 60 votes that is necessary to beat the filibuster, the cloture vote.
Who are the people over there obstructing legislation? The people that are in the minority in the Senate, just like the people that are in the minority here in the House of Representatives, the ones who are obstructors, pointing their finger at the people that have been passing legislation and actively moving policy that is good for America and saying, you are do-nothing.
Well, if nothing gets finally accomplished and onto the President's desk for a signature, it is not because this House of Representatives did nothing. In fact, it is not because the Republican leadership in the United States Senate did nothing; it is because the obstructors in the minority party on each side of the aisle stepped in the way, did everything they could to slow down the process, obfuscated the issue, demagogued the issue, and then said, you are do-nothing.
That would be like having somebody dump sugar in your gas tank and then argue that you were not there on time when you went to go to work, blame you for something that they did.
Another case in point would be the energy issue that was raised here. We are going to solve the energy problem in America is what was said. We have been working to solve this energy problem in America. And, Mr. Speaker, and for the information of the minority leader in the United States Congress, I will point out that we are producing more renewable energy than any country in the world today, right now, today.
I have heard people on this side of the aisle say we need to go to Brazil and learn what they are doing with ethanol down there, because we need to do what they are doing. Well, the problem with that is two- or three- or tenfold, Mr. Speaker. And one of them is Brazil is producing ethanol out of sugar cane. We do not have a lot of sugar cane here; we are not likely to get a lot of sugar cane here. But we are producing it out of corn. And we will produce it out of cellulosic material such as switchgrass, cornstalks, hay grounds, you name it.
But to go down to Brazil to learn what they are doing with ethanol, when they are making it out of sugar cane, and they are making a lot of it with archaic equipment, when Brazil, even though they burn far less ethanol than we do, cannot produce enough to meet their own needs, and to repeat the argument that Brazil is a 100 percent, they are burning 100 percent ethanol, it was not made here tonight, that I heard, Mr. Speaker, and I want to clarify that, but I have heard that on this floor before, that is a false statement when you hear that.
I went down to Brazil. I looked at their operations down there. I went to their ethanol production and their car production facilities. I went to their gas stations. I drove down their roads. They only have 20,000 miles of hard-surfaced roads in Brazil. And their ethanol production, as a percentage of the gallons burned on the roads, all of the roads in Brazil, is only 15 percent; not 100 percent, 15 percent. That is all, Mr. Speaker.
If you take out of that mix the diesel-burning vehicles, the cars and the trucks that are burning diesel fuel and just get them down to the vehicles that are flex-fuel gas burners, ethanol burners, those cars that can conceivably be retrofitted to burn ethanol, then your number becomes 37 percent of that is ethanol, and the balance is gasoline.
They have a blend. We burn a 10 percent blend in Iowa. That is popular across the country. That is a standard ethanol mix. But the blend that they use is 25 percent. When we got down there, they had just dropped the 25 percent blend down to 20 percent because Brazil did not have enough ethanol to meet the demands of their marketplace. So they burn more gas, less ethanol, did not have enough sugar cane, and were not able to produce enough ethanol, and we are considering going down there to learn from them.
Mr. Speaker, I would submit the United States of America produces a lot more ethanol than Brazil does now or ever will. And we are in an aggressive growth mode. It is such an aggressive growth mode that now, in fact today, there is discussion in the hearing in the Ag Committee about how we are going to have enough grain left over to feed our livestock if a huge percentage of it goes to fuel production.
And I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, that in my congressional district there were producers there that for the first time, I will say the first time anywhere, the first time in history, owned shares that were invested in an ethanol production facility for corn, and a biodiesel production facility for biodiesel. And so they had to make a decision do I plant more soybeans because I am likely to get a better return off my shares invested in the biodiesel plant, soybeans go into that diesel, or do I plant more corn because I am likely to realize more profit when my corn goes into my ethanol plant.
What do I do? I have got, say, 1,000 acres. How do I balance that all out? Those questions were being asked by producers when they put the crop in the ground this spring for the first time ever, and next year there will be hundreds more with the same happy predicament, Mr. Speaker.
And the list goes on and on. And in the Fifth District where we are close to the number one ethanol producer in America, I believe we will be there by the end of next year, there are at least 14 ethanol production facilities that
are up and running, on the drawing boards, or have broken ground, or are under construction, one of those three phases, at least 14 in the congressional district, the 32 counties in western Iowa that I represent.
And there are more of them out there that I have not caught up with the business transaction on that yet. But there is a tremendous amount of investment going into ethanol production all throughout the Corn Belt. We started, actually Minnesota initiated some very good policy that initiated home-grown engineering that has now grown into the region where I live, and into that region in Minnesota, north central Iowa, western Iowa, and parts of South Dakota and Nebraska as well.
That home-grown engineering has been a real, real asset to the development of ethanol production. But we produce far more ethanol in the United States than they do in Brazil. We have more modern technology than they have in Brazil. There will be over $1 billion of capital investment in my congressional district this year alone put on the ground for renewable energy production facilities, including wind chargers.
So there is a lot of progress being made economically. But, Mr. Speaker, there is also a lot of progress being made to provide this supply of ethanol, and provide this supply of biodiesel with the renewable fuels that take the burden off of Middle Eastern oil and give us more freedom, more autonomy, and make us less dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
That is what is going on with energy from the renewable energy perspective. It is a dynamic time. I would add, also, that in the State of Iowa, if you add the counties that are in our neighboring States, one county in Minnesota, Illinois, I better say Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, that circle of our neighboring States, just one county in, you add that to the ethanol production facilities within the State of Iowa, and you are looking at about 61 ethanol plants all together. Sixty-one. And they will probably all not get built. But if they do, they will be able to process every kernel of corn that we produce in the State of Iowa, which causes us to have to make some adjustments. Absolutely.
Up until just a few days ago, all of the biodiesel production in Iowa was in the Fifth Congressional District, Mr. Speaker. And we are aggressively building out biodiesel production. That is going to go out to the limits of the Soybean Belt.
Ethanol production is going to go to the limit of the Corn Belt. And cellulosic is a few years away, but there is high, high hopes for what it can do with the potential for energy.
Those things are happening. They are happening now. We provided the tax credits. We have put the structure in place so that individual entrepreneurs could invest their capital, could put together the business transactions so that we can have ethanol production and biodiesel production that is large in scale, efficient in its operations, and available to the American consumer like it is today in growing quantities. These plants are averaging 75 million gallons a year, roughly, or more. It is a significant quantity of renewable fuels.
Who is going to solve this energy problem? The people that are here that have provided for the ethanol, biodiesel, the people that have passed legislation that is going to provide for better sitings and more sitings for the refinery of crude oil that comes into this country. And we cannot refine all of our crude oil anymore because it has been an environmentalist barrier that has blocked the construction of oil refineries, and it has limited our ability to process. So we find ourselves buying more gas, more diesel fuel on the market rather than refining from crude oil and keeping those jobs here in the United States.
Who stands in the way of that, Mr. Speaker? The people on this side of the aisle. The people that argue that, well, you cannot have that oil refinery in my back yard, the NIMBY phobia. You cannot have that oil drilling rig offshore from my State. And so we have this situation where we are growing the renewable energies in the United States aggressively and dramatically, and at the same time we are sitting on a tremendous amount of oil, a tremendous amount of natural gas, being blocked by environmentalist elements that you will find in that caucus in huge numbers, in my conference in very small numbers.
But it is not the Republicans that are holding the energy development up in the United States, it is the other party that is doing that, Mr. Speaker. We need to be drilling up there on the North Slope of Alaska. We did so successfully starting back in 1972. That has been an environmentally friendly operation going on up there, and one of the measures would be that the caribou herd in 1972 was 7,000 head, and now, as of about 3 years ago, the last numbers I have seen, that caribou herd is 28,000 head.
Now, we could not have damaged the environment and had that kind of a growth in the caribou herd on the North Slope. But if you go east to ANWR, the same kind of topography, there just is not a native caribou herd. They do come in from Canada and have their calves there and go back again about the middle of June, the latter part of June. But we can do even better there with the new technology that we have.
What nation, what nation, especially an energy-dependent nation, would sit here and refuse to tap into massive supplies of crude oil that we know lay underneath the North Slope of Alaska, in ANWR, along the shore in the arctic coastal plain? What nation would leave that oil there and buy from the Middle East and buy it from Hugo Chavez? The more money we send to them, the more belligerent they get, Mr. Speaker.
It defies logic. But it is being held up by that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, not this side of the aisle.
Outer continental shelf drilling, we know there is a minimum conservative investment of 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore. We are trying to open up the legislation to get that drilled. It is a narrow little transaction going on. We should do far more.
We should simply open up the whole thing and let development come in and start pumping that gas out, pump the oil out, get it into this market, grow the size of the energy pie, provide more and more Btus of energy from all sources, and then start apportioning the percentages of those sources according to whether they are a finite or a renewable source so that we can have a well-managed energy policy.
Mr. Speaker, I think we can get there. We are moving down that path. But every time a person on that side of the aisle is elected to this Congress, there is a great risk, and the odds are they are going to vote with the green interests, whether they understand the issue or not. That is why we have trouble with our energy policy. That is why this Congress can't open up those energy fields.
And do not be deluded for a minute, Mr. Speaker, into thinking that there is going to be an opening up of ANWR or the outer continental shelf if there happens to be some people from the other side of the aisle that will get their hands on a gavel. There be less of that kind of energy, not more. Energy prices will go up.
If you believe in the law of supply and demand, there would be under their scenario less supply. There would probably be then more demand, which means the price would go up on energy.
They will not solve the energy problem. We have offered the solutions here, and we have had to squeeze them past them, and we are going to keep doing that until such time as the American people send us more allies here to get this job done even better.
So, the idea of the energy situation is something that I think that needs to be explored. And if were a rubber stamp Congress, as the other side of the aisle alleges, then we would be drilling in ANWR right now, we would be drilling on the outer continental shelf right now, Mr. Speaker. We would have a significant supply of energy for the American people to consume. Oil wouldn't have peaked out there above $75 a barrel. Thankfully it is down now.
I would like to tell you that I am going to take responsibility for the gas prices here over the last couple of weeks. I don't have any credit for changing those prices in the last couple of weeks. I would like to take credit for it, but I can't. But I bought gas for $2.10 last weekend, Mr. Speaker, just last weekend. $2.10. It was up over $3
gallon, I remember $3.07 a gallon perhaps a month ago.
So as the price of gas spirals downward, part of that is because you have marginal wells that weren't pumping, there wasn't profit for them to be pumping, and when oil prices went up, it paid them to pump that oil out on to the market. So when you raise the price, you can buy a lot more oil, and a lot more oil gets explored.
Chevron found a tremendous find down in the Gulf of Mexico, and it is one of the largest finds anywhere at any time. As that field gets developed, that will change the price of oil worldwide and it will make it more available to us here in the Western Hemisphere.
So I am looking forward to moving forward. We will solve every energy problem here in the United States of America. We have the ability to do that. We have the incentive to do that. We just need to get the people out of the way that don't take a rational position, but take a protectionist position.
I would challenge them, if we should be starved for energy, Mr. Speaker, I would say to them if we should be starved for energy, then where do you stand on opening up ANWR so we can get that into the pipeline? Where do you stand on opening up the outer continental shelf?
I think we know, Mr. Speaker, because the votes are on the board. We have had a number of votes on those issues in here, and we know what happens. The other side of the aisle blocks those agendas and they don't produce a constructive result. They simply say ``we need to pass a law that says Detroit has to make a car that gets 50 miles to the gallon.'' Then that fixes everything.
Well, it just may not be possible to make a car that will haul my family that will get 50 miles to the gallon, so to legislate that kind of efficiency is not a very good return on our legislative investment, Mr. Speaker.
So, a number of these promises will not be kept, and I am trusting the American people won't provide that opportunity, because they will understand that.
But I would like to shift us over, if I could, Mr. Speaker, to another field of interest, and that field of interest would be the Afghanistan and the Iraq theaters that are there. As we review those circumstances, I have been refreshed on the issues that are before us in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
Mr. Speaker, I can tell you that we have exceeded the expectations in Afghanistan for a long time. Yes, we have conflict going on there now. There has been some resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
We need to keep in mind also that these kind of conflicts are seasonal. This is the seasonal push that wraps up, and by winter they go back into the mountains and hole up again, it is too cold at the high altitudes, so there isn't a lot of activity going on in the wintertime. But when the weather is warm and people can move about, that is when our troops have been attacked and that is when we have descended upon them.
But every time it has been the Taliban that has dramatically lost the encounter. And it will continue to take some of these kinds of operations in Afghanistan for a considerable length of time.
But while this is going on, NATO troops are standing up, American troops are supporting them, and troops from other countries are coming in under the command of NATO. We are getting Afghanistan handed over more to the coalition of international forces underneath a NATO banner. That is a very good thing, Mr. Speaker, and it is a very positive transition that is taking place in Afghanistan.
We need to understand that when you go into a country that has no tradition of a liberal democracy, no tradition of being able to go to the polls and vote, select their national leaders, direct their national destiny, they don't have that tradition, they don't have the experience, they don't have the culture that they can get to this place where we are fortunate to be in this country without some help and guidance, and are glad for that help and guidance and they are reacting towards it and they have had a significant amount of stability in Afghanistan that has flowed from the liberation that took place within a couple of months of the September 11 attacks here on the United States.
I consider it to be a very successful operation in Afghanistan. We need also to keep in mind that there are elements there that do cause violence. One of them is just the tribal conflicts that have gone on there for century after century. Those tribal conflicts still exist. We would be deluding ourselves if we tried to convince ourselves that there are not going to be tribal conflicts going on over the next decade or half a century or maybe even a century. It is hard for that to get all put away.
So there are likely to be some flare-ups that are just tribal conflicts in Afghanistan. That is the way it has been. That is the frictions that have been there for millennia, and that is the frictions that are likely to be there at least into the future of our lifetimes. So there will be violence that comes from tribal conflicts.
There will also be conflicts that come from the temporary resurgence of cells of the Taliban. We are always able to go into those areas and pacify those areas, and the local people have been supportive of our troops and they are supportive of the NATO troops. So that is an issue that we will have to continue with.
Then there is just plain simple criminality that goes on. It goes on in any country in varying degrees, and at some point you get the rest the violence toned down, the Taliban violence, some of the tribal violence that is more likely to happen under these circumstances today than it might be when there is more stability in Afghanistan.
So when the tribal violence gets toned down and the tribal violence gets toned down, then we are just left with the criminal violence that is there for the most part, and it needs to get toned down to where it is manageable, and at that point the police force takes over.
So the progress that is being made in Afghanistan should give us good cheer. It should give us good optimism. It has exceeded the expectations of this Congress, and it is to the credit of our President, it is to the credit of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Pace, General Myers, who has commanded this during that particular period of time, our commanding officers, our intelligence, our logistics. Our troops on the ground, our soldiers and Marines that have served so well and honorably, have turned out a result in Afghanistan that exceeded our expectations and continues to be promising. So, Afghanistan is moving along at an optimistic rate.
In Iraq, Iraq, Mr. Speaker, has been a little more difficult. In fact, significantly more difficult, but far from hopeless. Far, far from hopeless.
The allegation was made today that in Iraq we are in a civil war. I have defined a civil war here on this floor before Mr. Speaker, for the benefit of those who don't think it through.
For the benefit of those that want to throw that term around without being challenged on the validity or accuracy of their prediction, they say ``civil war'' because I think secretly, well, not in secret, a civil war in Iraq would serve their political interests. I don't know what they secretly wish for, but a civil war in Iraq would serve the opposition to this White House, to this majority, it serves their political interest. So they come to this floor regularly and say civil war in Iraq, civil war in Iraq.
It can't be substantiated by fact. I have defined what a civil war would like look. It would be when the Iraqi military, Kurds and Shi'as and Sunnis alike, put on the same uniform, strap on the same helmet, charge into the same combat situations together, guarding each other's back, when those people that are defending the freedom and the safety and providing for the security in Iraq, the Iraqi military, that are now over 300,000 strong, when they choose up sides and start shooting at each other, that, Mr. Speaker, would be the definition of a civil war.
It is not a civil war. It is not likely to be a civil war. But there is rising sectarian violence that does threaten some stability in Iraq. It is also the violence that comes from the insurgents, from the terrorists, from al Qaeda. Those people are a smaller percentage.
But we have to discourage and eliminate the local militias taking that security into their own hands. That security needs to be in the hands of the authorized personnel from the government of Iraq that ultimately will end up answering to Prime Minister Maliki in that pyramid chain of command that has to go out through that country.
As the days and weeks and months go by, more and more Iraqis are trained, more and more are performing well, and more and more the Iraqi people are starting to see that their future is with a strong and prosperous and unified Iraq.
I want to give credit to a good idea, Mr. Speaker, that came from the gentleman who has added so much to the fiscal discussion in America, Mr. Steve Forbes. His idea was, and I have given it some thought and it is intriguing to me and I am inclined to be supportive and ready to endorse such a concept, Mr. Speaker, but he suggests that all the oil revenues in Iraq really belong to the Iraqi people.
A significant percentage of those revenues need to go to the government of Iraq in order to run the government and fund the operations that go on there. But to set aside a percentage of that oil revenue and then divide that up among Iraqis, so much to each Iraqi citizen. He said if you did that in the fashion that Alaska does that with their people, I believe he said that the annual check for being an Alaskan that comes from the oil revenue is about $834 a year.
If that number, $834 a year, is something that provides for Alaskans to have a stake in Alaska, can you imagine what a similar check like that would do for Iraqis to have a stake in Iraq? The idea that if the oil flows out of Iraq, prosperity flows in, you are not cut out of that economic equation if you are an Iraqi. If you register yourself as an Iraqi with an address, you end up with a group of citizens from Iraq that are on a certified voter registration list, a list of people there, people who will live by their own identification and have to because that check will find them if they are who they say they are.
It is an intriguing idea. It is an interesting idea, because it does unify and move towards the unification of the Iraqi people. If they all have a vested interest in producing a lot of oil and shipping that oil out of Iraq and those royalty checks that would come in, come into the national coffers and be distributed out to the Iraqi people, they are going to be keeping their eyes out when somebody comes out to sabotage a pipeline or an oil well or a refinery or a distribution terminal out in the Gulf. They will protect their interests, and they will all line up, I believe then, against the people that are seeking to destabilize Iraq. It is a good idea, and it is an idea that I hope our President takes a look at and one that can be discussed over in the Middle East.
But this was never going to be easy, and the idea that Iraq is a diversion in this global war against Jihad fascism could not be more erroneous. Mr. Speaker, if Iraq was not a threat to us, then what other Nations were not a threat to us?
I would ask, produce that list. Put them up on the board so we do not have to worry about them anymore, and we do not have to send anyone in there or be prepared with a military contingency plan. We can simply turn our focus on to the place where the folks on the other side of the aisle allege we ought to be putting it which I do not know where that is, Mr. Speaker. All I know is they tell us where it is is not, and they contend Iraq was never a threat.
In fact, today, in the aftermath of Hugo Chavez's speech before the United Nations, Mr. Speaker, that nearly frothing at the mouth, radical, emotional, unstable speech that was delivered by Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela on the floor of the United Nations, where he said things about our President that were way beyond the pale, and remarks that the junior senator from Iowa said, I can understand where he is coming from.
He said there were people by the thousands that lit a candle and marched in Tehran September 11 in support of the United States and in sympathy with the United States for being victimized on that day by those terrorist attacks and that all of the Muslim world was on our side on that day. This is the statement of the junior senator from Iowa, Mr. Speaker, but you know, it needs to have a different clarification.
There may have been people walking in the streets of Tehran that lit a candle in solidarity with the United States. I would expect they were the people that were the moderate Muslims, the ones who were well- educated, and they were working towards a future and they had a measure of freedoms until the Ayatollah came in 1979. I imagine those people that were walking with candles with solidarity towards the United States back in 2001, September 11, were the very people that are our allies today. But the junior senator said we turned them all into enemies and now we have polarized and alienated the Muslim world against the United States.
I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that a more objective truth is the truth that in almost every major Muslim city in the world on September 11, when that hit the news, there were people dancing in the streets with glee because the United States had suffered those blows on that day. That is the reality of it. They showed their true colors. In fact, in some of the Muslim enclaves in the United States, people took to the streets to celebrate, and in some of the mosques in the United States, the Imam preached about what kind of blow was landed on the United States favorably.
These are facts of historical reality, Mr. Speaker, and I have spoken towards the tale end of this about just the United States, but across the world we have had radical Islam line up against us and it is not just because we are the ally of Israel. I will say that Israel is the bulls-eye in this global war that is going on right now. They would like to annihilate Israel because they see that as doable. They would like to annihilate the United States because they believe we are the antithesis of their culture. I would submit that it is not a culture they represent.
I would ask this question. In the last 700 years, Mr. Speaker, is there anything in that culture that is aligned against us, radical Islam, is there any contribution that that civilization has made in the last 700 years that would be a contribution in the area of math or science or physics or chemistry, any kind of medicine? Is there any kind of contribution in the last 700 years, Mr. Speaker? I hope that there is someone that can come up with a contribution in 700 years from that civilization that has declared war on us. I cannot find it. I asked Middle Eastern scholars to find it for me. They seem to be stumped as well, Mr. Speaker.
And so is it a civilization that we are at war with or is it a defunct civilization, hardly a civilization at all, one that lashes out, one that worships death, one that we could never understand and should not try because it is not rational? It is not rational from a Western civilization viewpoint. No deductive reasoning approach will help us figure out the Middle Eastern, suicide Jihadists, fascist mind.
But what we must do is change the habitat for the people who believe that their path to salvation is in killing us. That culture has to change or this war will not be over, and this price that has been paid with nearly 3,000 lives on September 11 and nearly another 3,000 lives since that period of time in the theaters of Afghanistan and in Iraq, will continue to mount week by week, month by month, year by year in a perpetual conflict until such time as we change the culture of the people who believe their path to salvation is in killing us.
Mr. Speaker, it is not Islam. It is not the Muslims that are the problem. They are the host upon which the parasite Islamic fascist lives, and a parasite will attach itself to a host, which Islamic fascism does to Islam. It will feed off the host, which Islamic fascism does to Islam, and it will reproduce on the host, which Islamic fascism does to Islam. Sometimes it attacks the host. Sometimes it drops off and attacks another species, goes through another cycle and attaches itself back to the host again.
That is what is going on, and I am asking the moderate Muslim world, help us eradicate the parasite from within your midst. That is the only way we can do it in a relatively painless fashion. It must happen because
they have pledged death to all of us who do not subscribe to their perverted version of the religion.
So, Mr. Speaker, those are the circumstances that face us and the people that dance in the streets with glee in Muslim cities in the world where radical Islamists, the Islamic fascists, the people who are at war with us, and it is not that we made them enemies after that period of time. It is not that going into Afghanistan or going into Iraq made them enemies. They were our enemies before then. They danced in the streets on the very day that the junior senator from Iowa said there were folks in Iran carrying candles, and I thank those people in Iran. I believe they were, but I believe they are still with us.
Our enemies are still against us. That dynamic has not changed except for the habitat has changed in Afghanistan and changed in Iraq. No longer can either one of those locations be a terrorist staging area, terrorist training grounds or terrorist breeding grounds. That has changed because freedom has arrived in both of those locations, even though we have got some work to do in Iraq.
I would shift to another subject matter, Mr. Speaker, and one that I think is important to have a brief discussion on. We have taken some significant steeps here on the floor of this Congress to resolve the biggest problem that this United States has, and that is, how are we going to provide national security if we do not control our borders, if we do not enforce our immigration laws, if we cannot bring together a solution that resolves this issue.
The statement was made over here on the other side of the aisle that they would provide a comprehensive immigration reform policy. Well, that comprehensive immigration reform policy that they are talking about, Mr. Speaker, is the one the President presented. It is the one the Senate has passed. It is the one the President had endorsed. It is the one the Democrats want to vote for, and do you know, Mr. Speaker, if this had been a rubber stamp Congress, we would have comprehensive immigration reform.
But the truth is, this House of Representatives has blocked the amnesty legislation that is proposed by the gentlewoman from California, the esteemed minority leader who spoke here on the floor within the last hour, and also by the President and also passed by the United States Senate.
That is amnesty, pure and simple. Although it is complicated and convoluted, it has come back to the big scarlet A word, amnesty. The American people have rejected amnesty, amnesty in any form, amnesty by any name.
They want enforcement. They understand that there is an average of 11,000 illegals pouring across our southern border, not every day, Mr. Speaker, every night. That is when the action starts. Every night, on average, 11,000 illegals pour across our southern border.
The border patrol has testified here that they stop perhaps 25 percent to 33 percent. Testifying witnesses have also said that in the last fiscal year, the border patrol intercepted 1,188,000 in an attempt to come into the United States, just on our Mexican border. The year before it was 1,159,000 that were arrested trying to come across our Mexican border.
Now, to do that calculation, Mr. Speaker, if you take the 25 percent number or someplace a little higher than that of interdiction that I gave, that means more than 4 million people attempted to cross our southern border last year and the year before. When I go down and talk to the border patrol agents and I say you are getting 25 percent enforcement on people that are breaking into the United States, they say, no. The most consistent number they give me is perhaps 10 percent, not 33 percent, not 25 percent, perhaps 10 percent.
One officer who was an investigative officer and should have been in the position to know, when I posed the question to him and said do you stop 25 percent, he broke up in hysterical laughter, Mr. Speaker. He said, no, not 25 percent. I said how about 10 percent? Not 10 percent. About 3 to 5 percent is about all they stop.
So calculate these numbers out. The population of the United States is growing, Mr. Speaker, and it is growing a number of ways. It is growing every night when 11,000 illegals pour across our southern border.
For the period of time it works like this. Every 8 seconds, on average, another illegal comes into the United States. In that 8-second period of time, what is that comparable to? Oh, a bull ride, if you do not get bucked off, is 8 seconds. Every, I think the number is 7.6 seconds in America a baby is born. So every time a baby is born in America, an illegal jumps the border. Our population is growing simultaneously. Illegals in this column, newborn babies in this column and that graphical number is going up and up simultaneously almost to, well, within the 3 to 4/10ths of a second. Every 8 seconds an illegal crosses the border, every 7.6 a baby is born, and every time a bull rider gets on that bull, by the time you hear the bell, another illegal has jumped across the border.
That is how intense this is. 11,000 people a night, 4 million people a year, and it goes on and on and on.
The leadership and the majority in this Congress, the Republican majority, understand that it is a terrible wound in our border that has to have a tourniquet put on it. We have got to stop the bleeding, Mr. Speaker, and so we look at a number of ways to do that.
I will say behind me is a model of the concrete model that I have designed, and that came not because I sat here and listened to testimony, although a lot of that data mattered. It did not come about because I listened to other people around here talk, although I listened to them. I put together a number of ideas, and a year and a month ago, I called for a fence on our southern border. It was an opening round that was designed to sell the idea, and the idea gained momentum although I was criticized roundly for such a radical statement, but the idea gained momentum, and 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days later, 114 days later, we passed the fence legislation off the House of Representatives, 700 miles, double wall much of it in the most important strategic locations, and leaves us open I believe to continue to build more fence on our southern border.
We can put a fence in. We can put this concrete wall in that I have designed that is behind me here, Mr. Speaker, and we will do this, but the reason that we need to build a wall on the border, contrary to the position that was taken by one of our esteemed newspapers today is because we have an open border that is not even marked for hundreds of miles. Anybody that wants to, you can walk, crawl, run or drive, occasionally fly, across that border is free to do so. We have not even defined the border, and yet the force of 11,000 people a night, 4 million people a year, $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming across that border and people that want to get a job and for a better life, I concede that point.
The force of all of that together cannot be stopped by putting border patrol agents shoulder to shoulder on the border. We can do that. It would cost a lot of money, and we have to have backup people, but that is not the best and most economically viable solution.
If we build a barrier, we can force all human traffic through the ports of entry. That is what I submit we do. I would put a chain link fence down on the border itself, and then I would put the concrete wall in 100 feet. I would design it this way. I would put wire on top, and that wall would be the structure that would be too difficult to cut through, pretty difficult to go dig under. It would have to be patrolled and have sensors, but I believe that this 25 percent effectiveness that we have today would turn into a 90 or 95 percent effectiveness if it is managed, maintained and controlled and has sensors put on it and cameras to back it up and we integrate our technology along with our physical barrier, Mr. Speaker.
Then I would submit to the American people, if there are some things we have not considered adequately in this debate, this idea of a comprehensive bill that really says amnesty starts with a couple of premises, one of them is that there are Americans that will not do this work.
And, truthfully, every single job there is to do in America is being done
by natural-born Americans, people that have birthright citizenship here, those who are born to a mother and a father who are both citizens. Traditional Americans are doing every single kind of work there is in this country.
We have a 30 percent dropout rate in our high schools in this country. Those young people who don't have a continuing education, that don't have a high school education, they need the lower-skilled jobs. Some of them, that is what they want out of life, but their opportunities are being taken from them by the price being undercut of money going to illegal workers in this country by the millions.
The 30 percent of the dropouts then end up on welfare, on crime. They end up not being the quality of citizens that they could be, not realizing their potential, because the entry-level jobs and the kind of jobs that they haven't access to because of their limited education are being taken away by illegals. That is point number one on that issue.
Then there is the argument of we don't have enough people to do this work. That is another falsehood, Mr. Speaker. And I would submit the response to it this way, that is, if you are a corporation and you are looking to move into a city or a town, a region, or community to establish a new production facility of some kind, and you need to know what the available labor supply is to evaluate that location versus perhaps several other locations, Mr. Speaker, what you would do is you would send a little team in there to evaluate the area, and you would meet with the mayor, the chamber of commerce, the development corporation, maybe meet with the law enforcement people to get a sense of what the crime rate was, and you would meet with the educational people and get a feel for that whole community.
And to evaluate whether there is enough labor supply there, you wouldn't do what the advocates for amnesty are saying. They are saying, well, there is only a 4.7 percent unemployment rate, which means that is a full employment economy. Well, first of all, it is not, Mr. Speaker. During World War II, we had a 1.2 percent unemployment rate, and that still wasn't a full employment economy, but as close as it has been in the last century. So I submit that as a number to measure that is a lot closer to full employment than 4.7 percent.
Just the same, there are 7.3 million people in the United States that are on unemployment. That is not the only number you would look at if you are a corporation looking to place a facility in a location. You would go in there and do a study and say, not how many are on unemployment, yes give me that number, but your question would be, what is the available labor supply? And what is the educational level of these workers? And what is the wage scale here? And what are we going to have to provide for benefits to compete for these employees? You would ask those questions and you would get your answer. And for the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, it works out this way, the available labor supply is this:
We have 143 million people working. We have 7.3 million people that are unemployed. But we have not in the workforce between the ages of 16 and 69, 61,375,000. Pardon me, that is to the age of 74. Wal-Mart hires people to be greeters there and they enjoy their days. So that is 61,375,000. You add to that the unemployment rate, and I look at this number on this chart, 7,591,000, the most current number that I have. It takes me up to 69 million nonworking Americans.
So if you would like to reduce that smaller number there, that is about 7 million or so between the ages of 70 and 74, fine, you can take this number down to 61 or 62 million people.
But we have maybe, maybe 7 million working illegals in America and maybe 70 million nonworking Americans. So what kind of a rational policy would not hire one out of 10 of the nonworking Americans rather than bring in tens of millions of people here, 66 million people by a significant number of analysis of the Senate version of the bill, match the total number of all Americans naturalized in all of our history, double that, 66 million from 1820 until the year 2000 and another 66 million, and employ about 60 percent of them and end up with having to support the deficiencies in health care and a burden on the infrastructure when you have got 70 million people in America that are not in the workforce today that are of working age.
Mr. Speaker, this approach often defies logic. The people that have a vested interest are the ones that are driving this debate. The libertarian powerful business interests on the other side, they are making money on this deal and they are using that money to advance an illogical approach that does not take into consideration the long-term best interests of the United States of America. And the liberals on the other side see political power, so open the borders. And that is why they are hollering and calling for what they call a comprehensive immigration plan, which is an amnesty plan that would bring in 66 million new people.
And what we know about them is when they come into a place, they will assimilate into the politics of the locale where they arrive. And that means they aren't going to be bipartisan split down the middle. If you can get them to go into a Democrat enclave, that is what they are going to be. If you could get them to go into a Republican enclave, that is what they are going to be. If anybody doubts that, just ask yourselves, how many Irish Catholic Bostonian Republicans do you know? I understand there are two. I know one. They have not assimilated into the politics of the rest of America; they stay in their political enclave. That is what will happen with the newly arriving immigrants into this country as well, just to add another point to all this, Mr. Speaker.
So I submit we need to establish an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well- being of the United States of America and use those considerations and no other. If we do anything otherwise, we are opening up our borders to be the relief valve for poverty, and we know that there are at least 4.5 billion people on the planet that have a lower standard of living than the average citizen in Mexico. And so we cannot be the relief valve for poverty unless we are willing to accept a population in the United States that would exceed, say, 5 billion people or more.
What should the population of the United States be 50 years from now, 100 years from now? A significant question. What is our future? What is our destiny? This is a long-term issue, and it is one that needs to have serious consideration. But enforcement, seal the border, and birthright citizenship, shut off the jobs magnet is what we will do, and we will build a fence and we will start it this year.