Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized here in the United States House of Representatives. And I came to the floor to talk about a number of things that I am convinced are of importance to Americans.

And as I sat through this discussion over the last 45 minutes or so that I have tuned an ear to this, I cannot help but move into some of my disagreements with the remarks that were made by some of my esteemed colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

And I want to state first that I appreciate the tone of their remarks tonight. Sometimes they are not so tolerant, they are not so patient, and the tone gets a little more intense than it was. It does not change my disagreement. I just appreciate the approach that they bring in our disagreement. And that is what we are supposed to do here. We are supposed to air our differences, Madam Speaker, and lay those things out, and the American people tune in on what we do, and they weigh in with each of us, and we draw our conclusions based upon our convictions plus the input that comes from all over this country.

So I would first say that the statement was made consistently that we invaded Iraq totally on false premises. And, first, I would remind the body of resolution 1441, the last United Nations resolution that finally was the last straw. There were a number of other resolutions that Saddam Hussein violated. And we know that it was not our responsibility to prove that he did not have weapons of mass destruction. It was his responsibility to comply with the United Nations, to comply with the weapons inspectors. He did not do that.

The war that took place in 1991, Desert Storm, that war was never over because it was not completed because Saddam did not comply with the conditions of the cease-fire.

So the resolutions came before the United Nations. Resolution 1441 was the last-straw resolution, and that was supported by, of course, all members of the Security Council, and it passed the United Nations. Someone needed to enforce the resolution if the United Nations was to have any teeth in anything that they did. If there was to be peace in the Middle East, someone had to enforce that resolution. And if we were going to keep Saddam Hussein out of his neighbors' territory, like Kuwait that he went into that began this in the first place, someone had to enforce the resolution.

So the second generation of Bushes stepped forward and built a magnificent coalition, a coalition of more than 30 countries, a coalition of the willing that went in and liberated Iraq beginning in March of 2003 and crossed that country with armored columns into Baghdad, the largest city ever in the history of the world to be liberated and occupied by a foreign power. That happened in a matter of weeks, Madam Speaker. It was a magnificent military accomplishment. And it was done with fewer troops than the first time, I agree.

But as I listened too, I will not call it the dissent on this side because certainly we have not read the majority opinion. I hear from this general, he disagreed with the number of troops, and this general thought that we could not probably keep the Iraqis on our side, and this one thought there was going to be a civil war, and some of the people in the CIA disagreed, and a GAO analysis tells us that we really should not be there.

Who are these people, Madam Speaker? Who are they to be directing our foreign policy? Are these elected individuals that are the voices of the people? Are they the Commander in Chief? Do they speak for the Commander in Chief, Madam Speaker? What business do they have weighing in? Is their voice in the wilderness of any more volume or any more credibility than the next person on the street, the next person that might be your neighbor? Do they have any more credibility than the elected Members of the United States House of Representatives or the United States Senate?

My answer to that is no. Some of them were involved in foreign policy. Some of them were involved in military policy. I will grant that. I heard three generals that were named. I think I could probably come up with six to nine generals that disagree with the President's policy. But if it is nine generals, I will see your nine generals and I will raise you 9,000 generals who do not disagree with the President's policy and have not disagreed with the President's policy.

And I would like to lay this out for the mission that it is. There is a Bush doctrine, and this Bush doctrine was finally recognized by the national news media when on the west portico of this Capitol building, President Bush gave his second inaugural address, and in that second inaugural address, he laid out his vision.

Now, it was laid out prior to that. It was laid out at least in his State of the Union address January 28, 2003. It was laid out in his defense strategy for the United States of America, which came out in the previous September, 2002. And he made it clear that his vision was to promote freedom, to promote liberty, especially in these countries that fostered and bred terrorists. It was a clear policy established. ``The Nationality Security Strategy of the United States'' was the name of the document published in September of 2002. Very consistent with the President's speeches. Freedom beats in the heart of every person. All people yearn to breathe free. Free people do not go to war against other free people.

And I have often, on the floor of the House of Representatives, Madam Speaker, talked about the similarities and the corollaries between the end of the Cold War and how we can get to the end of this global war on terror. And I point out that November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. It came down from the force of a people that wanted to be free. They yearned to get out of that trap that they were in.

They yearned to reach across to their fellow man, their neighbors, their family members that were divided by that wall down through the middle of Berlin. But it was the yearning for freedom that made the difference.

When they climbed up on top of that wall, they took hammers and chisels and chipped the stone out and the concrete out, and when they broke bottles of champagne on there and climbed up on top and danced and sang and celebrated, it was a glorious day.

Much of the world missed the point. Much of the world, and I remember watching the network news media at the time, much of the world was talking about how families were being reunited, how important it was that we saw this joy of the reunification of families that had divided since after World War II.

As I sat and watched that, it occurred to me that when the Berlin Wall came down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down with it. The Cold War, the beginning of the end of the Cold War was over. In fact, it was over on that day. It took a little while to clean up the mess, but what happened when that wall was breached by people that yearned for freedom was the echo of freedom. Once they got past that wall, once they got through the Brandenburg Gate, it echoed across Eastern Europe. It echoed across Eastern Europe with a crescendo. And it was almost a blood-free revolution. For practical purposes, it was virtually blood- free.

As country after country yearned for freedom, Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia, country after country, the Soviet Union collapsed, Madam Speaker and they had a measure of freedom far greater than they had ever seen before, and they still have a measure of freedom greater than they had seen prior to the end of the Cold War.

Hundreds of millions of people breathe free today because the Berlin Wall came down, because Ronald Reagan's vision, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' When that happened, when that vision was realized and freedom echoed across Eastern Europe and hundreds of millions of people became free, they stood in the square in Prague and rattled their keys together by the tens of thousands and came to power and later had their velvet revolution and separated those two countries without blood, and they live compatibly today as two separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Those things happened in the blink of a historical eye, and it was a historical miracle. But that miracle that we look back on now from a period of 15 years or so, 17 years, that miracle that took place was the kind of miracle that can be emulated again.

The second George Bush, Bush 43, came to power, and this Nation was attacked. And when this Nation was attacked, it was clear that we had an enemy that was determined to annihilate us. They attack our value system, they attack our culture, they attack Western Civilization itself. And they believe that their path to salvation is in killing people who are not like them. In fact, they kill more Muslims than they do Christians or Jews, it is just that Jews are their preferred tar gets, Christians are their second preferred targets, but they will kill whatever target is in front of them if they think they can sow some kind of discontent that might breakdown social order, and if the social order gets broke down, then they think they can somehow emerge into power.

So this is how this thing unfolded from 1989 quickly until today. The Bush doctrine is the vision of freedom echoing across the Arab world the way it echoed across Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

Now, I direct the attention of the Speaker and the public to the vision of what the world looks like today What has changed in the world since September 11, 2001? How much different is the map of the world today?

If we would paint that map with freedom, you can go to Afghanistan. When we made a decision to go into Afghanistan, people on that side of the aisle said it will be another Vietnam, it will be another quagmire. No nation has ever been able to go into Afghanistan and invade, occupy, liberate, be able to operate in that foreign country in an effective fashion. Everybody has been defeated, everybody has been run out. The British have lost, the Russians have lost. You can go back through history and no one has succeeded in Afghanistan.

Yet a month, actually less than a month after September 11, we had operations beginning in Afghanistan. And just a few months later, the Northern Alliance, coupled with coalition forces, routed the Taliban, surrounded and destroyed many al Qaeda and liberated Afghanistan.

There is a proud National Guard unit from my district that was on the ground in Afghanistan that protected the voting locations, the voting booths and the routes to them, and some of the areas other troops from our coalition forces protected in the rest of the areas, and on that date and that location, the people in Afghanistan went to the polls for the first time in all of history and cast their ballots for a free government and they ratified a Constitution that now directs a free people, and Afghanistan is an up-and-running free country.

This up-and-running free country has its problems, yes. And now that there has been an acceleration in the violence that has taken place in Afghanistan, the people who were afraid to criticize over these last 3 to 4 years or more are now starting to criticize again.

The level of their criticism goes up in direct proportion to the number of casualties that go up in Afghanistan. And it is the same in Iraq. You could index it. If you could listen to the decibels from the other side of the aisle, the decibels of criticism of our Commander-in- Chief, undermining our efforts to free the rest of the world and free this burden of terror off the American people, if you could measure the decibels of objection from your side, you could index that directly to the number of casualties of American and coalition troops, because it is political opportunism that raises the objections.

When the casualties go down, the objections go down, because the credibility diminishes. The casualties go up, the critics get up here, come to the floor and unload more and more. And when they do that, they are undermining our military who are on the line.

But some of these other points that were made. Interesting things. Why does it matter if people like us in the first place? I would ask that question. There is much concern about the rest of the world doesn't like us. We need to do something so people can like us again.

I recall going to the Greenbriar on a weekend that would have been the latter part of February in 2003. We had a bipartisan retreat where we got to know each other. We had breakout sessions and we brought in experts, especially from around the Middle East.

There was an entire handful of experts that had lived in the Middle East and knew the culture and history and had a sense of how they could explain to us what was going on. We hadn't studied the Middle Eastern culture very much as a nation. We know a lot more about it today.

But as these experts sat around and they started up the discussions and we had these sessions, and I didn't know the other colleagues very well, I had only sworn into this job a month earlier. So I spent a lot of time listening. It was important for me to learn what my colleagues didn't know and also to find out what they knew that they could impart to me. But I wanted to make sure that when I shared my viewpoint, that it was going into a place where there was a knowledge void so we could help fill that up. I hope they are doing the same thing with me. That is one of the ways things work.

The author and journalist Tom Friedman gave an address to start that weekend out, and that set the tone for the whole weekend. The question was, well, they don't like us very well, and they are not going to like us any better when we get done with them. If we go into Iraq, and hadn't gone in at that point, if we go in, they are going to start to hate us even more.

So we sat around and spent the weekend agonizing about how to make people like us. Well, how in the world can you decide to go make people like you when they just got finished bombing us, flying four airplanes into America, killing 3,000 Americans and believing that the 19 hijackers that were on those planes are now off in the next life with their 72 virgins each.

That is their belief system. And we are worried about people like that liking us? I will submit that you can't worry about that. You can't negotiate with people like that. The only thing you can do is stall them off with fear or take them out with force. Those are our alternatives.

A statement was made over here tonight, Madam Speaker, that we are in the middle of a civil war and we are being asked to protect the Sunnis from the Shiites. The middle of a civil war. There was a revolution that was introduced here that declared we are in a civil war. The junior Senator from Iowa introduced a resolution in the Senate that declared we are in the middle of a civil war in Iraq. The middle of a civil war.

They have declared that now, oh, since, 3, 4, 5 months ago. I haven't noticed that there has been an acceleration in the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence in the 3 to 4 to 5 months since they began to talk us about being in a civil war.

Wishing it were so does not make it true. I can define ``civil war'' so the American public can identify this easily. We go back and look at our own Civil War. That was when brother was fighting against brother. Yes, it was North against South, but sometimes they lined up on opposite sides of the line and they shot at each other, and sometimes brother shot at brother, and I imagine that occasionally brothers actually killed brothers.

Friends that went to the military academy met on the line. I am thinking about General Armistead, and I believe it was General Reynolds on the line at the corner and the angle, at the battle of Gettysburg, facing each other, unit to unit. That was the Civil War. Half of the people in the military, or a number approaching that, took off their blue coats and put on grey coats, and they went to war against each other. They chose up sides and went to war against each other, Madam Speaker

If there is going to be a civil war in Iraq, it will be when the Iraqis who are in uniform today, 257,000 strong, trained, in action, defending the security of that nation, all wearing the same uniform, some Kurds, some Shiias, some Sunnis all mixed up in their different units.

Unlike the local police that more reflect the ethnicity and the religion of their locality, the military is mixed up

with about an even mix and unit by unit of Kurds, Shiias and Sunnis. I ask them, when I go over there, what is most important, the fact that you are a Shiia, the fact that you are a Sunni, the fact that you are a Kurd, or the fact that you are an Iraqi?

And they have always answered, Madam Speaker, it is the fact that I am an Iraqi. And these Iraqis, 257,000 strong, defending Iraqis from terrorists who are within their midst, in ever-reducing numbers and ever-reducing resources are standing together shoulder to shoulder, fighting together.

They are not fighting each other. They are fighting together against the terrorists in their midst. This is not a civil war. A civil war would be when the Iraqis that are in uniform defending Iraqis, 257,000 strong, choose up sides and start to shoot at each other. That is not happening. It has not happened. And if it begins to happen, that does not mean that they are certainly in a civil war, but that would be an indicator to start watching pretty close, Madam Speaker.

So also the argument from the gentleman from Massachusetts, we cannot secure Afghanistan with less than 150,000 more troops than we have, quoting some expert, well, I think the experts that the President has employed in both Afghanistan and Iraq have done pretty well.

In fact, it was essentially the same people that planned Afghanistan, that planned Iraq. They had the right number of troops in Afghanistan. They said it could not be done, but it was done. And it is a magnificent success. The troops that they sent into Iraq were absolutely adequate for the job of liberating Iraq.

Now, the circumstances that follow afterwards apparently are not bad enough for the people on the other side to say, well, I thought you should have had 500,000 troops there, but now I think you ought to have no troops there. And how can you say that we should have more but yet we should not have any? There is not a consensus on the other side of the aisle. I believe we need to follow our Commander in Chief.

The other statement, we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Reclaiming my time. Madam Speaker, I did refer to him as some expert, because I did not pick out how you defined that. But I did attribute it to an expert.

Reclaiming my time. I pose the question to the gentleman from Massachusetts, and that is, Are you advocating that we send 150,000 troops to Afghanistan? I yield.

Reclaiming my time. I do appreciate the gentleman's sentiment on this. I know that you are right on the vote. I am confident that I can go back through the Congressional Record and pick out the rhetoric that supports my remarks.

But I guess it is a balance that there was one vote against the resolution. I do recognize the gentleman's point. I look forward to bringing all of the resources necessary to protect America in the future anywhere we have to in the world.

I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts. Picking up on my next point, it is that the statement made here on the floor that we are not winning the war on terror, ``the rest of the world believes we are losing the war on terror.''

I do not believe that is true at all. In fact, who would want to trade places with the other side? How would you like to try to conduct or construct an optimistic scenario if you were, say, Zarqawi before he was sent to the next life by the United States Air Force?

How would you put together a scenario by which you could possibly win? I would point out that listening to one of our experts, one who is actually under the command of our Commander in Chief, General Casey, who said the last time I was over there, he said the enemy cannot win if the politicians stay in the fight. That is what I am about, Madam Speaker, is seeing to it that the politicians stay in the fight.

Our solders and marines deserve it. They deserve everything we have to support them. When they approach me in Iraq and say to me, I am proud to put my life on the line and commit a year out of my life to defend freedom and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom, but why do I have to fight the United States news media too, why do I have to fight the anti-war detractors, my answer to them has been, you should not have to do that. That is my job. And it is a job of all of us, to stand up together.

But also the criticism that we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq. That is not a criticism that sets on very solid ground from my perspective. I support the President in that. You cannot give people a date that you are going to pull out. And so I would submit to the other side of the aisle that has found some experts to support the position that they are advocating, they should listen to an expert that I would think that they should support, and that would be the expert called former President Bill Clinton, who said, and agreed with President Bush, that we cannot give the enemy an exit date or they will just simply go underground.

He said, you cannot give them a date. Bill Clinton, 2 days ago supporting President Bush and his position not to telegraph when we might be ready to deploy out of Iraq. And so the selective process is going on, pick the people that support your position and then declare them to be experts. And I generally stand with my position. But, let's see. The people who got it right were ignored; the people who got it wrong were rewarded.

I think it is a bit early to declare such a thing. I think historians will make that decision. I think the advisers that got us into Afghanistan successfully and successfully have managed the liberation of Afghanistan got it right.

I think the same advisers were there to put together the strategy for Iraq, and given the military operations that are there, the liberation of Iraq, they got it right. To maintain the safety and security in that country has been difficult, but the strategy, there is not a consistent viewpoint here, to get Americans out is what we hear from people like Mr. Murtha, because they are targets of the enemy.

If we pull out to the horizon, which we found out, I thought the horizon might be over there where the sun sets or where the sunrise is or up on the

hill, the other side of the hill, just some place out of sight would be the horizon. We found out a month ago their horizon is really Okinawa. He said let us redeploy our troops to Okinawa, then if things get bad, we can go back in there.

So the Out of Iraq Caucus, I wonder how large a caucus that is, but their position doesn't have a futuristic view. What takes place in the Middle East?

I would say this: We need to be looking at the Bush doctrine, we need to be looking at when the Berlin Wall went down, and that echo of freedom that I talked about earlier, we need to be looking at the way a map of the world looks today, and a free Afghanistan, 20, 25 million people and a free Iraq; 25 million people, an Iraq that is far safer than the news media would have us believe, that cameras are trained on the IEDs before they go off, but they are not trained on the happy Iraqi playing children.

We have a new conflagration in the Middle East. We have the circumstances with Israel, an Israel that has been trading land for peace. When there is no rational reason to trade land for peace, there is no historical model of somebody trading off land and getting peace.

We could go back to the prior, to World War II, you would think the focus on that, if that history would be pretty acute, the trade-off for the Sudetenland, to Hitler, to get peace, and finally, the carving up of Poland between the Germans and the Russians, and ultimately war.

It always happens, you can never trade land for peace, and yet the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon, and I understand why. It was costly to be there, but the agreement was that Hezbollah would not be operating in southern Lebanon or in Lebanon at all.

Finally, most of the Syrian troops got out of there, not the Syrian intelligence people, but the Syrian troops. Hezbollah accelerated and built up their forces there, and they smuggled in missiles from Syria, probably from Iran to Syria and into Lebanon. Israel sits there today in a two-front war, being shot at from Gaza and being shot at from Lebanon, missiles raining down from the north, raining up from the south.

I would submit that if they had succeeded in moving the Israeli people, the Jewish people out of the West Bank, moved them up against the fence, or inside the fence, if they had succeeded in allowing an autonomous West Bank, they will be firing missiles from the West Bank as well, and the only area Israel would not be shot at from right now would be from the sea.

The sea, of course, is the place where the neighbors of Israel would like to drive all Israelis, and they don't have very long. They cannot make very many mistakes. I am glad that they have stepped up to defend themselves, and I am glad that they began operations north and in the south.

It is the right thing to do, and talk of negotiating for peace without the eradication of Hezbollah in Lebanon would be a mistake. They must go in, and they must take out Hezbollah, take them out, take out their entire ability to conduct military operations there, pacify southern Lebanon, before they can come back out of there again. It has got to happen. If it doesn't happen, there will not be peace. The missiles will continue to rain in.

The Syrians, complicit in this, sitting up there, providing military weapons; and Iranians, we believe, were down in Lebanon helping advise and helping to fire off some of the rockets that were fired, especially the one that went to the Israeli ship.

We have acts of war being conducted by Iran against Israel, and I believe acts of war being conducted against Israel by Syrians. The Israelis have to be looking to the south to Gaza, to the north to Lebanon, and over to Syria and on over to Iran.

They have got to look at their sites at four different locations. We must stand with them every step of the way. We have got to do so with a vision, with a vision of how this end game might work. We need to be thinking that the nuclear capability, the growing nuclear capability of Iran in the very belligerent hands of Ahmadinejad is far too dangerous.

We have to believe that if he had the capability to drop a nuclear warhead into Tel Aviv, this would be about the time. We have to understand that Hezbollah is conducting operations and firing missiles into Israel at the direction of Iran.

Iran has been and is providing the supplies. Iran has recruited, founded, recruited and trained Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of Iran. They cannot shake the responsibility that when Hezbollah acts in an act of war against Israel, it is really an act by a surrogate of Iran.

I came to the conclusion in September of 2004 that there was a 95 percent probability that we would have to go in and take out the nuclear capability of Iran. We cannot sit and let a rogue nation have that capability, a nation that deals with, trades with, and probably is able to swap nuclear secrets with North Korea.

These two axes of evil are still out there, and they are still dangerous, and they are getting ever more bold. When we have people here in this Congress, that say we are losing this war on terror, that Iran is a winner, that Hamas is a winner, that Hezbollah is a winner, I don't know how they can be winners when they are being taken out 24 hours a day by the IDF.

But that scenario gives them hope. Members of Congress think they are winning. Then their optimism will be stronger, or they will probably lack the defeatism that we think they are getting.

So we must look at Israel, we must look at this end game with the idea that if we have to take action, then we may have to do it in a more urgent fashion than we might otherwise, because of the war that is breaking out in the Middle East, the war that is breaking out with Israel.

On that subject matter, I trust our Commander in Chief to be putting an end game in mind. I stand with him in his vision on this safety and this security and on a strategy to get to the end of this global war on terror. I would ask the American people to envision this, envision how freedom echoed across Eastern Europe in 1989.

Country after country after country became free, and today they go to the polls, and they choose their leaders. They direct their national destiny, and they join the European Union, and they join NATO, and they are good allies, and they join the coalition and our operations in Afghanistan and the coalition of our operations in Iraq.

The people who are the newest to freedom are the first to fight for the freedom of others. I stood in a military base in Basra some time back, where a British general was commanding the region down in the southern part of Iraq. In that group, that group of soldiers, if you look at the flags on their shoulders, there were British soldiers, Australians, Romanians, Polish, Danish, Netherlands, I am forgetting one or two, but that was all, just happened to be those in a group. I lined them up and took a picture. That is the true coalition forces. They are there.

Shortly after I came back from Iraq, the Australians doubled their troop involvement in Iraq. They doubled it, just simply doubled their troops. Do you think it made the news in the United States of America? Only one or two news outlets when we did a LexusNexus search, but, you know, al Jazeera picked it up. You know, al Jazeera scooped the major news media in the United States, because they were paying attention.

So, Madam Speaker, we will stand with the Commander in Chief with the vision for freedom, and we will look forward to the day that the Arab world breathes free, and when that day comes, country by country, piece by piece, the people that get up in the mornings there then can turn their outlook from teaching hatred, from making bombs and trying to kill others to try to drag the rest of the world down, they can turn that focus to building their homes, building their families and their communities and their mosques or their churches, building their country into a model of prosperity instead of a model of destruction.

I think in the amount of time that I have, I am going to shift subjects, and we will talk about the security on the other side of the United States. I would point out that we have also a security concern on our southern border; and down there, that 2,000-mile long border

that runs from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, that border has, according to the Border Patrol testimony at the Immigration Subcommittee hearing, as many as 4 million people pouring across that southern border annually. That is about 11,000 people a day, 4 million people annually.

In the past year, in 2005, they stopped and turned back 1,188,000 people, most of them run through, identified, put on a bus, taken to the border and sent back through the turnstile into Mexico. The year before, there was 1,159,000. The number has been growing. It has crept up from 900,000 on up to now nearly 1.2 million, 1.2 million people caught when we are catching a fourth to a third, by most of the testimony that comes here.

But when I go down on the border and I meet with the Border Patrol officers down there, Madam Speaker, I ask them and I propose that number, are you stopping 25 percent. I found no one down there on a regular basis that told me that they stopped 25 percent of the illegal border crossings. Most of them, they gave me the number of 10 percent, and one, when I submitted the 25 percent number, actually went into hysterics and said, oh, it is not more than 3, perhaps 5, percent; 3 percent of illegal crossers and 5 percent of the illegal drugs that are coming across the border.

Now, when we talk about numbers of those size, it is hard to put it into perspective. So I would put it this way: every time an illegal comes into the United States across the Mexican border, that is an average of one every 8 seconds. In the United States, every 8 seconds, there is a baby born in America, and it might be an anchor baby and a baby born to an illegal mother. That baby will have citizenship here in the United States. I am opposed to that policy, but every time a baby is born, an illegal walks across the border into the United States. As our population grows, half of it is an illegal population.

A bull ride is 8 seconds long. For the length of a bull ride, a baby is born, and an illegal crosses a border. A cowboy rides a bull another 8 seconds, only they are not riding 24 hours a day, we are having babies and having illegals come across every day, 24 hours a day.

How many people are 11,000 daily? To measure 11,000, I would put it this way. Santa Ana's army that entered into Texas that began the great war that ended up in a free Texas and ultimately Texas, a great State in this Union, Santa Ana's army was about 6,000 strong. When they stormed the Alamo, they were 2,500 to 3,000. He had split his forces; 2,500 to 3,000 storming the Alamo, and we think that was a massive armed force, and it was. But Santa Ana gathered all his army up together and he came across the border one time and wreaked havoc across Texas; twice that number marches across that border every single day. And what does America have to say about that? Ho-hum.

Well, we can find a way. They have absorbed themselves into our society. Somebody needs somebody to do some cheap work, and so we really should not concern ourselves with this. I disagree with that, Madam Speaker. I think that a country that does not control its borders cannot very much longer declare itself to have borders, and a country without borders is not a country, a simply amorphous mass of a North American continent.

We have to have borders and we defend them, and we have to defend those borders for all the reasons that we know, but there are other reasons that most of America does not know, and that is, as we hear the President say, we cannot stop people from coming across the border that just want to come here for a better life. Well, we cannot? Of course, I think we can.

And yet, if he will concede that point, that point that we cannot stop them unless we legalize them so that they can come back and forth in some legal fashion, if that cannot be done, how in the world then does the President or anyone else propose that we can stop the force of $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming into America? Ninety percent of the illegal drugs in America cross our southern border and that is according to the DEA. That is $65 billion worth. That is marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin that comes in from China and gets funneled up this way. It is cocaine that comes from Colombia.

Colombians used to have a pretty lucrative trade on cocaine until the Mexican methamphetamine brought their market down; and on top of that, when September 11 came, we tightened up the security of our airports, and it is a lot harder for them to smuggle cocaine into the United States. So now they have a transportation route that comes up around the inside of the gulf, along the rail line in Mexico, a lot of it controlled by MS-13, the most brutal gang this continent has ever seen.

But you have Colombian cocaine, you have Mexican methamphetamine, you have Chinese heroin and Mexican marijuana coming into this country, totaled up value, $65 billion. Now, the force of a $7- or $8-an-hour job for someone that wants to come and pick lettuce, tomatoes or apples or whatever it might be, that is one thing. Somebody wanting to walk across the desert to pick apples, it is hard to fathom somebody that wants a better life that much, although we have to sympathize with that and solution-wise in fixing Mexico, not in draining off all of the discontent, and the poor people that are in Mexico and in the United States. But the problem is we can deal with that.

What we have not done is taken steps against the $65 billion worth of illegal drugs; and as I go down there, Madam Speaker, and I sit along that border at night and listen to the infiltration of the illegals sneaking through the brush, being unloaded out of the vehicles, picking up their packs and marching off through the brush, when it gets light and I go and look at the tracks and see where they are marching off through the desert and they are carrying a 50-pound pack of marijuana, pack trains of people, 10 or a dozen or 50 or even as high as 100 people, each with 50 pounds of marijuana on their back, marching across the desert because they cannot drive a vehicle across there in some of those locations now because we put in vehicle barriers, well, the vehicle barriers are environmentally friendly. They have let the desert antelope crawl through. And a man with 50 pounds of marijuana can throw his pack through there, crawl through, put on his pack and walk across the desert. That is what is going on

So we need to force all traffic through the ports of entry. That is my mission. That is why I believe we need to build physical barriers to do that, Madam Speaker.

So I have designed one. I have spent my life in the construction business. We build things, design things, pour structural concrete, make it out of steel. You name it, we have done it. Mostly it is earthwork of all kinds. So I submit that on this desert floor, when I go down there, it lays pretty good for this job.

I would, Madam Speaker, dig a trench like this in the desert floor, dig a trench down through that desert floor, and I will demonstrate another thing. As that trench is dug, we pull a slip form trencher right along behind it. It will be pouring concrete right in the trench. As you move the trench, the concrete would move along like that. You come along in a couple of days when this cures, leave a slot in the middle, and start setting precast panels right up in this slot that I have. These would be already made, already cured. They would be about 10 feet wide or 13\1/2\ feet long, and they are designed to be a 12- foot high constructed height.

And we just pick them up with a crane, set them in like that. You can see how easy this is, Madam Speaker. Once you get the trench and the footing poured, it is a simple task to set the precast concrete panels right into the footing and into the slot.

Now, that builds us a 12-foot high concrete wall. I do not submit that this wall be built right on the border because I think it is important for us to be able to do surveillance on both sides of this wall.

I would submit that right on the border, we put up a 10-foot-high chain link fence, a chain link fence with about four barbs tipped out to the south. I would hang a sign about every quarter of a mile, in Spanish, that tells people go to this Web site or go to the U.S. consulate and here is where you apply to come into the United States legally. That would be my approach.

And then, when they cut through the fence, when they dug under the fence,

when they went around it, over it, or through it, whatever they did, that would tell us that is a location where we need to beef it up.

And I would pull back 60 feet. I would put this footing in, and I would drop this concrete fence, and they will have demonstrated that we need it because they have violated the one that was the lighter fence that they didn't respect.

And so, we have this concrete wall. It is about 6 inches thick. It ends up 12 feet high, 10-foot-wide panels, one after another. And our little construction company could toss together about a mile a day of this once we got going. Now, we won't be bidding any project like this, but we have the capability of doing it is my point.

And certainly there would be a little bit of engineering design that would be touched up on it. But this is basically the design that I believe we would be ending up with. It costs about $1.3 million a mile.

Now we are spending $8 billion on our southern border, $8 billion. That is $4 million a mile every year, and we are paying Border Patrol people to drive back and forth on HUMVEES, to park and look at it and be a deterrent just for being there, and we are paying all the administration that it takes to support the people and, of course, their weapons and all the technology.

And I am for supporting this wall with additional technology. And it is okay with me if they want to fly drones around and let us know when people are approaching the wall. But I will tell you, they will find that this wall doesn't let them cross it.

And people will say, well, if you build a 12-foot wall, I will show you a 12-foot ladder. And that might happen, Madam Speaker. So I have a little bit of a solution for that. And that solution consists of, this is actually a little piece of solder, but just a little nice little concertina wire to put on top of this wall as a deterrent. Easily installed. And you can see that it can provide that deterrent effect.

Now, I also submit that we run a little current through this wire, and that provides also as a deterrent. Now it is up there where you would have to have a ladder to get your hands on it. But that will keep people from putting a ladder up against it. And then we will have our borders respected and protected.

And if we fail to do this, Madam Speaker, we are going to continue to see 11,000 people a day, one every 8 seconds, $65 billion worth of illegal drugs pouring across this border.

Whenever we built the fence in San Diego they went around the fence. And each time that you do that they will go around it because the money is too great, $65 billion. We have got to shut it off. And we will build this thing where they don't respect a more modest barrier, and continue to build until such time as all traffic goes through the ports of entry. And that means legal and illegal, through the ports of entry. And then we will beef up our people there. We beef up our technology there.

And if we do that we can then finally say we have control of this border. And if we enforce there, if we end birthright citizenship, and if we enforce employer sanctions, those three things will solve this issue.

And I would ask the President commit to enforcing our immigration laws, commit to controlling the border, spend the next years of your administration establishing that. And when that is done, while the next President is campaigning for the 2008 election to be sworn into office here in 2009, that campaign can be about whether or not we need guest workers in this country and how many we might need and of what skills they might come from.

But we cannot build a guest worker plan on a false foundation, a foundation of the promise of enforcement. And the only way we can ever know that we have enforcement is to actually enforce, prove it can be done. If we prove it can be done, then we will have something solid to build this guest worker plan on. But without that, we are building a guest worker plan on hypotheticals. The hypothetical will be that we will enforce the law. That has not happened. It has diminished over the last 20 years. An employer under Bill Clinton was 19 times more likely to be sanctioned for hiring illegals than under our current President. And so I am asking, let's enforce the law. Let's demonstrate that we can do it. Let's put fixtures on the border, because this $1.3 million per mile is a one-time investment that will free up other people.

As I asked in the testimony down in Laredo of the sector chief for the Border Patrol there, I said, if you have a wall like this, does it take more or less border patrol officers to protect that border? And his answer, even though it isn't the administration's position to support this, was it takes less border patrol officers to enforce this wall.

So, Madam Speaker, that is my encouragement for the President. That is my encouragement for our Commander in Chief. That is my encouragement for the American people. Stand up and support our military in the Middle East and defend this country, and we will continue to be a great Nation.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, especially I want to thank Chairman Sensenbrenner for the hard work that they have done to put together the framework for the reauthorization for the Voting Rights Act. And also I want to thank the sponsors of my amendment, Mr. Istook, Mrs. Miller from Michigan, Ms. Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida, Mr. Spencer Bachus from Alabama, for joining me in this and many others who have worked hard throughout the last 4, 5, and perhaps even 6 weeks to get us to this point where we can have a debate on this amendment and end up having a vote on how to improve the Voting Rights Act.

I think it is important from a symbolic standpoint to be able to improve and vote on the Voting Rights Act. We are able to do that because also of the indulgence and the patience and the good years that come from all the leadership in this Congress, and I appreciate that a great deal.

What my amendment does is it recognizes that the Voting Rights Act was established in 1965. 1975, not as an original part of the act itself but as I would say a decade-old afterthought, came this imposition of foreign language ballots in 1975, and that came in as a temporary measure. Now, today, it is not so temporary from 1975 until 2006, but it is set up to sunset August 6, 2007.

So what my amendment does, Mr. Chairman, is it would lift the Federal mandate imposing foreign language ballots on localities by allowing the amendment to sunset, and the mandate is due to expire in 2007.

It is that simple. And the reason is this, that it is consistent with federalism. The Federal Government doesn't need to be imposing foreign language ballots on any locality anywhere in this country. They can make those decisions locally.

Anyone who is a citizen of the United States that is a naturalized citizen has had to demonstrate their proficiency in both the spoken and the written English language, so they have no claim to a foreign language ballot if they are a naturalized citizen. So, therefore, there isn't a need for foreign language ballots unless someone is here by birthright citizenship and hasn't had enough access to English to be able to understand a simple ballot. But in those circumstances we protect those people by allowing a right to assistance. They can bring an interpreter of their choice into the voting booth with them to do that interpretation.

So all my amendment does, the King-Istook-and others amendment, it lifts the mandates and allows the local electoral districts to retain their local control and their right to print in the languages they choose; and there are plenty of examples across the country that do that.

Some of the things that are objectionable about this would be, for example, the determination of how a district is imposed by the Federal Government on foreign language ballots, and one of those things is surname analysis, Mr. Chairman. So we have a computer program that sorts the last names of people. If it kicks out that a certain percentage of them have a Spanish last name or a Chinese last name, then there will be foreign language ballots that go to those districts, whether everyone there maybe came here with Cortez. That is how bad it has gotten. It has been abused.

And we protect the rights for localities. So it is a reasonable and general amendment that lifts the Federal mandate for foreign language ballots and lets local governments to do what they choose

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. Chairman, I would inquire as to how much time I have left.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds.

I wonder if I might have been stereotyped here. I didn't hear anything about immigration on this side. I didn't hear anything come out of Mr. Gingrey about immigration. We are

talking about the Voting Rights Act, and I think that is what this debate will be about on this side, the Voting Rights Act.

But I would point out that there is a reason why natural-born citizens utilize this more than anyone else, and that is because one of the criteria that is used to measure is the question on the census that says, Do you speak English: not at all, not well, well, or very well? And if you answer well, you still are put into the limited-language- proficient category.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Mrs. Miller).

I thank the former secretary of state of Michigan, and I now yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Campbell).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth).

I would be happy to engage in a colloquy with the gentleman from Arizona.

No, this amendment does not impose restrictions on printing ballots in languages other than English.

The answer is ``no,'' this amendment does not change the Federal law that allows voters to bring their own interpreter.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for the highest compliment anyone has ever received on the floor of this Congress, and express the same of my friend, Mr. Pence.

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire of the Chair how much time I have left?

Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ginny Brown-Waite), also a cosponsor of this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the next governor of the State of Oklahoma, and a cosponsor of this amendment, Mr. Istook.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns) who has worked very hard on this issue.

(Mr. STEARNS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the cosponsor of this amendment and a member of the Judiciary Committee, the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Bachus).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Gary G. Miller).

Mr. Chairman, I will take the opportunity to close with that minute and a half.

I would speak, first of all, to Mr. Pence's statement that now is not the time. Now is actually the only time in a half a century where this Congress has the opportunity to have a voice on the reauthorization of this. It was reauthorized in 1982, until 2032 if the language prevails. It is in the bill. We have to do it now.

Citizens are required to demonstrate proficiency, in both spoken and written word, of the English language. They don't have a claim. Naturalized citizens do not have a claim to foreign language ballots. American-born citizens do have, and they can make that claim locally, like they do in places like Wisconsin, where the electoral board of Wisconsin just determined that they would be printing ballots in the languages both of Hmong and Spanish. So they have demonstrated how local control actually works, Mr. Chairman.

And then the waste is demonstrated in places like California where a small precinct, 650 people, 33 separate ballots for 650 people in languages English, Spanish, Chinese, at a cost of $100,000 for that county alone. Three hundred counties are covered by this. We don't need to be imposing this upon the American people.

The heavy hand of the Federal Government can be lifted off. People will still be voting in the languages of their choice because they will be controlled by the locale, consistent with the 10th amendment, States' rights, federalism, fiscal responsibility, and the philosophy of the majority of this Congress, the Republican Party and the view of the individual opportunity to vote. We will protect those rights.

But my amendment would lift the Federal mandate imposing foreign language ballots on localities by allowing the mandate to sunset. The mandate is due to sunset and expire in 2007. We let the wisdom of our forefathers take care of that.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Speaker, it is a privilege to have the opportunity to address you this evening and take up a number of issues that I believe are important to the American people.

As I come in here and listen to the tail end of the dialogue that takes place here on the floor, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt), my friend whom I serve with on the Committee on the Judiciary, for acknowledging that some of us will stand up and speak to the lack of enforcement on the part of this administration.

In fact, in our private conversation, I reiterated something that I put into the Record the night before last in that if you are an employer in the United States and you are knowingly and willfully hiring illegals, you were 19 times more likely to be sanctioned under Bill Clinton's administration than you are under the current administration. That is the level that this enforcement has drifted to. That is the issue that they speak to.

However, I would say on the other side of this argument, we have seen an acceleration of enforcement on the border. It is too little too late to satisfy me and many of my colleagues here in Congress. But the point missing from this dialogue is when amendments are offered on the floor; if they are serious about passing those amendments, it takes homework to get that done. You have to reach across to the other side of the aisle and identify some people to work with on the other side of the aisle and get those sponsors and cosponsors for those amendments so when it comes to the floor it is ready for passage.

A late-arriving amendment that is not designed to pass, but makes a statement has very little opportunity to actually make it into law, and some of those amendments are viewed that way by myself and many others. So I am looking forward to a bipartisan effort on this enforcement. It is one of the reasons that I have talked so long and relentlessly on many things that we need to do.

But I came tonight to talk about another issue, and that is an important

issue that is in front of us tomorrow. Tomorrow the House of Representatives will be taking up the legislation that is proposed to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.

Now, the Voting Rights Act was first written into law in 1965. It was an essential piece of legislation in 1965. We were in the middle of the civil rights demonstrations that were taking place. Those of us who lived through that time, and I can say during that period of time it was a very impressionable point in my life. If my math is correct, I was a sophomore in high school. The television was full of mostly peaceful marches and peaceful demonstrations.

It was an issue that those of us who lived in the Midwest were pretty much protected from that and didn't see the necessity for those kinds of demonstrations right away, but the demonstrations on television, and it was important that television did carry that message at the time, that educated the American people.

I look back on that time, that time in history, when we saw mostly peaceful marches. We saw fire hoses and dogs, yes, and there was violence and there were people that died in the process. But for the size nation that we are, for as large a problem that we had, and the problem we had was the institutionalization of racial segregation primarily in the South. And there were millions of Americans who were citizens in good standing that were shut out of the polls and shut out of many of the other avenues of what we consider normal life today.

It is hard for the generations that are sophomores in high school today to understand what it was like in those years back in the middle 1960s and in many of the years before them.

The circumstances of the segregation in the South and the discrimination that was there, the poll taxes, the literacy tests, many of the Jim Crow laws that were put in place to keep African Americans from going to the polls and being able to vote and help select our national leaders and their Members of Congress and their State leaders, and participate fully in the life of freedom that had been earned by the blood of hundreds of thousands a century earlier; and it took a century to get the Voting Rights Act in place after the end of the Civil War. That is how big this issue was back in 1965.

This sore festered for a century. In a century, this Nation couldn't find a way to come to grips with the issue of discrimination in the South. For me, it is hard for me to have that reference point except for what I saw on television and read in the newspaper, and what my teachers and classmates and family had to say.

Some of that, I have to admit, is a little vague in my memory. But I can say there was an incident that framed it for me. That was some years ago my wife and I needed to go down to New Orleans for a conference down there. We decided that we would drive down on the east side of the Mississippi River and come back on the west side of the Mississippi River. I like to see what is in this country. So when we do those trips, we weave back and forth and take side trips.

As we went down, we stopped also at Vicksburg to see the battlegrounds of the great Civil War battles that took place in Vicksburg, Mississippi. That was an experience, to stand on that hallowed ground and understand the battle that took place there and the price that was paid to move forward more on liberating and freeing the people that were enslaved the hundreds of years before that.

But the thing that impressed me the most was the stop that we made in Port Gibson, Mississippi. Port Gibson, Mississippi, was a location where a priest that had grown up in our hometown, Father Tony Pudenz. Father Pudenz had been the pastor in St. Joseph's Church, I believe it is St. Joseph's, in Port Gibson, Mississippi. That was his favorite parish. That was the place he wanted to retire. In fact, he was on the edge of retirement at that moment.

But as we went through Port Gibson, I knew he had lived there. He had grown up in our hometown, and he was about 75 years old. So we drove through the town and I looked for the church and rectory. When I found the rectory, we pulled in and I knocked on the door. Father Tony Pudenz came to the door, actually astonished that someone from Iowa would drop in on him unannounced with a surprise, to the rectory at St. Joseph's Parish in Port Gibson, Mississippi.

Well, that visit turned out to be one that framed this for me because he took us over to the church which was just a few steps across the yard. He said, I want to show you my church. He pointed out that the church was built in 1848, and it was built originally with $10,000 that was contributed to the parish by the family of Jim Bowie.

Jim Bowie was killed at the Alamo more than a decade earlier, but the family had significant presence in Mississippi and somehow they had enough money to make that kind of contribution to that parish in 1848. In fact, a lot of woodwork in that church, as I understand the way it was told to me by Father Tony Pudenz, was carved by the Bowie family.

As I looked at that woodwork, I thought about how that tied back to the history of the United States and to the history of Texas, and how it anchored back to a time before the Civil War.

As we stood in that church, and the glass in that church is all blue tint so it is like standing inside of an iceberg. It is like the sun would shine through if you were standing with ice windows rather than these blue-tint windows, and it gives almost a surreal sense with the woodwork done by the Bowie family and that sense of standing inside an iceberg or standing inside an igloo, perhaps, that was done with fairly clear ice.

As we stood there, he pointed up to the balcony. And the balcony, very similar to the balcony that the press sits in here in the United States Congress, and he said this church was built by these families and the floor of the church was for the white families and the balcony was for the black families.

And I looked at that. To stand there in that place and understand that in a house of God they would construct a house of God to be segregated for one color of people to go up to the balcony and for another color of people to be seated downstairs, and for their minds, never the twain shall meet; even though they go to church together, they would be separate. And I will say certainly equal in the eyes of God, but not equal in the eyes of fellow Christians going to church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, probably some time well prior to 1848, but the church was built beginning in the year 1848.

As we stood there in the aisle on the floor of that church, he said that last week, the previous week, they had buried the editor for the newspaper in Port Gibson. This editor of the newspaper was the individual who, in 1967, had, with the segregation still in the church, went in and sat down with his family, several children, sat down in a floor pew, and sat there with his family. And a moment before mass began, he got up, took his family and hand in hand they went to the back of the church and went up the steps in the back of the church and sat down in the balcony with the African Americans that were there to go to mass.

No longer was that church segregated because the editor of that paper had the courage and principle to take his family up to the balcony to sit with the black families and worship with them together.

When that happened, part of the people, some of the families, got up and walked out of the Catholic Church and walked across the street to the Episcopalian Church where those families and their descendants worship to this very day.

At that time, that little parish of St. Joseph was, I think he said, about 75 families, maybe it was 90 families, and a mix of three- quarters white, one-quarter black, but they go to mass together seated together as part of God's family like they really are. That is what it was like in 1967. That is what it was like in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed.

It is no longer like that in the South today. That is something, an experience for me that frames a lot of this issue, and an understanding of what went on.

It was important to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It was important to enfranchise every one of the adults that are all viewed to be the same as God's children. And we are God's children, all of us.

We need to guarantee those voting rights to everyone. The Voting Rights

Act was a quantum leap to do that. The discrimination statistics that were there, the statistics that were gathered up beginning in 1964, and the measurement of those statistics in 1968, and then in 1972 showed that there were lower percentages of blacks voting than whites voting. And there were lower percentages of blacks that were registered to vote than there were whites registered to vote, and something needed to be changed.

And so those criteria and other criteria were established and the Department of Justice was charged with the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act to guarantee a path to the polls for every legitimate voter in America, and no longer would there be Jim Crow laws, and no longer would there be people who didn't have an opportunity to voice their opinion in the polls and choose their local and national leaders.

The Voting Rights Act has been an extraordinarily successful act. It was designed to be temporary. No one believed in 1965 that we couldn't cure this problem and at some point we could make enough changes that we could move away from the need for those requirements. They were strict. They are tough.

The voting districts that are still under that today are locked in in statistics that are measured from 1964, 1968 and 1972. We are not using 2004 data to evaluate whether Georgia still should be a covered district. We are using 1964, 1968 and 1972 data; not 2004, not 2000, not 1996 data.

So those districts that have been declared to be racist, bigoted districts that demonstrated that by the statistics that are there, the measurement criteria, are stuck in time.

If we pass this legislation tomorrow with the Voting Rights Act, and we use those 1964, 1968 and 1972 statistics to measure States like Georgia, Texas and the locales within 16 States across this country, they are locked in. They are locked in and can't move a voting booth from the Catholic Church to the Episcopalian Church across the street, or from the post office to the school. They can't move a voting booth 10 feet without prior authorization by the Department of Justice.

That will be the case fixed in time from 1965 until 2032. By 2032, that is almost four generations. Four generations could come and go, and we are using the same measurement of people in 2032, if we pass this legislation as presented to this Congress.

Thomas Jefferson declared a generation to be 19 years. That is not too bad a measure. We know generations turn over a little faster or slower than that. But truthfully, 19 years, multiply it out, it is almost four generations between 1965 and 2032. But it will be true, there won't be anyone voting in 2032 who remembers what it was like in 1965 when they passed the Voting Rights Act. That would be a simple fact.

And if you want something to be institutionalized in perpetuity in legislation in America, then you reauthorize that for a quarter of a century or a half a century. By the time that comes up, no one remembers what the debate was. No one is vested in any other alternative. They just think, huh, that is the way it was then, that is the way it always has been, why would we want to change something after all these years? It seems to have worked pretty well and they got so used to it they can't conceive of not having it in place.

So I submit that we need to take a look at shortening up the reauthorization so that we can do a better look at the effects of any changes in this reauthorization for the Voting Rights Act. And I submit that districts that are covered, districts today need to have an opportunity to work their way out of that that is not as stringent as the very, very tight district requirements that are in it today so that they can work their way out. And to measure someone by 1964 standards in 2032 is just utterly wrong. Back in 1964, to think that the great- grandchildren of the people that made that decision will be voting in 2032, and they are responsible? How can we hold them responsible for decisions that were part of the culture in 1965?

So we have come a long way, America, and we will never eradicate racism in this country totally. There will always be some elements of it because there will always be the levels of prejudice, and they might not always be something that can be defined as racism. It might just be prejudice that comes from other reasons because there will always be competing forces in this society. But the evidence of it has diminished significantly and dramatically. And I would like to give the people in Georgia and Texas and these other States an opportunity to move out of that list. And I would like to, if it is good enough for Georgia and Texas, it ought to be good enough for the rest of us. That would be the standard that I would go by and then shorten this reauthorization time.

There is another aspect of this that is an essential piece, and that is the Federal mandate for foreign language ballots, and that is a piece that we will be debating here on the floor tomorrow.

The Federal Government, the Congress, in I will say an unexpected move in 1975, put into place temporary measures to require a Federal mandate for foreign language ballots. Now, I don't remember that there were people in America clamoring for the foreign language ballots in 1975. It may have been the case, but it was designed to be a temporary measure. They thought the need for it would diminish as assimilation increased.

What we have seen since 1975 is partly because we are the enablers there has been less assimilation instead of more assimilation. The direction for more languages in America has increased towards more and more languages in America instead of less, and we still have in place this mandate for foreign language ballots.

The reason that I am opposed to requiring them at the Federal level is because if you are a naturalized citizen here in United States, by law you will have had to demonstrate your proficiency in both the spoken and written word of the English language. That is the standard that is required before you can be a naturalized citizen. And so if you are a naturalized citizen in America, you have no claim to a foreign language ballot because the certification of your citizenship says you are certified to vote in English. That is one of the important responsibilities of citizenship. And if the standard wasn't high enough that you can read a ballot, we need to raise the standard, not lower the standard and hand you a ballot in a language where there may be errors in because we don't have enough interpreters to interpret into other foreign languages.

I simply want to lift the mandate. I want to allow localities to make the decision on whether they need to provide foreign language ballots, not the Federal Government. I don't want to be printing millions of ballots that aren't used. I don't want to get any more letters like this letter that I have here in front of where the gentleman who wrote it said, in all five elections where I have served as a judge, no foreign language ballots were requested in my precinct. Yet in the last election in that precinct they printed 33 different kinds of ballots, not because there were 33 different languages but because there were 11 different parties and three different languages that were required.

This is a subject that is easy to understand. It is relatively simple. But it's important and it's essential because if we send the message out of this Congress that we are going to chase you down and hand you a foreign language ballot, whether you want it or not, then we are also sending a message that we really aren't serious about assimilation.

And if we are going to be bringing into America 10 million or 60 million or 90 million new Americans in the next generation, 19 years generation, if we are going to do that, we have got to be invested in assimilation.

No nation in the world has ever assimilated the numbers of people or the percentage of the population that we have here in this country. But there is a limit to what we can do. And if we send the message that says we are not serious about assimilation, we are going to be enablers for people to live in ethnic enclaves. And if we do that we are ensuring that they will not be able to access the American dream.

That is the wrong message to send. We have to lift the mandate. And if it is necessary to have foreign language ballots at the localities, then they can make that decision locally. They are paying for it anyway.

And so, Madam Speaker, that is the basis and the core of my argument. But there is a gentleman here from New Jersey who is articulate on this subject matter, someone whom I look forward to hearing from, and I would be very happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for his contribution to this discussion and this debate here this evening. And, also, I thank him for his dogged determination on a number of sound causes that he and I have worked together on.

And sometimes I just simply admire the work that Mr. Garrett does. And I am not always over there to lend a hand, but I want him to know that, if needed, I am willing to on any subject that I can think of that Mr. Garrett has brought forward. And I appreciate the leadership and support that has been there on this cause.

It has not been an easy task. I had not thought about it as dogged determination; I had simply thought about it as a cause and a principle that needed to be established. Simple common sense if you are going to have a Nation that promotes assimilation and one of the standards of that promotion of assimilation is a Federal law that defines the standards by which people that come to this country are naturalized, conditions they must meet before they can get a hold of that brass ring called citizenship.

And, Mr. Speaker, citizenship needs to be precious. It needs to have great value. If we are going to be a strong nation, we have got to look at this flag and feel that lump come into our chest when it comes down in the parade. We have got to have a sense of common history, a sense of unity, a sense of common cause. And if we market citizenship off cheaply and if we diminish those standards, then we are going to find that our values also are scattered and diluted and diminished.

But when we pull ourselves together with this and we promote the idea of assimilation, and that is that the language requirements for demonstration of English proficiency are in the Federal Code 4, it is to set that standard high enough that anyone who then is naturalized as an American citizen has a significant amount of English proficiency that will let them go out into the rest of the world and access this American Dream.

And we know that the lowest numbers that I can find are that those who speak English in the United States earn at least 17 percent more than those who do not speak English in the United States. Those who speak English well earn more than twice as much as someone who does not. So these issues are important.

Some of the standards that we used to require in our Federal mandate, the standards that we use that establish the determination that there will be foreign language ballots imposed into these districts, whether anyone actually asks for one or not, the issue that was brought up by Mr. Garrett that the standards of 5 percent or 10,000 people, whichever comes first, is the standard that would then require limited English proficiency groups, would require those ballots to go into a district. And, now, how do you measure who speaks English in a limited-English- proficient manner? And the manner that was brought up by Mr. Garrett, the surname analysis, can you imagine having a computer program, and in that program you run through it the last names of all of the voters that are registered in that voting district, and you have software set up that picks up things like the little apostrophe over the ``O'' in maybe an Hispanic name or the configuration of the vowels and the consonants when it comes in a certain way that indicates that it is a surname of a certain nationality.

So this surname analysis will do a measure of likely Hispanic last names, or I should say Spanish last names, or maybe likely Asian or Chinese last names. I do not know if it picks out the Irish or not, but I can go through the phone book and do that. So it kicks out these names. And if it kicks out 10,000 names that have a Spanish last name or 10,000 names that are Chinese last names, or 5 percent or more of that voting district that are Spanish, Chinese, Lithuanian, whatever the subject might be, then by Federal law there will be ballots printed in those languages at that locale, paid for by

the local election board or the county taxes or whoever is the one in each particular State that determines that, a Federal mandate, an unfunded mandate.

And I especially think it is ironic about Spanish surnames, because some of these people that have a Spanish surnames are descended from immigrants that came here in the 1500s. They have been here since about before the Mayflower, before Jamestown. They came up to the Southwest. They were Americans long before anybody else that I know of, and yet we would presume by their last name alone the prejudicial preconception that we have to send them Spanish language ballots.

It is a lousy measure. It has never been a good measure. It is actually, I believe, a prejudiced measure, to be so prejudiced that because of your name, they can determine whether you can speak English. That should be anathema to all of in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, and I hope that we fix that tomorrow.

But another measure that is equally as ridiculous is the census, another way that we determine whether people can speak English well enough to qualify for all-English ballots or whether we have to give them a ballot in another language and impose that upon them whether they want it or not.

So the United States Census puts out this questionnaire, and presumably there is someone sitting down interpreting the questionnaire. I do not think it just gets mailed out in other languages. But they ask the question, How well do you speak English? A, not at all; B, not well, do not speak English well; C, speak English well; or, D, speak English very well.

Now, if you say that you don't speak English at all or not well or even if you say that you speak English well, all three of those categories, A, B, and C, are all measured as limited-English- proficiency speaking. Even if you say you speak English well, you have to say that you speak English very well in order to not be qualified as having limited English proficiency that would trigger the foreign language ballots.

So I think there have to be English professors, high school literature teachers, probably politicians as well, who make their living with this language, who will read that and think ``I have never reached the standard that I thought I ought to; so I do not want to be so proud that I put down I speak it very well. I think I will just put down I speak it well. And, inadvertently, they will be putting themselves in a category that will be calling for a foreign language ballot.

And with the Chinese language, how many dialects are there, 300 and some dialects? At least it used to be. But which version of Chinese is it? Is it Mandarin? Is it Cantonese? Is it any other version there?

There is really no way we can administer this effectively with an equal protection perspective as long as it is a Federal mandate. And it is a Federal mandate. It is a federally unfunded mandate that imposes foreign language ballots on voting districts whether anyone wants them or not and whether anyone calls for them or not. In fact, I do not know that there are records kept on these ballots and how many are actually used. If there were, I would like to have seen those records.

But to give you an example, Mr. Speaker, this letter came, and it is dated June 24, so it is fairly fresh. And I just happened to be going through my mail a couple of days ago; and I get a packet of it, and I read through it, and try to be tuned in to what the American citizens have to say about the work that we are doing here.

And this gentleman has freed me up to speak about this openly and publicly and into the Record. But I think for the sake of avoiding the kind of things that might come, I will just read it to you and represent it without identifying him individually. But this is an individual who is a judge in a voting district out in California. He has a Ph.D., and he is an educator, a professor. He has a good handle on the English language.

But it says in his letter: ``Dear Congressman King, let me express my support for your efforts to let the multilingual ballot provision of the Voting Rights Act fade into the sunset. For several years I have served as an election judge in a polling place in my hometown,'' which is in California. ``My precinct over the years has around 650 registered voters. In the June, 2006, primary, we had 11 parties on the ballot.'' That would be political parties. ``We had available 33 separate ballots because members of each of the 11 parties had ballots available to them in three languages--English, Spanish, and Chinese. In the primary, general, and special elections over the past years in which I have served, no voter has ever requested a ballot in a language other than English.'' I will repeat that. ``No voter has ever requested a ballot in a language other than English.

``Putting aside the question of the appropriateness of ballots in languages other than English, I would simply point out the large cost to the county in complying with the Voting Rights Act. The waste of public money is significant. As a Republican, I would be truly disappointed if a Republican majority in the House and the Senate cannot repeal at least the multiple language provisions in the Voting Rights Act.

``Very truly yours . . . '' A copy sent to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee as well.

So we made contact with this gentleman. And in there again he reiterated that in all five elections where he has served as a judge, no foreign language ballots were ever requested in his precinct even though they had 33 different versions in this last primary election. Thirty-three, not one other than English was called for. And it cost his county, and I believe this to be a low-population county, $100,000 approximately per election to print foreign language ballot materials and to administer and to translate.

So $100,000 does not sound like a lot to a Member of Congress when we deal with billions and, in fact, trillions of dollars, but it adds up over this country. We have thousands of counties in America. And of those that are compelled to print these foreign language ballots, the dollars contribute.

And it isn't just the cost of it. It isn't just the burden of the administration. But it is the risk of the mistakes that come when we translate into foreign languages.

We have to have a standard. We have to have an official ballot. And when you start translating into foreign languages, you lose the sense and the meaning. And there are languages out there that their voice inflection determines the meaning and its context determines the meaning, so it becomes a judgment call on how it is interpreted.

And, again, we do not interfere with the right of the localities to print foreign language ballots if they so choose. What we do is just remove the unfunded Federal mandate that requires foreign language ballots and we let the localities make the determination on how they are going to provide ballots that can be read and utilized by the people that are there in the fashion that they see fit. There is nothing that prevents them from doing that. In fact, there is nothing that prevents them from doing that today, Mr. Speaker.

In fact, I have here a copy of yesterday's USA Today.

It lays out circumstances in the State of Wisconsin. The headline in this story is, ``Lawmaker critical of Wisconsin translations.'' We are going to disagree about these things across the country. It is part of our system, but the story reads like this.

``The Wisconsin State election board began translating voter registration forms and absentee ballot applications into Spanish and Hmong this year, a move that one State lawmaker says could swing an election.

`` `This is for people who function on a day-to-day basis in languages other than English but want to acclimate to Wisconsin and to participate in the democratic process,' Elections Board spokesman Kyle Richmond says.

``Translating the voting materials was not required under the Voting Rights Act because Hmong- and Spanish-speaking residents make up fewer than 5 percent of the State's eligible voters.''

Mr. Speaker, we do not address that issue. We leave that intact. If States want to determine they are going to print foreign language ballots, they will print them.

We also protect and preserve the Federal statute that exists that allows an

individual to bring a translator into the voting booth with them. So, if ballots can be printed in foreign languages because of the local government, if we protect the tenth amendment, the States rights issue, and let them determine their election process, and if we lift the foreign language ballot, the Federal mandate, the unfunded mandate for foreign language ballots, then we have got the principles of the tenth amendment there, the States rights issue. We have got that and we support that. We support the Federalism issue that government is better off if it is devolved to the States and remains in the States rather than bring the power here to Washington, D.C. It is time to get it back to the States where they belong.

I would submit another issue that seems to be a bit of a curiosity to me, Mr. Speaker, and that is the issue of what will be the case when we get to that point where there are voting districts where no one in that district speaks English. Is it presumed by law that one would have to then qualify under this Federal mandate to get an English language ballot, even if no one wanted one in that district?

Well, it seems a little hard to conceive of this today, but it is far easier to conceive of this today than it was easy to conceive of this in 1965 when this was not part of the law, but in 1975, when it was put into the law and they believed that it would be temporary then, those who voted for this provision, this unfunded Federal mandate for foreign language ballots are the people who, if they are watching us today, if they are on this planet or looking down on us from above, would be astonished that we would still have this in place. They would be astonished that we have this difficult of a debate going on about whether we can simply let the sunset take place, let these provision requirements expire and allow States rights to take place and allow localities to make these decisions.

This is just an interesting subject that we will take up tomorrow, Mr. Speaker. We will debate this significantly and intensively, and I am hopeful that the wisdom of this Chamber will be reflected in a positive vote on the floor here in the United States House of Representatives.

I am quite appreciative of all the effort that has gone into this. This has been a spontaneous effort, not an orchestrated effort but a spontaneous effort, and sometimes when you stand up and take a stand it reflects through the hearts and the philosophies of those of us who are charged with representing the wishes of the people in all of America.

I know that when this bill, the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act until 2032 came to the Judiciary Committee and I offered a couple of amendments then to try to improve it, the climate in the committee at that time was not very conducive to amendments being adopted. Yet, I made the argument, offered the amendments, and there were nine that voted with me on the amendment that would have eliminated this Federal mandate for foreign language ballots. That was a significant amount on the amendment.

But on final passage, then I found myself as the sole voice that voted ``no'' on the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in the Judiciary Committee, 33-1 was the vote, and I have often said when I found myself the lone vote, dissenting from everyone else, I use a defense, it is a little ditty that I simply memorized, and it talks about the people's judgment, people's judgment being a democratic vote, a majority vote that rules here in this House, as it should, and it goes like this: Nor is the people's judgment always true, but most can err as grossly as the few.

In this case, I do not want to point out the people that disagreed with me on this issue as necessarily erring, but I want to point out the necessity to stand on principle and how a single vote can make a big difference, and with that 33-1 vote, had I not put that vote up, it would have been unanimous coming out of the Judiciary Committee. Had it been unanimous, it would have been very difficult for anyone to make an argument we should reconsider the cover districts arguments from Georgia, Texas and other covered districts that have been led so well by Lynn Westmoreland and Charlie Norwood.

That team has been strong and powerful, and they have been dogged in their determination, and they have been relentless, and they believe powerfully in their cause. I support the spirit of their efforts, but that would have, I believe, have fallen on deaf ears if it had been a unanimous vote out of the Judiciary Committee, but one ``no'' vote gave them a small beachhead to go to work on and their beachhead gave a beachhead for the rest of us to head our positions together here and our need to allow the sunset of the foreign language ballot mandate to take place.

I reflect back upon the moment when I gave a Memorial Day speech in Denison, Iowa, and as I finished my speech and as the ceremonies concluded, the mayor came up with his little baby in his arms, and I suppose he was 6-weeks-old at the time. So I took a look, good look at that healthy, little boy, and I said to the mayor what is his name. Well, his name is John Quincy. I said John Quincy. John Quincy said always vote for principle, though you may vote alone. You can take the sweetest satisfaction in knowing that your vote is never lost. He looked at me and he smiled and he held that little boy, and he said that is why I named him John Quincy. He will be a man of principle.

That always matters to vote your principle, though you may vote alone, but your vote is never lost. There are stories after stories on how important it is how one vote can make a significant difference in America.

This may be one of those times. I am hopeful it will be one of these times, Mr. Speaker, but I believe strongly that there is not a necessity out there for the Federal Government to mandate foreign language ballots. I believe strongly that we need to send a message that we are a Nation that welcomes legal immigrants with open arms, we encourage them to come into this fold.

I go and speak at the naturalization services whenever I have the opportunity. They are some of the most moving experiences that I have. When I look people in the eye and I can see that mist, that moistness in their eyes, that sense that that event in their lifetime ranks right up there with the wedding day or the day that their first-born child might be born with important moments in their lives, and there are many of them that will say that is the most important moment in their lives.

So I have had the opportunity at those naturalization services to remark about how important it is, from my perspective, and how I am moved by the stories that came through my family about my ancestors who came here, and I sign and autograph a Constitution for each one of the newly naturalized citizens I have had the privilege to speak to at a ceremony and pass them out and congratulate them and ask them to keep that Constitution close to them, close to their heart like mine is close to my heart, read it, study it, understand it, linking it to this history, becoming part of this shared experience that we have, reach out and reach towards this American dream, this American dream that really is to leave this world a better place than it was when we came, to lay the groundwork so our children can have a better opportunity than we have had.

We think it gets harder every generation, but it is hard every generation, and our parents gave us more opportunity than they had. So it goes, back through the generations, and so it needs to go on through the succeeding generations in the same fashion.

If America is going to be this glorious Nation that we have become, if we are going to take ourselves to the next level of our destiny, we always have to reach out and ask to challenge people to follow through in this American dream, to make America a better place.

So we can do that by promoting this great unifying idea of a common language. It is the most powerful unifying force known throughout history for all humanity. It is true for all languages. It just happens to be that we are fortunate in this country that our language is the English language, the language of business for the world, the language of the maritime industry for the world, the language of air traffic controllers and all air traffic communications in the world and this language that has been the companion to freedom everywhere throughout the world.

As I read the book written by Winston Churchill called, the History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and I followed through on that history, as each tracks the English-speaking peoples around the globe and a part of its conquest and trade and colonization, but the English people never doubted and never lacked for faith in their civilization, in their culture, in their destiny, in their duty, and they promoted those values around the globe. As they did so, wherever they went, they left the English language, and wherever the Americans have gone, we have left the English language. If you go places today, and follow the English language wherever the English language is, you will find freedom, also.

Freedom's been a companion to the English language wherever it has gone around the globe. We should be very grateful we are descended from English common law that respects these values that we have. We have taken up that cause, and we have advanced it beyond this constitutional republic that we have that is rooted in this responsibility to be an informed citizen and active citizen and informed voter. Part of that responsibility is to get informed within this English language so you can understand this culture of America.

It is very difficult to understand the decisions that have been made if you are not able to access the common newspapers that are there, not able to get on the Internet and not able perhaps to carry on in conversations around your entire regular travels that you have. It is very difficult. It is not impossible, but if we allow the localities to make the decisions on whether or not there are going to be foreign language ballots and what languages they might be in.

You can bet that those localities will be looking at these like this county in California, this particular voting district in California with the 650 registered voters, and they would say, well, we printed the last five elections in 33 different ballots and three different languages and no one in all that time has asked for a foreign language ballot; you suppose maybe this time we ought to cut those numbers down and maybe eliminate it all together and just put English language ballots out there like we did in the past? I think the answer is, yes, let us stop that waste; let us stop being bigoted in saying everyone cannot understand a language because of their last name.

Then perhaps there will be others like Wisconsin in this other USA Today article that is here, Mr. Speaker, where they decide at the locality, we want to spend the money, we want to take that responsibility, we want to reach out to the Hmong- and the Spanish- speaking people and give them a ballot in a language that they can understand and be comfortable with.

Now, I would question why it would be that they could be American citizens in Wisconsin and not speak the English language well enough to vote. I would question that, but that is a debate for Wisconsin, not a debate for this Congress.

So I submit, Mr. Speaker, that tomorrow we will make a decision. It will be a big decision. It will be a decision that will have long-term implications. Those long-term implications do not seem very big today as we talk about the simplicity of this argument. No one will be disenfranchised from being able to vote. I ask them to become informed voters, and that is a challenge out there to English speakers and to other speakers to become an informed voter.

But what is down the line is the message that we are sending to the newly arriving Americans that 10 or 20 or 60 or 90 million Americans that we might have within the next generation, that message that here is our language, learn this language. We will not be able to say that if the first thing we do is hand them a foreign language ballot. How do we ask them to assimilate if we are going to be enablers?

That is the question that is before us. That is the long-term implication of these questions that are before us, Mr. Speaker, and I am going to ask this body tomorrow to make a long-term, wise decision, save millions of taxpayer dollars, take the oppressive thumb off the back of localities, let them make the decisions themselves, let them reach out to people and take care of them in that fashion, save the money, provide better, more efficient services, do the right thing, preserve the tenth amendment, preserve the idea of Federalism and move this Nation to the next level of its destiny so that we can be a Nation that welcomes all, with equal opportunity for all and prejudice against none and prejudice towards none.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, July 13, 2006, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the profound honor to address you in this Chamber. It is a privilege that has been experienced by only a small number of Americans throughout the years.

I come to the floor this afternoon and evening to address the issues that are important to us today. I intend to bring up the issues that have to do with our border control, border security and enforcement of our Nation's laws, and to talk about the facts behind them, the reasons that the American people clearly see this issue as a necessity for enforcement, and the reasons why establishing a guest worker/

temporary worker plan in the middle of an unknown set of circumstances with regard to enforcement simply has too many hypotheticals involved in it to be able to build a good logical plan.

And to make that case, I would state that there are times in one's life when we are called upon to make large decisions, decisions that have tremendous impact, decisions that reflect and echo across through the generations. It might be the generations of our family, it might be the generations of our neighborhood. In this case, we are talking about the generations of Americans for a long time to come.

There are two opposing competing forces in this immigration field today. One of them is this powerful force that is the heart and soul of the center of America, that we need to enforce the laws that we have. We need to control our borders. We can't be a Nation if we don't have a border, and we can't call ourselves a Nation if we don't enforce our border.

That is something that is a basic fundamental that the American people know. They may not sit down and articulate it every day. They may not actually intellectualize it. They may not go back and read all of these immigration laws that we have. They may not look back and see the responsibility we have constitutionally to establish immigration laws here in this Congress. They may not do all that. They might just have a subliminal sense that is what we should do because it is common sense; it makes sense. To some it is in their gut instead of their brain, but they can trust their gut because their instincts are right on this.

They understand we have to enforce the laws here in America; and if we don't do that, we won't be forever America. That is the position on the enforcement side. That is in one corner of this prize fight debate going on across America.

In the other corner are the people that say that they are for a policy for guest worker, temporary worker. They are for a policy of amnesty by any other name, but amnesty. They have been seeking for years now to redefine the term ``amnesty.'' You can look it up in the dictionary, but the definition I keep being told I should accept is the argument of what would not be amnesty. It would not be amnesty if someone came into this country, broke the law to come in here and broke the law to stay here, and they stayed here a long time, 5 years or more. Their roots went down. They made some money. They sent a lot back to their home country. They started a family. Maybe they bought some property. Maybe they are a valuable employee to an important business that is in the community. They sent their roots down.

Now, they are law breakers. Whether they overstayed their visa or whether they jumped the border illegally, they broke the law. So then the argument is it isn't amnesty if you just say to them we think you are a pretty good citizen, other than the fact that you broke the law. We would like to just give you amnesty, but in order to avoid this argument, because we know Americans reject the idea and the concept and the real definition of amnesty, we are going to redefine it. So if you just pay a fine of $1,500 or $2,000, or the Senate kind of ratcheted it up in some cases to as much as $3,200, if you just pay the fine, that takes care of your punishment.

So it is no longer going to be amnesty because you have paid a price for breaking the law. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that it is not necessarily so much as pay the price as that it puts these people on a path to citizenship.

The Senate language does that. The path to citizenship is an objective that is more than was asked for by the people who came here illegally. Many of them just wanted to work here and make money and send their money back home, or save money and go back to their home country and perhaps retire. But we are offering them the plum of citizenship for a price. And the price is maybe $1,500 or $2,000 or $3,000 or $3,200. But citizenship for a price.

And that price, I believe, is cheap; and I think it cheapens the citizenship. Citizenship should be sacred. It should be precious, and it is to those who are Americans by choice, who got in line, waited long years to come into the United States, came here, learned to speak English, learned to write English, learned about our history, learned about our culture, learned about our civilization and went through that process of naturalization and became Americans by choice, naturalized American citizens.

And I have had the privilege to speak at a number of those naturalization services in my district. And those are some very, very proud days for me, Mr. Speaker, but they are far more, as far as proud days are concerned, for the naturalized citizens. That is a highlight of their life. And in their lifetime, of the things that matter to them, the day of the citizenship ceremony stands out. It stands out and maybe stands with the day they get married perhaps, maybe the day of their first-born child, those kinds of milestones in life.

The naturalization service and ceremony is a milestone that stands with the very finest events in our lifetimes. And so those people that came here and became naturalized citizens, they don't want to see amnesty for people who jumped the border to get here or broke the laws to stay here. They know what amnesty is, and they don't want to see their citizenship cheapened by having it for sale, putting it up for a $1,500, $2,000 or $3,200 check.

What price citizenship for America? Priceless. But you have to demonstrate that you are going to respect the laws and live by the rule of law.

And so, some time back, I went to a groundbreaking ceremony for a, it was an $81 million expansion of a plant in my district. There was an individual there who was protesting me, and his signs said things such as, I am a former or a current illegal immigrant, and I believe that we ought to give amnesty to these people that are here illegally, and they should have a path to citizenship--different phrases to express what I have just said.

And so I find out afterwards that he is not shy about saying he is also a former illegal immigrant who was granted amnesty in the 1986 amnesty that was signed by Ronald Reagan.

So here is an individual who jumped the border, came here illegally, living presumably in the shadows. 1986 rolled around, and by the stroke of a pen over at the White House, he and more than 3 million others received amnesty. Now he is out protesting in the streets, declaring that 10 or 12 million or, more appropriately, 60 to 90 million people should have the same path to citizenship that he achieved by the stroke of a Presidential pen 20 years ago. And he is advocating that people break the law, jump the border, come here and make demands on American taxpayers and demands for a path to United States citizenship after they have shown contempt for the laws of the United States of America.

And their first act was to break the law of the United States of America. The very first moment they set foot on this soil across that border, they broke American law. And they march in the streets and demonstrate in the streets, with flags from other countries often, and argue that they are not criminals.

But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that if they cross the border illegally, they are guilty of a criminal misdemeanor. By definition, it is a criminal misdemeanor punishable by less than a year in jail. I think it is 6 months, actually. But that is a criminal misdemeanor. That makes them criminals if they are guilty of this crime.

It isn't the Congress that has passed a law in H.R. 4437 that makes them criminals. That would make them felons. And they are arguing that they are not criminals.

Yes, they are. They are criminals. They haven't been adjudicated to be criminals yet, but they admit to their criminal action. They just say, don't call me a criminal.

Well, respect our laws, please. And if you do that and you don't break our laws, then we won't call you a criminal. And, in fact, we wouldn't be moving legislation that would identify felons either by that standard, Mr. Speaker.

And so people who are granted amnesty, who have broken our laws, have contempt for the rest of our laws because they have profited from breaking our laws. And that is the wrong kind of reward. If we reward lawbreakers with citizenship, what are you going to get? More lawbreakers.

The same Ronald Reagan that only let me down about twice in 8 years in

office, and I have mentioned one of those times. That same Ronald Reagan said, what you tax you get less of. What you subsidize you get more of. And you know if you subsidize law-breaking you are going to get more law-breaking, Mr. Speaker, not less. You aren't going to be able to draw a line in the sand and say now we are not going to tolerate any more law-breaking.

There is no will in this country right now within the administration to enforce the laws we have. And the White House is working against the laws that we are trying to pass asking for more enforcement. And they are working with McCain, Kennedy, Hagel and Martinez over in the Senate, working on their version of amnesty, saying we are for this. We are opposed to amnesty, but we think we ought to be giving people a path to citizenship who broke the laws to come here. They just should have to do this rigorous process of moving towards American citizenship and finding this path to citizenship, and it includes learning English and keeping a job and paying some of your taxes.

That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Paying some of your taxes should give you a path to citizenship, not all of your taxes, some of your taxes, 3 out of the last 5 years. You pick the 3 years to pay the taxes in.

Well, I would like to be able to do that. I had a couple of good years out of the last 5. I would like to take those out and say, send me my money back, Uncle Sam. That was a little tough on me. And I want to do this. If we are going to give this to people who broke the laws to come here and who aren't paying any taxes, to offer them, you pick the lowest 3 out of the last 5 years and pay your taxes, and we will give you this plum of citizenship, I think we are going to have millions and millions of people who don't pay any income tax at all.

In fact, we have that today. So this function of just pay your taxes 3 out of the last 5 years, it will be okay. That is not amnesty. I am saying that, itself, is amnesty to not require them to pay those taxes.

Another argument that is in the Senate bill is, well, they have been here working, they have been paying Social Security taxes, so surely you will want to grant them credit for the money that they earned so that they can collect their Social Security and put pressure on that system when they reach that retirement level.

Mr. Speaker, they earned the money illegally. If they weren't here working here legally, their earnings are not legal either. And to reward them with a retirement fund when our Social Security is going to go bankrupt if we don't overhaul that Social Security, and on that case, the President has been right all along, the need of a personal retirement accounts, need to overhaul Social Security, put more pressure on it because the Senate somehow believes it is not fair.

It isn't just if we don't grant people that have been working here against the law the benefits that come with that in the form of retirement and SSI. Their families are going to benefit from this as well, the death benefit that goes along with it, the disability benefit that comes along with it, because they have been earning money under a false Social Security number. And somehow we are going to ratify and certify and give people a benefit for having broken the laws of the United States of America. That is wrong, Mr. Speaker.

And so, Social Security is one piece of this. And putting citizenship up for sale is another piece. And how do you determine the value of that citizenship? Do you grant that by what is a coyote charging today? Is it $1,500, $2,000, $3,200 in order to get passage into the United States illegally? Whatever that price is, it seems to be indexed pretty closely to the price that citizenship is for sale over in the United States Senate. That is how I would describe what is going on here: citizenship for sale in the United States Senate, running contrary to the rule of law, undermining American values, weakening our entire culture and building, not shutting off the jobs magnet, but turning on the current to the jobs magnet with even more amperage, Mr. Speaker.

Because once this carrot of citizenship, this path towards amnesty that would be granted under the Senate language happens, there will be untold millions more come across the border that want to come here and take advantage of the amnesty that has been offered, or if they aren't able to get on that particular bandwagon, then they will want to take advantage of the next inevitable amnesty that will come along.

There have been seven amnesties in the last 20 years. We talk about the 1986 amnesty; there have been six others. Smaller, lesser, they came about because we missed some people in 1986, so we had to pass a few more amnesties to catch up and kind of clean up those people that are here in this country. And the promise in 1986 was, well, but this is the last time. This time we really mean it, in 1986; this time we are really going to enforce the law. This time we are going to make sure that we seal and control our border. This time we are going to be 100 percent confident that the Federal Government is going to do their job. 1986.

And, you know, there was some enforcement going on in 1986. And it didn't take very long before we had a new President and then another new President, and then in 1992 we got President Clinton. And I was appalled at the lax approach that President Clinton had in enforcing our immigration laws. That is when I started to pay attention because I saw that there were people that were being naturalized before the 1996 election, particularly in California, perhaps a million of them, who were hustled through the process and went to the polls and voted. And they knew their duty. Go to the polls and vote. Vote for the President. That is the way you say thank you for getting hustled through the citizenship process. That was appalling to me. A million people, many of them in California.

Those people, some of them have, for want of a better term, matriculated to Iowa in order to, and gone to work there, and that is how I hear these things, they come up there, a million people.

Today, a million people sounds like chump change, Mr. Speaker. A million people coming into the United States quickly under the Clinton administration. But, the facts are, employers during the Clinton administration were far more likely to be sanctioned and punished for hiring illegals than they are today. Under the Clinton administration, they were 19 times more likely to be sanctioned by the administration for hiring illegals than they are today. The risk was 19 times greater. That is how much enforcement has diminished over the last 20 years.

1986 to 2006 enforcement of immigration laws has gone down to the point where it is almost nonexistent. Border control has not been anything that alarmed anyone in this administration until they got an alarm that they weren't going to be able to get their guest worker plan passed, and then that alarm sent out the message that said, we are going to have to position ourselves so that America sees that we are going to enforce the laws. So we have got a few more Border Patrol agents. We have got a commitment to send the National Guard down there. We have got speeches that talk about a virtual fence. And I would say that a virtual fence is not going to keep out the forces that are pushing on that border.

Now, I could talk about this border to significant lengths. I have been there about four times in the last year. But I think that those trips down to the border are far less than those that have been made by my friend from Colorado. And my friend from Colorado has been on this issue, I believe, his entire congressional life.

I have been on it my entire public life and before. I grew up believing in the rule of law. It wasn't something that we conceived of sanctuary policies, or we didn't think that because we were a municipality or a county or a State that we didn't cooperate in enforcing Federal law. Law is law and we have to work together at all levels to enforce all laws.

And issue after issue has been brought to this floor and before the American people by my colleague from Colorado, and I would be very happy and honored to yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Tom Tancredo.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado.

It is important, I think, Mr. Speaker, that we are able to hear that direct message from the Colorado State legislature. That is an amazing thing beyond the conception of us, I think, here a year or two or three ago, let alone four or five or six when this issue first came up. And I would even go back to my recollection in 1996, when Pat Buchanan ran for the Presidency and he said, I will call hearings. I will make sure we have a national debate on immigration.

And that was what we lacked in 1996. That is what Mr. Tancredo has been working for for all of these years he has been in this Congress. We are at this point now where you cannot avoid a national debate on immigration. It is everywhere. It is in the coffee shop. It is at work. It is here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. It is in our churches. It is in our homes. It is absolutely everywhere. And the reason is because it has gotten so bad that Americans are being personally impacted piece by piece by piece. They are standing up saying, What can I do within the jurisdiction that I have, within the resources that I have? How can I step in and fix this? And we have seen other States take action too. There have been 8 or 10 States that have had some kind of legislative immigration activity going on. And so I applaud them for that.

And the Minutemen, I had the privilege to go down to the border of Arizona and Mexico and help build some fence to get some of that project started. And I happen to have a list of 25 Members of Congress that would be happy to help put some fence up to be able to control this border.

But I want to lay a little groundwork for that before I yield to my colleagues. And that is this: that an administration that had the determination to shut off the jobs magnet and enforce the laws at our borders; if we had the ability and the will to enforce our borders and shut off that jobs magnet, and add into that shutting off birthright citizenship, which is another magnet that brings people here and starts that chain migration for up to 350,000 babies every year that should not have been born in the United States of America, those kinds of decisions from an administration that was committed could have kept this under manageable proportions.

But what really has happened is that lack of commitment has allowed for a lack of enforcement. The lack of enforcement, that message echoes through the entire countries south of our border, on the Rio Grande and at our border with Mexico. When that happens, it magnetizes and more people come into the United States.

Now we have a situation where 4 million people a year pour across our southern border. Four million. And I went down there and repeated what the Border Patrol tells me here in hearings, that they stop perhaps 25 to 33 percent, a fourth to a third of the illegal border crossers. And they are not very free about talking about what percentage of drugs they interdict coming down there. They will talk about the tonnage, but not the percentage. They say 25 to 33 percent of the border crossers they stop.

And I say that to the Border Patrol people who are down there sitting in a nice quiet place where they do not have to worry about a superior listening in on them. And some of them laughed when I said, You are stopping 25 percent, maybe 33 percent? Some of them laughed. None of them said yes. One of them went into hysterics and said, 25 percent? We are not stopping anywhere near 25 percent.

I asked them all what is the number. The most common number I got was perhaps 10 percent. I had one of the high-level investigators tell me we stop about 3 percent of the illegal crossers and about 5 percent of the illegal drugs. But the power and the force of this is just awesome. It is $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming across our southern border, and that is a powerful force, Mr. Speaker. That force is so powerful that even if we shut off all illegal people coming across the border, even if we shut off the jobs magnet here in the United States, even if we end birthright citizenship to shut off that magnet, that does nothing to shut off the $65 billion worth of illegal drugs.

And that is why we have got to build a fence, and that is why we have got to build a wall. That is not an administrative decision on whether to enforce or not, whether to deploy people or not, or whether to actually arrest them and prosecute them. That is a physical barrier, not an administrative decision. That is why it is important, Mr. Speaker.

And I would be happy to yield to my friend from Virginia who raised this issue with a powerful voice on immigration.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia

(Mr. Goode) and appreciate particularly the strong voice that you have been, solid and consistent and strong. I remember you were at one point saying, I want a wall and I want it 2,000 miles long and I want it from San Diego to Brownsville. I am looking forward to the day when that last mile gets built, and by then maybe we will have the kind of border security that we need.

But Californians have a long experience with the border control issue, and one of the leaders on this issue is the gentleman from California (Mr. Gary Miller), and I am very happy to yield to him.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Gary G. Miller) for that presentation and that perspective. It is a little bit different one than I often bring to this debate, and very glad that it is here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, and am glad that it is something that the American people can pick up on as well.

Before I yield to the gentleman from Georgia, I am going to do the 2- minute drill on the King Wall on the border. I come to this conclusion this way. As the gentleman, Mr. Miller, made the statement that people come here and work and send their money back. And that dollar figure now is $20 billion that gets sent out of the labor here in the United States. Many of it is the labor of the people that are working here illegally. $20 billion to Mexico. Another $20 billion to Central America and the Caribbean. $40 billion out of this economy being sent out by people who come here that undercut the wages of American people.

$40 billion going south. $65 billion going south to pay for the $65 billion dollars worth of illegal drugs that come across our porous border. And they used to take that, and maybe still do, bring in some of those drugs on semis. There are places that the border is not even marked. So they can drive across the desert; they can drive their own road. In New Mexico, for example, the border, you would never know you crossed the border there, because when they finally set that border up, they set one of those big old big brass transits, probably not a lot different than Lewis and Clark had back in those days, and looked across at the horizon and put a concrete pylon up on top of the highest point of the horizon, lined up on that and then said, okay, now we will go to the next horizon, put up another one. That is all that is there.

And so there are roads that are made that cross the border a lot of places; the channel of the Rio Grande River gets driven across a lot of places. A place that is infamous, now called Neeley's Crossing, where they bring drugs across there and defend that border and threaten Americans that want to seal that off.

All this is going on, Mr. Speaker, and a lot of it is not just the force of people that want to come here for a little better life, not people who just want to pick lettuce or tomatoes or go work in a sheet rock crew or whatever it is, but $65 billion worth of illegal drugs.

So whatever we might do to shut off the jobs magnet is not going to shut off those illegal drugs. That is another force. And that force is far more powerful than the desire for people to change their lifestyle.

So when I go down there and sit on that border, what I do is I have come to this conclusion: we cannot shut that off unless we build a fence and a wall. I want to put the fence in, but I want to put a wall in. I designed one. And this just simply is the desert floor. Put a trench in that desert floor.

We have the ability to put together a machine that would be a slip- form machine that would lay a footing, about like this, Mr. Speaker, if I give you a look at the end of that, so you would have that about 5 foot deep underneath the ground. That would keep the wall from tipping over.

We would pour a notch in it that allows us to put precast panels in. It would look like this, only this would be flush with the desert floor. And then you would bring in precast concrete panels, 10 feet wide, 13\1/2\ feet tall. They would construct it to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that, Mr. Speaker.

Drop these panels in together, in this fashion, just take a crane and drop them in, Arnold Construction Company could build a mile a day of this pretty easily once you got your system going. And it is not all going to work, the whole 2,000 miles are not going to work that way, but a lot of it will work this way, Mr. Speaker.

And so just to wrap up this construction, this would be an example then of how that wall would look. Now you can also, you deconstruct it the same way. You can take it back down. If somehow they got their economy working, and got their laws working in Mexico, we can pull this back out just as easy as we can put it in. We can open it up again and we can open it up and let livestock run through there or whatever we choose.

I also say we need to do a few other things on top of that wall, and one of them being to put a little bit of wire on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb over the top or put a ladder there.

We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time. So I submit we build a wall like this, we do it for as many miles as we can, as many miles as we need, but it is roughly going to be 2,000.

And when you do that, then the Border Patrol that we are spending $8 billion to protect 2,000 miles of border, $4 million a mile, we can build this wall for about $1.3 million a mile. If we do that, then that frees up our forces to be effective. And this would force the traffic through the ports of entry rather than across that vast open space that we have between San Diego and Brownsville.

This will be economically feasible. The $4 million a mile, we can make an investment of about $1.3 million for each mile, and that is only one time one year. Otherwise, we are paying Border Patrol $4 million a mile every single year. What do we get out of it?

$65 billion worth of illegal drugs and 4 million people coming across the border. This will shut off almost all of that. This will direct almost all of it through our ports of entry.

Those are the reasons, some of them, not all of them, Mr. Speaker, on why we need to build a wall. But in the brief time that we have, I want to make sure that I can yield to the gentleman from Georgia who has been such an eloquent voice on this issue.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I yield back, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Chairman, the Fiscal Year 2007 Science, State, Justice and Commerce Appropriations bill would fund the JAG-Byrne program at $367 million, which leaves a gap beyond what many States and local law enforcement agencies can fill without cutting multi- jurisdictional task forces which are critical in fighting the war against drugs.

At a time when meth and other drug crime enforcement has already stretched funding resources thin, this funding reduction will certainly have a negative impact. Most of Iowa's meth is in the purer form of ``Ice.'' It is coming into my State from a foreign nation, Mexico. Our cocaine seizures are almost all of Mexican origin.

Recent marijuana seizures in Iowa are of Mexican origin. States, like Iowa, can use Federal assistance in dealing with this now

national and international drug problem. State resources are being stretched thin to combat meth trafficking from Mexico and to work drug conspiracies that have their roots in Mexico and beyond. I continue to support increased funding for Byrne grants. State and local agencies take the brunt of meth investigations without Federal assistance. More than 90% of drug arrests nationwide are made by State and local law enforcement. Tom Constantine, former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) testified that the majority of DEA cases begin as referrals from local and multi-jurisdictional drug investigations. He was unaware of any major DEA case during his tenure that did not originate from information gathered at the State and local level.

Byrne-JAG is an effective Federal partnership with State and local law enforcement. The key is local control and information sharing across local, State and Federal jurisdictions. Last year, Byrne task forces seized 5,600 meth labs, 55,000 weapons, and massive quantities of narcotics, including 2.7 million grams of meth. These results demonstrate the power of using Federal dollars to leverage State and local partnerships.

The National Drug Threat Assessment 2006, authored by the Department of Justice, found that Mexican criminal groups control most wholesale distribution of powder and ice methamphetamine. According to DEA and HIDTA reporting, Mexican criminal groups are the predominant wholesale methamphetamine traffickers in the country--even in the Northeast and Florida/Caribbean Regions--supplying various midlevel drug dealers.

Mexican control over wholesale and midlevel methamphetamine distribution is likely to increase as a greater proportion of wholesale methamphetamine production occurs in Mexico-based laboratories. Unfortunately, declines in domestic methamphetamine production, particularly by independent producers, will strengthen the position of Mexican criminal groups as midlevel and retail distributors.

Iowa has made great strides. Iowa is a model for how to address domestic sources of meth lab production with its tough precursor laws. Unfortunately, to meet the demand, more meth is coming in from Mexico. A coordinated multi-jurisdictional response involving local, State and Federal agencies is crucial. Local law enforcement needs to have the funds in this amendment to fight drug crimes.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding me time and for the privilege to address this issue.

Mr. Chairman, we have heard from the other Member from Iowa (Mr. Latham) that the Food and Drug Administration has classified marijuana, along with heroin, LSD, methamphetamine, hashish and a number of other drugs, as Schedule I drugs. That is because they carry a high potential for dangerous abuse.

And so doctors in most States even prohibit them for being prescribed for medicinal purposes. That is a standard. That is the national standard. The issue was raised about States' rights. But no one has raised the issue about States' rights about the other drugs that are Schedule I drugs.

But we do have a right, a constitutional right and an obligation to regulate drugs in America. The question really is, is marijuana among them? And it is. And so we would be seeking to, by this amendment, usurp that decision and change that standard.

But with regard to the addictive nature of marijuana, I am looking at a study here that says that if adults started at a fairly young age, say by the time of 26 or older, they used marijuana before the age of 15, 62 percent reported a lifetime cocaine use, 9 permanent reported lifetime heroin use, and 54 percent reported nonmedical use of psychotherapeutics. And this does not include methamphetamines, which is abused more than any of these drugs that I mentioned here.

So this is a high use issue. It is also something that infringes upon or inhibits our ability and our reflexes with regard to driving. So, for example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that marijuana use has been shown to impair driving performance. These things we know.

Then with regard to the gentleman from California's statements about he could not, that Mr. Nofziger could not get himself to eat, if that is our issue, then let us focus on the synthetic THC that is now available. It is available in a drug by the name of Marinol, and it has been proven to be effective, especially dealing with cancer patients and with the nausea associated with the chemotherapy treatments and also with the appetite, that might help assisting the appetite with AIDS patients.

There is a way that we can use the THC, and there is a way also that we can protect this country against that kind of Schedule I drug.

Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, it is a Federal mandate for foreign language ballots. Anybody can vote locally on that. But it takes away the Federal requirement for foreign language ballots and allows individuals to bring interpreters into the voting booth. That is protected by Federal statute, those two points. So it doesn't take away foreign language ballots. It just takes away the Federal mandate that requires them. There is surname analysis. We are also using dialects, 16 to 17, in Michigan; and that has got to stop.

Mr. Chairman, there are really only two reasons that a person might ask for a ballot in a language other than English. One of those reasons would be if you are a naturalized citizen and you had received and earned your citizenship here. That is a Federal requirement, though, to demonstrate proficiency in the English language, both the spoken and the written.

So one would presume that if you are a naturalized citizen and you ask for a ballot in a language other than English, that you somehow circumvented the standards that are in Federal statute. So I do not think that is a legitimate reason to ask for a foreign language ballot.

The second reason would be if you were born in this Nation, by birthright citizenship, and you had grown up in an enclave where you did not absorb enough English to be able to go to the ballot box and cast a ballot in English. In that case, we have a Federal statute to protect your right to vote, and you have a right to vote, because you can bring someone into the voting booth with you to do that interpretation.

So those two things are covered. What this Stearns amendment does is removes the Federal funding that enforces this multilingual ballot mandate. It ends the Federal foreign language mandate, at least for a year. It is a good thing to do.

But if localities want to express this, they can. The States or the counties or the voting districts can still continue to present ballots in any language that they choose. That is why this is a good Stearns amendment. That is why it is something that we ought to do for the future.

We are looking at bringing in perhaps millions and millions of new citizens. That is hanging in the Senate today. If

we do that, with the President talking about the need to learn English, then for those reasons we need to assimilate and encourage people to use the English language. This is a gentle amendment. I urge its adoption.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to address this issue. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, we do have concerns about our jurisdiction over this particular subject matter. But it is certainly true that there are whistle blower cases where multiple requests for extensions by the Department of Justice unnecessarily delay a final resolution of the case in the courts. But this amendment in its rigidity is not an appropriate solution, and I am concerned about this.

The courts currently make the decision as to whether an extension should be provided to the government in these cases. The government cannot singularly decide to stall the case, and the use of the False Claims Act has proven to be one of the most effective tools we have to go after fraud against the government, especially large-scale fraud.

But in those cases where a whistle blower has brought large acts of fraud to the attention of the government, the fraud is spread throughout a large enterprise. And in those cases, there may be a very real need to request multiple extensions in order to establish a viable prosecution on behalf of the government and therefore maximize the chances of recovery. In those cases, multiple extensions are to the benefit of both the government and the whistle blower.

I point out some issues that have to be dealt with by the Department of Justice in these cases, and that would be, first of all, that if the government has a tip, they will have a 5-year statute of limitations to bring a criminal charge, a 6-year statute of limitations to bring a civil charge. And when you look at all the things that a case has to do, first we should keep in mind, each case is different, and they cannot all fit in necessarily to a 6-month extension clause, but they might be stretched out across that. They might be less time than that. The whistle blower often agrees to those extensions, but it is the judge that has to decide.

And then, think in terms of the work that must be done by the Department of Justice. First of all, they have got to interview the whistle blower and document evidence and establish an investigative team and then to consider whether to conduct a criminal investigation and coordinate that with the agency. They may need also to issue subpoenas for documents, interview relevant witnesses and even perhaps defer a decision in case to case and also perhaps also include a grand jury. All of these things are things that have to be considered into this amendment that is offered by Mr. Baird.

So I would suggest also that, of these kinds of whistle blower cases, a list of some of the very high dollar cases that took extensions beyond what the limitation of this amendment would be, for example, these are the things that would not have happened if we had been limited to a 6-month extension: HCA, $1.7 billion claim; Serono, $700

million claim; GlaxoSmithKline, $140 million claim; TAP Pharmaceuticals, $875 million; Astra Zeneca, $354 million; and I hesitate to say this, King Pharmaceuticals, $124 million; Advanced PCS, $137 million; Schering-Plough, $345 million.

You get the understanding. That is about half of my list that I present here. I know there is a lot more discussion to take up. But all extensions must be approved by the judge, and I think it is worthy of deliberation.

I appreciate the gentleman for bringing the amendment, and I am hopeful that we can find a resolution that is constructive to the justice we all seek and the efficiency that we seek within the judicial branch of government and the Department of Justice.

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time remains?

Mr. Chairman, let's be clear about what we are talking about here. This is a case where the police officers had a warrant, and it was a legitimate warrant, and that is not in question. And then, when they approached the location to serve the warrant, they knocked, and within about 3 seconds, and they admit this, then they entered to conduct the search, there was the subject of the warrant.

And the question is, did the police officers then wait a reasonable time? Did they meet that reasonableness standard? And they agreed that they did not. But the issue really is, the warrant was there. It was a legitimate warrant. It was a warrant that, had it been served exactly according to the letter of the intent of previous case law and the Constitution, then that evidence would have been admissible in court, not excluded.

So the court ruled that simply because the officers were abrupt in their entry was not a reason to exclude the evidence from the court. That is the case here with Hudson v. Michigan. That is the kind of thing that the Hinchey amendment would seek to preclude.

Now, I do not know what the motivation is for that. I do not know why one would want to, because we had some maybe abrupt or rude police officers exclude evidence from a court, especially criminal court. I would think we would want to have that evidence available to the court, and then we would want to take a look at the kind of activities on the part of those officers, because there are other remedies that can be found.

Those other remedies are in the civil courts, the remedies are in police officer enforcement, and there is also a particular Federal statute that allows for that relief. So I would submit then, Mr. Chairman, that there is plenty of relief here to resolve this, and the Hinchey amendment goes the wrong way.

Furthermore, by the time, it would be impossible for Justice to comply with this amendment, because by the time the court ruled that they had not complied with the Hinchey language, they would have already served the warrant, already taken action on this, and already the funds would have been expended. So it would be impossible to comply with this particular amendment.

The effect of it would be to tie the hands. If they did, they would have to be very, very cautious about how they take care of these activities, and that would mean that there will be times when these criminal cases that would not be investigated, warrants that would not be appropriately served for fear that they would be in violation of this amendment, even though there is a not a way to avoid it.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I do not believe that was my argument, was the practicality of how we comply with the Hinchey amendment, and the fact that it is impossible to comply with the Hinchey amendment, however impractical it is.

So I would submit that this does tend to circumvent Hudson v. Michigan, and I would ask for opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I rose for the same point of order.

I do, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, this point of order is raised appropriately, and I concur with the gentleman from West Virginia in that it is legislation on an appropriations bill. It is actually a taxation. It is a revenue generator. It levies a tax on explosives and on firearms ammunition, and it is a way to generate revenue, perhaps as much as $130 million in this appropriations bill, in order to protect the interests of the firearms industry, the explosives industry, the people that are very closely regulated today and do not need to have additional regulation.

Mr. Chairman, it is important that the section be struck out, but it is also important that we maintain our standard here and avoid legislating on an appropriation bill.

So, with that, I again suggest that this point of order is one that is very solid on the policy of not legislating on appropriation bills, and I urge the Chair to sustain that point of order.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you this evening, and I appreciate the fact that my message to you echoes across America in this technology that we have today.

As I awaited my opportunity to address the Chair, I also reflected upon many of the remarks that were made by my colleagues in the preceding segment, and I would like to start out first by stating that there were some remarks that I do agree with. I know that may seem a bit unusual, but the objection to the proposed policy by the newly sovereign nation of Iraq to the rejection of the proposed amnesty is something that we stand together on, as I heard my friend Mr. Larson say; and I thank him for raising that issue tonight.

As I think about what that means, to offer amnesty to someone for killing Americans or killing coalition troops but not amnesty if they happen to attack Iraqis, whatever stripe they might happen to be, and the same administration will be making demands on us to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law and punish American soldiers that may or may not, but certainly today we know are accused of those kinds of activities.

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

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman; and I will take a good look at the text of that. I know that philosophically we do agree, and I will give it serious consideration, and that is the spirit that we should operate in in this Chamber. I appreciate the gentleman's work on this cause.

I do also, though, have an obligation to lay out a disagreement, and that disagreement is with the language we

heard with regard to permanent bases. We know that a year ago there was language that was inserted into the Department of Defense appropriation bill, and this was language that I understood a year ago was introduced by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha). This language prohibited any of the funds from being used to negotiate for or to establish any bases in Iraq.

Now that language was taken out in conference. It passed through this Chamber, and no one caught it, evidently, and it was taken out in conference, I understand, at the request of the White House, because the President is the Commander-in-Chief. That is something, Mr. Speaker, we didn't hear over here in the last hour, about who it is that conducts foreign policy in America. Constitutionally, the President of the United States has the duty to conduct foreign policy, and he is the Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces.

The rest of this verbiage and rhetoric that comes out is an effort to try to fence him in, limit his options, and sometimes make him look bad across the globe. But the President is the one who conducts our foreign policy, and he is the Commander-in-Chief. But the Murtha language a year ago would have tied the hands of the President, would have tied the hands of the Iraqis and prohibited them from even negotiating for a temporary base, no matter how essential for the entire nation of Iraq.

Well, that language was stripped out in conference, thankfully so; and the bill went to the President without the Murtha language. This time, the bill came to the floor with the same language back in it again. The language, they argue, prohibits permanent bases. But there is nothing in that language that says permanent. It just says no money will be used to either negotiate for or establish bases in Iraq. All bases, no matter how temporary. Not even to talk about it.

Now we have a sovereign Iraq, with a new prime minister, Prime Minister Maliki, and we have a new minister of defense and a new minister of the interior, and now that they are finally standing on their own two feet, within a matter of weeks. We are tying their hands as well as the hands of the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States, the conductor of foreign policy by Constitution, with language in the DOD appropriation bill that says that not $1 of those funds can be used to even negotiate for a temporary base, no matter how desperately it might be needed by the newly sovereign Iraq.

Now, that is a shortsighted policy. That is a foolish policy, Mr. Speaker. It is a policy that if we had followed that policy in each one of the other conflicts we had been in, for example, we wouldn't have bases to operate out of in Kuwait. We wouldn't still be in Germany, a pretty handy place to have. We utilize those bases considerably in Germany. We wouldn't be in places across the Pacific.

And, in fact, that place we finally found out was the horizon. When the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) said that we should immediately redeploy back to the horizon, we couldn't get him to define what the horizon was for months. Finally, he has defined horizon. Out on the horizon from Iraq, so you can quickly deploy in case there is a crisis, and I don't know why you would want to let it get to a crisis stage, but that was the strategy, and now he has said that horizon is Okinawa. We should redeploy to Okinawa. From there, we could mount air raids into Iraq, perhaps with some B-52s and do some carpet bombing to teach them a lesson, I guess.

But when you are taking on a terrorist entity, you have to beat them on the ground where they are. You can't pull out and let things brew and then come back in with overwhelming force. The gentleman from Pennsylvania knows that. He knows that if we ever pull out of Iraq, they will do everything they can to make sure we don't go back for any reason whatsoever, no matter what the consequences.

And I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, the consequences would be cataclysmic if we pull out of there, let things fall apart, and then the terrorists will have the very thing they were seeking to establish in Iraq in the first place.

So the Murtha language in the Department of Defense appropriation bill did make it through this floor in the House of Representatives. We could have made some better decisions on that, but it will go over to the Senate, where hopefully it will get pulled out, but I am just confident, if that is not the case, that it will be pulled out by the White House at their request in conference.

No president should have their hands tied behind their back and then be drubbed here every night on the floor of the House of Representatives and prevented from conducting his foreign policy. That is what happened at the end of the Vietnam War, and the end of that cost three million or more lives in Southeast Asia because this Congress tried to tie the hands, and effectively did tie the hands, of the Commander-in-Chief.

Now, we also hear that they are quite offended by the term ``cut and run.'' And you can describe it a lot of ways, but I can't describe it any better than cut and run. That is what I heard they want to do. Why can't they simply wait for the new government of Iraq to get their feet on the ground and establish themselves and do what they are doing, which is taking on this enemy? They are taking out the enemy, going into Baghdad, in some of the neighborhoods in Baghdad and cleaning those areas out.

Now, war is never pretty. It is always ugly, and it is always costly, and you can never measure the progress of a war by the minute or the hour or the day. It has to be looked at incrementally. And sometimes a battle that is lost might end up being the war that is won, and vice versa.

We know that the writings that came from General Giap and other commanders of the Vietnam military, they were desperate. They were nearly ready to give up. But what gave them hope and what kept them in that war and kept them from giving up and surrendering was the rhetoric on the part of the left wing United States Senators and House Members.

In fact, that is something that is in Bud Day's book. Colonel Bud Day, who is the highest decorated living American war hero, writes in his book that the first years of his incarceration as a prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton, as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, after being shot down over there, the first years they had to write propaganda. But after a few years, all they had to do was quote people like Senator Kennedy and Senator Fulbright and Jane Fonda, and, he said, pick your House Member, that we quote as well.

That is going on in this conflict as well, Mr. Speaker, in the same way these 30-some years later. The results are going to be different, because the American people are not going to fall for this same rhetoric again. They are advocating cut and run. If they would like to describe it some other way, honestly, I would be happy to pick that language up, too. I like to use a lot of adjectives. Cut and run is the short term for it.

They say that 80 percent of the Iraqis want us out of there. I would like to know more about that poll. I would like to read the question. I would like to know who they asked. I think you could get a higher number than that. I think you could get 99 percent of the Iraqis to want us out of there, the same way they wanted us out of there 3 years ago. They said so. They said, we are happy to be liberated, and we want the Americans to go home, some day.

But not any time soon, Mr. Speaker. Not before the Iraqi people have control of the security of their country, not before the political solution at least gets some roots down and gets to operate. And the President has made this clear.

But the people on the other side of the aisle would not let the President move troops out of Iraq at a rate that he sees fit. They always want to be a little ahead of him.

If the President says we have 150,000 troops there, and they are thinking, well, maybe he will pull 10,000 out next month, they might hear a rumor coming from the Pentagon, and that isn't an air-tight operation over there either, Mr. Speaker, they might hear a rumor from the Pentagon that we are going to move 10,000 troops back to the United States. So people on the other side of the aisle jump to the floor, run down here and say, I demand the President remove 10,000 troops and bring

them back to the United States. And they will pound on the podium and make that demand in the hopes it actually happens. Because then they can stand up and say, he finally listened. He wouldn't listen for a long time, but, finally, he listened. They want to get ahead of things so they can declare they were the cause of those decisions.

And that just makes it harder for a Commander-in-Chief to make the right decisions. In fact, running out front and trying to get in front of an issue reminds me of Robespierre, who was one of the leaders in France during the revolution, about the 1789 time period. He looked out his window, and he said, the people are marching in the streets; I better get in front of them and see where they are going, for I am their leader. A few months later, Robespierre was a head shorter. I don't know if he ever learned the lesson that you can't lead from the rear. You actually have to have some vision of your own.

You can't get up every morning and try to decide who am I going to attack today; who am I going to make look bad. Surely if I can pull some people down the ladder on either side of me, I will look better, if I can drag them down the ladder. That is the mentality that motivates a lot of the people on the other side of the aisle.

They said that, according to the Pew Foundation, I didn't hear the percentage, but a significant percentage had a negative image of the United States, a negative image of the United States. Do you suppose some of those people listen to the rhetoric on the floor of the United States House of Representatives on a regular basis? What do they think, the kind of message they are sending? What do they think of the United States?

I wonder if they answered to the Pew Foundation's poll, I wonder what the gentleman that made this argument would say if they asked, do you have a positive or negative view of the United States?

I am going to say I would expect they would have said we have a negative view, because that is all I hear is a negative view from that side of the aisle. I don't hear solutions. I hear negative attacks on the White House, negative attacks on the Republicans and Congress.

Somehow they will learn how to spell Republican with four letters so we can truly be a four-letter word, instead of this optimistic, progressive operation that is looking for ways beyond the horizon to make the world a better place. Then the question was from the gentleman from Washington, Who was driving the bus when it comes to the Iraq policy?

When you swear allegiance to uphold the Constitution, you are supposed to understand what is in there. I need to inform the gentleman, the person driving the bus, when it comes to Iraq policy, is the person driving the bus when it comes to foreign policy, and the person driving the bus when it comes to being Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, in Iraq, its President Bush by Constitution.

So I hope that has cleared up some of the issues here. There are no negotiations going on for permanent bases. There would be no negotiations going on for permanent bases. We have no permanent bases anywhere around the globe.

We have no permanent bases here in the United States. They are all temporary bases. They are all established for a period of time, a term that can be agreed to by the parties involved. Sometimes it is a short term, sometimes it is a longer term; but none are permanent. If anyone thinks that here in the United States we have permanent bases like Fort Hood, for example, or Fort Campbell would be another, the answer to that is, no, they aren't permanent either. All bases in the United States are all subject to the BRAC approach.

We voted on that, and we are closing some bases, and we are downsizing some bases and shifting some materials around. That ought to convince anybody in this Congress if they had ever been through a BRAC vote and a BRAC negotiation, that there is no such thing as a permanent base, no matter how badly Members of Congress would love to have permanent bases in their districts, even these Members, there is not any such thing takes a permanent base in the United States or overseas. We are not inclined to negotiate for them, but we are inclined to negotiate for temporary bases where they make sense and where we can reach an agreement with the people who are the sovereign government of each individual nation in question, including Iraq.

I would point out also that we have a neighbor to Iraq called Iran, and this neighbor is developing nuclear capability, not just the ability to build a bomb and detonate a bomb, but the ability to deliver that bomb to a target site. They have said that Israel has no right to exist, and they want to wipe it off the map.

They have named us as one of their number one enemies. So sitting next door to Iran, with a couple of large military bases, one would think that it would be a pretty good idea not to foreclose an option to be able to maybe mount an operation from the very bases that we have invested so many dollars into.

We have billions of dollars invested in Iraq. We have a tremendous amount of blood and treasure invested there, and that investment should return something back on it. It already has. It has returned freedom to the Iraqi people.

If we play our cards right, and we are able to negotiate with them, we might one day look at that and say it was a very good thing that we stripped out the Murtha language and saved the options and the authority of the President of the United States, who is Commander in Chief, and who by Constitution conducts our foreign policy.

I would be happy to yield to my friend from Tennessee, Mr. Wamp.

I thank the gentleman from Tennessee, and I wish to associate myself with every remark made here in this spontaneous demonstration of Mr. Wamp's heart and head and involvement in this big effort that we have. I don't think it can be overemphasized, and I am going to make it a point to go back and look at the Congressional Record and read through those words again. Sometimes there is a gem that shows up here on the floor; and this is something that happened tonight, Mr. Speaker. I do greatly appreciate it.

I want to emphasize that I believe that our United States military that is involved in this conflict, this global war on terror, it is the very highest quality military ever sent off to war. And I don't say that to diminish the contribution on the part of anybody, especially the greatest generation or those wars that came behind. I say this

to build on top of that reputation, not diminish it.

But some of the reasons we heard from Mr. Wamp were, first of all, they are an all-volunteer service. And not only that, they are people that have all volunteered for this conflict, because this conflict has gone on long enough that everyone had a chance to re up. So everybody that is in uniform got to consider the current state of conflict globally, and they signed back up again in numbers far larger than ever anticipated.

They said, I am going back for a second tour, I will go back for a third tour, I will put my life on the line, and I will certainly put it on hold for a year or more to give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom. Because they believe, as Zach Wamp and I believe and as President Bush believes, that we never go to war against another free people. Free people resolve their differences at the ballot box, not on the battlefield. That demonstration of that has been true throughout history, and it can be true in the Middle East as well.

I continually point out this example, and that is on 9 November, 1989, when the Berlin Wall went down, when people climbed over the top of it and chiseled pieces of it out and broke champagne bottles on it and families were reunited, the story in the mainstream media was all about how families were reunited, and they seemed to think it was all a personal thing, that now they didn't have to write letters across the wall or maybe wave through the Brandenburg Gate at each other or go to Checkpoint Charlie and figure out how they might get through.

No, it wasn't about that. It wasn't about that at all. It was about the end of the Cold War. It was about the Iron Curtain crashing down November 9, 1989, not predicted until you look back at Ronald Reagan when he said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. And the people tore down the wall out of a desire for freedom.

That desire for freedom, once that wall went down, November 9, 1989, within about 2 to 3 short years, freedom echoed across eastern Europe, almost bloodlessly. And I will say virtually bloodlessly in the single most significant historical event of my lifetime, the end of the Cold War, Mr. Speaker. That freedom that echoed across eastern Europe for hundreds of millions of people can be the same freedom echoing across the Arab world for hundreds of millions of people. And that is a formula for a final victory in the global war on terror.

But not until then. Because there is a habitat that breeds terrorists. There is religious fanatical beliefs that their path to salvation is in killing people who are not like them. And we are some of their preferred targets. Wherever we are, they will attack us until that ideology is defeated. You have got to do it boots on the ground there, and you have got to give people freedom and hope, and that is what we have been doing ever since September 11, 2001. The American people have voted on that issue. They have elected their Commander-in- Chief.

I heard these Presidential debates in Iowa. First in the Nation caucuses and continually eight or nine and sometimes ten candidates for the White House would get up every morning and decide what can I say to tear down President Bush. And they would have advisory teams out there trying to find soft spots that they could attack the President on. They didn't stand up and debate the differences between them as candidates, to determine who would be the nominee for the presidency. They decided that they would line up and take shots at the President. Whoever could be the most aggressive criticizer of the President presumably would be the one who then won the nomination and went on to run for the presidency and perhaps the White House.

That is when Howard Dean melted down, John Kerry emerged. The John Kerry who stood there and said over and over again, wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. First I voted for it before I voted against it. That example of leadership, that gift that kept on giving, and probably the biggest reason why we have this fine leader in the White House today is that that gift that kept on giving kept reminding the people that there was a stronger leader that had a clearer vision; and that has been true in spite of relentless, relentless attacks.

My friend from Tennessee also talked about how important it is for us to be a sovereign Nation that secures our borders; and I wish to pick up on that subject matter, Mr. Speaker.

Because, as I watch this situation, and we knew that when we were attacked by enemies from within, most of whom had violated our immigration laws in one form or another, faulty paperwork or let their visas expire, entered into the United States by a method that may or may not have been legal, but certainly the majority of them were not legal at the time that they attacked the United States, the 19 hijackers from September 11, tell us that if they want to come here to do us ill, then we needed to secure our borders.

So we got busy and spent a lot of money and set up a lot of new standards; and we have things now that are halfway in place, like US VISIT, where we have a computer database now that tracks everybody that comes into America, that is not quite yet tracking everybody that goes out of America, so we don't have a balance sheet list of who is here. We just have a list of who came. If they come back again, then we can presume that they left and went home again and then came back again. But, other than that, we have not caught up with US VISIT.

We set up the security in our airports where it is locked down tight. Yes, they make mistakes and sometimes things get through. But for a while there, you couldn't get a nail clipper onto an airplane without them breaking off the file that you might use to clean your nails and file them with. That is how tight it has gotten. And our matches and cigarette lighters, things like that have been shut off of our airplanes. So we have done a lot. We have done a lot to create a TSA that is there protecting our airports.

And we are doing a better job at our ports. In fact, the job that is being done at our ports is far better than the critics would have you believe, because it has got a random and statistical selection process of these containers that are sealed containers, and it is more important than opening every one and looking through them to use our resources to pick which ones to open, which ones to x-ray, which ones to look through.

In fact, I have been the witness to some of that success as they have gone through sealed containers in our ports and uncovered contraband material that is in there.

But our most porous and most open vulnerability that we have, Mr. Speaker, is the vulnerability in the 2000-mile border between us and Mexico. Down there, when you have that kind of travel of people flowing across the border, and I sit on the Immigration Subcommittee, and for now 3\1/2\ years, I have heard continual testimony, nearly every week, that deals with how many people are coming across our border. And that number, the most consistent number that I come up with as I listen to this testimony from border patrol officers, high-ranking officials, it is their job to know this, and they will say that, well, that number is perhaps four million a year coming across our southern border. Four million. And they will testify that they stop 25 to 33 percent, a fourth to a third of those that seek to come across our borders, which means you have a positive opportunity, a chance, the odds are better that if you want to come into the United States illegally across the southern border, it is better that you make it that you don't.

We stopped, out of that four million that come across the border a year ago, we had stopped 1,159,000. That was for 2004. For 2005, we stopped 1,188,000 of those. Most of those were put on a bus, turned around and taken down to the port of entry, and they got off the bus, and they watched them walk through. Some of them got picked up within 24 hours when they came back in again.

We have a catch and release program that will stop them seven to 14 times before we adjudicate them and punish them, rather than just take them back.

But I would be happy again to yield to my friend from Tennessee at any time.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman and appreciate his delivery here on the floor.

I would point out for his edification that at that town where you met that lady in Cleveland, Tennessee, is where I believe this suit was made. You will be glad to know that I look around to find American-made suits, and I buy them off the rack in Denison, Iowa, and I am proud to do it.

I appreciate that contribution to this succession here tonight as well. And I point out also, Mr. Speaker, that it isn't just Americans that believe this way. It isn't just Americans that concur with the statements of Mr. Wamp and myself, but I have a survey in front of me. That survey is of the Hispanics in America, and some of these polls are this: that opposing increasing overall levels of immigration, overall immigrations of immigration, legal or illegal, 56 percent of Hispanics oppose it, and 31 percent say let us go ahead and increase the levels of immigration. But 56 percent, a significant majority, are opposed to increasing those levels of immigration.

Benefits for illegal aliens, 60 percent of Hispanics oppose; 20 percent support benefits for illegal aliens. And then even a guest worker program is kind of split. It leans a little bit in favor of a guest worker program, but it is not decidedly in favor of that.

A pathway to citizenship, Hispanics in America oppose that for people who are in this country illegally today, 52 to 38 percent.

So this is not something that alienates Hispanics in America when you stand up for the rule of law. It is one of the reasons they came here. And they followed the law. They jumped through the hoops, and they respect this. And they want us to honor their citizenship and support this rule of law and also defend our border.

And the time I spent on the border, and there have been a number of times that I have gone down and invested my time there, I sit down had and, of course, I meet with the highest ranking people that are there, and I see the display of all the equipment that they have and the technology they use and the tactics that they use, and the effectiveness that comes with that gives me a nice warm feeling.

Then I go back down there, and I sit alongside the border, and I talk with the rank-and-file people that are the boots on the ground, Mr. Speaker, and I listen to what they have to say. I listen to the Texas border sheriffs, what they have to say, and the local law enforcement along through Arizona as well, and I come up with a little bit different picture. And that picture is, as I said earlier, 4 million people pouring across our southern border every year; and yet if we appropriate the funds requested by the President, it will be $8 billion to protect our sovereign border, 8 billion. And yet the numbers of illegal crossings are going up, not going down. The dollars' worth of illegal drugs coming across the border are going up, not going down.

So one would think if money were the answer, if we just threw more money at it, and we had more Border Patrol officers and we had the National Guard down there that the border crossings would go down. Well, they will in some areas until they retool and do their end-run and go through the areas that are vulnerable. And the President has said that we simply cannot stop people at the border that want to come here for a better life. If they want jobs to provide for their families, they are going to come. That has kind of been his answer and it is almost the same tone. As he contends that we cannot stop people that want to come here for jobs, I would argue that we can. In fact, of the forces pushing on our southern border, the easiest force to stop is the one of the honest hardworking people that just want to have a job and a better way of life. Those are the easier ones to stop. And if we cannot stop them, then we sure in the world are not going to be able to stop the criminals, the terrorists, those that want to come here to do us ill, those that are carrying $65 billion worth of illegal drugs across our border.

That is a tremendous amount of force, $65 billion pushing against our border and the drugs that come through there. Ninety percent of the illegal drugs in the United States come across the border from Mexico. Has anyone heard the Commander in Chief speak about that subject matter? Has that been uttered in a press conference? Is it anything that seems to be part of the lexicon or the rhetoric that comes from the White House? And I think no. But I think that needs to be a very big part of this debate. If we want to take a position that we cannot stop honest people from coming into the United States, why do we think we can stop the dishonest ones that want to come into the United States?

And that is why I contend that the time that I spent on the border, the time that I sat down there in the dark and listened to the illegals unload from their vehicles that drive up near the border, get out, pick up their backpacks and infiltrate into the United States, those that I have seen that are crossing illegally, the things that you see in the streets, 500,000 marching in the streets of Los Angeles with Mexican flags, that ought to give us an image to go by. They are feeling so confident, so self-assured, so strong that they go to the streets to demonstrate against us, thinking that they will scare us into granting them amnesty.

I mean, the threat of can you imagine a lawn that wasn't neatly trimmed or can you imagine having to cook your own steaks? Some of those things are arguments that have been made, Mr. Speaker. So I think the American people did get a message from that. I think they understand that there is a growing force here in the United States, and it is growing faster than 450,000 or so a year illegals coming in, growing faster than most realize.

Because if 4 million come in and we stop a little over 1 million and take those physically back to the border and watch them go back through the turnstile, some are back the next day. Some are not going back to the border because the Mexican consulate has all of the credentials for them to have access to our stations everywhere along the border, and they decide which ones go back and which ones do not. Now, why do we let the Mexican Government decide that? That is the same mentality of one who would write into a bill that we have to go consult with Mexico before we could build a fence on our southern border.

Now, I do not disagree with the gentleman from Tennessee. There is a lot of technology that we ought to be using. But I am a little bit more of a fellow that says I know what does work. We do not know that the technology works. I hope it does, but I know what does work. And as I sat down there on that border and I watched them catching drug dealers and pulling 180 pounds of marijuana out from underneath the bed of a truck and then hauling a Mexican across the border from Mexico that had been stabbed in the liver in a knife fight that just happened while I was there, those incidents come along so often that it is just part of the daily life down there. And the only way that you can shut that off with that force is to build a fence and a wall.

And I do not submit that we do all 2,000 miles all at once. I submit that we do so where the highest pressure is, and then when they start going around the end, extend the fence and extend the wall. But I would put a 10-foot high chain link fence on that border. And I would put that fence all the way. We need to define the border, and ``virtually'' does not define the border. So I would put a 10-foot high wall. I would put razor wire on top. I would put a sign on the south side about every 200 feet in Spanish that says: Here is the Web page you can check with your wireless laptop, how to get in connection with the U.S. consulate and how you come to the United States legally. Go apply here. Do not be knocking on the gate on this fence because it is not open unless you have the credentials to come here legally.

Every nation has to do that. And as they begin to tear down that 10- foot high chain link fence and cut holes through it and do it like I saw them down there south of Lukeville where they had cut through the chain link fence and chained it back up again and put a hinge in there and a gate through our chain link fence with a double padlock on it and a great big guard dog on the Mexican side, that is their passage into the United States, Mr. Speaker, and it has got to be shut off. Those are people who mean us ill will.

So I am going to submit this: this box, before I cut the notch in it, this represents, let us say, the New Mexico, the Arizona, and the Texas part of the border, maybe part of California. Now, just plain old desert. We go in here to build this wall and we dig a trench through here. This is, Mr. Speaker, the trench that one would dig. And as we dig this trench, we build some machines up in Iowa that do a good job. They are the kind of machines that you pull this trencher along here, and as you do that, you pull the slipformer in behind it, and you pour a slipformer of about a 5-foot-deep tongue down in here. And it has got a slot in it, a notch in it. And you move along with that trencher and that slipformer, pouring a footing for this concrete wall that goes across the desert. A 5-foot-deep slot in it with a foundation so that it holds the vertical wall up and it is rigid.

And then you get a footing that looks something like this. It won't quite be above the ground, Mr. Speaker, because this area right here would be flush with the ground. But, nonetheless, one gets the image here that we are working with.

And then you bring in truckloads of these precast concrete panels. These panels would be 10 feet wide, about 12\1/2\ feet tall, tongue and groove, reinforced with steel, and you would just pick them up with a crane. They weigh about 188 pounds, and you drop them in the slot one at a time. The first one would go in like that. Then you pick up the second one and you put it in like

this. And pretty soon we end up with a wall here that will keep illegals out. It will keep the illegals out, and it will also keep out the drug runners, the smugglers, the terrorists.

And this is a pretty quick operation. It is not hard to do at all. Our little construction company, which I sold to my oldest son, could do about a mile of this a day. Now, we are not going to be in the business of bidding this. I want to tell you that in the beginning. That is not my interest. I am just taking my background, Mr. Speaker, and using it to demonstrate how simple it is to put together a design that they are not going to get across.

Now, it doesn't mean that they are not going to have some kind of human catapult and launch people across it or that they will not design and build some kind of a 12-foot-high ladder. Yes, they will. But it is not going to be that easy because we are going to put some of this wire right on top of there called concertina wire, or razor wire. I only put on one roll, but you could put on two or three, set that the concrete. We can then put cameras on the backside, if we choose, or on the front side. This would be about 100 feet inside the chain link fence. So there would be 100 feet of no man's land that one could patrol. So they would have to come through our 10 feet high chain link fence on the south side with the razor wire on top of that. And they will try to do that.

When they get to this wall, they would probably carry their 12-foot ladder through the fence. They would put it up on top and they would try to get over here on this side. They do not know what is over here. They cannot see the sensors, the cameras, the vibration sensors, the infrared, whatever is there that would trigger our warning, and that will let the Border Patrol converge on that area.

We can shut this traffic off going across our southern border at least 90 percent and maybe even a number approaching 100 percent if we make a commitment to the manpower to patrol a wall like this. And it will take far less manpower. We are spending $8 billion on our southern border, $8 billion. That is $4 million a mile. And I would say this: if you would pay me $4 million and say, Steve, you protect that mile, I am going to protect that mile. There will not be a species of anything getting across that mile if that is what my contract says.

So I will submit that the easiest way to do that with the least amount of manpower is build a fence, build a wall. This can be constructed for about $1.3 million a mile. One point three, when we are spending $4 million for that mile, every mile, to wear out Humvees and have our Border Patrol park on the X and watch people come through, sometimes a border that is not even marked, let alone fenced. And if it is fenced, it is not even a barrier for human beings.

We are talking about building a lot of fences along the border that are vehicle barriers so semi-trucks full of marijuana cannot get through and straight trucks full of marijuana cannot get through and pickup trucks that have drugs in them, it is harder for them to get through.

But, still, what they do is they just create burreros, pack horses, human pack horses. So they will bring the drugs up to the border, and if there is a vehicle barrier there, they will throw their marijuana through, their drugs through, go through and load their backpacks up with that, and each one of them carries 50 pounds of drugs, 25 miles across the desert, up to a predetermined location point where they will then take their packs and toss them in the back of the semi or the straight truck.

Some of those people then, the illegals that are carrying drugs in that pack train, the burreros in the pack train, climb in the truck and they go on into the United States. Some of them are continuing drug dealers. Some are criminals, some want just an honest day's work. And some turn around and walk 25 miles back down in the desert and pick up another load and come back again.

When they tell us that maybe 4 million people came into the United States, but a lot of them went back home again, some of them are going back to get another load of illegal drugs.

That is how $65 billion worth of illegal drugs comes into the United States, and we can't stop that if we are simply going to sit down there and think that we are going to do this by a virtual approach to the border. We have to do it physically. We have to stop it.

$20 billion gets wired back to Mexico out of the wages and labor that is there. Another $20 million gets wired to the Caribbean and Central America from the labor of the United States of people that are here. So there is $40 billion that goes south of the board that comes off of the labor. Out of the $75 billion worth of labor at the hands of illegal people in the United States, most of it comes out of there. It is $40 billion going south. Additionally, there is another $65 billion paying for the drugs that comfort north.

So we have got altogether over $100 billion being used for drugs and the economic incentive for Vicente Fox. Over $100 billion. And what is the next highest economic factor in the Nation of Mexico? Oil. $28 billion worth of oil. But this overall drug and human package for just Mexico is $85 billion, nearly 3 times the value of the oil in Mexico.

So we must stop this. We must do it with a human barrier. We can do it with this wall. We can build this for $1.3 million a mile. I will stand with it. We will design the machines to do it. We will build it, Mr. Speaker, and we need to stand together as a country.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 2 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, June 27, 2006, at 9 a.m., for morning hour debate.

I thank the Speaker for the privilege to address this House of Representatives.

I came to the floor here to speak about a number of issues, but the subject matter, as often happens when I arrive here and listen to the preceding speakers, that subject matter does change, and I would just take it from the top.

Gas prices. Mr. Speaker, gas prices are exactly the same that they would be if we had Democrats in charge of this Congress rather than Republicans. The difference is people have a lot more money in their pockets to buy the gas with, because Democrats would raise the taxes, take the money out of the pockets of the working people and gas prices would not have changed.

We need to do more with energy supply, and I am for that. We can't get past some of the Republicans in here. But there aren't Democrats that I know of that will support us expanding the supply of energy.

We need to drill in ANWR. We need to drill on the Outer Continental Shelf. I am hopeful we will be able to bring out a bill within the next few days of proceedings in the House so that we can drill on the Outer Continental Shelf for gas and oil, within reasonable limits that we can work out with the States.

So, gas prices are the same as what they would be. It is just that people have more money in their pockets under Republicans to pay for this gas.

This is also a global market. It isn't a United States market. We are not able to drill for oil in places where we know we have reserves because the environmentalist coalition blocks that drilling in the United States of America, especially the Outer Continental Shelf and other places, our non- national park public lands. We have a tremendous supply of natural gas and oil. We are not able to get into that.

That is focused over on that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, not this side of the aisle. We need a far greater supply of energy, and you will have less energy, not more, if you listen to the advice of the people that spoke ahead of me.

With regard to the tax issues that came here today, the estate tax, most of the money that is taxed in an estate tax has already had the tax paid on it. Most of that is earnings that have already had the taxes paid.

So if you go out and you earn $100,000 over a year or a lifetime and you pay the income tax on that and that becomes savings that you invest, when that portion of that capital is taxed at your death, much of that, the core of it, the equity of it, the basis of it will be taxed a second time, not a first time.

How many bites at the equity apple does government need? Does government need to tax people on death? Does government in fact need to tax people for their productivity? My answer is no.

I would take all tax off of all productivity. I would put it on consumption. Then if people inherit a few million or a few billion dollars, when they spend that money, they would pay the tax and no one would escape it. But as we have it today, attorneys, and especially large corporations sometimes have whole floors of tax attorneys whose jobs it is is tax avoidance. So very wealthy people avoid the tax, and very poor people don't pay tax. In fact, even lower-middle income people don't pay very much, and sometimes not at all. It is those middle people in there that have earned a reasonable nest egg that get taxed, but they can't afford the attorneys or they don't do the planning because it is that marginal kind of an equation.

But we need to quit taxing people upon death. No taxation without respiration. This bill that we brought out

here today doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. And I am not one who is full of class envy. I believe I am the poorest delegate out of the Iowa delegation from a cash-in-the-bank standpoint at least. I am one of the richest on the part of family and those kind of blessings. But I don't envy anyone the wealth that they have earned. In fact, I am proud of them. I encourage them. Keep doing that.

People that build equity, their capital, if it is invested in a bank or in stocks or wherever it might be, finds its way into the hands of people that are reusing that money to create jobs. We have to have wealth in this country to create jobs. That is why we have jobs. This idea that we can raise the minimum wage and somehow or another it is going to make the world a better place for people just belies the simple fact that labor is a commodity, like corn or soybeans or gold or the oil that we talked about, and the value of labor is determined by supply and demand in the marketplace.

That is why it is $8.50 an hour or more to flip burgers at the burger stand in the Midwest. That is why very few people are working for minimum wage today, is because the supply of labor has not driven the price of wages down low enough that the minimum wage kicks in. The standard is higher.

So now the people on this side of the aisle want to raise the minimum wage a couple bucks an hour to try to catch up with what the economy has already done. If the argument ever was there that we should raise the minimum wage, no, the markets have already raised the minimum wage. That is what we ought to have as markets.

Sometimes people go to work for a minimum wage and then they realize, I don't like living here. I don't like this low wage that I am getting for the work that I am doing, so I am going to go get an education or I am going to train for a skill, because I want to upgrade this world that I am living in.

That should happen to most of us that start out into the working world. It certainly happened to me, and it happens throughout the process. If an entry level wage is what the minimum wage is today, most people aren't there very long before they move on up the line.

But if we can legislate a minimum wage without costing jobs, if people don't get laid off when the wage gets pushed higher by a potential Federal increase in the minimum wage, if we can legislate a minimum wage, Mr. Speaker, we can then legislate a living wage; and if we can legislate a living wage, enough money to live on, maybe raise a family on, maybe buy a modest house on, if we can do that, Mr. Speaker, without costing jobs, without reducing the number of opportunities for Americans, if we could take this $7.50 minimum wage proposal that perhaps takes it from $5.15 cents an hour, up a couple of bucks up to $7 and something, if we can do that without costing us jobs, why not take it up to a living wage? Why not take it up to $12, $13 or $14 an hour and call that a living wage, so that people could earn that much money and go buy their modest house and raise their family, and maybe they could do it on 40 hours a week.

But I will submit that we don't do that because we know if you raise that wage to that level, it certainly will cost jobs. And if we raise the minimum wage, if you have a minimum wage at all, it costs jobs. We should let the marketplace determine.

But the philosophy over on this side of the aisle says no, we have to legislate that at the Federal Government because it is a political kick for them, not because it is a rational economic one, Mr. Speaker. And I will submit that if we can legislate a minimum wage without a penalty to jobs in this economy, we can legislate a living wage at $12, $13 or $14 an hour without a penalty to the economy in this country. And if we can legislate a living wage, there is no rational reason by the rationale of the people on this side of the aisle that we can't just simply legislate prosperity.

If we are going to do this and do it at all, then let's legislate prosperity so we can all live in opulent mansions and we won't have to work and work our way up from the bottom at all.

What a wonderful country this would be if we could follow the rationale of the people on the other side of the aisle, who say that they don't even worry about partisanship. They don't worry about being bipartisan, about working with Republicans on this side of the aisle. But they say put me in, coach; elect those other people out and put me in, because I want to run this country.

But it is night after night after night, 60 minutes, sometimes 120 minutes, of the most pessimistic message anyone could ever hear on any television show anywhere in America on any given night. I mean, if I had that kind of an attitude, I would not want to get out of bed in the morning. I would be afraid to walk over a bridge for fear I would jump off of it.

No, this is an optimistic nation. That is not the right tone for America. This is an optimistic nation, Mr. Speaker. We have freedom. We have a freedom that was granted to us from God, that flows through the Declaration into the Constitution, the sacred covenant we have with God delivered to us through our Founding Fathers that he put on this Earth to guarantee us these rights. And we have these guarantees that flow through the Declaration and the Constitution; the freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, guaranteed property rights. Not what they were before Kilo, I will admit, but guaranteed property rights. The freedom to be safe in our persons and freedom to be judged only once before a court of law. We have equal opportunity under the law, guaranteed under the 14th Amendment and also I believe the 15th Amendment, Mr. Speaker. We all ought to take advantage of that opportunity.

We should recognize that on the day that we are born, our glass is half full. In America your chance to fill your glass the rest of the way up is greater than it is anyplace else on this planet.

If you have a negative attitude and say your glass is only half empty, and you get this almost terminal case of the ``poor me's'' when you think about what it is like to have to go out and earn your share of the prosperity that is totally available in this country, if that drags you down, then I guess that is the motivation that brings you over here to the floor of the Congress, Mr. Speaker, and that is the motivation that just continually goes into this never-ending series of lamentations that we have heard now for, oh, maybe a year-and-a-half or so.

I know that a lot of Americans just turn the channel on that. Well, that is good advice, America.

But I am going to talk to you about some other things that are important in bringing out an optimistic message. I would submit, also, that there are bipartisan bills in this Congress and there are many of them. Any time that anyone wants to come into this gallery, Mr. Speaker, or watch this on C-SPAN and watch the votes or look them up on the Internet to see what the votes are, you will often see that there are significant votes up here where maybe almost all of us agree. Time after time after time, it is all green lights up here or all but three or four green lights up here on the board behind where I stand, Mr. Speaker. Those are bipartisan bills.

There are bipartisan bills that come to this floor day after day after day. Often for the first day of the week whether it has a Monday or a Tuesday for votes, those votes that come up that night are under suspension because there isn't dissension. We have found issues that we agree upon. We have bipartisanship and we reach across to the other side of the aisle. It is just that sometimes that attitude of ``I don't even worry about bipartisanship'' that were heard over here from Mr. Meeks tonight, sometimes the hand that reaches across for bipartisanship gets bitten and then that causes the person to pull back again and think, well, all right, I guess maybe there are 232 Republicans and I guess we only need 218 votes to pass legislation, so is it worth the effort to have bipartisan legislation.

I will submit, I do believe it is worth the effort. Issues come through the committee better. They come through more smoothly. They come to the floor. They pass more smoothly. In fact, there are times when the conscience of the left calls into check the conscience of the right. I am on the right. I am making this confession. We have bipartisan efforts and we need to have partisanship in this Congress. The

reason we need to have it is so that we have viewpoints from both ends of the political spectrum so we can come together with a policy that is best for America. That is the mission and that is the vision.

I didn't listen enough tonight to know if the people on the other side of the aisle, the lamentations group, have actually spoken about some of the other issues, about the national security. I suspect they have. That is part of the repertoire for every night. But regardless, I am going to rebut that as well.

I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that we have some things going on around the world. We are involved in a global war on terror. We know that there is a battleground in Afghanistan and there is a battleground in Iraq. The argument that somehow we went there for the wrong reasons just astonishes me, and I am waiting to hear, maybe ever so faint from the other side of the aisle, the apology for being utterly wrong on weapons of mass destruction. I have not heard that apology from anyone over there, Mr. Speaker. Yet it is true. They have been utterly wrong. I have stood on this floor continually, and I said the law of physics is this. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Now, we knew that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He admitted he had weapons of mass destruction. He said that he destroyed them and got rid of them, but we could, of course, not believe him. We sent the inspectors in. He had the inspectors running around in circles. Anyone who has listened to the tapes of Saddam and some of his henchmen there knows very well that they knew where the inspectors were at all times and they were giving them the runaround. They talked about it on the tapes. There are 12 hours of tapes there that say so. That material, that information, is available to the public today.

And so we know that he had weapons of mass destruction. And we know that he was pulling the wool over the inspectors' eyes. And we know that he used them on his own people. In one instance with only three of the weapons, only three of the canisters for gas, he killed 5,000 of his own people up in Kurdistan. 5,000 people with only three.

We got the news. We got the news a couple of days ago, Mr. Speaker. The information about the collection and the gathering of the finding of the weapons of mass destruction had finally been declassified by the Pentagon. When it was declassified then, we saw Senator Santorum and Chairman Pete Hoekstra go before the world and say, We have found weapons of mass destruction. Since 2003, we've accumulated 500 of the weapons of mass destruction.

Now, there isn't very much information that is available to the public that has been declassified, and I will confine my remarks to the declassified information that is there. But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, the facts are that we have found over 500 weapons of mass destruction and among those are mustard and sarin gas and that they are lethal and the warning that comes out from the Pentagon is that they remain lethal. And so whether these were pre-1991 or post-1991, nobody on that side said, well, he had them up till 1991, then they're gone again. That wasn't a condition. In fact, they are going to find a way to put conditions on it. No matter how much we come up with, no matter what the reality is, they will never make an admission that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when we went in.

And so they were found. They were found perhaps in various locations around Iraq, and the cumulative total right now is 500. We are confident that we will continue to find more. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that if we do not find them and if the terrorists do find them, they will find a way to use them on coalition troops, on Americans. They will use them on their own people if they think they can create the kind of chaos that would melt that country down, get us to pull out and turn that into a training center and a mission operations control center for al Qaeda and for their side of this global war on terror.

No, Mr. Speaker, Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, he had significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and the fact that we didn't end up with great huge warehouses full sitting there waiting for us to ride in on doesn't prove that they don't exist. It has been proven and admitted and no one denies they did exist. Saddam had them. He used them.

And so what I have said is, either you have to believe that Saddam Hussein used his last canister of gas on the Kurds and simply ran out of inventory. And so there he was, his warehouses were empty, and we came in to liberate the Iraqis and he simply had used up his supply of chemical weapons. Either you have to believe that or you have to believe that those weapons that we know existed are somewhere. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. So the King version of that is, everything has to be someplace, Mr. Speaker, and we found 500 of them and there are many more someplace, whether they were hauled across the border by the Russians and whether they were buried in Syria, whether they are buried in Iraq.

But I would ask the people on the other side of the aisle, this group of lamenting pessimists that we hear every night, if you will confess that there are 500 different pieces of weapons of mass destruction, then you can make your arguments about how much that means to you. It means a lot to the American people. It means a lot to this war effort. But I would ask, then, if they happen to be something that the Iraqis forgot about, which one wag actually said, how do you forget about 500 pieces of weapons of mass destruction, if that is the case and you think they don't exist, where did we come up with these MiG-29s that were buried in the Iraqi desert, fully operational MiG-29s. They were ordered to be buried by Saddam Hussein. We found that out. Did we find these jets by having some kind of a United Nations weapons inspector walking around with a metal detector in the desert? No. Did we find them by using intelligence having someone who said, all right, I know what we did, we dug a hole and we buried these MiG-29s, scattered them around the desert. Here's where they are. Here are the GPS coordinates. Go dig them up. They're operational. You can dust the sand off, fuel them up, and fly them out of here.

That didn't happen either, Mr. Speaker. What happened was the wind blew the sand off the tail section of a MiG. Some people looked over there and thought, That's funny. That looks a lot like the tail section of a jet. Let's dig down and see what we have got. They dug down and found out, a MiG-29 sitting there, fully operational, buried in the desert. If they can bury an airplane and we can't find the airplane except by happenstance, weather and good luck, tell me why anyone would think that they couldn't have buried weapons of mass destruction there when we know that they exist, we know that he used them on his own people, we know that he only took three of them to kill 5,000 people and we found 500 of them. And think what kind of devastation that could have been on the American troops and then think about how many others are there somewhere that might fall into the hands of the enemy and be used on Americans, coalition forces, or the brave Iraqis themselves that are in uniform today defending Iraqis to the tune now and the strength of 267,000 Iraqis in uniform defending Iraqis, performing well, fighting well, carrying on operations, taking over security of the country and providing that next level of safety, security and freedom for the Iraqi people.

Mr. Speaker, this has been distorted so far that I don't know if I can express my disappointment with the message that the American people have been getting, having gone to Iraq a number of times myself, having looked our soldiers in the eye, having sat down and been briefed by our commanding officers, including General Casey and General Abazaid, having a working relationship with Secretary Rumsfeld on this and knowing that from the lowest ranking foot soldier or marine to the highest ranking officer in our military, to the Secretary of Defense and to the President himself, everyone's message indexes up and down the line, the message that comes out of there is, we are winning, Mr. Speaker, and we are scoring points, and we are providing more security in Iraq, not less, and the future is getting brighter by the day and the enemy is giving up more and more people and more and more equipment

and more and more ability to carry out operations. Their will to fight is being destroyed, Mr. Speaker, and it is being destroyed systematically.

So, Mr. Speaker, I submit to you that poster of Abu Masab al Zarqawi. Zarqawi was the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. He was pretty difficult to find for a couple of years. He pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and he was an inspiration and a recruiting force and probably the most evil, diabolical person that we have seen on this globe in my lifetime. He is the person that devised the most brutal ways to slaughter people. He is the one who made sure that he was on a videotape beheading Americans. The torture deaths, the burning deaths, those who were killed, a child killed and had bombs planted inside the cavity of the child and have that detonate when the family comes to collect the body. That is the kind of diabolical evil that Zarqawi was.

Now, it is ironic, I think, that he said these things about Americans. Zarqawi said, Americans are the most cowardly of God's creatures. They are an easy quarry. Praise be to God. We ask God to enable us to kill and capture them.

``Americans are the most cowardly of God's creatures.'' That is the last thing I have seen out of Americans. I have not seen any of that out of Americans in Iraq or anywhere else when they put on the uniform. They are the most courageous, the most noble, certainly not the most cowardly, and are far from an easy quarry, Zarqawi.

Zarqawi was in a safe house. I appreciate myself and I think, Mr. Speaker, Americans will appreciate the irony of Abu al Zarqawi being in a safe house. That safe house didn't turn out to be too safe for him and the pictures of that house after it was blown to smithereens by two 500-pound bombs that came from a pair of F-16s would tell the world how unsafe it is to be the number one enemy of the United States of America, of the coalition forces, of the Iraqi people and of the free world.

And so Zarqawi went to meet his maker and checked into the next life. What has met him there, Zarqawi knows today. But if there is a place for evil people where they burn in infinity, I have to believe that Zarqawi is there. I have never seen such evil out of anyone anyplace on the planet in my lifetime.

This is the individual that was the inspiring spirit of al Qaeda in Iraq and pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi was the individual who was the inspiring part that recruited enemy soldiers to work for him. He is the one that organized the funding effort and the military munitions and the equipment that they needed in order to attack coalition forces and the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people, women and children included, where the only discrimination he made was occasionally he would spare the lives of some Sunnis because he had a preference to the Sunnis. This man is now dead and he is gone. In the aftermath of the detonation, the blowing to smithereens of the safe house, there were a lot of data that was gathered there, computer hard drive data and paper documents. And those paper documents and the hard dive data, Mr. Speaker, indexed with a lot of other intelligence that had been gathered around Iraq and other places that were indexed into that location in the world. All of that data that has been pored through now, and I mean all of it, Mr. Speaker, points to one thing: the enemy, the terrorists in Iraq are losing. They are having great difficulty recruiting fighters. They are having difficulty finding funds. They are having difficulty pulling together weapons and they are having difficulty finding the material to improvise explosive devices with.

They are having difficulty logistically because security in Iraq is getting tighter and tighter and tighter and moving from section to city, from city to section, and from city to city. It is ever more dangerous than it was before.

They are getting demoralized and dispirited. The very thing that some of the people on the left would like to have the enemy think about the United States is actually happening to al Qaeda and the terrorists in Iraq. We are very close to putting this thing away.

Their spirit is weak and Von Clausewitz wrote a book, and the name of the book was ``On War,'' and Von Clausewitz's statement on war was the object of war was to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war, and that seems to be a little bit obvious, but I think it is something that bears repeating.

We should all be in the same effort here. We should be in the effort of destroying the enemy's ability to conduct war, and that means we need to turn our military loose on them with a ferocity that we can bring to bear, and we have been doing that. We have been doing a great job, both in Afghanistan and also in Iraq, but additionally to that, we need to be destroying the enemy's will to carry out war, to conduct those acts of war, and that means they need to understand that our will will not be shaken. We will not let up. We will provide all of the troops and all of the support for the troops and all of the equipment and the training and the munitions and the weapons and the tactics and the technology necessary to take them out until this is over because the stakes are far too high. We cannot tolerate stepping back from this confrontation.

We made a commitment to go in there, and there is only one option, and that option is victory, Mr. Speaker. There is no option to any phased pullout or any drawdown unless it is something that it is no longer necessary to have troops there.

There is also an option to escalate if we need to do that, if we see the need to do that, but if we need to do that, that option is on the table. If we needed to double the troops there, that is what would happen, if that is what the generals asked for because this enemy, this one is dead. The ones beneath him, some of them, many of them are actually dead, and the one who follows will soon be. Those that are part of the officers will be sent into the next life as well, but at some point, they are going to understand that they cannot carry on this fight, that it is absolutely hopeless.

The best part of it is, Mr. Speaker, it will be hopeless when the political solution in Iraq is fully manifested. Now they have a prime minister. Now they have a fully operational Cabinet, one that was carefully chosen and it was a little bit of a struggle to get to that agreement, but their minister of defense and the minister of the interior, in particular, are very, very important cabinet positions. Those positions are now filled with good people. People that are going to have the best interests of the future of Iraq in mind, not their best interests in mind, but the best interests of the future of Iraq.

That means that the minister of defense is going to continue aggressively taking out the enemy. We have seen that kind of leadership out of the prime minister, and we will see that kind of leadership out of the minister of defense.

The minister of the interior is going to be looking at their national resources and thinking how do we convert this oil into cash, and they will set up a formula to do that. When that cash starts to flow into Iraq, prosperity begins, and it will take a little while, but it will take root. When prosperity takes root, the root that is there now for freedom goes deeper and wider. It has something to nourish itself, and that will be the profit that comes from marketing the national resources called oil, and the wealth of that will generate the many layers and the cycles and the interconnectivity of the economy.

That is all going to take place. That is going to take place because the Iraqi people see themselves as Iraqis first and Shi'ias, Sunnis and Kurds second. They understand that they have one chance at freedom, and that is as a unified Nation, and they are fighting together to do that, and we need to stand with them. We made that pledge.

Our commander-in-chief is the commander-in-chief. The President of the United States has that constitutional duty and responsibility, Mr. Speaker, and we need to stand with him.

When I see amendments come out here on this floor that undermine the President's authority to conduct this military operation as he sees fit, then that is unnecessary interference. If there is anything that takes away a tool from the battlefield, if there is anything that undermines our ability

to do negotiations to work with and cooperate with the Iraqis, that is undermining the war effort, and that should not ever happen out of this Congress.

We committed to this task. This Congress voted to commit to this task, and we put up at least two resolutions since then committed to this task. We will, Mr. Speaker, stay committed to this task, and those who work against it are working on the side, and this is what makes this guy, what made him smile was when our left-handed leaders here stand up and say we cannot win: wrong war, wrong place, wrong time.

Some say that the American soldiers are carrying out operations that are not becoming of American soldiers. Things happen in war, but our soldiers are conducting themselves with honor and with dignity.

Zarqawi, Mr. Speaker, is now gone, checked into the next life. I will tell you, then we have another leader in the other side of the theater in Afghanistan that ran a tape just other the day. This, Mr. Speaker, is Ayman al Zawahiri. He would be second-in-command among the al Qaeda and operating, we think, out of the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has put out a tape, and let me see, it is kind of interesting to watch how they do this when they take some serious blows, as they did when Zarqawi was killed by those American bombs.

As we see the intelligence that they are operating out of desperation and despair, that every bit of that intelligence says that they are losing the war, and when we see these weapons of mass destruction have been discovered and accumulated since 2003, when the people on the other side of the aisle say, well, that is not really any big deal, killing Zarqawi was not that big a deal and finding the weapons of mass destruction is not that big a deal and the intelligence is there that says that they are dispirited and they are running out of resources and they are having trouble recruiting, that is not that big a deal.

Then we have Zawahiri who does about a 3\1/2\ minute video. He is calling out also I think in desperation, and he says I am calling upon the Muslims in Kabul, in particular, and in all Afghanistan, in general, and for the sake of God to stand in the face of the infidel forces that are invading Muslim lands.

Well, I do not know that we have invaded Muslim lands, and I am surely convinced that there is a lot of strong Christians there. That would be a definition, by my definition, would mean they are not infidels. He also calls out to Egyptians. He is an Egyptian-born fugitive, Zawahiri, who says, here is his operation. The collapse of American power in Vietnam, they ran and left. He thinks that is going to happen in Afghanistan. He thinks it is going to happen in Iraq.

Americans did not run and leave, but they were deployed out of Vietnam by the direction of this Congress. This Congress lost their will, and losing our will back in 1974, Mr. Speaker, has given inspiration to a man like this in 2006. It is costing American lives today, coalition lives today in Iraqi, and innocent and civilian lives today because that has been what has inspired this Egyptian-born fugitive who also said in his tape, the young men of Islam in the universities and schools of Kabul should carry out their duties and essentially go volunteer for Jihad.

But we have a prime minister in Afghanistan. They are a free country. They are a sovereign nation, Mr. Speaker, and people went to the polls in Afghanistan for the first time with those routes to the polls and the polling places being guarded by American soldiers, by coalition soldiers, and for the first time in that place on this planet, free people went to the polls and elected their national leaders, chose and helped direct their national destiny, the first time ever in Afghanistan in the history of the world that that has happened. They elected Karzai.

So he says, of Zawahiri, the truly elected leader, the leader of the Afghan people says, Zawahiri is the first enemy of the Afghan people, the first enemy, and then the enemy of the rest of the world, says Karzai during his press conference. He killed Afghans for years, thousands, and then he went to America and destroyed the twin towers.

Mr. Speaker, Karzai went on to say we and Afghanistan want him arrested and put before justice. Well, Mr. Speaker, many of Zawahiri's supporters have been delivered to justice, perhaps 600 of them in these last operations. Coalition forces, Afghani troops and Americans are serving well in Afghanistan in some of the most intense operations that we have seen over there in some time, and they are serving effectively over there, Mr. Speaker. They are going to preserve and protect the freedom of Afghanistan.

I just have not heard the criticism of the other side of the aisle with respect to Afghanistan as I have with Iraq. I am wondering why that is. Twenty-five million people freed in Afghanistan; 25 million people freed in Iraq. It takes a little longer in Iraq than Afghanistan. Fewer casualties in Afghanistan. There are more in Iraq certainly, and it is sad and it is a tragedy for every family. It is a tragedy for every family, but they can take great pride in knowing that that sacrifice has great value, frees people around the globe, and it is not just the freedom of the Iraqi people or just the freedom of the Afghan people.

This is an inspiration of freedom that will one day free every Arab in the world. Everyone through the Middle East will one day breathe free and perhaps even in my lifetime we will see that happen.

The return for that sacrifice does not just do that. Some may think why do I care about freedom for an Arab people. I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that to the extent that the globe is free, we can also be more free in this country, safer in this country, Mr. Speaker, because wherever there are free people, they are not plotting and scheming to go to war against us.

The United States of America has never gone to war against another free people. We work out our differences in a democratic process. To the extent that the globe becomes entirely free, with people who can have their differences in the voting booth instead of on the battlefield, is also the extent that the world becomes a safer place. Even though we have had ongoing conflicts going on around the world, it seems like it never ends, and in fact, Mr. Speaker, it does not end. It has been a long, long time since we have had conflict that took lives by the millions as opposed to lives by the thousands or even the hundreds.

That means that millions of lives, I believe, have been saved, and if this inspiration for the Arab people, if Afghanistan and if Iraq become the lodestars of inspiration for a free people, that echoes across the Arab world the same way that freedom echoed across Eastern Europe, Mr. Speaker, that is the formula for victory in this war. We can get there. We are getting there.

Freedom has never been easy and it has never been without price, but freedom is priceless, Mr. Speaker, and it is a profound honor for those who have given their lives also, for those who have given their limbs and other parts of their bodies or a year out of their life to give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom and to help ensure safety and freedom for the American people for perhaps a long time to come, and that, Mr. Speaker, is the reason why we fight.

Now, there is another subject matter that needs to be brought up because I hear from the other side of the aisle that it is intolerable. It is intolerable to have the level of violence in Iraq that we have. It is intolerable to have the level of casualties in Iraq that we have. So, therefore, we should cut and run, Mr. Speaker, and that is almost the words that get used, and sometimes they actually do get used.

Well, the ranking member of the Defense Subcommittee came here on the floor some months ago, and in news conferences around the country and nationally, and then globally it got picked up and certainly by Al Jazeera and Arab TV that we should pull out of Iraq immediately. Here we are holding together this country and nurturing and training troops, and we have someone who is viewed as a leader in the armed services in this Congress who says we should immediately pull out and pull back to the horizon. That was much discussed around America, and sure it was discussed in the Middle East. I am sure it was a great inspiration to people like Zawahiri. In fact, it was a great inspiration to Zarqawi. He was alive then.

But Mr. Speaker, if we should pull out to the horizon, the horizon to me

would be some place in range, someplace where kind of the top of the hills so you look down in the valley and shoot down in there if you need to or rush down there if you have to. No. We found out where that horizon was in this past week, Mr. Speaker, when that Member, the representative from Pennsylvania, said, no, we should immediately redeploy to Okinawa. Now, how many people in America could have gotten that multiple choice question right? I would have missed it, Mr. Speaker. If you would have given me two answers, if you would have said Okinawa and let me see if I can pick another one, Australia, I would have gotten it wrong. I would have picked Australia. If you had given me 10 choices across there, I think you maybe could have picked two or three, I could have, as being more likely or less likely but Okinawa? I would have never done that in an essay question or a fill-in-the-blank.

I do not know where he came up with Okinawa as a place to deploy all of our troops over to. It is not a tactical thing that makes any sense. It is not a political thing that makes any sense to take our troops and say we are going to take you out of Iraq and we are going to put you in the barracks in Okinawa where you can train, let us say train beach landings in Okinawa to get ready to one day go back and fight in the desert in urban warfare. Does not make sense to me? Now, if he said let us deploy them down to the border, to the illegals that are coming across this border, that would have made sense, but Okinawa? To say we are going to mount military operations out of Okinawa to go into Iraq in case there is some civil unrest where you have to be there quickly, where you have to have boots on the ground, when our troops, our coalition troops and Iraqis have to understand the neighborhood, have to know the people, have to have relationships there in order to be effective? Okinawa?

Okinawa? Okinawa? I don't think that there is anybody in America that can, with a straight face, defend such a proposal. And it causes me some concern about the foundation of where that came from.

I would like to know. I would like to know if this is kind of a mental equation where you take a kaleidoscope and you bump it and it looks a certain way; and then you leave it like that for a while and you say, this is the way it is. And then over time, you bump it again and it cracks a little differently and you get a different picture entirely. I think that is how we come up with Okinawa. It can't be a rational, deductive reasoning path that gets you there.

Even the argument that you can mount air missions out of Okinawa to come into Iraq and somehow they can be effective from there, no, Mr. Speaker, we have many bases a lot closer to Iraq. If there was the idea we would run out of those bases or fly out of those bases, it would not be out of Okinawa.

But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we do have a base agreement there in Okinawa. We do that in the aftermath of any of our military operations. We have open discussions with the sovereign nations that control those territories and we enter into those agreements so that we can have better security and be better positioned militarily. We have bases in Germany and we have them scattered around in other places around the globe. We have Gitmo down in Cuba that is a legacy left over from the Spanish American War of 1898. So that is something that a sovereign nation must do, Mr. Speaker.

So I think we have covered some of this with regard to the enemy, but the issue of the casualties being too great needs to be raised, Mr. Speaker. So I am going to submit something.

I was asking the question on how dangerous is it for a regular civilian in Iraq. How dangerous is it? What would it be like when I see violence on television day after day after day? I think sometimes they must announce to the television cameras there is going to be a detonation of an IED so they can set their cameras up and be homed in on the site so they can see the dust and the smoke from the explosion and the flying parts that come out of there.

How else would they know to have a video camera set up down there? And I know some of that film comes from the enemy. They set the cameras up and make sure it gets to the news. But we see it day after day after day, something that would appear to be an intolerable level of violence, and something that the people on the other side of the aisle surely can't stand to see, because they come down here on a daily basis and say, bring them home, Mr. President, we can't tolerate this type of violence.

But what must it be like for a regular Iraqi citizen, an average citizen that could be living in a random place in Iraq? They might live in a small town or city somewhere. But what are the odds that you are going to be killed in an explosion of a suicide bomber or the detonation of an improvised explosive device?

I thought I would look into that, Mr. Speaker, and I came up with some very interesting statistics, and I have them here.

This is a little example that tells us about the violent death rate across some countries, some of them selected for their high rates of violence and some selected for their low rates of violence, like the United States; but it is designed to tell us about how dangerous it is to be a regular citizen in Iraq, Mr. Speaker.

We went to a couple of Web pages and pulled the most reliable information that is available. This is the information that is used by Congressional Research Service people who provide us factual data to be used here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and in committees. This is the factual data that is used as a foundation for the decisions that are made in Congress. That factual data came up with these numbers for us.

The violent death rates for civilians are rated in the per 100,000 category. So here is the United States: 4.28. That means out of every 100,000 Americans each year, 4.28 of them, on average, meet a violent death. That is considered, in the civilized world, a relatively low violent death rate. There are other countries that have lower rates, certainly. Many of the States have lower violent death rates, including Iowa, I might add.

But 4.28 is compared to Mexico, with a rate that is more than three times higher. About three times higher. The violent death rate in Mexico is 13.02 per 100,000.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I take us to where Iraq is. This is our subject here, Iraq's violent death rates. An average citizen in Iraq is going to be faced with this statistical reality, that 27.51 Iraqis will die a violent death out of every 100,000.

Now, keep in mind, there are 25 million of them. So you can calculate what this number is, and I just haven't done this for this survey. But what does that compare nation to nation? Well, it is clear that Iraq is about twice as dangerous as Mexico, 27.51 compared to 13.02.

So you are about twice as likely to die a violent death in Iraq as an average citizen as you are in Mexico. But as you can see here, about seven times more likely, 6-point-something times more likely to die a violent death in Iraq than you are in the United States.

So it is not so safe by that standard, Mr. Speaker. But when we look down the line on some of these other representative countries, for example, Venezuela, with Hugo Chavez down there, who is really running a tight ship down there, I hear, with 31.61 violent deaths per 100,000.

It is more dangerous to be an average citizen in Venezuela than it is an average citizen in Iraq, Mr. Speaker. And even more dangerous yet in Jamaica, only by a little bit, with 32.42 violent deaths per 100,000.

So there is your comparison. It gets a little more dangerous as we go down the line: Iraq at 27.51, Jamaica at 32.42. But South Africa, Mr. Speaker, has 49.6 violent deaths per 100,000. Significantly more dangerous to be an average citizen in South Africa, in the nation of South Africa, than it is to be an average citizen in Iraq. Not quite twice, but moving up the line along in that direction.

Then we go to Colombia, almost a neighboring country down there. They produce a lot of drugs down there that come up into the United States. There is a drug culture down there and it is violent there, and the death rate is 61.78 violent deaths per 100,000. Clearly

more than twice as high a death rate in Colombia as there is in Iraq.

Now, that seems to be a little bit shocking, but when you go to Swaziland, 88.61 violent deaths per 100,000. So you are up there a good solid 2\1/2\ times more dangerous to be walking around in Swaziland as a regular citizen than it is to be walking around in Iraq as a regular citizen.

That gives us a sense of the level of violence that is there. Can they tolerate that level of violence? Can they be a sovereign nation with that level of violence? If it never diminishes from where it is today, can they still continue to move on and have a civil society; and could they still produce and deliver electricity and goods and services and have shops open up and close down at the end of the day and people could go on with commerce?

The answer to that is, well, they are doing it, Mr. Speaker, in Venezuela, in Jamaica, South Africa, Colombia and Swaziland every day, and we are not hearing a word about that in the news. But every day we see the violence in Iraq that the cameras have been trained on before it happens, Mr. Speaker, and it is a distorted viewpoint.

Safe in the United States, three times more dangerous in Mexico than in the United States. They have a drug culture down there too that is coming at us at a rated of $65 billion worth of illegal drugs a year, but almost seven times more dangerous in Iraq than it is in the United States, but then incrementally more dangerous in Venezuela, Jamaica, South Africa, Colombia, and Swaziland.

I think I made my point on that, Mr. Speaker.

So, then, okay we are talking nation to nation, Iraq compared to other nations. But what is it like for those of us who live in cities? We have a sense of what it is like here, for example, in Washington, D.C. Well, I just happen to have, Mr. Speaker, this little chart right here that lays out the relative violent death rate for civilians in the cities.

Now, I would point out that we have exempted military deaths in Iraq and police deaths in Iraq, and done so because they are involved in combat over there in a war against the terrorists. So they are faced with running into that on a daily basis and those casualties will certainly be higher. But we are comparing an average civilian to an average civilian in some of these other places in the world.

So we will start out here. Let us go to the low side of this, with 27.51 deaths in Iraq. Now, we could not find any reliable statistics for city-by-city data of violent deaths in Iraq, so I can't give you Mozul, I can't give you, Mr. Speaker, Kirkuk, or Basra, or Tikrit, or any of those places. That information is not available by the CRS research that has been done on these Web pages that provided this data. If it doesn't come through CRS, I don't have enough confidence in it being reliable. In fact, we just simply could not find it, so we put out what we have.

An average citizen anywhere in Iraq, to give you a sense of what it must feel like to live there, compared to Oakland, California, it is a little bit safer in Oakland, California, with 27.51 deaths per hundred thousand in Iraq and 26.1 in Oakland, California. So if you are walking the streets of Oakland, California, and you are wondering whether it is dangerous or not for you there, you should have about the same kind of feeling if you are living in a random place in Iraq.

That doesn't mean there are not highly violent locations in Iraq, but it just means that overall average citizens feel about the same as in Oakland, California.

But St. Louis is a little more dangerous than Iraq, on average, with 34.4 deaths per 100,000. Atlanta is more dangerous yet than Iraq, at 34.9 violent civilian deaths per 100,000.

Someone said, well, you didn't include the policemen's deaths in these cities. They are not included in this data. And I can't tell you actually whether they are or whether they aren't, but I went back and looked at the level of deaths that we had in the last year, one in Atlanta, and none in Washington, D.C., so you can see statistically it just simply is not relevant. So that issue doesn't really matter to this debate.

So we have 27.51 deaths per 100,000 in Iraq, average citizen; Baltimore, 37.7. If you feel safe in Baltimore, you ought to feel safe in Iraq. Detroit, 41.8. The rate is going up. If you feel safe in Detroit, you ought to feel safe in Iraq. Washington, D.C., 45.9 violent civilian deaths per 100,000, and 27.51 in Iraq.

Now we are getting up there to that number that is approaching twice as dangerous in Washington, D.C. as it is for an average citizen in a random place in Iraq. If you feel safe in Washington, D.C., you should feel equally safe in a random place in Iraq. There are many places more dangerous than that, but a random place in Iraq.

Now, when you get to New Orleans, and this number is pre-Katrina, 53.1 violent deaths per 100,000. And guess what, Mr. Speaker? They called out the National Guard and deployed troops down to New Orleans because the level of violence got so high down there, even with the diminished population. There was a violent murderous event down there, and so the Governor called out the National Guard to deploy them on the streets of New Orleans to get control of that city.

Is anyone on that side of the aisle talking about that, about calling the troops up and mobilizing the National Guard to go to New Orleans because of the crime rate? Well, it has finally happened, Mr. Speaker. This crime rate of 53.1, that is almost twice as high as the crime rate in Iraq, might well be higher than twice the crime rate in Iraq after this last flurry of crime they have had, where there were five people that were executed in one vehicle. We don't know whether it was over drugs or a grudge or both, but likely that would be the foundational excuse. There would never be a reason for doing something that horrible, Mr. Speaker.

So the Governor called out the National Guard. And the people on this side of the aisle, they are not saying, what is your exit strategy, Governor Blanco? When are you going to get the National Guard out of New Orleans? We don't need to have troops deployed there, in an American city that ought to be a civilized place. They are not calling for pulling the troops out. They are not calling for an exit strategy.

They are not objecting to troops being deployed to New Orleans to keep order for a simple crime rather than the kind of violence that comes in Iraq from the terrorists that are trying to turn that society into an uncivil society, Mr. Speaker, the terrorists that are attempting to break that country up and start a civil war; the terrorists that think if they just kill enough people, maim enough people, if they can kill enough people in a heinous enough fashion, sooner or later everyone will say, enough, I can't take it any more. Will you please just stop killing us in the brutal fashion that you are.

Why would anybody think they would ever stop? That is their religious belief. That is their religious mission. They think somehow their path to salvation is brutally killing us; killing people who are not like them. And I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that they kill more Muslims than they do Christians or Jews. Not that they are their preferred target, but it is just simply, I think, because they are handier.

Those who announce that there is a civil war in Iraq, that resolution that has been introduced over in the Senate and I believe a resolution that may have been introduced here in the House that says there is a civil war in Iraq, how can they come to such a conclusion, Mr. Speaker?

I will define a civil war in Iraq so folks can have a measurement to go by, and that is this: 267,000 Iraqis in uniform defending Iraqis trained on the job today, taking over more than 30 bases, covering a high percentage of the real estate in Iraq, Mr. Speaker, and these Iraqis are recruited, and they are mixed up. They are not sorted out by Kurds and Shi'as and Sunnis. They are blended together in one force.

When those Iraqis choose up sides and start shooting at each other wearing the same uniform, Mr. Speaker, that will be the definition of a civil war.

So great strides have been made. There is a great reason for optimism. There will be a successful conclusion. This Nation will not blink. This Nation will not retreat. This Nation will stand forward until victory. There is no alternative but victory, Mr. Speaker.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, June 26, 2006, at 12:30 p.m., for morning hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate the responsibility and the privilege to speak to you in this House and to represent my constituents here.

I came over here to raise the issue on a number of bits of subject matter. And as I sat and listened, of course, the subject changed a little bit as I listened to the group here on the other side. And I think that it is important to edify Americans as to the difference between Republicans and Democrats. And I am just really grateful that when I was born and I was reared in a family, I began to build a certain attitude about life. And as that attitude unfolded, I was taught from the beginning to fend for yourself. You are going to have to get out there and make something out of yourself in this lifetime because nobody is going to do it for you. Your ship will never come in. Take control of your life. So at an early age, I realized that when I was born, my glass was half full and it was my job to get out of bed, go to work every day, and go ahead and fill that glass up.

I was not raised with an attitude and neither did I gather an attitude that my glass was half empty. I was always grateful that I was born here in America. And when I would ask my parents, what is the best country in the world to come from? They would always answer, The United States of America is the best country in the world. Eat your cold mashed potatoes. There are people starving in China.

That is kind of the composite of the upbringing that I had. But grateful for this Nation, and I would always ask why, what is the difference? And probe into these other countries. And, of course, the people starving in China part was what we talked about then. But country after country in the aftermath of World War II, we were the only surviving industrial nation, and this Nation that had preserved freedom for the world, for the entire globe, and had we not done that, we would not be standing here today speaking in English, for example, Mr. Speaker, but speaking in a free way with free ideas and having this free exchange.

I stand at the same spot on which Tom DeLay gave his last speech here in this Congress. And he made a point that I think is an important one. And that is that, yes, there is partisanship and, yes, we have sharp disagreements. We have those disagreements because we have a Constitution that protects our right to do so. But he made a point that was, you show me a Nation that does not have partisanship and I will show you a tyranny. So when we disagree, we need to be grateful that we can disagree, and we should base that on fundamental philosophical differences and highlight those.

But there is a difference in human nature. Part of human nature is like me that sees our glass half full. Part of human nature is like the people on the other side of the aisle that see their glass and the glass of their constituents as half empty. And that is all right if you look at it from that perspective. But then you have to take it to the next level. And the next level is those that see their glass half full set about going to work to fill it, and we pull each other up the ladder because we know that as we all go out and work and produce and market and save and invest that that helps everyone, that this economy grows. This is not a zero sum game. It is not a goose that has so many golden eggs in it where we can just simply slaughter the goose and harvest the eggs. It is an economy that needs to have inputs. It needs to have capital investment, both intellectual capital and real dollars in a real way. We need to have entrepreneurs. We need to keep generating new ideas. This organism of our economy, has a lot of components in it, and it needs to be working and churning. And when we go in there and we tap into this organism of our economy and we start to take from it and not put into it, then it slows down the growth of our economy and it grows slowly.

But this was an economy that when Ronald Reagan was sworn in outside this building in 1980, the Dow Jones was below 1,000. I do not remember the exact number, but I know it was below 1,000. Today it is at 11,000. That is a good measure of what has happened with our economy, and that should be something that should tell, Mr. Speaker, the American people that when your glass is half full and you go to work to fill that glass up the rest of the way and you help your brethren up the ladder along the way that the sum total of the size of the pie, which is divided up amongst now 300 million Americans, gets greater and greater and greater, and that means when the pie is bigger, the size of the pieces can be bigger for each individual that is involved. This is not a matter of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. This is a matter which the argument that I am hearing really slows down this economy and that when you tax someone for the labor they do, you punish them for that labor.

Ronald Reagan also said what you tax, you get less of.

So we have a first lien on all productivity in America. The Federal Government has the first lien on all productivity in America. So we tax production. We tax earnings, savings and investment. We tax Social Security, we tax your pension, we tax your capital gains, your income tax, your corporate income tax, your partnership income tax. Also we tax your earnings on investments and your Alternative Minimum Tax. All those things are taxed.

Well, when there is a tax applied to anything, it is a disincentive to

produce. So the first lien on all productivity in America slows down the productivity in America, but it does gather dollars from those wages to run the Federal Government.

Now, if you think your glass is half empty and it is not a growing economy, but simply something, a same size pie every year that gets divided up differently depending on who has the political power, not depending on who produces into this economy, eventually what you are doing is you are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, harvesting the eggs and thinking somehow there is going to be another goose come along.

Mr. Speaker, it will not. There will not be another goose come along. This is the one we are going to have to nurture. This economy that is growing, the one producing the golden eggs that are popping out here, it is because people have invested capital and taken risks and put in sweat equity and had a vision and made a sacrifice with their time and their dollars, and sometimes from their families, to make their businesses run or to go to their jobs to help their companies operate, or sit in the basement or up in the attic working sometimes working on inventions that become creative inventions that increase and contribute to this dynamic economy that we have.

So much was said about the national debt. My glass is half full and I am going to work to fill it up. Most Americans are doing that. That is why Republicans have control of the House, the Senate and the White House.

Some folks believe their glass is half empty, and if they sit around with their tin cup, then let me tell you, that cup will never be full. You have to take charge of your life.

Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have compassion. In fact, everybody in America has access to high quality health care. We have the highest percentage of personal ownership of their homes ever in the history of the United States, and, I would submit, in the history of the world. That home ownership was at 68 percent the last time I checked. If you go into the poverty regions, you have a higher home ownership there than ever before. This administration has been great for people who are on the lower income side of this, and I have got a proposal I will talk about that will make it even better yet.

But I want to give everybody hope, Mr. Speaker. I want to give them all hope that there is a reason to get out of bed to go to work and make your life better.

In fact, to solve the pathologies in the United States, it is a pretty simple equation, and that is simply this: For people who are going to have children, to get married and stay married, get a job and keep a job. Statistically that solves almost all of society's pathologies.

It is not a complicated equation. We need to encourage people to go to work. Most do. Out of 300 million people in America, there are 7.5 million on the unemployment rolls. Those numbers have been actually inching down as new jobs have been created.

There is about another 4.3 million that are on welfare, and another 5.3 million that have exhausted their unemployment benefits that are still looking for a job but are not technically listed on the unemployment list.

That as a percentage of America isn't particularly large, but altogether, between the ages of 16 and on up through retirement, there are 77.5 million non-working Americans in this society. We have a large labor force there that we can go to when we need that labor force. But we have made good progress with the unemployment lists also there.

We haven't reached the lowest unemployment. I would point out that when people say we are at full employment at 5 percent unemployment, or 4.7 percent unemployment, I don't accept that number. The lowest unemployment that I can find statistically throughout, at least the last 100 years or so that we have kept records, is 1.2 percent unemployment, and that was during World War II. So I qualify that statement.

But that was when we had all hands on deck. If we really get in trouble, we can be all hands on deck again. We haven't needed to do that. So, we do have a large labor force that is here and we can draw from that.

But as I listened to the Members on the other side of the aisle, the group that has consistently been down here using the word ``Republican'' as if it were a four letter word, I don't know how to spell it with only four letters, but I know how they say it when it sounds like a four letter word. They talk about the national debt, they talk about a balanced budget and they talk about the balanced budget under Bill Clinton.

I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, there was a balanced budget under Bill Clinton, but there were budgets that were sent to President Clinton that were vetoed because he sent them back and demanded more spending, over and over again.

This government was shut down by a veto of Bill Clinton, not because he was insisting that we should balance the budget. He was insisting that he wanted more money. That was the issue here back during the Clinton years. I will admit that there was a partisan divide going on during that time, and I will say that the Republicans in this Congress presented those first balanced budgets that we had seen in decades, and they insisted that the budgets be balanced, and that is what happened. It wasn't because Bill Clinton was ponding on his podium asking for balanced budgets. He was demanding more spending.

Now, a decade later, I hear Members of his party come here on the floor it take credit for the balanced budget during the Clinton years, when, yes, he signed them all right, he did not have a lot of choice, but this Congress, this Republican Congress, made him balance the budget. In fact, they balanced the budget and they required him to sign it.

Then, in the aftermath or in the latter months of the Clinton administration, we had this thing going on called the dot.com bubble. I don't know if we realized it was a dot.com bubble until it burst. But when you think about it, it had to happen. In fact, my instincts were telling me that it was this; that we had technologically, because of great inventions by Americans and the stimulation that we have here and the structure that rewards productivity, invented the technology that allowed us to store and transfer information more effectively, more efficiently and cheaper than ever before.

It was an amazing ride to see that dot.com bubble go up in our stock markets, because the people were investing in these dot.com companies on the anticipation that there would be a financial reward on the other end that would be in proportion to our ability to store and transfer that information more cheaply than ever before.

Well, it didn't work out quite that way, Mr. Speaker, because information has value, but it isn't measured just by the amount of information. It is measured by its commercial value, and information as a commercial value has to allow you to produce a good or service and that deliver that good or service more efficiently than before, otherwise as a business you don't have an interest for paying for that information.

In the case of the Internet would be a good example, it is also marketable that you can get people to pay for their Internet service so that they can have recreational information on the Internet service. So you can use that Internet for business purposes and you will pay for that, and people also pay for it for recreational purposes. That is the only two ways that information has a value in the marketplace. So we overspeculated on our ability to store and transfer information more cheaply and more efficiently than ever before, and that was the dot.com bubble.

Well, the lawsuit on Microsoft I believe was the lance that pierced the dot.com bubble. It would have burst anyway, because it was a growing bubble that was speculation. But when that lawsuit came and the lance of the lawsuit against Microsoft pierced the dot.com bubble, then we saw the stock market begin to contract. In fact, a lot of us will say we were moving into a recession, and I will say we were, and that was at the end of the Clinton administration.

On top of that, we inaugurated President Bush out here on the West Portico. When that happened, he was in the middle of this bursting of the dot.com bubble and the decline in our stock market and our economy.

We hardly got a handle on what was happening there, and along came September 11, the terrible damage to our financial institutions in the heart of New York City at ground zero, the Twin Towers, and, of course, the attacks on the Pentagon and the crash of the plane in Pennsylvania. That was an attack on our financial centers that sent it into a further downward spiral.

So we had two things working against this economy: The formerly balanced budget, running into the dot.com bubble that shut down the revenues here and dramatically reduced our revenues here in the Federal Government, and on the heels of that came the September 11 attack and the impact on our financials in the United States of America was dramatic.

Then on the heels of that we had to create a Homeland Security Department, that spent billions of dollars to protect 300 million Americans, and has done so very effectively. We have not been attacked on our own soil since that time in any effective way. And additionally, we had to appropriate money because we went to war in the global war on terror.

All of those things stacked against this economy, and, do you know, we are growing back out of this thing, because there was vision on the part of President Bush, there was vision on the part of his financial advisers and vision on the part of the leadership in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, that had the fortitude to come to this floor and propose tax cuts that stimulated this economy.

If President Bush had not had the vision and the courage to do that, if this Congress hadn't had the vision and courage to step forward and propose and initiate these tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts, as we know them now, we would have seen a depression, not just a recession, but a depression in this economy, Mr. Speaker, and that would have been the price we would have paid if we would have stuck with, I will say the philosophy that we have heard over here on how we ought to be running a balanced budget.

The people on the other side of the aisle, if they had been in the majority in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, would have proposed tax increases. They would have said, well, first of all, let's not take on these global terrorists. Let's figure out a way that we can curl up into a national fetal position, and perhaps we could have just put enough guards at every school and every bus stop and every theater and every church and maybe even every home and turned America into one great big, huge Israel, and somehow or another cowered away and apologized to the terrorists, and maybe they wouldn't have attacked us again. But they would have. They attacked us in the first place, didn't they?

So under the leadership of the other side of the aisle, there would not have been a proactive tip-of-the-spear effort in Afghanistan, there would not have been a proactive tip-of-the-spear effort in Iraq. They would have turned the United States into one huge Israel, and that would be a defensive posture with enemies all around, wondering where they are going to come from next.

That is not the way I want to live, Mr. Speaker. I refuse to live that way. I insist that we exercise our rights to live in freedom, and freedom requires risk, it requires sacrifice, and there is danger involved. But it is worth it. It is worth it from the time Patrick Henry articulated it so well, it is worth it from the time that it has been articulated so well by my colleagues on this floor on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, and I am honored just to be a part of that.

But we took on the war on terror. And it is interesting to me that before our troops went into Afghanistan, there was much objection to the foolhardy nature of mounting a military operation in a country that had never been invaded successfully and occupied before in all of history. And yet that took place successfully on the part of our United States military, working with our coalition forces, many of our coalition forces.

They said it couldn't be done. They said it was another Vietnam. They said the passes in the mountains would be impassable, and no one could sustain a military operation through there because they would be ambushed over and over again, and that the people in Afghanistan couldn't handle freedom. They had never had that freedom before. They had never voted there before. This wasn't the kind of people that could handle freedom.

Well, they were right about one thing, Mr. Speaker. They had never voted there before. But there were American soldiers and American Marines that were on the ground guarding the travel routes to the polling places, guarding the polling places, and I am very proud of the Iowa National Guardsmen that were there at that time on that soil that provided an opportunity for the Afghani people for the first time in the history of the world since Adam and Eve to go to the polls and choose their leaders and direct their national destiny of 25 million people, a huge accomplishment when that liberty bell rang across the globe. And the inspiration that comes from that carries over to the issue of Iraq, Mr. Speaker.

Now, this issue with Iraq, it is the same size country; 25 million people in Afghanistan, 25 million people until Iraq. The complaint I hear on the other side of the aisle is that Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush didn't listen to the military advisers because the people on the other side of the aisle found a general that disagreed. I don't know if it was a Sunday afternoon or Monday morning quarterback, but they found a general that disagreed.

Well, I understand there are about 9,000 generals in our military, and if you can find one that disagrees, in fact, I saw six that disagreed, and it takes a long time to gather those kind of people.

I will bet that some of those people will show up in the campaigns for the Presidency working for candidates by the year 2008. I expect I will see some of those generals that claim that they counseled for the opposite, working with and for Presidential candidates, for Democrats on the other side of the aisle. I am not suggesting that they have a motive, I am just suggesting that they have a different philosophy about the future of America, even though they are generals and even though they are literally a handful out of the 9,000 generals that we have.

But the advice that the President followed and the advice that Secretary Rumsfeld followed was the same people advising in Afghanistan for the most part as advised in Iraq. The same number of people, Mr. Speaker, 25 million people in Afghanistan, 25 million people in Iraq.

We heard the same arguments:

It's another Vietnam.

It's a quagmire.

You never can do that.

No one could go into Iraq and invade and occupy that country.

We didn't, really. We liberated them. We had an armored column go across Iraq to Baghdad in less time than ever in the history of the world. Baghdad, itself, was the largest city ever in the history of the world to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power. Absolutely a true statement. Berlin was the next largest that I could find, and that was far smaller than Baghdad.

But they only occupied it for a split second as they erroneously put up the American flag and then realized, This is the wrong message to send to the Iraqi people. We're here to liberate you. And they ran the Iraqi flag back up the flagpole. You haven't seen an American flag fly around there since then because the Iraqi people are liberated. They give me smiles, and they give me thumbs up when I go to that country because they are still grateful.

The gentleman from Pennsylvania that has been on the floor so many hours here in the last couple of weeks, he finds a different view. You can find whatever it is that you want to support your argument, Mr. Speaker. But in this case, I stand with our soldiers. I stand with our marines. I stand with the judgment that said, go to Iraq. And, in fact, there have been some announcements today that I could take up in a little bit.

I am very happy at this time to yield so much time as he may consume to my friend Mr. Ehlers for any remarks he may choose to make.

Thank you, my friend, Mr. Ehlers. I appreciate your input on that. I would say with regard to that, that I believe that there is a unique American character, a unique American culture; there is a vibrancy within this overarching American culture that causes us to sometimes challenge the rules, sometimes look into the science, sometimes wonder why cannot that be, why can't we accomplish that. There is a creativity that comes within this culture, this vibrancy that we have, and it is based and rooted in our freedom and in our property rights and in the reward that comes from that, when, say, a Bill Gates comes up in our lifetime and in a matter of a couple of decades turns himself into the richest man in the world. And what a thing he has done for the standard of living and the quality of life for everybody on this planet.

I would yield.

Reclaiming my time, you and Mr. Gates both are giving nerds a good name.

Taking up from there, the issue of the balanced budget by the people on the other side of the aisle. I spoke to what happened here in the nineties to balance the budget and what happened to the economy when the dot.com bubble burst and the 9/11 attacks came, and we had to invest billions and billions into homeland security and invest billions and billions into the overall global war on terror. Things will go fast on you in a hurry when you have got to do quick reaction, but the tax cuts have brought a lot of that back. We are moving in the right direction.

I am willing to balance this budget. The people on the other side of the aisle are willing to balance the budget if they can raise somebody else's taxes, not their constituents' taxes, but perhaps my constituents' taxes. But I would balance this budget. It is a simple equation. And we always should know what it takes to balance the budget and know whether we are willing to do so or not and have a debate here on this floor, Mr. Speaker. That really hasn't happened a lot of times.

But I would submit that if we were to balance this budget, this one that we are in the process now with doing our appropriations bills for the 2007 fiscal year, what it would take is, we have the entitlement spending for Social Security, for Medicare and Medicaid. That goes on. Unless we change the policy there, those expenses are already locked in, and they grow year by year. Interest is something that as long as there is debt, there will be interest. That is also locked in, and it will grow. Those are the entitlements, the automatic spending, if you will. We

also have defense spending, which is necessary.

I would take that defense spending off the table as far as something that I am willing to cut. I want to make sure that our military have all the best equipment, the best training, the best protective devices, and that they are properly taken care of and well fed and well housed. I believe we are doing that better than any military ever in the history of the world.

So what is left is called discretionary spending, these items where we could actually go in and cut some of this spending, this spending that is not on autopilot, and what it would take to balance the fiscal year 2007 budget, when you take nondefense discretionary spending, and that is that smaller piece of the pie, and I have forgotten exactly the percentage that is, but take what we spent in 2006 and cut it 5 percent. If we simply spent 95 percent of the money that we spent on nondefense discretionary spending, that part that we can actually control, if we cut that 5 percent and spent 95 percent of what we spent in 2006 for 2007, we would have a balanced budget, Mr. Speaker. In fact, we might have a balanced budget with a little bit less than that because our revenue has been coming in more than we anticipated, significantly more, because the economy is doing better than we anticipated. That is part, also, of the climate that we are working in. And part of it is also because the dynamics of the Bush tax cuts. The two rounds of Bush tax cuts are the reasons why the economy is going better than we anticipated.

So we will get there over time. I think we should be more aggressive in cutting our spending. I have been working to do that. Many of us have. We don't have the votes in this Congress to do that. But the people on the other side of the aisle are not willing to cut a dollar anywhere. They are only willing to raise taxes on somebody else's constituents. And then they say, Give me a balanced budget. That equation doesn't work, Mr. Speaker.

The equation that will work is cut the spending. It is the spending, not the taxes. If you raise the taxes, you lower the overall revenue because people will stop doing business. What you tax, you get less of. That is the equation.

And the concern about the national debt, let's get to this balanced budget. In fact, let's get to a surplus budget, and let's start paying down the national debt. We did some of that in the middle nineties. If we can do that, we can work this national debt down. It is not a matter of the difference so much of which country that might be holding that United States paper. You see that on the map that Japan holds a lot, China holds a lot, but that is not the issue so much as it is the size of that debt and the willingness to pare down our spending, and the willingness to stop creating new programs and eliminate the programs that are no longer necessary and get rid of this unnecessary funding for the programs that would embarrass a person to have to vote for them and rolling them up into an omnibus spending bill or into a conference report without having a chance to strike them out by line item.

Those are the things we need to do, Mr. Speaker, and so we can get to a reduction of our national debt. We are going to have do that with a dynamic economy and reducing the growth in our spending.

I would submit also that we need to do some overhaul in Medicare and Medicaid and in Social Security, and this is another way that we get a handle on this budget. Otherwise, Social Security grows and becomes out of control. It was not the people on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, that pulled down the effort to overhaul and reform Social Security and give people control of some of their own retirement funds. It was the people on that side of the aisle, and that is another reason why we do not have control over this budget. But it is not imminent, and if it is not in imminent threat, that means that politics and this democracy as some call it, I call it a constitutional republic, will not operate unless there happens to be an imminent need and urgency to get that accomplished.

Let me also, Mr. Speaker, speak about the balance of trade, and we have a negative balance of trade. A year ago it was a minus $617.7 billion. We got the report out near the end of February this year, and I do not have the exact number in front of me, but it was in the neighborhood of minus $725 million, growing at the rate of about 20 percent a year increase in the negative balance of trade, meaning that we are buying more goods from other countries, goods and services from other countries, than we are selling to them.

We are to the point even where agriculture, which always used to be a big surplus for us, is narrowing down to where there is hardly a margin at all for agriculture, and the way it is going it is probably going to be a trade imbalance. It could be in the red just for agriculture in a few years at the rate that it is going.

But if we are down to minus $725 billion a year in this balance of trade, that means that we are buying $725 billion more of goods and services from foreign countries than we are selling to them, and that has got to be turned around. That is a sign that we are not manufacturing as much as we should, we are not marketing as much as we should, and it should tell us that we need to do some things with our tax structure so that we can adjust our taxes and provide those incentives to be able to produce and market in foreign countries in a more competitive fashion.

Perhaps, Mr. Speaker, I will come back to that in a little bit, but before I had the colloquy with Mr. Ehlers, I was talking about Iraq and about Afghanistan and Iraq and the global war on terror. I would like to take us back to that, that global war on terror, and specifically the battlefield, the theater of Iraq, which is a major component of that. We know that that is the central battle in the war on terror.

We know that Zarqawi wrote a letter a couple of years ago that was about 17 pages long, as I read it, and he said in there that they were having a great trouble, that Iraq was essentially their last need out; that they did not have mountains or forests to hide in; that they had to find a way that they could hide in the homes of the Iraqi people; and that the Iraqis that were willing to take them in, the terrorists, the al Qaeda that had been operating in Iraq now since liberation of Iraq, the Iraqis that were willing to take them into their homes, which is the only place to hide, you do not hide so well out there in the desert, were as rare as red sulfur. Mr. Speaker, as rare as red sulfur. Now, I am going to have to do some research sometime to determine how rare red sulfur is, but I expect that is quite a rare commodity and the Iraqis who would take them are rare.

Well, they are even more rare today than they were then when Zarqawi not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago, was sent to meet his Maker by two bombs from two different F-16s. When he was sent to meet his Maker in the rubble of the so-called safehouse, now there is an oxymoron is it not, Mr. Speaker, a safehouse that Zarqawi was hiding in turned out to not be so safe because intelligence had gotten information to our military and our military had targeted the house and dropped a couple of bombs in on him, killed Zarqawi. In the rubble were computer hard drives and paperwork and a lot of intelligence, and a lot of intelligence has led us to other intelligence, and a lot of other intelligence that we had were dots out there that got connected by the intel that was within this so-called safehouse that was turned into rubble.

From all of that intelligence, the body of that intelligence as it has been released to the public and our intelligence people have pored down through it, the body of that intelligence says that al Qaeda and the terrorists in Iraq are in a very difficult situation. They are having trouble recruiting fighters. They are having trouble getting military supplies and munitions. They are having trouble with their communications. Their operations are being disrupted, and that the effectiveness of the coalition forces, and I will say in particular American forces, and especially the effectiveness of the Iraqi troops that are now in uniform defending Iraqis and taking on these terrorists in the midst have al Qaeda in disarray.

All of the information that came, all of the data came, all of the intelligence that came, all pointed to the same

thing. This is a desperate enemy and a desperate condition with a very limited amount of supplies to work with, a limited amount of recruitment ability to be able to recruit troops and a limited ability to affect life in Iraq.

We are winning, Mr. Speaker, and it has become very clear as the intelligence unfolded.

I would point out also that Saddam's trial is nearing its end, and we are going to see a verdict in Saddam Hussein pretty soon, and it has been drug on now for about 8 months. That is plenty long, but in the meantime, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that we are going to get a verdict. I happen to know that if he is found guilty of crimes against humanity that in that section of the Criminal Code of the Iraqi law, and I have actually sat there with the judges in Baghdad and discussed this with them, and they spoke English to me so I could understand it directly and not be dependent upon an interpreter, but in that section of Iraqi law, crimes against humanity only provide for one penalty. If you are guilty, there is only one penalty, and that penalty is death.

Now, there have been three of Saddam's attorneys that have been murdered throughout the process of this, and some of the other people involved in this have been as well, but the punishment that may come if Saddam is found guilty is only one punishment. He has been, of course, an active person there, I will say, since there is a case before the court in Iraq. We know the evidence, Mr. Speaker, and I am going to let the evidence speak for itself at this point.

But I would say that Iraq is coming along. They are making good progress. They now have a sovereign government. They now have a full cabinet. They now have a prime minister. When you get a sovereign government, they can make decisions. They can make decisions about like what to do if Saddam is found guilty, whether they will bring another trial for other crimes against humanity, whether they will mete the punishment should he be found guilty, what they should be doing for their citizens.

I hope they do this: open a bidding process globally so they can bring in oil companies that have the capital and the technical ability to sink more wells into the vast oil fields in Iraq and build some pipelines and some refineries and get more oil coming out of that country so they can get cash coming in.

It is a shame to have $70 oil in a country that is starved for cash and that has oil sitting underneath its sandy desert and not having that turning into cash at $70 a barrel for them. I want to see that happen. This was not American blood for oil, but this was American blood, coalition blood and Iraqi blood for freedom, for freedom, Mr. Speaker, and they will have the freedom to do with their oil as they choose and to cash the checks for that oil, and they need to get it flowing out of there. That would be the first order of business besides the security issues that come before this government, if I were the prime minister or in the parliament of Iraq.

So this military security situation is making good progress, and the intelligence that we have gathered and after the death of Zarqawi, their leader, and they have taken on a number of their leaders in the first and second tier who were very close to Zarqawi, but after that, all the intelligence says they are in desperate condition.

Now, why would we do what has been proposed here on the other side of the aisle, why would we pull out? Why would we cut and run? Why would we want to redeploy to the horizon, Mr. Speaker, when this war is making progress and we have people who have this opportunity to be free?

I sat down with Benazir Bhutto shortly after the September 11 attacks, and she happened to be giving a speech in my district at the Buena Vista University in Clear Lake, my hometown. Benazir Bhutto is the former prime minister of Pakistan. She served at two separate segments of time there in Pakistan and is a very respected leader of the Pakistani people and has a sound judgment, which is the reason that she has been able to be in power in Pakistan.

I asked her a question and I was trying to understand at the time our enemy, how do we conduct a war that we could finally get to the point where we can declare victory, what would victory look like and how do we get to that point so we could declare victory. We need to define it and we need to get there.

We were talking about radical Islamists, that perhaps 10 percent of the Muslim world are lined up against Muslims, as well as Christians and Jews and an attack on Western civilization to some degree, and how do we finally defeat them. Her answer was, this hatred comes out of having no hope. It comes out of not having an opportunity to build a better life for their families, for their homes and their communities. She said, you have got to give them freedom; you have got to give them a chance at, she used the word, democracy.

If they have that freedom, like we have here, then they turn their focus to hatred and murder and barbaric slaughtering like they did of our two soldiers a couple of days ago in Iraq. They turn that hatred over, and they put their efforts towards their families, their community, their churches, their mosques, their countries. When that happens, that energy that is within all of us is used for a constructive good. There is a culture change. That culture of hatred that breeds terror that is in the heart of poverty and hopelessness that is in many of the cities, especially in the Arab world, can be replaced by freedom and hope and prosperity.

That is the definition for victory, Mr. Speaker. That is the definition that was given to me in a very private conversation, without any reservations I would add, by Benazir Bhutto. I appreciate that from her. I respect that from her, and I think she laid that out in a way that indexes in, links in very well with the Bush doctrine.

President Bush understands this. He came out with this philosophy within weeks of September 11, and he stuck by this philosophy all along. He has defined victory. He is leading us to victory. We need to stand with him on that issue, and I do, and standing with the President also stands with our soldiers and marines, and it stands with them and it stands with their mission. Those two things, Mr. Speaker, are linked together.

If you are going to support your marines, you also have to support the mission that they are on because some of them have given their lives. Some more of them will give their lives for global freedom and for the freedom and safety of the American people. They have to believe in their mission. I believe in their mission. The President believes in their mission. The American people believe in their mission, and some of the people on the other side of the aisle do not, and they claim that they can support the troops and oppose the mission.

I would think that there is not a soldier in this country that would say send me off on a mission that you do not support but tell me you support me. No one could be asked, and you cannot ask anyone to put their life on the line for a mission that you do not believe in. That is the crux of this debate: Do you support the troops and the mission. And that is not negotiable.

Then, as I talked about balancing this Federal budget, there is also this imbalance in trade that I was talking about, $725 billion imbalance in trade. What we need to do with that, Mr. Speaker, is fix that. We need to fix that by changing the tax policy. The tax policy that we have now taxes all productivity in America. I spoke about that a little bit earlier, and in fact, we can change that around totally and utterly.

I came to this conclusion in 1980 after the IRS had audited me one too many times in a row. When they did that, I went back to work after 4 days of pulling papers out of my files and handing them over to the IRS and sitting there throughout this audit. When it was finally done, it cost me some money, and I believe to this day I did everything exactly legally and technically correct. It was my intent to do so, but they I believe had to justify their 4 days in my office. So they made a Monday morning quarterback decision, and I had to accept the result of that if I were going to stay in business because I could not take anymore capital out of my business or anymore time away from our productivity to go fight the behemoth system of the Federal Government.

So I went back to work, and as I went back to work I began to start with this conclusion: I would like to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service. I would like to eliminate the IRS code. I would like to see to it that no one has to go through what I went through ever again.

I would like to have people have a voluntary tax system so that they can decide when they pay their taxes. And as I worked this system out, Mr. Speaker, and I really put together a fairly complete proposal on my own as I was sitting in the seat of a bulldozer meditating for 10 or 12 hours a day, and there is plenty of time to think there, I thought about this policy, and this policy today is called H.R. 25, The Fair Tax.

Now, I couldn't find anybody that knew anything about this issue in 1980, but as I worked my way through that, throughout that decade, I found a little more information and a little more information, and by about 1991, I found a book written by Daniel Pilla, a former IRS agent, called Fire the IRS. He had worked for the IRS for years, and in that book he had done the data, had pulled the data together and done the research that supported the conclusions that I had drawn just simply from working my way through this policy. I didn't do the math, but he did. He did the analysis, and his analysis fit my philosophy.

We linked together at that point. I don't know if Daniel Pilla ever recognized that, but I want to thank him for the work he did on that book. It was inspiring to me and confirmed my conclusion and helped move me into public life.

I believe that we should take all tax off of productivity. I think as a fundamental change, if we do that and put it on consumption, then people can volunteer to pay taxes. They will do that when they make a decision to purchase. We take all the Federal tax off of all productivity. That means you get to keep all the money you earn, with the exception of whatever State taxes might be there.

People in America would get another 56 percent more into their paycheck. If they got a $1,000 check for that week, they would have $1,560 more they would get to take home. If it was a $100 check that week, it would be $156 more they would take home. That extra money, that 56 percent more, is money that would be saved and some would be spent, but people would make a decision on paying their taxes themselves without having the IRS stand there, or more figuratively Uncle Sam standing at the time clock on Monday morning.

You know, America gets up, takes a shower, shaves, goes to work, and walks through to punch the time clock, and as soon as they punch that time clock, Uncle Sam's hand goes out. He's going to take every dollar that you make that day until he is satisfied. When he is satisfied, he puts that money in his pocket, Mr. Speaker, and then you can go to work for the State for a little while. They put that in their pocket, and then you are on your own for the rest of the day.

But we can change that entire dynamic where Uncle Sam is no longer standing there. The image won't be of Uncle Sam by the time clock any longer, it will be the image of your being able to get all the money you earn and then be able to decide when to pay taxes with it.

Alexander Tyler said, when a majority of the people figure out that they can vote themselves benefits from the public Treasury, on that day democracy ceases to exist. Well, we are very close to that because 44 percent of Americans don't pay any income tax right now.

I heard a number the other day, and I have to qualify it because I haven't verified it yet, but it was that 3 percent of the people pay 97 percent of the taxes. I don't know if that is true, but the philosophy is there. A small percentage of people at the top of the income bracket are paying a large percentage of the income tax on the other side. And many, many people, millions of people are absolved from tax liability whatsoever.

They are not paying taxes, but they are voting, and they are writing letters to their Congressmen and putting demands on government to provide them services. So their incentive is to push people to grow government and to lay back and use more government services, rather than have the incentive be to go out and go to work and grow the size of their own pie, fill their cup, so to speak, feed the goose that lays the golden eggs.

That is what we need to do, Mr. Speaker. We are underproducing in this country. What kind of a Nation would be having a debate about an immigration policy that would take in, they are saying with a straight face, 10- to 12 million people?

I remember when under the Clinton administration, prior to the 1996 elections, they accelerated the naturalization process for a million people, a lot of them in California. Some of them made their way to Iowa, and some of them made it clear what they thought their agreement was, and I will speak about that another time perhaps, Mr. Speaker, but a million people came in prior to the 1996 Presidential elections.

I was appalled that a million people could come into the United States like that, without having a real policy established here in this Congress, but just simply let across the border, naturalized, legalized, and given an opportunity to vote. But we are, and as appalled as I was by a million people in 1996, the United States Senate now is speaking openly about 10- to 12 million people, and I think they know what I believe and what my senior Senator believes, and that is that the number is not 10- or 12 million, it is more like 20- or 22 million, or a number greater than that. And we are talking seriously, Mr. Speaker, about legalizing all of those people that are here in the United States, or all but a relative handful of the people here in the United States illegally.

Now, the justification for it would be because we don't have enough Americans that are willing to do the work that needs to be done. Mr. Speaker, I object to that kind of thinking and that kind of talk. It is an insult to the hard-working Americans that are out there, those that took pride, like Mr. Ehlers, who grew up with his cup one-eighth full. I said mine was half full, and not because of wealth, because we weren't well off, but because of family, and because of our work ethic, and the culture that I grew up in was a tremendous head start to be anchored in that way.

But here we sit now with the argument that Americans won't do this work. Well, they may not do it for 4 bucks an hour. No, Mr. Speaker, in fact, they may not do it for $5.15 an hour. But there is supply and demand in the labor force, and the labor in this country has been altered and distorted by 10- or 12- or 20 million people in this country. And all of them are not working, it is a percentage of them. That number is somewhere over 50 percent, or about seven-twelfths would be one way of looking at that.

All of them are not working, but perhaps 6.3 to 7 million, according to a CIS study, are working. And so let's say it is 7 million people. I referenced earlier in my remarks, Mr. Speaker, that there are 7.5 million unemployed in America. There are another 5.3 million that have exhausted their unemployment benefits that are still looking for a job. So you get up there to 12.8 million. That is already more people on unemployment, at least by the statistics the Senate is dealing with, who are here illegally. It is almost two to one for those working that are here illegally.

And then, if we look at those who are on welfare, there are about 4.3 million of those. If we take a look at teenagers, and teenagers need to be busy. One of the good things about raising kids is if you can keep them busy, if they have energy and you keep them busy, they will be all right, but you have to work them a little to do that. And so of those between the ages of 16 and 19, there are 9.3 million of them who are not in the workforce in any way, not even part time, not even flipping burgers down at the hamburger stand or picking up a check whatsoever. 9.3 million. Some of them presumably could be hired to do some of the work they claim Americans aren't doing.

Then if you look at the, I will say the young senior citizens, between the ages of 65 and 69, there are about 4\1/2\ million of those. Some of those would like to be working, but we have a few disincentives in place so that they do not. That is a universe to go and hire from; 7.5

million and 5.3 million and 9.3 million, and then the 4.5 or so million that are the young seniors.

But in between the ages of 20 and 64, that real working age, none of those people have been addressed yet, except for the welfare folks that I am talking about. There are 51 million not working Americans there.

But even if I pare this down and take those that are over 70, actually I haven't spoken to those at all, but those over 70 out of it, those over 65 out of it, and if we go down and take those under the age of 16 out of this equation, and we roll this all back together and think what is the universe, what is the size that we hire from for our workforce, that force, Mr. Speaker, that workforce is about 61 million.

That is a reasonable number to look at. And we are trying to hire perhaps 7 million people to replace? If we did that, we would hire maybe one out of nine of the nonworking people that are of primary working age in the United States. We surely should be able to do that.

In fact, Mr. Speaker, we could also replace some of these jobs with technology, but we will not do that as long as there is a very cheap labor supply to go to. Cheap labor causes employers to de-adopt technology, and that is a retrogression of our economy when that happens. We need to be driving technology not de-adopting technology. That technology would reduce some of the demand for that labor.

No one, no one I know of, has addressed the subject of how much of this 7 million people that are doing this work, which is only 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product, in other words the illegals are about 4.6 or 7 percent of the workforce, and they are about 2.2 percent of the productivity, that workforce is not all necessary work, Mr. Speaker.

I will conclude this statement on another evening, but I appreciate the privilege to address the House, Mr. Speaker.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 25 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until Thursday, June 22, 2006, at 10 a.m.