Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I am going to be joined during the course of this hour by Representative Thad McCotter of Michigan and perhaps others who may chime in during the course of the hour.

Mr. Speaker, the big news on Capitol Hill this week and the big news around the country was the Senate race in Massachusetts where, for the first time since the 1970s, a Republican, Senator-elect Brown, has been elected in the State of Massachusetts. You know, there are a lot of maps around this place, blue States, red States, and Massachusetts is one of those States that they really should come up with their own color of blue. I mean, it is the deepest of blue States.

And so it was certainly a surprising event, and a lot of pundits and a lot of people are scratching their head and saying, Well, what caused this? Is it voter anger? Are they mad at Republicans? Are they mad at Democrats? Are they mad at everybody? Or how about this health care discussion? And some of the exit polling that went on up in Massachusetts indicated that, yeah, people were concerned. People were concerned about the way that both the House and the Senate health care bill were being fashioned, the process that was being used, and then some of the provisions that were in it as well.

And so I thought during the course of this hour we would spend some time talking about at least what in my opinion are some of the difficulties with the way things are going with the health care discussion, and as well as Mr. McCotter's observations as well.

Before coming to the Congress, I was a prosecuting attorney and I tried cases in front of juries, and I always learned that people pay attention a little bit more and they learn a little bit better, Mr. Speaker, with their eyes than they do with their ears. So I brought with me a visual aid to help us during the course of this discussion.

With apologies to Hasbro, when I was a young person growing up, one of our favorite things to do, if the size D battery was working, was to play the game of Operation. We have modified the Hasbro game a little bit so we can talk about, from head to toe, some of the difficulties with--again, in my opinion and Mr. McCotter's opinion and apparently a good number of the American people's opinion--what's the matter with this discussion.

I want to start with the head up there in the Operation game. It's called a ``brain freeze.'' I've politely taken out ``brain freeze.'' Instead, we've put in ``CMS administrator.'' CMS is basically the organization that runs the Medicare program in the United States of America. It has a budget of about $700 billion a year. It's bigger than the Pentagon, and it will be tasked over the next little bit with implementing the rules and procedures of this health care legislation, either bill or some modification of the bill, and putting this thing into place.

So you would think, if you're a supporter of this health care reform that is barreling through the Congress, well, I hope we've got a topnotch guy or gal in charge at CMS.

Sadly, the reason that there is a question mark up there is that there is no administrator at CMS. As a matter of fact, the last time there was a confirmed administrator at the Medicare oversight administration was in 2006, October 2006. Of course, people who watch the calendar know that that wasn't all on President Obama's watch. It was in the last couple of years of President George W. Bush's administration. He nominated a fellow by the name of Kerry Weems, who was acting administrator, but the Democrat-controlled Senate refused to confirm Mr. Weems.

The interesting thing about it as you know--because people get accused of playing politics all the time. So you say, What was Mr. Weems? Was Mr. Weems like Rush Limbaugh? Was he like Glenn Beck? Was he some dyed-in-the-wool partisan? Actually, Mr. Weems--and this was written about him by one of the analysts: The nomination of Mr. Weems will be a departure from tradition. Historically, CMS administrators have either been academics or lobbyists. The academics often lack leadership and executive skills. The lobbyists often come across as too Machiavellian.

Since CMS was formed in 1978--it used to be called HCFA--there have been 30 administrators. Mr. Weems would have been the first administrator, if the Senate had chosen to confirm him in 2006, who actually was a career person who had worked his way up within the CMS structure. He was not a political hack; he wasn't a political appointee, but for reasons known only to them, the Democratic majority in the Senate didn't want to confirm him.

Now fast-forward to a year ago almost exactly, and President Obama is inaugurated. You would think that, if one of the big national priorities that we're going to talk about is health care, one of the first nominations or maybe the second nomination would be to get somebody in charge of this program so that when this rather large restructuring of one-sixth of the Nation's economy is passed that we're going to have our best talent on the ground, whether you agree with it or not. We are now 1 year and 1 day into the Obama administration, and we have yet to have a nominee put forward for that position. Certainly, we have not had anyone confirmed for that position.

Mr. McCotter.

I'd be happy to.

Well, I think there is some of that, but it's interesting that you should bring that up.

Just yesterday--and this isn't unique to the Obama administration. Every administration has a lot of jobs to fill. Just yesterday, the President of the United States sent up 40 nominations to the Senate to consider for confirmation under the Constitution so that they could begin to serve. There were some judges; there were some U.S. attorneys; there were some United States marshals. Interestingly enough, I found that he even had time to name two people to fill vacancies on the Marine Mammal Commission, but not one of those 40 is the new director of CMS.

Quite frankly--and we're not going to talk about national security today--you know, his nominee for the TSA, who are the folks who frisk you at the airport, just withdrew. We don't have any nominee in the pipeline for that either.

I'd be happy to.

We do.

I thank the gentleman very much.

So, if you begin at the head, clearly we have a problem in that we don't have anybody in charge should this health care legislation pass and become law.

We next go down to the Adam's Apple. I left the Adam's apple on the chart because the way this thing has gone--and it really epitomizes the entire last year. We were told we had to have an $800 billion stimulus bill by President's Day. Nobody knows why. It's not because we're going to spend it on Presidential stuff, but we needed to have the stimulus bill, so we got it

done. Now, people were embarrassed. It was 1,200-pages long. It was finally written in its final form at midnight on Thursday, and then we voted on it on Friday. I didn't read the 1,200 pages between midnight and about 11 o'clock in the morning when we voted on it, and I don't think a lot of people did. But when you legislate like that--people woke up, and they found out that that legislation specifically authorized Wall Street bonuses to a company called AIG that the President is now complaining about. He says this executive compensation has to stop.

Well, because we had to get the stimulus bill done by President's Day, nobody really read that, and as a result, anybody who voted for that--and the President signed it--authorized these tremendously large bonuses that they're now complaining about.

You then fast-forward, and we were told that we needed to have cap- and-trade legislation, the national carbon tax, in place by the Fourth of July weekend. Again, I don't know why. The Senate has still not acted on that legislation, and that legislation wasn't completed by midnight. Again, we voted on it on a Friday. The last 300 pages of that were not submitted to the Rules Committee, which meets upstairs in this building, until 3 o'clock in the morning on Friday, and we still then voted on it later in the day on Friday.

Just like the AIG bonuses, the Wall Street bonuses that the majority party sanctioned and voted for in those 300 pages, when you legislate like that, funny things happen. In that particular bill, people found out that things were regulated that they didn't know. If you have a water cooler in your home or in your office, it's regulated in these 300 pages. If you have a hot tub or a spa, it's regulated in this cap- and-trade legislation. Probably the most shocking to my constituents was the Christmas lights. If you have Christmas lights, they are regulated under this cap-and-trade legislation, which, thankfully, isn't going anywhere.

You know, I always tell my folks in Ohio not to worry. Christmas lights are only regulated if your display is 48 inches or above. So, if you are a fan of a short Christmas tree, you're okay. The government is not going to regulate your Christmas lights. If you get that wreath for the door, make sure you get the small one. Don't get the big one.

Well, again, there are people in this Chamber who think we should regulate hot tubs, spas, water coolers, and Christmas lights--I don't happen to be one of them--but again, the American public certainly and at least their representatives here in the Congress should have a chance to read what it is we're passing.

That then brings us to this health care legislation.

I yield to the gentleman.

I thank the gentleman for his throaty humor.

I would just say, you know, the setting up of that panel led to some of this discussion. People are talking about death panels and so forth and so on. I was never a big subscriber to that rhetoric, but it was strange that, shortly after that, the Department of Health and Human Services appointed a blue ribbon panel, which is what we do around here when we can't figure out what to do, and they came out with a recommendation that women under 45 didn't need to have mammograms as often as had been recommended in the past. Now, some would argue that one way that you could control health care costs is by rationing care or by not providing mammograms, for instance, even though mammograms have proven to really enhance the early detection of cancer and save lives in this country.

So it's that kind of stuff that gives fuel to these theories that there are death panels and all this other business; but if they wouldn't do this stuff, you wouldn't have some of these theories getting legs, if you will.

We went down to the wishbone because, you know, the President is going to come to this Chamber next week and give his first State of the Union Address, but it actually will be his third speech to a joint session of Congress. The last one was on the matter of health care. I remember that I actually applauded the President because he indicated that--and you know, again, there's a lot of misinformation out there about this health care proposal--if you have health care and if you like your health care, you get to keep it.

Well, the wishbone is we have about 8 million people in this country who wish they could keep their health care under either the House or the Senate proposal. Sadly, one group that cannot is the group of people on Medicare Advantage. I don't know how many folks in the gentleman's district are on Medicare Advantage. I have about 14,000 people. The satisfaction rating is high, but there will be no more Medicare Advantage. So, you know, it's hard to figure out how that statement ``if you like it, you get to keep it'' fits with the fact that, well, you get to keep it, but there isn't going to be any more of it.

On top of that, health savings accounts will also be eliminated. We've got a lot of people in this country who, in order to sort of take care of their own and to be good consumers of health care, set up health savings accounts as a result of legislation we passed here in 2005, Medicare part D. No more health savings accounts. No more flexible spending accounts.

So the rhetoric--I mean, I think, as a principle, if you like what you've got, you should be able to keep it. Don't mess with me. Let's fix what needs to be fixed, but that's not true, sadly, and that's where the wishbone comes in.

I next want to get to the funny bone because this is one of my favorites. Again, during that speech and during other presentations that the President has made during the course of this discussion, he has--and I think correctly--indicated that the drafting of this legislation should not be done behind closed doors. It should not be done in private. It should not be done by a small group of people. It should be done, you know, certainly with the participation of the 435 Members of Congress and with the 100 Senators and others. I think he even suggested and others suggested that it should be on C-SPAN. So this is funny:

It's not on C-SPAN. Funny. Not only isn't it on C-SPAN, until this thing got derailed by the Massachusetts Senate election, this set of decisions was being made by--I know that our team here in the House was five people. Most of them were from California, strangely enough, and there wasn't a Republican in the bunch. I don't know who the Senate team was, but they met in private, behind closed doors. There were no C-SPAN cameras, and there was certainly no public knowledge of what was going on in those negotiations. So the funny bone is funny. It's not on

I thank the gentleman.

The gentleman may remember--and I didn't have this experience--that, during the month of August, there were a lot of town hall meetings on YouTube where people were standing up. Basically, they had done some research online, and they had looked at--I think the bill was called H.R. 3200 at that time, or maybe it was 3400. They'd actually read it. I did 18 town hall meetings during that time, and I didn't have any angry mobs or anything like that. What I did have, on more than one occasion, are some senior citizens in the front row with a computer printout. They asked, Well, why is this provision on page 196 in the bill? Why are you doing this?

The greatest concern and what people get, and it is both the House and the Senate bill: when the President was here he said, We agree on 80 percent of this stuff. We do. In America, if you have a preexisting condition, you should have insurance, and you should have the opportunity to be insured. I think if you can't get insurance, we need to find a way to get you covered. I think that you shouldn't have to stay in a bad job just because you are afraid of losing your health care. So the President was right, 80 percent of that.

But if that is the case, why then, to take care of these identifiable problems that people say, yeah, that is not fair, we should fix that-- why then do you have to do the other monkeying around? And the other monkeying around truly, as far as the seniors are concerned, both bills take about $500 billion out of Medicare. Now, why do you have to short the people that are receiving Medicare by $500 billion to take care of these other problems? And people understand that, and that came through loud and clear during the month of August.

I yield to the gentleman.

I thank the gentleman for his observations and hope he can stay with us for the rest of the hour.

I was just reminded, Mr. McCotter and I are both lawyers; the gentleman is a doctor. Back home, when people say, I practiced law for 30 years, they say, When are you going to stop practicing and really do it? But it is another subject.

All right. I want to move down a little lower on our buddy here, and we have pork ribs. In the original game, it is just ribs. I call them pork ribs because, interestingly enough, in the Senate bill--I am going to talk about the Senate bill for a minute--they have trouble. Go figure, they have trouble even though they had 60 Members, now soon only 59. But 60 Members who were members of the Democratic Party, which is filibuster-proof and everything else, but they were having trouble getting it across the finish line. So there were some pretty highly publicized slabs of pork that were and are in the Senate bill.

The reason it is relevant is that after the Massachusetts Senate race, there was some discussion--and I see today that the Speaker has rejected it--but there was some discussion that, because they have lost their supermajority in the United States Senate, that they just bring the Senate bill over here for an up-or-down vote in the House of Representatives. So it becomes relevant what is in the Senate bill, as well as what is in the House bill.

There was a column in the Washington Post. Now, I have been here for 15 years. The Washington Post is not a real right-wing, right-leaning newspaper. And it was a column written by a guy named Dana Milbank. Aside from reading his column every once in a

while, I see him on that show with Keith Olbermann, ``The Countdown.'' He doesn't strike me as a Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck type, either. But he was apparently moved to put pen to paper, and he talked about the slabs of pork in the bill.

And you can begin with the Louisiana Purchase. Apparently, in order to get the Senator from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu, on board, she received $100 million in 2011 in extra Medicaid money for Louisiana.

Now, why is that important? Because, as both gentlemen have correctly pointed out, the centerpiece of this bill--how do you take, whatever the number is. Some people say it is $47 million, some say it is $30 million, some people say it is $15 million. How do you cover more people without it costing money? Everybody gets that. And so clearly, when you say that some of that is going to be taken up by the Medicaid systems within the States, it is going to cost those Medicaid systems more money.

So Senator Landrieu said, Well, in order to get my vote, okay, it can cost more money in Tennessee or Michigan or Ohio in Medicare expenses, and you all can pay more taxes, but not the folks down at the Mardi Gras. We are not going to pay that.

Probably the most famous one, Mr. Milbank wrote about it; I call it the Corn Husker Kickback. Senator Ben Nelson was much publicized, and Senator Nelson got an additional $100 million in Medicaid money, and he then became the 60th vote that was necessary to clear the Senate.

You have got Gatorade. There is another Senator down in Florida, and he got an exemption. I talked before about, I wish I could keep my health care. Well, there are a lot of seniors in Florida, and about 800,000 of them are in Medicare Advantage, which is eliminated under both bills. In order to get Senator Bill Nelson's vote down in Florida, he got to keep all of his Medicare Advantage people in Medicare Advantage. But in our States, if this were to become law, they are out.

I want to go to Montana. The head of the Finance Committee over in the Senate, Senator Max Baucus, of course is from Montana. He secured Medicare coverage for anybody that has been exposed to asbestos. Now, I think that is okay with me; but you have got to read the fine print in all of this business. And it only applies to people who were exposed to asbestos who worked in a mine in Libby, Montana. So again, Ohio, Tennessee, all the other 49 States, if you were exposed to asbestos, you are not covered; but if you are from Montana, you are.

I yield to Mr. McCotter.

I thank the gentleman for that observation. And just cueing up on the doctor's comment earlier about NICE and Great Britain, there are a lot of stories. You hear stories of people in Great Britain love their coverage, some people hate their coverage.

One of the stories that I have seen is there is a condition that you probably know, macular degeneration, where the back of the eye degenerates and eventually can lead to blindness. It is tied in many cases to people who are diabetic. There are a number of drugs that can help slow or even move towards a cure for macular degeneration.

The NICE program, the NICE board which we are now modeling this board that Mr. McCotter talked about in the United States, apparently will not approve the best drug, the drug that has the greatest results. And I get that. I mean, there is a big fight between the boutique drugs and generic. But they will only cover one eye. They won't cover both eyes. So it sets up sort of this strange situation.

I haven't been to England lately; but if you go, it is sort of everybody is going to have an eye patch. It is going to be okay on International Pirate Day, but it is probably not going to work out the rest of the year. But those are the choices that you wind up getting in.

Before yielding to the gentleman from Michigan, I just want to finish the pork rib so we can move on to sweetheart deals and the rest of our patient here. We may have to come back and do this again to get through all of the time.

But the last pork rib I want to talk about is two Democratic Senators from the State of North Dakota, Senators Dorgan and Conrad. They, through their skill, were able to get a provision bringing higher Medicare patients to hospitals and doctors in frontier counties. Now, they weren't as blatant as some of the other ones that say it's coming to Florida, it's coming to Nebraska, but frontier counties.

I guess I'd yield to the gentleman from Michigan for his thoughts. First, I want to just ask him to answer, Do you have any frontier counties in Michigan, because we don't in Ohio.

Does the gentleman have an observation he'd like to make?

I'd yield to him.

It's interesting the gentleman should make that point. Senator Reid of Nevada, of course, is the majority leader on the other side of the Capitol in the Senate, and he was asked about these special deals. The gentleman's correct; it takes a bill that I think is flawed and now makes it not fair. It's not fair to Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, and other States that we're going to pay higher taxes to take in the people that can't get insurance into our Medicaid program, and the people in Louisiana and Nebraska and Florida aren't going to have to do that. But Senator Reid was asked about that and his quote was: There are 100 Senators here, and I don't know that there's a Senator that doesn't have something in this bill that isn't important to them.

I think I agree with that. If they don't have, then it doesn't speak well of them.

Now, I've got to tell you, our Senators back in Ohio, nobody likes this stuff. But I've been in places where they asked, How come you didn't get? Ben Nelson got. This guy got. Why didn't you get anything? So the gentleman is absolutely right. It's a flawed bill, but now in the Senate it's been made worse because now it's not fair because people in Nebraska and Iowa and North Dakota and Florida and Louisiana are going to be treated better than the constituents in our State. That's not fair. That's not fair.

Well, thank you.

The gentleman makes a great point, because you would think that the Governor of Nebraska, who doesn't have to go find $100 million to put into the Medicaid program and a budget that's strapped, would be doing cartwheels over this deal. He was quoted just like Senator Reid was, and he said, Nebraskans did not ask for a special deal, only a fair deal. Under no circumstances did I have anything to do with the compromise. I, along with Governors all across America, have expressed concern about the unfunded Medicaid mandate. I have said all along that this bill is bad news for Nebraska and bad news for America. Additionally, I've criticized Senator Reid when he got a special deal for Nevada that didn't apply uniformly to all States. Our Senator negotiated this deal rather than a fair deal for both Nebraska and America.

Again, if you're the chief executive of Nebraska, you think you'd be happy about this because part of your budget problems have just gone away as a result of this deal. But they recognize the gentleman's point exactly. As Americans, they want everybody to be treated fairly, even if it's at the cost of they could have gotten something extra.

Sure. Happy to.

I thank the gentleman.

Perhaps it's still because you're still practicing after 30 years they didn't feel that they wanted to solicit your opinion. I would say that I actually introduced a bill, and it wasn't 2,500 pages long. It was 85 pages long. It was written by the American Academy of Physicians. I didn't write it because I'm not smart enough to figure that out. They wrote it. It didn't cost what this cost. It covered everybody, took care of preexisting conditions. Around here, when you want an amendment to a bill, you've got to take 50 copies up to the Rules Committee, and so I got a mule and took 50 copies of this 85-page bill up to the Rules Committee. They didn't even think about it.

Now, what's the danger? Here, back to process, you talk about process and people's eyes sort of glaze over. But the stark reality is on this side of the aisle there are only 178 Republicans. Over here there are 257 Democrats, and the magic number here is 218. You get the simple majority, you're able to pass legislation, unlike in the Senate. So what are they afraid of? If they had made in order for 5 minutes the opportunity for me or you, as a physician, or Representative McCotter, as a representative of about 700,000 people in Michigan, say, ``You know what? We don't like your thing but we have an idea to improve it, maybe make it a little bit more bipartisan,'' what is the danger in letting us talk for 5 or 10 minutes, vote on it, and then move on? They can squish you like a bug. I've said back home, at 178-257, we can't stop a one-car parade. And so this talk out there that somehow Republicans are stymieing this effort--we can't. We just don't have the ability based upon the makeup of this Chamber.

Their problem has been that some Democrats are fighting with other Democrats. And if you look at how this thing is falling apart, some people think it's gone too far. Some people think it's gone not far enough. Not many people think it's just right or else we'd have the legislation on the floor.

I want to just skip past the next two, and I would invite the gentlemen to come back and maybe we'll spend a whole hour on the next two, but one is an arm and a leg. We could talk all day about what it costs. The one thing I do want to mention about the cost is, you look at CBO. CBO scored the first bill, I think it was $1.6 trillion over the life of the bill. It was going to be an additional cost. The Senate bill is about a trillion, and they pay for it. And that's where the ``hard to stomach'' comes from, the new taxes and fees that are going to be hard to stomach to pay for this thing.

But the amazing thing to me is that people around here were bragging that it only costs a trillion dollars, but the taxes--the taxes and the fees would start now. If this bill had been passed and signed into law by the President, they would begin taxing all the things we'll talk about another day today, but the benefits that they are proposing to give to people don't come in until 2013.

Now, the three of us I don't think would be in the Congress if we had invented a business that we could come to people and say, You know what? I would like you to pay me a hundred thousand today and for the next 4 years, and in 2013 I'll get around to building you a house or getting you a car, whatever the case may be.

So it's not just a trillion dollars. It's not just a trillion-and-a- half dollars or whatever the figure is. It is a trillion dollars once you start the benefits after you've been collecting taxes for 4 years.

The gentleman from Michigan.

I thank you.

I want to get to my favorite one. This is ``you've got to be kidney.'' We talked at the top of the hour about some of the things that were in the stimulus bill, some of the things that were in the cap-and-trade legislation, but when you rush through a 2,000-page bill, it's got a lot of stuff in it. And I have ``you got to be kidney,'' and maybe the two gentlemen have an observation about it. I thought a couple of things came to my mind about ``you've got to be kidney.''

This is a bill about health care, about taking care of people who are sick, making sure that people get health coverage. There is a provision in the bill that gives veterinary students--people training to be doctors to take care of horses, dogs, and cats--they're able to tap into a $350 million fund to pay off their student loans. Now, I like veterinarians. I don't want to get in trouble with veterinarians. I think they do a great job. But what in the devil does a veterinarian have to do with a health care bill to provide better health care for people in America?

My second statement, before I yield to the gentleman, is that there is a provision in the bill that somehow--I think some of the drafters of this legislation think the people who we represent are stupid. So it's their proposal that they are going to require--and I'm sure it's not going to be at no cost--every vending machine in America to have a label that tells you whether or not what you're about to buy is good for you and what's in it, what's not in it, and so on and so forth.

Now, I have got to tell you, if you look at me, I'm not such a healthy eater. But I will tell you that I know when I put 80 cents in the vending machine in the Rayburn House Office Building, and I'm going to get one of those Hostess Cupcakes with the delicious cream filling, it's not good for me. I know that. We don't need to make that Ho Ho $1.50 because the Hostess people have to put a label on there telling me, you know, that if you eat this, you're probably going to gain weight.

I would be happy to.

The gentleman is being facetious.

So those are two things that jumped out at me. I don't know if either gentleman would like to add to that before we move on.

I do take umbrage with that, Doctor.

We have about 10 minutes left, and I know the gentleman from Michigan is sort of an expert on this. This goes, again--if you like your plan, you can keep it. We have called it thigh- quality plans, which of course is high-quality plans. And in the Senate bill, in order to pay for some of this business, the gentleman maybe could enlighten us on what it is they do to people that have--either provided by their employer, their labor union or by whatever--a plan that really takes care of them and their family, a little pricey, but it takes care of them. I would like the gentleman to share his thoughts.

I thank the gentleman. Just to get to the last two, and then we will come back for another hour another day. This painful business down here on the foot, that's called a corn. And of course during the last election, a lot of people became familiar with an organization by the name of ACORN. Again, when you talk about what was handed out in the Senate, the Senator from Illinois who was the replacement for Senator Obama when he came President Obama, Senator Burris, is claiming a provision in Senator Reid's manager's amendment that could funnel money to ACORN through the health care bill. Specifically, for those that care, it's on page 150, and it says that ``community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups'' may receive grants to ``conduct public education activities.'' So we have ACORN. And again, I'm not going to talk about all the other ACORN stuff. But what does ACORN have to do with lowering the cost of health care and making sure that people are provided?

To wrap up, the last one that we have is a kind of tricky medical, the Achilles' heel. And I put the Achilles' heel on this chart because the Achilles' heel of this entire plan, in my opinion, is the will of the American people. The American people have spoken up. They have spoken up in Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts. They're speaking up on the streets. They spoke up in August at town hall meetings, and it's a strange thing. I have seen a couple of articles that say that the Senate has a really tough job after they passed their bill around Christmas because they have to go home and try to convince people that a bill they don't want is good for them. I have been in public life for about 20 years. That's a strange paradigm.

So closing thoughts from the gentleman from Tennessee.

Well, just taking back my time for a minute. They say we have 5 minutes left. So we are going to be okay, and we'll get to Mr. McCotter for a closing thought.

But there was a focus group in Massachusetts the night of the election, run by a pollster named Frank Luntz, and there was a physician in the focus group. He mentioned that exact point. He said, Why don't you have malpractice reform? Why don't you stop this needless double testing to make sure that you don't get sued? Actually, when our proposal was put forward, the bean counters indicated that that would save to the system $56 billion a year.

Now to the gentleman's point about the high-quality plans: Why wouldn't you take that $56 billion a year out of frivolous lawsuits so that these folks that have negotiated for good-quality health care for their families don't have to pay a 40 percent income surcharge on income that they're not receiving?

Thank you. And I yield to the gentleman from Michigan for his closing thoughts.

I thank both the gentlemen for participating. I will just say that in light of this election in Massachusetts, I have hoped that the administration will push the reset button, and we would take the President at his word when he came here to this House. Let's get a bill. Let's get something done on the 80 percent that we can agree about. We can fight for the rest of the couple years on the 20 percent we don't. But let's get something done for the American people.

And not to use percentages, but as our friend here in the Operation game, my folks back home are saying, We need to take care of the things that, Doc, you've talked about. Why though, in order to take care of the 15 percent of the people we have to deal with--that's the estimate--do we have to mess with the other 85 percent? We have to mess with the people who have good quality health care? We have to take $500 billion out of Medicare? People don't understand it. And I don't blame them for not understanding because I don't understand it either. And I just have to say again, you've got to be kidding.

I thank you both for participating, Mr. Speaker. I thank you and yield back.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I am going to break the mold here and say something nice about five pages of the bill, this bill in front of me--I think those pages are right here--and say something nice about Mr. Obey as well, and Mr. Serrano is waving in the back.

By way of history, people know that the auto industry in this country got into trouble, and this administration made a decision to use leftover TARP funds to bail out Chrysler and General Motors. Both car companies submitted reorganization plans in February of this year and both were rejected by the auto task force.

The auto task force was kind of a strange collection of people that didn't have any experience in the auto industry at all. Most of them didn't own cars. Those that did own cars owned foreign cars, but they determined that the car companies had to be more aggressive when it came to dealerships. As a result, about 800 Chrysler dealers were closed and about 2,000 GM dealers. The problem with that is, with rampant unemployment, about 60 people work at each car dealership across this country. Car dealerships don't cost the car companies any money, and it was a strange way to do business and potentially take 200,000 people and put them on the street.

A couple of young, fresh-faced Democrats, Mr. Maffei of New York and Mr. Kratovil of Maryland, launched a legislative effort. But as a grizzled veteran, having been here for the last 15

years, I know that the one piece of legislation or pieces of legislation that have to leave town are the appropriations bills. We drafted some language and put it in Mr. Serrano's bill, and Mr. Obey took it. They didn't have to--they probably got in trouble for taking it--but that became the 800-pound gorilla that had to be dealt with as General Motors and Chrysler have moved forward on how to deal with this dealer situation.

I also want to say something nice about the majority leader, Mr. Hoyer. He took up the mantle and said we are going to solve this problem. As a result, the five pages that are here in the bill indicate that those aggrieved dealers now have the opportunity for binding arbitration, and the facts need to be brought forward, and hopefully fairness will prevail. But that wouldn't happen without something good and bipartisan happening in the United States Congress.

Well I thank my friend from Oregon for yielding. And, in fact, that is a representation, and most people will recognize the United States of America. And each of the pushpins represents an area where the administration has reported jobs being created or saved. And it's kind of interesting, saved is a tough thing to analyze. And I'm going to talk about that in just a second. But created or saved. And each of those pushpins represents either a fictional place that didn't exist, as the gentleman's been talking about, or where the jobs that are claimed on recovery.gov, were, in fact, not created and/or saved. I just want to digress if you let me for just a second though because, you know, the gentleman's pointed out that, in 2006, the Republican majority had done such a bang-up job that it was replaced by a new Democratic majority, and it became historic in that we have the first woman Speaker in the history of the country, Mrs. Pelosi.

And so for 3 years they have been basically directing how the legislative process in the House of Representatives works or doesn't work. And we have been saying on our side of the aisle for a pretty long time now, when we go back, when I go back to Ohio, I assume when the gentleman goes back to Oregon, people are saying, where are the jobs? Why don't we have any jobs? You gave $700 billion to the banks to lend money. They're not lending money. You created and passed an almost $800 billion stimulus bill to create jobs, and there aren't any jobs. And I think that they rightly ask, what is it that the Congress, this Democratic majority, has been doing with themselves to help stimulate the economy and create jobs?

I have a chart here that I like to use, and I want to be fair to them because they do have a rejoinder. But at the beginning of this year you had the Democrats in the majority in the House, Democrats in the majority in the Senate. And of course the President of the United States, President Barack Obama, was inaugurated on January 20. And this shows just through March of this year how the unemployment rate has increased. And the gentleman will recall that we were told that we had to pass this $800 billion stimulus bill or else unemployment would hit 8 percent. And now it's over 10 percent. If you look at the construction trades, the people that build buildings, roads and bridges and other things, it's 18 percent; 18 percent of the people that work construction in this country are currently out of work.

But just taking what--we'll get to the stimulus bill and the President's participation in a minute--but just what our Democratic colleagues have been thinking have been the most important issues facing the country, as this unemployment rate now has spiked to 10 percent. On the opening day of this Congress, which was January the 6th, you had kind of a modest, unemployment rate. Out here on January 20th you have unemployment is increasing. But then you get out here to, towards the end of January, the beginning of February, and again, when Americans by the thousands and tens of thousands are losing their jobs, the most important thing that the majority here in the House could put on the floor was a resolution supporting the goals and ideals of national teen dating.

National teen dating. You know, when people are losing their jobs in steel mills and auto manufacturing plants, the House of Representatives is talking about the importance of teen dating. Now, I'm the father of some teenagers, and I want teen dating to go smoothly. But more importantly, I really want the people that I represent to have jobs so that their teenagers can afford to go to school and buy things and eat food and things like that. Well, unemployment continued to spike. And now we get in the middle of February. The President now has been installed only for a month, and so we certainly can't criticize him at this moment in time. But again, as unemployment rises, the most important thing that this majority could bring to the floor, and people have to recognize, bills only come to the floor when the majority says they come to the floor. So what we did on that day was commend Sam Bradford for winning the Heisman trophy. And again, just like teen dating, I'm sure that the Bradford family's very proud of Sam, and I think it's quite an accomplishment to win the Heisman trophy. But again, tens of thousands of people are losing jobs.

So now we get out towards the end of February, people continue to lose their jobs. Every jobs report that comes out, it's hundreds of thousands of people are being displaced and out of work. And so surely, at this moment in time, you know, with complete control of the government, you would think we would be doing a jobs bill. But the most important thing that they could come up with was the Monkey Safety Act, to debate the Monkey Safety Act here in the House of Representatives.

And I want to be clear because when I mentioned this earlier, the Humane Society got upset with me. I'm not saying that this is a bad piece of legislation. But what I'm saying is, for crying out loud, when people want to know where the jobs are, why are we debating the Monkey Safety Act? I don't get it. But you get down into March now. And so again, hundreds of thousands of people are out of work. And you would say, surely, we're going to talk about a jobs piece of legislation in the House of Representatives. But when we get into March, the most important thing that they could come up with was the Shark Conservation Act. And, again, I like sharks. I don't like to swim with sharks, but sharks are nice to watch on television. But, again, where are the jobs, and where's the legislation?

And then we get out to where this chart ends at the end of March. I'm working on a new one that'll take us to where we are today. But you get out and, again, bad jobs report, tens of thousands more people have lost their jobs. And the most important thing that the majority leader could put on the floor was supporting pi.

Supporting Pi Day.

No, it's not P-I-E, which as you can tell from my girth, I enjoy pie. This is pi, the math formula, 3.14 or whatever it is. And we needed to recognize the importance of the number 3.14, rather than dealing with the people that are out of work in this country. So then, you know, to be fair to the majority, they will say, well, wait a minute. That's not all we did. We also passed the stimulus bill. And the stimulus bill, just south of $800 billion, and it was advertised as creating 3 million new jobs across country. It's now been in place for about 9, 10 months, and my constituents, at least, are continuing to ask, where are the jobs?

And I think the gentleman has correctly pointed out that not only have the jobs not materialized, because they have not gone to job- creating activities; instead, and on top of that, they continue to issue press releases taking credit for jobs saved or created. I can just tell the gentleman, in my district, and here's under the heading of ``press releases I would never send out,'' I represent the 14th District of Ohio. The White House sent out a press release saying that they had spent $100 million in the 14th District of Ohio of stimulus money to create or save jobs. And I guess I'd ask the gentleman, you know, so that sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. It's borrowed money, as the gentleman said. But then in the next sentence they say how many jobs they created and/or saved. Does the gentleman care to guess what we got for $100 million in my Congressional district?

I'm sorry. It was 126. And so, again, with a straight face----

No. What we could have done is everybody could have gotten maybe $800,000. But, no, the problem is as I go about the district, nobody knows where those jobs are. And I think, you know, the gentleman's talked about not only the difficulty of false claims of jobs, but jobs that have gone to places that don't exist. In Ohio--the gentleman's talked about Oregon--in Ohio, there was $7,960, not billions, but still a lot of money, if you're paying taxes, for a basketball system replacement in Ohio. And they claim that as a result of that, they created three jobs. Now that's a little bit better than the hundred million, because that's only a couple $3,000 a job. The problem, and basically, it was a grant to repair a basketball court in a park in Cincinnati, Ohio. But it was identified as Ohio's 0 district. Now, we have 18 districts.

Well, we have Ohio 0. And I'm sure that next fall in 2010 the Republican and the Democrat running in Ohio 0 are going to have a very tough race because nobody's going to be able to figure out where it is, because it----

So we clearly have some difficulties. I know the gentleman, if the gentleman's talked about this, I apologize. But down in Texas, this fellow who runs a public housing authority got $26,000. But if you go to the Web site, it says that they reported creating 450 jobs, which is pretty----

450 jobs for $26,000, which is pretty good. I mean, that's about $500 a job. The problem is when they contacted this fellow, whose name is Bob Bray, he said, Boy that's great. You did a great job with that 26 grand, creating 450 jobs. He says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. He told the government that he had created six jobs, basically five roofers and a fellow to inspect it. But when he was asked to do some reporting, they said, well, that's not enough jobs. And so the 450 doesn't represent jobs, it represents the hours that these six people worked to replace the roof. So we really didn't get a whole lot for that $26,000.

Well, for 450 hours. It was for 450 hours, all six of them. You know, it's a couple weeks work is what you're talking about.

I'm sure with the rainy season coming, I'm sure they're all nice and dry down there in Texas. But the fact of the matter is they put a new roof on, and now those people, I would assume, are unemployed or fixing roofs somewhere else. So clearly, this is a problem.

I think the message is--and the gentleman from Louisiana I think laid it out very well--is we don't claim to have all of the best ideas on how to do this. I think that in the House we represent about 47 percent of the American people. And as you move forward with sort of--it's like going to a bad movie, Stimulus 2 or Stimulus 3, about to rear their ugly heads around here. We would just like to have the ideas that we have--the gentleman's a former business owner, too--to say, Hey, I have an idea how to create a job. And I think if they were more receptive to that, you wouldn't have to report phony stuff, and people wouldn't be asking where the jobs are because the gentleman mentioned the health care debate.

One way to make sure that health care is less of a problem in this country is to have people working with health care, with retirement security. One way to solve the problem with the foreclosure crisis in this country is to have people working so they can pay their mortgages and their insurance and raise their families.

But just two quick examples. I don't understand why they're bragging about this stuff. The government claims to have spent $1,047 to buy a riding mower from the Toro Company to cut the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery. I'm all for cutting the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery, but the Web site claims that the purchase of that single lawnmower helped save or create 50 jobs.

We've got a lot of shift work going on there.

It was a riding lawnmower.

So anyway, and then to Connecticut. I think again what our constituents ask us to do is what the next story does. And that is, the Police Department up in Plymouth, Connecticut, received a grant, and they used it to buy new computers. And again, law enforcement needs the best tools to catch the bad guys, but the administration is saying that the purchase of these computers created 108 jobs. There's a couple of problems with that. There are only 22 people who work at the police department, and when they called the mayor--they called the mayor up there in Plymouth. They said, Hey, how come you guys are reporting 108 jobs with some computers. He said, I can't tell you. His name is Vincent Festa. He says that--and this is what our constituents want us to do--he said that the town has resorted to counting paperclips to save money but that it had no plans to lay off any police officers even without the stimulus. He couldn't explain the police report, and the town's police chief--unlike the mayor--didn't return telephone calls seeking comment.

So, again, we need to be included as we find out not only how can we help assist the economy recover, creating jobs, but we need to do what the mayor, Mayor Festa, is doing in Plymouth, Connecticut, counting the paperclips.

Maybe they don't have phones in West Virginia.

Both gentlemen have talked a little bit about some of the other stuff that's been going on. At the same time the economy continues to tank and people continue to lose their jobs, they continue to pile on. This health care discussion that we had a little while ago in the House, one provision in that bill says that at Taco Bell, at every vending machine, in every location you're going to have to have a sign next to it that says what the thing is not only made of but whether it's good for you or not.

I'm not a healthy eater, you can tell.

I think I have a healthy appetite. I don't know if I'm a healthy eater.

It's going to cost a lot of money, obviously for not only the consumer--because these signs are not going to come free--but also the people who are going to make all of this stuff. Does anybody think this compliance cost won't be added on? And how do you deal with compliance costs? You either raise prices or you let people go.

But anybody that thinks when they go to a vending machine and sees a Twinky, a Twinky filled with that delicious cream, anybody who thinks that that is good for you probably shouldn't be out and about without adult supervision during the day.

And then on top of that, we had the cap-and-trade bill a little earlier. Again, everybody wants clean air--I come from Lake Erie--clean water and everything else. But the fact of the matter is there was a huge national carbon tax. And again, when you have an economy that is ailing and people are losing their jobs, imposing more taxes on them, the places they work is not the answer.

So you sort of have this double whammy going on here. You have no help for the people who have lost their jobs, and by the same token, you have policies to create more job displacement.

Well, they did.

I want to go back just to the jobs business for a minute, because there's a couple of things you can do as a government. The government doesn't create jobs. That's one of the myths around here. It's people who have the entrepreneurial spirit. It's corporations that make investments in not only equipment but product and people.

But going back to the health care thing and Mr. Scalise's observation about more jobs leaving, I would think that the first thing would be to be like a physician; do no harm. Let's keep what we've got and then we can build on it. Then we go can grow jobs. But if you look again at the health care bill, how that's financed--and a lot of my constituents don't understand that everybody recognizes in a country as great as the United States we shouldn't have people who die because they don't have quality health care. They should have the ability to have affordable, accessible health care.

But no matter what that number is--some people say it's 47 million. The President came here and said it's 30 million. Whatever the number is, even at their number of 47, you're talking about 15 percent of the people in the country. And a lot of people are asking the question: How come we've got to screw up everybody else to take care of this problem that's dealing with maybe 15 percent of the people?

And specifically to the jobs issue, the Senate bill that they're now debating across the Capitol has a number of taxes in it. First, both bills cut half a trillion dollars out of Medicare. And how you're going to make the country healthier by taking away half a trillion dollars from people on Medicare I have yet to have explained to me adequately. But on the other side of the Capitol they're debating all these new taxes, and one is specifically on companies that manufacture wheelchairs.

Now, I have, not in my district but on the other side of Cleveland, in Lorain, Ohio, the world's leading wheelchair manufacturer. And in talking to the folks that run that company, they're saying, You know what? If this tax comes about--and it's hard to know why you have to tax wheelchairs to take care of somebody who doesn't have health insurance--if this tax comes about, it will completely eviscerate any profit margin that we have, and I'm going to take thousands of jobs and they're going to have to be terminated and I will go to China. I will go to China and employ thousands of Chinese to make wheelchairs and have them imported into the United States.

Now, some of our friends on the other side say, Well, that's not patriotic. What are you doing? You're thumbing your nose at the United States of America. Business is business and jobs are jobs. So to disincentivize--not only to do no harm, but to harm--doesn't make sense to folks back where I'm from.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 874.

I thank my friend from California for yielding.

I want to thank the Chair and ranking member of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee for moving this bill in such an expedited manner. I want to thank my friend and colleague from Illinois (Mr. Davis) and from California (Mr. Bilbray) for bringing this bill to the floor today.

I am proud to be the lead sponsor of H.R. 3788. It is going to honor a marine and native of Stow, Ohio, who gave his life in the line of duty, Corporal Joseph A. Tomci, and I urge my colleagues to support the bill. This bill will name the post office at 3900 Darrow Road in Stow as the Corporal Joseph A. Tomci Post Office Building.

As has been mentioned, Joe Tomci, a graduate of Stow-Munroe Falls High School, was killed in a roadside bombing on August 2, 2006. It was his second tour of duty in Iraq, and he happened to be only 21.

While I didn't have the pleasure of knowing Joe Tomci when he was alive, I have been awed by the impact that he had on those who did have the privilege of knowing him, loving him, and calling him a friend. There were thousands of people, Mr. Speaker, at his funeral. And every year since his death, friends and family have gathered to remember Joe on the anniversary that he died.

There is also a tree planted at Fish Creek Elementary School. And you may think, well, maybe that's where Joe went to school, but the reason the tree is there is that Joe was a pen pal of the students for 2 years, and the students would chart Joe's progress in Iraq on a map to reflect his experiences.

Joe Tomci was a great son, a great friend, and a great leader. And I honestly can't think of many people at the age of 21 who have made such a mark on the world in such a short amount of time.

He loved his family and his friends, he loved serving his country, and he loved being a marine. He told his mother, Gayle, that he believed in what he was doing and that he believed that his service was a benefit to the world.

I've had the privilege, as most of our colleagues have, of travelling to Iraq to witness firsthand the important work of servicemen and - women like Joe and what they're doing every day, as well as the selfless sacrifices that they and their families make. Some, like Joe, have made the ultimate sacrifice, but their deaths have not been in vain.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the work of the committee in approving this legislation, and I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, it is nice to see you in the Chair again, and I think you are getting the short straw in your caucus when we give these 1-minute speeches.

It is always nice, Mr. Speaker, when the veil lifts and you finally get to understand something. I have been puzzled since 2007 when the Democrats became the majority party in the House of Representatives, when gas prices went from $2.22 to $4.14 over the summer. I was puzzled why they passed such meaningful legislation as National Train Day and so forth and so on.

But two that caught my eye was the bill honoring cats and dogs and then the Monkey Safety Act. I thought they were chastened in this Congress, as we saw the unemployment rate go from this level to this level, and if I had a bigger chart, it could keep on going up.

But again, there is sort of a theme. While people are losing their jobs in America, they again passed the Monkey Safety Act and the Shark Conservation Act. I am thinking to myself, What's their fascination with animals? And it wasn't until I read Speaker Pelosi's government takeover of health care bill, if you go over to page 1,255, it makes veterinary students eligible for up to $283 million in Federal scholarship and student loan forgiveness.

What's with the animals?

I thank my friend for yielding. I want to commend Chairman Dicks and Ranking Member Simpson for putting together what I consider to be a fine bill. Like most bills around here, it has some warts, but overall, this is a good bill.

Particularly, I want to highlight what I think is good for the part of the world that I live in. I want to thank the President, President Obama, for putting in his budget request for the first time since I have been here real money for the Great Lakes; $475 million is included in the conference report. I also need to thank Delia Scott,

the clerk of the subcommittee, for working with us on report language to make sure that that $475 million, which is primarily given to the Environmental Protection Agency, doesn't get stuck to the sticky fingers sometimes here in Washington and that it actually gets to the Great Lakes to improve water quality, habitat restoration, and things of that great nature.

As we all know, those of us that live near the Great Lakes, it has 20 percent of the world's fresh water. I can remember a couple of years ago when we put real money into the Everglades, and it really was the Great Lakes' turn. The President deserves credit and so do the crafters of this conference report. I am also grateful that included in here are some things that we worked on in a bipartisan fashion, some land acquisition for what used to be called the Blossom Music Center. I'm grateful for that.

I am grateful for the work of the full committee chairman and chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in solving the difficulty that we had with some EPA regulations for Great Lakes shipping, and it was their leadership that, in fact, fixed that. I would just say to my good friend the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, when I was the ranking member on the Coast Guard Subcommittee and this pollution on ships legislation came up last Congress, I said, ``I told you so.'' And now those chickens have come home to roost. But I am grateful for that.

If there were disappointments with this conference report, one is, which I expressed during the conference, in the House bill--there is wonderful water infrastructure in this bill. If you represent an older group of cities, you know that we have pipes in the ground that have been there since 1920, 1930. Water infrastructure is greatly needed.

I was pleased to join with the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran) in offering an amendment that would have attached prevailing wage requirements for that infrastructure construction. The House bill had it, and it was accepted. But a funny thing happened over in the conference. The Senate said they couldn't do it. So now you have this sort of unique situation where you only have Davis-Bacon protection for fiscal year 2010. Now the EPA says they can handle it. I guess that you could handle it--but this pipe was laid in 2010, this pipe was laid in 2011. I think it's difficult, and I guess I am disappointed that we couldn't prevail on that issue.

The last source of disappointment is that this legislation carries the continuing resolution. I don't object to the fact that there is a continuing resolution. We need to keep the government operating. But the attachment, which has been done in the past--it was done earlier this year, it was done in 2006--to this legislation prevents the minority from having a motion to recommit on the continuing resolution. And the last time that we had this discussion, I was sort of chastened. The full committee chairman said, Well, you don't necessarily need a motion to recommit; we made in order hundreds of Republican amendments during the appropriations process. So I actually had my staff look at it, and in fact, that's right. There were 714 amendments made in order to the appropriations bills that we considered this year, but sadly, 688 of them were authored by only three Members: Mr. Flake, Mr. Campbell or Mr. Hensarling.

So that means that 26 substantive amendments by everybody else over here are the only amendments that were made in order. That's disappointing. I hope that, if we need another CR, we can have it be freestanding so we at least have the opportunity to make a couple of observations.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege to be here during this Special Order, talking about our friend John McHugh. You know, when somebody retires or leaves or goes on to something else, you miss him. People talk about the gym. I remember, and I miss, that on a pretty regular basis you would go out to the fireplace out here in the Speaker's Lobby and John would have the biggest cup of something with ice in it. He was a constant fixture out there, and you could talk to him on a regular basis.

People will talk about his service on the Armed Services Committee, but that isn't how I knew him. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and his work on postal reform.

I know John's office, for some reason in the last three Congresses, has always been either next to or across from mine.

His commitment to the military was always evident. He always had more brass in his office than a Sousa band. They were always coming and going, and they wanted to make sure that John McHugh understood where they were coming from.

I met John when I came here in 1995. Our service was on the Government Reform and Oversight Committee. John's post, when we were in the majority at that time, was as the chairman of the Postal Service Subcommittee, which no longer exists, but it was the Postal Service Subcommittee. The hot topic was postal reform. Postal reform hadn't been accomplished in about 25-30 years in this country, and there was a reason for that--it wasn't an easy thing to do, but John stayed at it in Congress after Congress, and suffered mightily because all of the stakeholders had a different view; you had the private shippers; you had the postal unions; you had the people with the postage meters. Everybody sort of had a dog in that fight, and it was John's job to sort of guide that through.

I'll never forget. I was a member of that subcommittee, and I wasn't so crazy about his first draft. I think it was called H.R. 22, his first piece of legislation. I sent him a strongly worded letter, reading, You know, how could you do this on postal reform? Well, John sent me a letter back, and just about took the skin off the back of my hand. It was the most pointed letter I'd ever received, and so I trotted right over to his office because I wanted to make sure he wasn't mad at me. We all send letters. We make points, but I wanted to make sure John wasn't upset.

In the end, H.R. 22 did, in fact, become law, and John modernized through postal reform and helped take the United States Postal Service into the 21st century, and that was no small feat. I know that he will do the same for the President as the Secretary of the Army.

You know, I happen to belong to a group of moderate Republicans. Some of us have sort of suspected that the President and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have devised a scheme to completely denude the House of Representatives of moderate Republicans. You know, first they started with my classmate, Ray LaHood, and they made him the Secretary of Transportation. Then they took McHugh, and made him the Secretary of the Army. At the time that they made that choice, I said--and I'll say again during this Special Order honoring John--that the President couldn't have made a better selection. We are the poorer here in the House without the benefit of his wisdom, experience and guidance, but I know he will well serve the men and women in uniform, and he will well serve his President of the United States.

Lastly, I would say that John and I also parked near each other. John did have a really sweet parking space in the Rayburn garage on G-3, and if there's only one good thing that has happened in the House as a result of his departure, it's now that I get to park in his parking space.

So I thank you for organizing this Special Order, Mr. King, and I yield back to you.

Mr. Speaker, all throughout history, there's been the big lie, and we've got the big lie going here again.

It goes like this: Republicans won't let us have health care reform.

Republicans are the Party of No.

Why are Republicans stopping us from reforming health care?

Well, I'm going to tell you something--the Democrats have won the last two elections because we did such a bang-up job. But the fact of the matter is, there are 257 of them. There are only 177 of us, although it looks like a bigger number over here today. We couldn't stop a one-car parade. This health care discussion is a fight between the left and the far left. And sadly for the Democratic majority, they've got people in their party that think that this health care proposal proposed by the far left is wacky. It takes $500 billion out of Medicare. You do nothing with the lawyers as they file lawsuits and cause doctors to practice defensive medicine.

This is a bad bill. They can't even get their own team to row the boat, but they want to say, Republicans don't want to reform health care.

I thank my friend from Alaska for yielding.

I want to commend our good friend and colleague, Ms. Herseth Sandlin, from South Dakota, for her hard work in bringing this bill to the floor today. I understand she has been delayed by travel difficulties, but I am honored to be the lead Republican on this particular bill.

I am also pleased to indicate that the lead sponsor in the 110th Congress was Ralph Regula, Representative Ralph Regula. It was his vision that really started this program as ``Ohio View'' in 1998. It began as a pilot program through a partnership between the United States Geological Survey and several universities in the State of Ohio.

Originally called ``Ohio View,'' the program expanded nationwide beginning in 2000 and is currently active in 35 States across the country. The AmericaView program helps States and territories access the Federal Government's nonclassified satellite and airborne imagery. It provides remote sensing data to communities in order to manage resources, plan for natural disasters, and respond to security threats.

The National Land Remote Sensing Outreach Act will maintain a nationwide AmericaView program and advance the availability of distribution and use of remote sensing data in each State. This bill will also expand remote sensing education as well as award grants to educational institutions and State and local governments to develop these programs.

There is a growing need for geospatial technology professionals, and this funding will bring remote sensing into K-12 classrooms across the country, strengthening students' science skills.

The AmericaView program has been valuable to communities across the Nation. I believe it is an effective use of taxpayer money.

Again, I want to thank Congresswoman Herseth Sandlin for introducing the bill again this Congress, and I appreciate very much the work of the Natural Resources Committee in improving the legislation.

I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Madam Speaker, I rise to object to the process by which the majority has brought the continuing resolution to the floor of the House of Representatives. While we can all agree that it is sometimes necessary to adopt a continuing resolution to keep federal government programs running in the new fiscal year as the respective Appropriations Subcommittees finalize their conference reports, attaching the resolution to the conference report for appropriations for the Legislative Branch is inappropriate and a direct attempt by the majority to stifle debate in this House.

Further, Madam Speaker, the majority's action in this instance is just one more swipe at the minority in a pattern that began at the start of this body's deliberation on Appropriations bills earlier this summer. It has continued to stifle debate throughout the process by restricting the minority's ability to offer amendments to these important funding bills. Over the summer months in which we considered all 12 appropriations bills, the majority's structured rules permitted the minority to offer just over 100 amendments, of which only approximately 50 per cent were on substantive issues directly impacting policy and/or program funding levels. That's just 50 amendments on real policy, impacting government spending on specific programs across the entire federal government.

Following on this abysmal stifling of Republican amendments on these bills, Madam Speaker, next the majority has again found a way to prevent meaningful debate on the funding resolution which continues to keep the government open by attaching it to the conference report on the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill. Since the conference report cannot be amended, there was no opportunity for another point of view in continuing the government's operations. Madam Speaker, this behavior is not merely frustrating, but it also works directly against the very backbone of our nation--a democracy with free and open debate on issues.

It is my sincere hope that in the future, Madam Speaker, regardless of which party holds the majority in the House, we can change course from this current process and instead open these important spending bills, including the continuing resolution, to amendment through an open process.

I thank the chairman for yielding.

This is my 15th year in the Congress, and I am constantly amazed at how both parties are able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

When the new administration came into office in January, I was excited as a Republican when he and our former colleague, the Secretary of Transportation, said we don't want to deal with infrastructure for 18 months. We are going to kick this thing down the road until after the next election.

I thought, my, what a wonderful opportunity for the Republican Party to regain its leadership role in transportation. And when I say ``historical,'' I talk about Abraham Lincoln and the Transcontinental Railway, about Dwight Eisenhower and the National Highway System. The chairman referenced President Ronald Reagan. George H.W. Bush signed the first comprehensive highway bill in 1991 called ISTEA.

We only ran into a problem during the reauthorization of what is now known as SAFETEA-LU, when, sadly, a Republican administration decided we only needed $256 billion out of a Highway Trust Fund that had more than that to solve all of the problems in this country. So, as a result, we argued, we wrangled, and we finally compromised, but the bill was 2 years late.

And when it was 2 years late, we didn't deliver the money to the States to do the projects, and people couldn't have jobs.

Now, for my good friend the new Member from Illinois, I just want to set the table. This debate today, there are only a couple of games in town. One is the President has said he doesn't want to deal with this for 18 months. That will cause a loss of jobs. Our friends on the other side of the Capitol, they don't want to deal with it for 18 months.

My friends who object now to this 3-month extension, what they are objecting to is not a 3-month extension. As the chairman correctly pointed out, we do this like changing our socks around here. This is not a big deal. But by passing the 3-month extension, you would give the only person in town who believes, and I got a bet on him, I got 10 bucks bet on the chairman, that he can get a highway bill done in 3 months. And if you don't like taxes, you argue against it later. You fight about it later.

But all this says is the only guy that is willing to do a full 6-year bill and will figure it out to put people back to work and do infrastructure in this country, Jim Oberstar, the chairman of the committee, we are not going to let you do that. We are going to take the 18-month extension from the Senate and we are going to be done.

I am telling you, it is just wrong. It is just wrong. The chairman needs to have the ability to put this forward. And the Republican Party, despite some members of our leadership, needs to stand up and say, you know what? Republicans, unlike what my friend from Oregon said, Republicans believe in infrastructure. We helped build this country. And to turn our backs on that now to try and score some cheap political point, as the gentleman said, is outlandish.

You need to vote for this thing. Get over it, and let's do the extension.

I thank the Speaker for the recognition and thank the minority leader for this hour.

I'm going to be joined by my good friend, Mr. Nunes, from California and Mr. McCotter, who is on his way.

I want to talk tonight, Mr. Speaker--most folks in America recognize the picture to my left. It's Larry the Cable Guy. And if you watch Larry the Cable Guy, his line is get 'er done. And get 'er done is a good way to entertain somebody in a movie. I would suggest it's not such a good way to run the United States of America.

Sadly, since the beginning of this year, we have had a majority in this House and in the other body and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that has taken the attitude of just get 'er done. And that can lead sadly to some unfortunate consequences.

The first get 'er done was we were told we had to have an economic stimulus package spending $789 billion of taxpayer money by President's Day. It was very important that the President of the United States have the opportunity to sign this bill by President's Day. So the White House's message to the Congress was get 'er done. And the leadership of this House got it done.

Sadly, they were embarrassed because included--and we're going to talk a little bit later in the hour--in the bowels of that stimulus package, which, by the way, was 1,100 pages long and Members of the House got 90 minutes to read it so I doubt many people read it--so people were embarrassed because they didn't read the bill to find out that in the bill was an authorization to give the insurance company AIG, which has received more, billions and billions of dollars, from the taxpayer, bonuses totaling $173 million.

Well, then the next get 'er done came along--and everybody knows we have a problem with the automobile industry in this country. And rather than wrapping up their affairs and going through a bankruptcy the old fashioned American way, the message from the White House was we gotta get 'er done in 40 days. Can you imagine a 40-day bankruptcy for Chrysler, the third largest automobile manufacturer in this country and for General Motors, the largest.

And the get 'er done there has been a lot of collateral damage. We have seen plants all across the country closed; we have seen about 50,000 auto workers about to be thrown out of their jobs. We have seen parts suppliers not get paid for manufacturing and making the parts that go into the cars. And we will talk a little bit later about the car dealers. Some brainiac decided that car dealers were a problem in this country and so therefore we have had to get 'er done; we had to close about 3,000 auto dealerships in this country, and we're going to talk about that, too.

But, again, just like the economic stimulus bill, get 'er done is not really a good way to run the country because the other collateral damage that has occurred here recently is there are about 50,000 people that didn't work for General Motors, worked for companies like Delphi, that had their health insurance through General Motors, and guess what? Nobody cared at all about what happens to their health care. So while some of the UAW members that work for General Motors and Chrysler are now secured by stock ownership in the new companies, these 50,000 workers don't have any health care.

Then we came along to what at least in my State is a pretty controversial issue, the cap-and-trade legislation. Some folks on my side called it the ``cap-and-tax'' legislation. And basically, when fully implemented, I believe it will drive any job that's left in the State of Ohio out of the State of Ohio.

But, again, there's a way to do things here. I've been here for 15 years, and the way legislation usually works is somebody has an idea. We talk about it. We have hearings. They bring it to the floor. Members who have other good ideas have the opportunity to amend that legislation, and then we vote on it. Well, cap-and-trade, sadly, came to the floor, and at 3 o'clock in the morning--I think we voted on the bill on a Friday, and at 3 o'clock Friday morning, in a 1,200-page bill--which, again, nobody had read. They put in 309 new pages at 3 o'clock in the morning, and then we voted on the bill later in the day. And, again, get 'er done.

But we were told we had to get it done by July 4. So the White House called up the House, said get 'er done. Leadership said to their troops, get 'er done, and they got it done. But just like in the stimulus bill, people are embarrassed, because in those 309 pages,

which nobody read, they have found out that this cap-and-trade legislation, aside from dealing with carbon emissions and setting up a whole new speculative system, derivative system to trade carbon credits, it regulates water coolers.

If you have one of those water coolers in your house or at the office with the big jugs you've got to tip over, that's going to be subject to regulation. If you have a hot tub or spa outside your house, that's regulated under the cap-and-trade legislation. And people were really surprised that Christmas lights are regulated under the cap-and-trade legislation.

Now, listen, all of us want to deal with climate change, but you're going to have to go a long way to convince me that Christmas lights are somehow leading to global warming. So that's in the cap-and-trade bill. So get 'er done isn't really a good way to run the country.

And now this week, thankfully, they were not able to get 'er done on health care. The proposal going through the committees of this House-- again, the White House said we've got to get 'er done by August 1, which is tomorrow. Everybody began moving around. But a funny thing happened on the way to get 'er done. Some conservative Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, said, We don't think the government should be in the business of running the health care system and we should have a United States health care policy in this country.

And the previous speaker, Mr. Price, was talking. This bill, again, get 'er done won't take care of it because there are some scary things in this legislation. One piece of it is, for the first time in our Nation's history under the national policy, end-of-life counseling will be available. Well, that's good. I happen to be a big supporter of hospice and all the wonderful work they do at the end of a person's life.

But the problem with end-of-life counseling in this bill is that to get the cost savings that they want to achieve, you have to control cost. And so many of the models are taken from Great Britain and Canada, and in those systems there is a board, as the President wants to set up, that determines what procedures are covered, what drugs are covered, and what are not. And just by way of example, the same board over in the United Kingdom, it's called NICE. So who could be against something nice?

But NICE doesn't cover drugs for people with Alzheimer's, doesn't cover drugs for people with breast cancer, doesn't cover some drugs for people with prostate cancer. And the best one was macular degeneration, which is a degeneration of the eye and can lead to blindness. They won't approve the most effective drug. They approve the second-most effective drug, but this NICE board has determined that you can only get treatment in one eye. And so if you go to Great Britain in about 5 years, you're going to see a bunch of folks running around that look like pirates with eye patches because the NICE board is only going to let them take care of one eye.

I will yield to my friend from California.

I thank my friend very much. You make a great point, and I think I want to reinforce that point.

There have been some speakers that have come to the floor during the last few days saying that somehow Republicans are the Party of No and we don't want to reform health care and we're blocking this great health care proposal that they have. Well, that's not true. There are 178 Republican Members of the House of Representatives, 247 Democratic Members of the House of Representatives, and they can do whatever they want, whenever they want.

Well, they got more.

That would be 218. So 47 people can leave the reservation and you still have a piece of legislation.

So we're not preventing them from doing anything. As a matter of fact, we have four or five good pieces of legislation on health care that solve the problems of the doughnut hole and Medicare part D, take care of the uninsured in this country that don't have insurance.

And not only that, it's a sad situation that leads to a lot of cost shifting for people who do have insurance, deals with making sure that you can't be excluded from health care if you have a preexisting condition. But nobody will talk to our side of the aisle. And the attitude since the beginning of this year has been, we've got 258 votes, and we're going to do what we want when we want, and when we want your ideas, we'll ask you. And it's unfortunate that we haven't been asked.

But we are certainly not blocking what it is they're attempting to do. They are, at the moment, having a fight amongst themselves. You have conservative Democrats versus liberal Democrats, and they can't figure it out. And once they're all on the same page, they can pass it, and pass it in the Senate, and the President clearly wants to sign it.

I thank the gentleman.

And the gentleman is hiding his light under a bushel basket because the other thing that his piece of legislation does that this piece of legislation that's being debated now does not do is that you bend the cost curve.

Two of the reasons that we're having a health care debate in this Congress are, one, to get better quality health care and take better care of people in this country, but two is to rein in the cost.

Now, one of the reasons that we don't have a bill this week and that they couldn't get 'er done was that the Congressional Budget Office came back and scored it, at one point, that this didn't save money. It was actually going to add $1.6 trillion to the debt. And to be completely bipartisan, because my friend brought up the Wall Street bailout, that was George W. Bush. That was Hank Paulson, his Treasury Secretary, that came to Capitol Hill with a three-page bill--can you imagine, a three-page bill--and said, you've got to give us $700 billion to go to Wall Street or the world is going to come to an end. So you take that $700 billion, you take the $700 billion--

Right.

I do.

Right. The gentleman is absolutely right. But if you take the $700 billion from the Bush administration, $789 billion from the stimulus package, you take the auto bailout--which is tipping $60 billion, $70 billion--you take the budget that the President sent up here that the majority passed of $3.5 trillion, you really are talking real money.

And a lot of folks come to the floor and talk about, well, this is a debt that's going to be passed on to our children and our grandchildren. That's true. But even those of us in our middle age are going to have a problem with this because we have to borrow it, and you have to borrow it from places like China, and you borrow it at higher and higher interest rates. And so it's not only a debt that needs to be repaid some day, the interest on the debt is eventually going to strangle this budget.

I would be happy to yield to my friend from Michigan.

I'm happy to yield to the gentleman.

Wow.

Reclaiming my time, it's my understanding that the Web site has crashed at least twice.

It's a great program.

I thank the gentleman. Reclaiming my time, the gentleman has just indicated why they can't ``get 'er done.'' They want to get all these things done, but the fact of the matter is they're not getting them done. And the figures that I saw, there are 16,000 dealers across the country that have entered into this program; so you're not talking about millions of applications that need to be processed. You're talking about 16,000 dealers, and even if the entire billion was exhausted, that's 200,000 cars, and they can't get it done.

So if this health care thing gets out of here where the government runs health care, I really don't want to have any heart problems, because you might wind up with a '57 Chevy engine in your chest.

That will be comforting.

I want to get back to AIG for just a second because that was the first ``get 'er done,'' the stimulus package. Folks were embarrassed that they actually found out that they had authorized, by voting for the stimulus bill, these exorbitant bonuses going to AIG executives. And just a week ago Saturday, it's been like 3 weeks now, this was the headline in the Washington Post: ``AIG Plans Millions More in Bonuses. Troubled Insurer is in Talks With U.S. Over Another $250 Million in Bonuses to Their Executives.''

And why it's important that we follow things like regular order, and people say nobody pays attention to process here, but why you can't have an 1,100-page bill filed at midnight and expect people to know what's going on and why goofy things happen is because that's not the way we are supposed to govern. ``Get 'er done'' is not a way to govern.

So in the stimulus bill, this chart shows the paragraph that was included in the stimulus bill that specifically, these 40 or so words, specifically said that any bonus that was agreed to before February 11 of this year, which was the day the stimulus bill passed, was protected. And then the $173 million in bonuses were paid to AIG, and I saw the President on television. He said, I'm shocked. We had people on the floor on this side of the aisle, I'm shocked.

Well, you shouldn't be shocked. If you had done the bill in the way that the Founding Fathers intended it to be done and if you gave people more than 90 minutes to read 1,100 pages, they wouldn't have been shocked. They would have known and they would have had a choice: Do you want to authorize $173 million for bonuses? If you do, vote ``yes.'' If you don't, why don't you fix the thing?

Sure.

Yes.

No Republicans voted for the stimulus bill, and 11 Democrats also did not vote for the stimulus package.

But it's worse than that because when the bill left the House, it didn't have this paragraph in it. When it left the Senate, it didn't have this paragraph in it. As a matter of fact, the Senate bill on the stimulus package had an amendment that was adopted the old-fashioned way, in a bipartisan fashion, with a Democratic Senator from Oregon, Mr. Wyden, and a Republican Senator from Maine, Ms. Snowe. And they drafted legislation because nobody liked this, handing out billions of dollars to AIG and Wall Street and seeing these executives who have failed. I never understood a bonus. A bonus is supposed to be because you did a good job. I have yet to meet anybody in any of the jobs that I had that said, Steve, you did a really crappy job; here's a bonus.

I yield to the gentleman.

I stopped counting it at about $125 billion. It may be more.

A hundred and twenty-five billion dollars.

We went on to award bonuses, and here's how it happened: The Snowe-Wyden language was in the Senate bill that said no bonuses. You know this and the Speaker knows this, that we pass the bill, they pass the bill; when it doesn't match up, we have to have a conference to try to work things out. So they appointed conferees. The Senate sent some guys and gals over; we sent some people over. No Republicans were included, by the way. And they said, Let's resolve these two bills. Well, by resolving the two bills, the Snowe-Wyden language was taken out, I mean physically taken out, and this new paragraph protecting the bonuses was put in by somebody.

We are talking a little bit about Larry the Cable Guy and ``get 'er done.'' This was one of my favorite games when I was growing up, the game of Clue, and with apologies to Hasbro, the problem is we have asked, since that news came out, who put that paragraph in? It shouldn't be that hard. Who put that paragraph in? Nobody will own up to it. But it didn't, you know, come from the heavens. Obviously somebody took a pencil or an eraser and took out the Senate language and put in that offending paragraph, but nobody will tell us who did it. And we've asked and asked and asked.

So here's Clue, and basically we think that we have it narrowed down to these folks. If you played Clue, you know you have to figure out what room it takes place in, what the weapon is, and who's the perpetrator. We know that the weapon was a pen. It might have been a computer, but I'm going to say it was a pen. And these are the rooms here in the United States Capitol, the Banking Committee, the Speaker's office, the Senate Leader's office, the conference room where these folks met, the lobby--I don't think it happened in the lobby--the Ways and Means Committee, the lounge, library, and the Appropriations Committee.

Now, we've been asking this since March of this year, and since March of this year, we have excluded the gentleman down here in the lower corner. That's Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, who's the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He actually emerged from this conference and sort of threw up his hands, according to press reports, and said, The government's being run by three people, and I'm frustrated. And he left. So we don't think Charlie Rangel did it.

Basically. That was his quoted statement in the press.

So the other folks, and we know this individual was in the room. This is Rahm Emanuel, our former colleague from Illinois who now serves as the President's Chief of Staff. This is Mr. Orszag, who is the OMB Director. Mr. Dodd, Senator from Connecticut who is the chairman of the Banking Committee. At the top the honorable Speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi of California; and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is the leader over on the other side.

And I put the question mark down there, and this really angers me, because somebody had to authorize it, but some of the statements have been that staff did it. Listen, there's something seriously wrong if a nonelected official or appointed official in the case of the OMB Director can change legislation. So they clearly had to have authorization. A lot of eyes were on Senator Dodd and the Department of the Treasury.

But here's what's frustrating. We're asking that question, and it's a pretty simple question: Who did it? And maybe you had a great reason for it. Just tell us why you did it. But they won't. So we have had to go to not only come talk about it on the floor, but we have had to take other action here since March to try to figure it out. So I filed something known as a resolution of inquiry, which asked the Department of the Treasury, Hey, who said take out the one and put in the other? Just tell us who it is. That's a pretty simple question.

And I'm going to say something about the chairman of Financial Services, Barney Frank of Massachusetts. He took the resolution of inquiry. They got more votes than we do. He could have killed it. He did not. He voted it out of his committee 63 or 64-0, and it's been sitting at the Speaker's desk since the end of April, the beginning of May.

Now, again, the Speaker knows this, but the way the legislation gets to the floor is that the majority has to schedule it. And for whatever reason, the distinguished majority leader, Mr. Hoyer of Maryland, has chosen not to schedule this piece of legislation for floor activity. So even all of the Democrats on Financial Services that want to know the answer to the question will not get the answer to the question because we can't get the bill to the floor. So we've gone a step further.

There is a provision in the House rules that if they won't act, you can file something called a discharge petition. We filed the discharge petition. It's right over there by the attractive lady in the tan suit. And we have asked Members to sign it so we can bring it to the floor and talk about it. To date, every Republican has signed it, and we don't have yet a Democratic Member who has signed it, but that's the only way we're going to get to it.

But Chairman Frank did something else commendable. He called up the Treasury and he said, Quit horsing around. Just tell us who did it. And he set up a number of meetings with the Treasury Department. My staff went to the meetings. I went to the meetings. The last contact that we have had from the Department of Treasury, and I just want to get it because it really is remarkable, we got a call, the banking staff got a call from a fellow who's in Government Relations at the Treasury Department and said that, Well, you know, we really didn't like that meeting because it was too political and we think our lawyer has said we can't answer your question.

Now, what the heck? It's not like we are dealing with somebody from the mob and the lawyer says take the fifth. We are talking about the United States Department of the Treasury, which is responsible for administering these billions and billions of dollars, and they're telling the United States Congress that a lawyer has said they can't tell us who authorized $173 million in bonuses for people who work at

Right.

Right. That's a fair summation of where we are. And that's troubling to me.

Larry the Cable Guy didn't do it. He's not on the chart.

But, again, this goes back to Larry the Cable Guy, however. That's why ``get 'er done'' cannot be the way to run the United States of America, because people get embarrassed. People will not have the opportunity to read things. You and I each represent about 700,000 people, you in California and I in Ohio. I had no input in this bill, not because I didn't want to. I'll bet you had no input in this bill. It's just not the way to run the thing.

And when you run it this way, you get embarrassed, and when you get embarrassed, you should own up to it.

That is where I was going next. Rather than owning up to it and saying take the language out, let's not permit this to happen, it was a mistake, the majority, rather than bringing the resolution of inquiry to the floor, brought a bill to the floor to tax these bonuses which they authorized at 90 percent.

I have to tell you, I don't think these people should have gotten these bonuses. But when you begin to use the Tax Code to punish people that you don't like and say, you know, today it is the AIG guys, we are going to tax you at 90 percent; tomorrow it could be truck drivers, we are going to tax you at 90 percent; we don't like the guys that do talk radio, we are going to tax you at 90 percent, it is a very dangerous precedent; and it is not only dangerous, it is stupid. And it is stupid because the head guy, the biggest bonus-getter, the biggest bonus- getter at AIG got $6.4 million.

Now, if you don't think you should get a bonus, why do you let him keep 10 percent? And 10 percent is $640,000. It takes 16 years for somebody in Ohio making $40,000 a year to make $640,000. So, again, it is not only a misuse of the Tax Code; it is stupid. It was a fig leaf, because people were embarrassed, and, sadly, sometimes when people get embarrassed around here, rather than doing the right thing, they do the politically expedient thing.

So they all went home. And, thank god, the Senate didn't pass that bill, and thank goodness President Obama said--he didn't say it was stupid, but he pretty much said it was stupid.

Yes, well, he has done that.

We can't get an answer, which is really shocking, that the United States Congress can't get an answer to a pretty simple question, Who did it?

I want to move on, with my friend's permission, to the get 'er done and the car companies. We were told we had to have an expedited bankruptcy proceeding, first with Chrysler and then with General Motors because that was going to save the car industry in this country and we have to move forward.

As a matter of fact, on April 30, the President gave a press conference when Chrysler went into bankruptcy, and this is his exact quote, that nobody should be confused about what a bankruptcy process means. It will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or live in the communities that depend on it.

Now, I was pretty heartened by that, and I was heartened because in Twinsburg, Ohio, we have for the moment, won't have soon, a stamping plant for Chrysler. About 1,200 people work there.

In the days leading up to the bankruptcy announcement, the company went to the Chrysler employees, the UAW employees, and said, In order to make this work, you have to enter into a new contract and you have to give up some stuff. You have to give up wages, benefits, some health care, some vacation.

The day before the bankruptcy announcement, the auto workers in Twinsburg, Ohio, went to their union hall and cast their ballots on giving up stuff, and 80 percent of them, over 80 percent of them, said, We are going to do it so we can keep our jobs, and we are going to do it so we can make sure that the company we work for continues to survive.

That took place all across the country. And the contract, not surprisingly, was approved.

Well, then a funny thing happened, and the funny thing that happened was that afternoon, when all the documents were filed in the bankruptcy case, there is an affidavit from a guy, his name escapes me, Robert, I will think of it in a minute, but that basically indicates that no, no, no, there are going to be disruptions. We are closing plants. We are throwing people out of work.

Specifically, eight plants, eight plants in cities all across America were

told, Hey, auto worker, even though you voted to give up some stuff to stay employed, we are shutting you down. Nationwide, it was close to 10,000 people were told they weren't going to have jobs anymore.

The interesting thing is before the President went to the microphones, he went to talk and give this press conference at noon on April 30. At 11 o'clock that morning the White House was very helpful in setting up a conference call with Members of Congress, Governors, other people that were interested in this issue, and with his task force, his unelected auto task force.

The task force members got on and said, This is a great day. This is a great day. We have saved Chrysler, or will through this bankruptcy. Jobs won't be lost. As a matter of fact, because Chrysler is going to enter into a deal with Fiat, the Italian car manufacturer, we have great news: we think Fiat is going to bring 5,000 more jobs to the United States.

So, silly me, I got off the call and watched the President of the United States. And then there is another call. When the President was done, we had another conference call with the guy that was the head of Chrysler then, Robert Nardelli.

Mr. Nardelli was basically reiterating the things that occurred during the course of the President's announcement, and then he took questions, which was nice. And the very first telephone call that he took was from Governor Granholm of Michigan, the Democratic Governor of Michigan. Obviously in Michigan they have got a lot of concern about auto manufacturing.

And she said, you know, Great job. Way to go. But I just have to ask you a question. The President in his announcement said this deal will save 30,000 jobs. I just want to make sure that that wasn't code for something else, because there are 39,000 people in the country that work for Chrysler.

Mr. Nardelli said no, no, no, no, he was just rounding down and there aren't going to be any difficulties, which, of course, wasn't true.

Later in the call, one of our colleagues from Wisconsin, Gwen Moore, Democrat from Milwaukee, she had, used to have, an engine plant in a town called Kenosha, Wisconsin. And she specifically asked, she said, 800 people work there. Where in your restructuring do you envision the Kenosha plant being?

She was told, We love Kenosha. Kenosha is safe. Kenosha is going to be fine. Those 800 people don't have to worry.

So, silly me and silly Representative Moore and silly Governor Granholm, we all sent out press releases praising the President, praising the task force and the work that they were doing, only to find out that my plant was closed and Ms. Moore's plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was closed.

Now, obviously that caused some concern with the folks in Wisconsin and the folks in Ohio, so the Governor of Wisconsin, Ms. Moore also and the mayor of Kenosha, sent a letter to Mr. Nardelli and said, Why did you do that?

Madam Speaker, I include the letter for the Record.

Chrysler LLC,

Auburn Hills, MI, May 7, 2009.

Hon. Governor Jim Doyle,

East State Capitol,

Madison, WI.

Dear Governor Doyle: I want to start by expressing my

sincere apologies about the confusion surrounding comments I

made on a conference call with you and other elected

officials about the Kenosha Engine Plant on April 30, 2009.

In response to a question from Congresswoman Moore

regarding the future of the Kenosha Plant, I mistakenly

conveyed the status of the Phoenix investment in Trenton, MI.

The facts I described were accurate for Trenton and not

Kenosha, WI. I recognize this has added further confusion to

an already difficult situation.

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify the

Phoenix Engine Program production status.

In 2006, DaimlerChrysler started a program for a new V6

engine family. Based on industry volumes and forecasted

demand, the initial planning volumes were 1.76 million units.

In order to achieve this level of production, a site

selection process was initiated that included four new

locations in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Mexico.

Before site selection was finalized, the engine volume

planned for the combined company was reduced when the common

engine program with Daimler was redefined as a Chrysler only

engine. This reduced the number of production sites to three.

These three sites would have the capability of producing

1.3 million V6 engines. Early in 2007, for a variety of

reasons, the Corporation was required to reduce its capital

investments in all programs which required a new production

strategy for the Phoenix engine. Therefore, Chrysler decided

to reduce the number of greenfield plant locations to two. In

May and June of 2007 the Company chose those two sites and

announced the greenfield investments of $730 million in

Trenton and $570 million in Saltillo and broke ground on the

construction of the facilities. The greenfield decisions were

based on the adjacency of the proposed plants to the point-

of-use assembly locations.

In February of 2007, Chrysler notified the State of

Wisconsin and Kenosha officials that a greenfield site was no

longer viable, but rather that a retool of the existing

Kenosha Engine Plant was under consideration. The Kenosha

retooling plan resulted in necessary capital savings;

however, it required the Kenosha site to continue to produce

its current engines through 2013.

In late 2007 and 2008, deterioration in industry volume

resulted in a drop of the 1.3 million unit demand to 880,000.

This reduction in volume and the need for Kenosha to produce

its current engines resulted in the company deciding to defer

the retooling strategy.

Chrysler kept Kenosha Area Business Alliance updated on the

status of the retool through 2008. As the market began to

collapse through late 2008 and 2009, a decision was made to

idle the Kenosha Engine Plant in December of 2010. This and

other restructuring actions were included in the Chrysler LLC

February 17, 2009 Viability Plan submission to the United

States Treasury and the President's Auto Task Force. The

specific plant actions, including Kenosha Engine Plant, were

not made public because it would have been presumptuous to

assume that the plan was going to be approved and

inappropriate to communicate prior to thorough discussion

with the United Auto Workers union.

On April 3, 2009, Chrysler officials met with the Kenosha

Task Force and reiterated the need to defer the Phoenix

Program. Upon emergence from Chapter 11, plans are to

continue to produce the current engine families through

December of 2010 at the Kenosha Engine Plant in order to

support our current products. The Trenton Engine site has

been completely facilitized and will launch when we exit from

Chapter 11. The Saltillo Engine site has also been

facilitized and is scheduled to launch mid-to-late 2010.

We would have hoped to have been able to convey this

information to you and the community in a more timely

fashion, but circumstances simply did not afford us an

opportunity to do so. It is expected that virtually all

employees associated with Kenosha and the other closures

announced in our Chapter 11 filings will be offered

employment with the new company.

While the company continues to address difficult market

conditions, we expect that the Chrysler Fiat alliance will

ultimately provide customers and dealers a broader

competitive line of fuel-efficient vehicles and technology,

and will result in the preservation of more than 30,000 jobs

in the United States along with thousands of employees at

dealers and suppliers.

Again, please accept my sincere apologies for the

confusion. We will continue to work with the people of

Kenosha to ensure an orderly transition.

Sincerely,

Bob Nardelli,

Chairman and CEO.

The response they got back, Madam Speaker, on May 7 he wrote to Governor Jim Doyle and he said, I know I said Kenosha was safe, but I just need to tell you I was confused. I thought Kenosha, Wisconsin, was Trenton, Michigan.

Now, if I had a nickel for every time I got in the car and tried to go to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and ended up in Trenton, Michigan, that would be something.

Now the gentleman is nitpicking.

Even the day before, and now I remember the guy's name, His name is Robert Manzo, Robert Manzo is the consultant that Chrysler hired to help sort of take them through this thing. The day before the filing, he sent this email exchange, which has been in all the newspapers, to the President's task force saying, Maybe we don't have to go this way. Maybe there is another way. Basically he said, I hope you think it is worth giving this one more shot, that is, to not have all these horrible things happen through the bankruptcy.

And here is the response from Mr. Feldman, the attorney on the unelected task force, who basically said, We are done, and indicated that he wasn't going to be treated to another terrorist like Lauria.

Now, I should explain. Lauria is the lawyer who represented the bondholders. These are people that invested

in Chrysler, and they were told that they had secure creditor status, and it was $27 billion.

Mr. Lauria represented some of them, and the some of them that he represented was the Teachers Retirement System of Indiana. So people who had taught the children of Indiana for years and had retired, in order to maximize their retirement fund they had invested in Chrysler, which was once a pretty safe investment, and they were told that they were secure, which means they get paid before anybody else gets paid.

Mr. Lauria was advocating on behalf of the teachers of Indiana and saying, You cannot just get rid of us. You have to compensate these people who have invested $27 billion in Chrysler. But the response from the task force is that these people were acting like terrorists.

There was a czar. The President of the United States appointed the auto czar, the head of the task force. He has recently gone back into private business. It is now headed by a fellow by the name of Ron Bloom, whom we will get to in just a second.

But, you know, a funny thing happened on the way to the task force too, because when they began making these decisions, people began to say, Well, who are these folks and what is their background? Were they in the manufacturing business? Did they make cars? Did they sell cars? Did they manufacture parts for cars? And The Wall Street Journal actually did a study of the members of the task force and found that most of them don't even own cars, and those that do own cars own foreign cars, the majority of them.

I think it was 12 or 16. And then we also had one of our colleagues from Ohio, Mr. Jordan, who serves on the Judiciary Committee, and the Judiciary Committee had a hearing with a panel that asked that question, How many people on the task force have any experience at all in the car industry? And the answer was none. Nobody. But despite that fact, they have made decisions.

Now, the second decision I want to talk about is the decision that they made that somehow we needed to close car dealerships all across America, and in Chrysler's case it was 789 and General Motors it is about 2,600.

According to the National Association of Automobile Dealers, about 60 people work at each dealership. So if you multiply that by the number of dealerships that were instructed to close, you are north of 200,000 people; 200,000 people. And let's get this straight about car dealers. Most of them own their own buildings, they do their own finance plan, floor plan, they do their own advertising.

The cost to the automobile company is pretty minimal. But, again, this nonelected task force that doesn't know anything about the car industry said, You know what? Toyota sells an awful lot of cars in this country and they don't have as many car dealers as Chrysler or General Motors, so therefore the car dealers must be the problem. They are the ones that are creating this problem.

So they basically gave--we had a car dealer from Michigan, I think it was, just at Chrysler's direction, was told to put $7 million into his building to make it attractive and all this other stuff. He didn't get paid for that. He got a letter saying, You are no longer a Chrysler dealer.

The car dealers basically came to town, and there were pretty amazing stories about some of these car dealers and the way they were treated.

But, you know, it's not just the 3,000 men and women that own these auto dealerships, it's the 200,000 people, the mechanics, the salespeople, the clerks, they're out of a job. So I don't know how you recover the economy by having less stores.

The gentleman is absolutely right.

I will tell you that initially the auto task force ran from this dealer issue like a scalded cat, and they were really quick to put out a press release saying, We're not micromanaging the car companies. We don't know enough to run Chrysler and General Motors. This was the car companies. This was General Motors, and this was Chrysler. They made the decision. They are the bad ones who decided they were going to throw all of these people out of work.

A couple of things run counter to that. The first was, just like I think it's an interesting business model that you are going to sell more cars with less dealers, the auto task force in the Chrysler bankruptcy, according to an article in the Automotive News, didn't want Chrysler to advertise their cars during the pendency of the bankruptcy. When somebody, apparently, told them how stupid that was, they said, Okay, you can spend half of it. It was $134 million. So, again, this unelected task force apparently thinks that you can sell more cars if you don't advertise and if you have 3,000 less stores across the country.

The other thing that sort of gets in their way is Fritz Henderson, who is the president and the CEO of General Motors, old and new, gave an affidavit to the bankruptcy court in New York.

I would like to insert that into the Record as well.

United States Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York, In re

General Motors Corp., et al., Debtors

Madam Speaker, could you tell us how much time we have left?

I thank the Chair very much.

In this affidavit, Mr. Henderson indicates that the idea of shutting all these dealerships--in their case, 2,600--wasn't his idea. The purchaser rejected their plan. Does the gentleman know who the purchaser of General Motors is? It's the United States Government.

It's the task force. So they rejected Chrysler's plan. They rejected General Motors' plan. They said, Go back to the drawing board. Mr. Rattner, who was the head of the task force, said, You have got to come up with a new plan; and Mr. Bloom testified in front of the Senate that they rejected the plans because they didn't find the car companies' plans to be aggressive enough when it came to shutting down plants, throwing people out of work, and closing car dealerships. So again, just like when people were shocked about the AIG bonuses, people running around town here saying, I'm shocked. Well, you shouldn't be shocked. You told them what to do. You didn't say that you have to close 10. You didn't say that you have to close one in Cleveland and one in California; but you did say you have to close a bunch; and you can't walk away from that responsibility.

And now there's legislation. I thought that the gentleman from New York was still in the Chair. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Maffei) is the lead Democratic sponsor of a piece of legislation that says, You've got to deal with these people fairly, these 200,000 people that you've tossed out of work. So he has proposed legislation. I have proposed legislation. But Mr. Rattner, before he left, in response to the legislation, the administration opposes the legislation to force the reopening of Chrysler dealers and prevent General Motors from closing dealers. So I don't know how much more they could be involved.

That brings us to Clue, the Travel Edition. The task force has said that they're not responsible for 20 auto plants closing and about 50,000 auto workers being thrown out of work. They're not responsible for the 50,000 Delphi workers who don't have health insurance today. They're not responsible for the 200,000 people that work at the dealerships across the country that are now going to be out of business. So who is? Around this chart we have Mr. Bloom. This is the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Geithner; former President George W. Bush; the President of the United States; Larry Summers, the President's economic adviser; and down there is Robert Nardelli, the former head of Chrysler I was talking about.

Again, the same scenario. This is a pretty simple question: who decided to take the ax to those 20 plants, those almost 300,000 people and shut 'er down? I mean it's no longer get 'er done. It's shut 'er down. I think we should find out, but nobody will fess up. Nobody will say who did it.

The gentleman is correct. I just want to conclude, unless the gentleman has another thought.

Well, I will. And I thank the gentleman for participating in this. I want to thank Larry the Cable Guy for making a cameo appearance during the course of this. We want to be bipartisan. We want to get things here. But get 'er done by a date certain, no matter what the details are, when you drop 300 pages at 3 o'clock in the morning, when you drop 1,100 pages at midnight, when you work in private and in secret to draft legislation to do things like cap-and- trade and health care legislation, it really is not the way that the government is supposed to work.

We know, on our side of the aisle, as Republicans, that we did such a lousy job that the voters replaced us in 2006. We understand that. But by the same token, there are a lot of bright people on our side, a lot of bright people on that side; and I would believe that we could come together on all of these important issues and give the American people some legislation that they can have confidence in because Members of both parties participated. People are very suspicious of Washington. They say, It's so partisan. They're always fighting with each other. A giant step toward solving that would be to work these things out in a bipartisan way.

I thank the gentleman, I thank the Chair, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 3326, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steven C. LaTourette

Bill Number: H.R. 3326

Account: Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide Legal

Name of Requesting Entity: Hunter Manufacturing Company

Address of Requesting Entity: 30525 Aurora Rd., Solon, OH 44139

Description of Request: Funds will be used for a regenerative filtration system, which is currently being developed by Hunter Manufacturing Co., which will reduce costs and provide protection against all chemical warfare agents for our servicemen and women. The U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, the nation's leading facility for research and development for chemical and biological defense, has a requirement for filtration systems to protect military personnel, critical equipment, and strategic facilities. Current filters do not protect against the full range of chemical and biological weapons, and they must be changed-out, creating higher expenses. The full funding would be used for the design, manufacture, and testing of the filtration system.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steven C. LaTourette

Bill Number: H.R. 3326

Account: Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Navy

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Main Sail, LLC

Address of Requesting Entity: 20820 Chagrin Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44122

Description of Request: The Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy have been developing a system to track their vast inventories of parts and supplies. This implementation of passive RFID technology will greatly improve visibility of parts as they flow through the DoD supply distribution system to our forward deployed forces afloat. The U.S. Navy believes this effort, which will bring numerous high tech jobs to Northeast Ohio, will reduce logistics, operating, and inventory costs, reduce manning needs on Navy ships, and increase military readiness. The full funding would be used to develop and implement the passive RFID infrastructure, including the purchase of hardware and software.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steven C. LaTourette

Bill Number: H.R. 3326

Account: Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Air Force

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Phycal, LLC

Address of Requesting Entity: 51 Alpha Park, Highland Heights, OH 44143

Description of Request: Funds will be used to allow Phycal to grow, harvest, and extract oil from algae for fuel for engine testing. Through partnerships with Ohio industry, government, and non-profit organizations, this project can accelerate the creation of a bio-fuel supply chain in Ohio and hundreds of new green jobs. Reliance on foreign oil has become a national security as well as a cost issue, and there is a rising concern about the cost and availability of aviation fuel for the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force is pursuing an alternative fuels program to identify alternative ``drop-in'' fuels from a number of sources, including algae, toward the goal of 50% domestic production of fuel by 2016. The funding would be used for research and development of its extraction process including purchase of equipment and prototypes.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steven C. LaTourette

Bill Number: H.R. 3326

Account: Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Army

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Advanced Materials Products, Inc.

Address of Requesting Entity: 1890 Georgetown Rd., Hudson, OH 44236

Description of Request: Funds will be used to help establish a titanium production plant in Ohio to implement more effective production techniques. In the United States, there is not enough titanium to satisfy military and commercial need at its high cost, which means we must look to Russia, China, and Ukraine to supply us. This project will bring the titanium market home to the U.S. and create new jobs in Ohio. The funding would be used for establishing a pilot scale powder plant, develop necessary technology, and manufacture large vehicle components.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steven C. LaTourette

Bill Number: H.R. 3326

Account: Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Steris Corporation

Address of Requesting Entity: 5960 Heisley Rd., Mentor, OH 44060

Description of Request: Funds will be used by Steris to develop methods for decontamination of a range of aircraft in order to protect our servicemen and women as well as keeping our military aircraft operational. Aircraft are a major part of the military's capability to perform operations. Loss of aircraft due to chemical or biological weapons makes a significant impact on the capability to resupply deployed forces, transport forces and equipment in theater, and execute missions. Steris's work further establishes Northeast Ohio as a leader in chem/bio and decontamination technology while meeting current security needs of the military. The funding would be used for development and demonstration of decontamination ability, including testing and purchase of equipment.

Mr. Speaker, a lot of the problems in this country can be alleviated with a good job. There's nothing like a good job. And that's why the folks in southwest Ohio were so excited last fall when a fresh-faced young Senator from Illinois came to town and promised that he would fully support the enrichment plant down in Piketon, Ohio, creating 8,000 new jobs. People had parades, they were excited.

The Senator, now our President, sent a letter to our governor on September 2 reiterating his promise. Big groundbreaking on July 15, one of our colleagues, Zack Space, was there, and said there are thousands of jobs at stake. Our Democratic Governor, Ted Strickland, wrote to the President in March--Without timely approval of the loan guarantee, the many thousands of new jobs being created will be delayed or perhaps lost.

But as it says in my daughter's favorite bedtime story, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, ``Oh, no.'' What happened today was the Department of Energy said there will be no loan guarantee, $2.5 billion will be lost, 8,000 jobs will not be created. But fear not, Mr. Speaker, they have not yet rejected the application of a French company, and the French company, no jobs, no investment, and rather than jobs, jobs, jobs, we should say travaille, travaille, travaille.