Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, we have been coming to the floor for about 4 months now in an attempt to get to the bottom of one or two mysteries. I had hoped to be able to come to the floor today to indicate that one of those mysteries had been solved or that we were closer to its resolution.

The Speaker will recall that earlier this year the United States Congress passed a stimulus bill that was requested by the new President of the United States, about $789 billion. And whether you agreed with that legislation or not, during its path through the legislative process there was great concern--and continues to be great concern; I heard one of my colleagues give a Special Order this afternoon about the bonuses, the millions of dollars of bonuses that are being paid to executives on Wall Street, executives who work for companies who, in some instances, have led to the mess we find ourselves in financially.

When the stimulus bill was being crafted over in the other body, the United States Senate, two Senators--one Republican and one Democrat, the Republican is Olympia Snowe of Maine, the Democrat is Ron Wyden of Oregon--they crafted language that would have put strings on, would have said maybe when things aren't going so good and we're giving billions of dollars of taxpayer money to these Wall Street firms, maybe we should have some conditions under which the bonuses are paid and how they're paid and how much they can get. But then a funny thing happened. The House passed its version, the Senate passed its version. Madam Speaker, you know that when we have bills that pass each Chamber and there are some differences in them, we have to appoint a conference committee, and they meet and work out the differences and then send back to us a conference report.

Somehow, somewhere in that conference committee, the language that was put in by Senator Snowe and Senator Wyden was taken out of the bill and about 40 words that are located on the easel to my left were inserted into the bill. And, Madam Speaker, as you read that language, not only were there no longer any strings on those bonuses, but this paragraph specifically protected any bonus that was given to any official, including the ones that became controversial a little later, AIG, and said any bonus that was agreed to before February 11, and February 11 was the day that the stimulus bill was passed, so anything agreed to before that day was protected. Then about a week later, the news came out that AIG, the insurance company that's received billions of dollars of taxpayers' money, was going to pay its executives $173 million in bonuses.

And you should have heard the hue and cry around this place, Madam Speaker. Everybody was shocked. The President of the United States was shocked. Members of Congress were shocked. Members of the United States Senate were shocked. People at the Department of Treasury were shocked.

Well, they shouldn't have been shocked because, after this language was inserted, the bill came back to both the House and the Senate. Every Republican voted against it; every Democrat, save 11, voted for the stimulus bill that included this paragraph that protected the $173 million in bonuses.

We have been coming to the floor for the last several months to try to find out, because nobody's fessing up. Nobody has said, Hey, you know what? I took out the first language and I put in this language, and maybe you could tell us why. But nobody will do that. Everybody wants this issue to go away. And as a matter of fact, people were so shocked that their reaction, the majority's reaction, was to come up with really a stupid bill, and that was to tax these bonuses, rather than going back and doing the right thing and taking out their mistake, to tax these bonuses at 90 percent.

And I will tell you why I call that a stupid bill, Madam Speaker. I call it a stupid bill because the person who got the biggest bonus at AIG got $6.4 million. I think it was a man. So if you're really mad at that guy, why just take away 90 percent of his bonus? Why don't you take away 100 percent of his bonus? So that stupid piece of legislation, and, thankfully, President Obama didn't think much of it and neither did the Senate, but the legislation over here still would have left that guy at AIG with $640,000. Well, Madam Speaker, in my district in northeastern Ohio, it would take 16 years for somebody making $40,000 a year to make $640,000. So again, rather than correcting the mistake, they came up with--it wasn't even a fig leaf, it was a fig tree to pretend that they were really mad about the bonuses that they authorized with their vote.

So we, myself and other Members, Mr. McCotter from Michigan, have been coming to the floor. And I grew up playing a game called Clue, a very wonderful game to play around the kitchen table with your kids. Hasbro, I think, is the manufacturer of it. And so with apologies to Hasbro, we came up with ``Clue,'' because if you play Clue, and, Madam Speaker, I don't know if you're a Clue player or not, but the

way Clue works is you start with a murder has been committed. In this case, it wasn't a murder. It was pretty bad, but it wasn't a murder. You start with what happened, and what happened is that somebody put in a bill in the middle of the night language that protected these bonuses that everybody became shocked about. So that's the crime in this particular instance. So you have to find out who did it. You have to find out where it happened in Clue, and you have to find out where the weapon is.

Now, the great news is that we know what the weapon is. It wasn't a gun or the lead pipe or the rope or any of that stuff. It was a pen. Somebody took a pen, took out the language that would have prohibited the bonuses, and then took the pen and wrote this paragraph into the bill.

So we got a third of the way there and I was feeling pretty good about it. And in our subsequent discussions here on the floor, we've pretty much narrowed it down. Here you have the Banking Committee, the Speaker's office, the conference room. And pretty clearly, it either happened in the Speaker's office or in the conference room. We get that from published reports, the shuttle diplomacy. I wish I could tell you that there was a Republican suspect in this, but there weren't any Republicans permitted into the conference room. So we believe, and I think for the purpose of this exercise we're going to say, that it happened in the conference room.

The missing piece and where I really thought we were getting close was who did it. Let's finish Clue, that it was Colonel Mustard with a pen in the conference room. And around this board we have the people that we believe, we know, were in the room and were capable of making this insertion. Madam Speaker, I know you know who they are. But just sort of running around the board here, down here Charlie Rangel, the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Here, a former colleague of ours, Rahm Emanuel, who is President Obama's Chief of Staff. Up here is Mr. Orszag, the OMB Director, the fellow that's the bean counter down at the White House. Over here is Senator Dodd from Connecticut, who is the chairman of the Banking Committee over in the Senate. In the upper corner is Ms. Pelosi, the distinguished Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mr. Harry Reid, the distinguished majority leader over in the United States Senate. So we have narrowed it down to one of these folks.

And the question mark down there, and this is really a disappointment to me, sadly, some are just saying that it was some staffer that put the thing in. So the question mark is this staffer who apparently has the power to change law and make law. And it may have been a staffer who was using the pen, but clearly a staffer had to be directed by somebody to do that.

We thought originally that Senator Dodd, the chairman of the Banking Committee, might be the person we should focus in on. He's made some public statements, but the public statements now have gone back and forth. His office says that they put it into the bill at the request of the Treasury. The Treasury says that they put it in at the request of Senator Dodd.

So here's what we did. Being the sleuths that we're attempting to be, we went out and filed a bill that basically would have required these folks to hand over some documents and fess up and tell us why they did it. It went to the Financial Services Committee here in the House. And to his credit, one of the heroes of this Clue game is Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who chairs the Financial Services Committee. He called up the resolution, and that committee voted for it 64-0. So I'm feeling pretty good about it now. I think that we're actually going to get someplace. But, sadly, the way that this place works is that when legislation is reported out of the committee, it doesn't come here to the floor for discussion or debate unless it is scheduled by the distinguished majority leader of this body, Mr. Hoyer of Maryland. And even though that event occurred a couple of months ago, Mr. Hoyer has apparently determined that we are too busy here in the House of Representatives to deal with this issue. And we're going to talk a little bit about how busy we've been in a couple of minutes. But we've had a setback.

So Chairman Frank, again, deserves credit because, even though the majority leader won't bring this bill to the floor so we can figure it out with documents, Chairman Frank said to the Treasury, Look, just sit down with the people that are interested in finding out the truth here and hand things over.

So we had some conversations, and, sadly, I have to report to the House, Madam Speaker, that we've had a setback. And while I wanted very much to come and be able to solve this game so we could get on to something else, but there was a meeting, a conversation, on June 3 between representatives of the Financial Services Committee and a fellow by the name of Damon Munchus, M-u-n-c-h-u-s, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs. He indicated at this meeting where we were talking about it, and I was promised a letter talking about who did this, he indicated in that conversation that the Treasury thought that that meeting was to talk about policy options and had nothing to do with this particular issue. And he then stated that if the true goal of the meeting was to reconstruct conversations between Treasury and Senator Dodd and his staff regarding this bonus provision and how they got into the stimulus bill--and I would say duh. I mean, what have we been trying to do here for the last 3 months?-- that on the advice of counsel, the Treasury Department would be unable to provide any documents about those conversations.

So, again, it becomes kind of important that we have the majority leader schedule this resolution so we can get the documents so we can figure it out and we can move on to something else.

And I see my friend from Michigan is here, and I yield to Mr. McCotter of Michigan.

I thank the gentleman. And the answer to the first part of your question is clearly this is not indicative of transparency.

Look, all we want to do is move on and find out why somebody felt it necessary in a dark room in the dark of night to put in language that protected these $173 million worth of bonuses and why they did it. They may have a great explanation. I doubt it, but they may have a great explanation. We just want them to come forward and tell us ``I did it'' and why they did it.

So I can't report, Madam Speaker, that we have solved this particular episode of Clue. And, sadly, we have another mystery that has sort of reared its ugly head here on Capitol Hill.

I thank the gentleman for that.

And I would go a step further. I am certain that President Obama did not know that this had been inserted into the stimulus bill because he appeared on television after the bonuses were given and said he was shocked that these bonuses have been given, and people in his administration said they were going to do everything within their power to get this money back. So I agree with you 100 percent. The President did not know, to the best of my knowledge, that this was occurring. And even our colleagues in the House, Mr. McCotter, the Democrats who voted for the stimulus bill, except for 11 of them, I don't think they knew it either.

I'm not just trying to be a nitpicker. I will tell you that one of the problems is you may remember that stimulus bill that spent $789 billion of our constituents' money. It was about a thousand pages long. So it was like the phone book of New York City. And as that bill was coming to the floor that week, one of our colleagues on the Republican side made a motion and came up with this novel idea about how about if we have 48 hours, 2 days, to read the thousand pages, and here's another novel idea, what if we put it on the Internet so that our constituents, who are paying $789 billion, they have 2 days to sort of digest it and call their Representatives and express their views? That was Tuesday. The problem is the bill was taking a little longer than people anticipated. The President had promised that he was going to sign it by President's Day, so the bill was filed Thursday at midnight.

Now, I've apologized to my constituents for not being up Thursday at midnight to immediately begin reading the thousand pages. But when we arrived at work the next day, on Friday, we were told, You're not going to have 48 hours to read the bill; you're going to have 90 minutes to read the bill that spends $789 billion, and good luck to you. Now, I have been here 15 years, and I would suggest to you when you legislate that way, silly things happen. And I think a lot of our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle who voted for the stimulus bill that protected those bonuses didn't know it either, in fairness.

But that's why it's important, I think, to protect the integrity of the House and both Republicans, Democrats, the President of the United States--who did it and why did they do it. Just tell us and then we'll be done.

But we've come to, sadly, a second mystery and this one is more catastrophic when it comes to the lives of people in this country. As you know, Mr. Speaker, the auto industry is in big trouble, and we are now faced with the bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors, Chrysler going first.

In the days leading up to the filing of the bankruptcy for Chrysler, there were a number of events occurring that I want to describe. On April 30 at 11:30, the White House orchestrated a conference call with Members of Congress, Governors, Senators, anybody that was interested in what was going on with Chrysler, and in that conference call they indicated, This is a great day, we're saving 30,000 jobs and everything's going to be okay. I mean, there's going to be some pain but everything's going to be okay.

At noon that day, the President of the United States took to the airwaves and made the announcement that the bankruptcy was the way we were going to go. Over here on the far easel are President Obama's exact words: No one 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.

And then at 1 o'clock, after the President had his press event, there was a second conference call with Robert Nardelli, who was the chief executive officer at Chrysler, with again the same group of Governors, Members, that were interested in it, and the first question on that conference call came from Governor Granholm, the Democratic Governor of the State of Michigan where my friend Mr. McCotter is from. She was concerned, because the President's announcement said 30,000 jobs had been saved. And while everybody was celebrating that fact, we all knew that there are more than 30,000 people that work for Chrysler in the United States of America.

Governor Granholm said, Well, listen, we congratulate you, we congratulate the President, I think this is really good news, but I hope that the President wasn't speaking in code. The President said that 30,000 jobs had been saved and we know that the number is about 39,000. So was he, you know, sort of just giving good news and we'll find out about the bad news later? Or have really all of the jobs been saved? And will there, in fact, be no plant closures?

Well, in response to that, Mr. Nardelli indicated that, Oh, no, no, no, no, the President was just using a round number. We don't expect plant closures and we don't expect any difficulties.

Now Governor Granholm did what I did. I don't know what my friend the gentleman from Michigan did but I issued a press release praising the administration, praising the auto task force and saying this is wonderful news, because I in fact had--I used to have--a Chrysler stamping plant in my district in a place called Twinsburg, Ohio. So I sent out a notice saying this is really good news. Well, sadly, that afternoon, and it's kind of a famous picture now, but this guy with a cart is taking all these banker boxes into the bankruptcy court up in New York. In that filing and clearly they weren't written between the President's announcement at noon and 3 o'clock when they were filed, located in there is an affidavit from a guy named Robert Manzo, who is one of Chrysler's consultants, and in there they identify eight plants that are going to be shuttered and 9,000 people, mostly United Auto Worker members, that are going to be out of jobs.

Now imagine, if you go with the scenario that I just indicated, that there were some people that were a little surprised. There are two more observations I want to make about that. We serve with a Member by the name of Gwen Moore who is a Democrat from Wisconsin--Milwaukee. During the course of that phone call, she specifically said, Hey, you know what, I have this auto plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a Chrysler plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I just want to ask you, under this plan, are we going to be okay?

And Mr. Nardelli went on and waxed on about how important the Kenosha plant was and the 800 people that work there, and, yeah, you need to rest easy, it's going to be okay.

Well, sadly, after the bankruptcy documents were filed, Kenosha, Wisconsin's engine plant was on the list of closures. Again, I think Representative Moore had some questions, as did the Governor of Wisconsin, saying, Well, what are you talking about? You told us you weren't going to close Kenosha.

Not to be outdone, Mr. Nardelli sent a letter of apology. He said, I want to begin by expressing my apologies. He goes on to say that in response to Congresswoman Moore's question about Kenosha, I mistakenly conveyed the status of the Kenosha plant with Trenton, Michigan. Trenton, Michigan, doesn't sound like Kenosha, Wisconsin to me. It's not only not a sound-alike, they're in different States for crying out loud.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to put Mr. Nardelli's letter of May 7 into 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 Nardell,

Chairman and CEO.

Then the other thing that occurred is, you may remember, Mr. Speaker, that the UAW, the United Auto Workers, were asked by Chrysler to enter into a new contract--a contract that gave up benefits, gave up wages, gave up off days. But they were told that if they supported this new contract, that was going to lead to a new, vibrant Chrysler where their jobs would be secure. And so they voted on April 28. All the Chrysler workers went to the polls on April 28 to say whether or not they approved or disapproved this new contract. I don't know all of the election results, but I do know in my little community of Twinsburg, Ohio that has 1,200, or did have 1,200 UAW members, 88 percent of their members voted for it, voted to give up benefits, give up wages, as long as it helped the company that they worked for survive.

So they voted for it, the thing passed, and then the next day they find out that they're out of a job. Mr. Doug Rice, who's the president of UAW Local 122 which covers Twinsburg, indicated that, his quote was, ``I don't know if I was told the whole truth on everything. I don't feel like I was. It would be a shame if this was something that was known for some time. If they kept this back from people, that's wrong. That's wrong.''

He was then asked, What do you think would have happened if you had known that you were going to be out of a job by approving this contract? He said, ``Needless to say, people ain't going to vote to eliminate their jobs.''

And I think that's right. I don't think any of these 9,000 people who worked at the eight plants would have said, hey, let's approve this new contract and vote ourselves out of a job.

I would like to put Mr. Rice's quotes from the Cleveland Plain Dealer on May 1 into the Record, Mr. Speaker.

``I don't know if I was told the whole truth on

everything,'' said Doug Rice, president of United Auto

Workers Local 122. ``I don't feel like I was. It would be a

shame if this was something that was known for some time. If

they kept this back from people, that's wrong. That's

wrong.''--PD May 1

Host: Would that vote have been the same had you had the

information you have now?

``No. Needless to say, people ain't going to vote to

eliminate their jobs,'' said Doug Rice, President of UAW

Local 122 in Twinsburg--WCPN (Public Radio, Sound of Ideas),

May 5, 2009

And then the mayor of Twinsburg, Ohio, and, Mr. Speaker, if you haven't been to Twinsburg, I will tell you, you may want to come this summer, or any summer. Twinsburg is famous for its Twins Festival and twins from cradle to very elderly twins show up. Last year I think we had 4,000 sets of twins. If you think you're seeing double, you will see double in Twinsburg during their Twins Festival.

Their mayor wrote to Mr. Bloom, Ron Bloom, who is on the President's automobile task force and basically said, What happened? She was on the call, she heard that everything was going to be okay and now all of a sudden she finds that a Chrysler plant that provides 13 percent of her city's tax base is going to be closed and 1,200 people are going to be out of work.

Basically she said, Look, I watched the President. I was on these telephone calls. What happened?

Mr. Bloom, in a letter dated May 6, writes back that what the President's comments were meant to convey, they meant to convey the message that the bankruptcy of Chrysler had in no way changed these plans.

I would like to put this into the Record as well.

May 6, 2009.

Dear Mayor Procop: Thank you for the note. Hopefully I can

clarify the situation at hand regarding the Twinsburg Plant.

On February 17th, Chrysler developed a viability plan which

proposed several plant closures, including a closure of the

Twinsburg Stamping Plant. The decision to close the Twinsburg

Plant was not in any way driven or influenced by the U.S.

Government. It was identified based on an assessment by

Chrysler's management of what was necessary to reduce

Chrysler's manufacturing capacity in the face of extremely

poor market conditions.

While the original 2/17 plan submitted by Chrysler was not

deemed viable by the Task Force, the more recently proposed

Fiat/Chrysler alliance plan has been approved. This plan

included the same plant closure schedule as the one

originally proposed by Chrysler, and the President's comments

were meant to convey the message that the bankruptcy of

Chrysler had in no way changed these plans.

We realize how unfortunate this situation is, especially

for the citizens of Twinsburg whose livelihoods are tied so

directly to the Chrysler plant. The current economic

environment has forced many communities to make sacrifices

that seem unequal and unfair, and the Task Force is working

actively to mitigate the impacts of these sacrifices. During

his viability determination on March 30, the President

announced Dr. Ed Montgomery, former Deputy Labor Secretary as

Director of Recovery for Auto Communities. Since his

announcement Ed has been going into communities and hearing

people's concerns and he has been assembling an interagency

effort to support communities and workers and promote new

job-creating initiatives.

Ed's role is to work with the communities that have been

negatively affected, my role is to work with Chrysler and GM

in their efforts to restructure, so that we can once again

see a strong and competitive domestic auto industry.

Sincerely,

Ron Bloom.

What these plans are that they're talking about is, both car companies, Chrysler and GM, filed viability plans with the task force in February. February 17, I believe. They were both rejected. But somewhere in conversations between the auto task force and Chrysler, it was indicated that there were going to have to be some plant closures. But nobody told anybody. There was no public document, no public discussion, no notification to the United Auto Workers--at least at the local level--that plants were going to be closed. That was the response from Mr. Bloom.

I yield to the gentleman for his thoughts.

I thank the gentleman.

That leads to the next point. Because Mr. Bloom from the President's task force testified yesterday, or the day before, in the United States Senate. But first let me finish this point.

Going back to the plant closures, what is now on that far easel, that's a paragraph that was in the UAW contract that people were asked to approve, and it specifically was bargained for by the people in my district in Twinsburg. This paragraph certainly doesn't tell them that their plant's going to close the next day, but it indicates that Chrysler's going to bring more work to the stamping plant.

So when my folks went to vote, they voted not thinking they were going to be out of work, they thought that more work was going to be coming via the agreement with Chrysler.

What the gentleman is now referring to is in addition to the 9,000 people put out of work and the eight Chrysler plants and, on top of that, I think it's 14 General Motors plants, we have now been told. For some reason in this bankruptcy, somebody has come up with a brainy idea that you can have better car companies if you don't have any auto dealers. And so the initial request in the bankruptcy was that Chrysler close 789 car dealerships in its network. We now know that General Motors is going to close about 2,600 of theirs. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, about 60 people work at every car dealership. If you take the combined closings of car dealerships at Chrysler and General Motors, it's north of 200,000 people are going to be thrown out of work that work at these dealerships.

What my friend Mr. McCotter was referring to is that when you question the administration, and again not the President. I want to be crystal clear about this. When President Obama said on April 30, this statement, that nobody's going to be negatively impacted, no communities are going to be negatively impacted, I believe he meant it and I believe he believed it to be so.

I don't think, however, that his automobile task force has served him well. By that I mean, Mr. Bloom testified yesterday, or the day before, in the United States Senate and Senator Hutchison of the State of Texas said, Hey, I don't understand a couple of things. First of all, it's a strange business model that you can sell more stuff with less stores. I never learned that in Econ 101 or anywhere else while I was in school.

But we don't think that car dealers cost the car companies any money.

But this issue has come up. Who said that all these car dealers costing 200,000 people to lose their jobs needed to be closed? And the gentleman's point is this: When Chrysler and GM submitted their studies about how they wanted to proceed, they had a plan, an orderly closeout of dealerships and consolidations, and they were told they weren't aggressive enough.

Specifically, Mr. Bloom testified over in the Senate that when they rejected the plans, he said, I think we said that General Motors is burdened by excess capacity. We said that their plant footprint, the manufacturing plants, has excess capacity, their dealer network has excess capacity, and the white and blue collar people that work there need to be downsized, and we told General Motors and Chrysler when we rejected their February 17 plan, you need to go back and you need to take a more aggressive approach. And, yes, that included dealers, but it included plants and a white collar head count.

So, it is parsing of words to say, and I have never said and I don't think my friend from Michigan has ever said, that Mr. Bloom said you have to close the dealership in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They didn't do that. But they did determine the parameters and they did indicate that you had to get down to a certain size, which then led to and will lead to 200,000 people being out of work.

I yield to my friend.

I thank the gentleman. And just to continue talking about the dealers and the 200,000 people, and you know what? It is more than 200,000 people, because I assume most of them have families, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, whatever the case may be.

The other interesting thing about car dealers, at least in my part of the world in Ohio, if you go to one of your children's Little League games or soccer games, you always see that it is a car dealer that has sponsored the team. The car dealer sponsors the chamber of commerce. The car dealer gives to charity. The car dealer does the food drive. So you are talking about not only displacing 200,000 people; you are talking about ripping the heart out of a number of communities.

You could understand it if these dealerships were somehow a drain on Chrysler and GM. But on June 3, Amy Brown, who is a lawyer for the affected Chrysler dealers, had the opportunity to cross-examine the aforementioned Mr. Nardelli, who was the chief executive officer of Chrysler, and was asked why it was necessary to eliminate the franchises when neither the government nor Fiat, the group that is buying Chrysler out of bankruptcy, asked for it to happen.

Mr. Nardelli said the 789 dealers represent a host of expenses. But then he was asked to quantify how much those things cost the automaker, and Mr. Nardelli said he couldn't, and he wasn't sure if his company had ever determined those exact costs.

At a hearing last week up in bankruptcy court they had a number of dealers in, and there are a number of dealers here on Capitol Hill testifying in front of the Energy and Commerce Committee. But just three quotes from car dealers who testified up in New York in the bankruptcy court.

Leo Jerome, who owns a car dealership in Lansing: ``I just want my day in court and give me a fair hearing. After I had a 10-month supply of cars, they gave me three weeks to sell them all. I think the White House Mafia is trying to run this thing through.''

Tony Manicotti, who has a car dealership in Sterling Heights, Michigan, said, ``They've ripped our heart and soul out. It's been part of me since I was a child. It's hard to believe what the government has done. They are supposed to save employment--not create unemployment.''

And an Orleans Dodge Chrysler Jeep dealer, Mike Comiskey, who was responding to a question by the bankruptcy judge, Judge Gonzalez, his dealership had been ruined by Hurricane Katrina but he reopened it 5 months later. During the course of Hurricane Katrina, he provided fleet vehicles to police departments and fire stations in every parish of Louisiana that was affected by the hurricane, and also provided vehicles for the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans.

Mr. Comiskey says, ``I will probably end up living out of my car as a result of this set of decisions.''

Now, it brings me to I think where the gentleman was going, and that is the Clue travel edition: Who is this task force and who made the decision to close eight Chrysler plants without telling the workers that it was going to happen, throwing 9,000 people out of work? Who made the decision to be more aggressive and throw 200,000 people out of work that work for auto dealers?

Now, before I talk about the Auto Task Force qualifications and where we are going to go with the game of Clue, I have to tell you I have mentioned Mr. Manzo, who is the Chrysler restructuring expert, and you may recall, Mr. Speaker, there was some discussion about bondholders. God forbid someone could take some of their money and invest it in a company in this country and be told that they were secured creditors.

The secured creditors at Chrysler had invested money. And you know what? They have since been characterized as ``unpatriotic'' or ``not wanting to go with the flow.''

But the one group that was most prominent in this is the Indiana State Teachers Pension Fund. So the Indiana State Teachers Pension Fund thought that buying Chrysler stock was a good investment and they couldn't lose, because as bondholders they were first in line should something like a bad bankruptcy happen. Well, we have rewritten the 200 years of bankruptcy law, and it doesn't matter if you are a secured creditor or not.

But Mr. Manzo called Matthew Feldman, who is an attorney for the President's Auto Task Force, on the day before this announcement was made, and he basically said, Hey, I think I have a way that we can avoid the bankruptcy of Chrysler and restructure some of this debt and work with the bondholders.

Sadly, this is from an email submitted in the bankruptcy court up in New York. Mr. Feldman's first response by email, not real grownup, it says: ``I'm not now talking to you. You went where you shouldn't.''

Well, Mr. Manzo apologizes in a subsequent email, and it comes back, ``It's over. The President doesn't negotiate second rounds. We have given and lent billions of dollars so your team could manage this properly. And now you're telling me to bend over to a terrorist like Lauria?'' Mr. Lauria is the lawyer that represents the Indiana teachers' pension fund. ``That's BS.''

Of course, the next day we have the bankruptcy.

But you say, you know, maybe this task force of the President's, which I believe is not serving the President well, is made up of people who are really knowledgeable in business, in the car industry, in the car dealership industry, and so we should probably defer, because I don't happen to be any of those things. So maybe we should defer to their judgment in this matter.

The gentleman has a thought he would like to share?

I thank the gentleman, and that is where we were going to go next. There was a hearing here on Capitol Hill about 3 weeks ago in the Judiciary Committee and the witnesses were asked by a colleague of ours who joined us the last time we did this, Mr. Jordan of Ohio, Do any of these individuals on the Auto Task Force have any expertise in how car manufacturing or car dealership businesses operate? The witness indicated the answer is none; they have no experience. He went on to say that The Wall Street Journal actually did a survey of the members of the Auto Task Force and discovered that a substantial portion of them don't even own cars.

Now, I want to be fair, because I think that witness was talking without all of the facts. But there is an article that appeared in the Detroit News, close to the gentleman's home, on February 23, and that is not quite right. Of the 10 senior policy aides who work on the President's task force, two own American cars and the rest either own no cars or they own cars manufactured in other countries, foreign cars.

Does the gentleman have a thought on that?

I thank the gentleman very much. Mr. Speaker, could I inquire as to how much time is left?

I want to finish Clue the travel edition and get to something I talked about at the beginning of the hour. But just to finish it, again, the game of Clue, manufactured by Hasbro, we know that the weapon, in this case, not the pen, but the ax, an ax has been used to get about 210,000 people, make them unemployed in this country. And again, we have the same rooms. It happened in one of these rooms. And around the board, down there is Mr. Nardelli, the former chief executive officer of Chrysler, Larry Summers, senior adviser on the economy to the President, President Obama, of course. Over here is Ron Bloom, who I've talked about. Here is Mr. Geithner, who is the Secretary of the Treasury, and here is former President Bush. So this group forms our new Clue travel edition. And as we move forward, I think, again, it is important that the American public know who made the call to force these car companies into bankruptcy; who made the call to lie to 9,000 auto workers at 8 plants across the country, and who made the call that, even though they don't cost anybody any money, that we have to close all these dealerships and put people out of work.

And I keep hearing, and the gentleman has heard it too, that this task force doesn't want to run the day-to-day operations of Chrysler and GM. But sadly, for them, there is an article that appeared on May 11 out of Detroit that indicated that Chrysler wanted to spend $134 million in advertising during the period of its bankruptcy, and this unelected task force told them they couldn't spend any money on advertising. Now, they finally relented and said okay, you can spend half of it. But for a bunch of folks that are claiming they don't want to run the car company, they've now set up the situation where they didn't want them to advertise and they didn't want them to have as many stores as they used to have to sell their cars. Again, that's a strange, strange business model.

So we will be back, Mr. Speaker, as we move forward during the course of these discussions, to try and figure out who did it and what room it happened in and why they did it.

I want to move now to the observation that I made at the beginning of the hour. At the beginning of the hour I talked about the AIG bonuses and the fact that legislation that was approved in a bipartisan fashion, 64-0, has not been brought to the House floor by the distinguished majority leader for discussion and debate. And we keep hearing how busy we are here, and we heard that last year. And my colleagues will remember last year, when gasoline was going through the roof and our phones were ringing off the hook and people said, Hey, can you give us a national energy policy, for crying out loud? We're dying. We can't afford to put gas in our car and drive to work. We were told as well that we were too busy. And I get that. This is the most deliberative body in the world. We have a lot of important work to do. And if the majority truly feels we were too busy to deal with the national energy policy, I would have taken them at their word. But sadly, here is a chart, and then we'll go to the second chart.

When the new majority became the majority, we Republicans did such a bang-up job that the voters threw us out and they installed the Democrats as the majority party beginning on January 29 of 2007. At the time the retail price of gas in the country was $2.22. And on that day the most important thing that they could come up with to debate on the floor was to commend the University of California Santa Barbara soccer team. I like soccer. I congratulate them. And gas isn't so bad--$2.22.

It goes up to $2.84, and the most important thing that the majority can schedule to be on the floor is to declare October National Passport Month. A lot of my constituents didn't know what National Passport Month, what month it occurred in. Now they know.

Gas goes up to $3.03 a gallon. We're not debating the price of gas or a national energy policy. We're commending the Houston Dynamo soccer team.

Now, those of us in public life are told that you don't get elected unless you get the soccer moms. So I guess, you know, while gas is going up to $3.03, we've got the soccer moms; we're all squared away.

Gas goes up to $3.77. The most important thing the majority can put on the floor is declaring National Train Day.

It's getting serious--$3.84. A lot of people are calling me saying, Hey, what are you doing? We passed Great Cats and Rare Canids Day. And I have to tell you, I didn't even know what a rare canid was, but I Googled it, and it's a dog. So when my constituents were paying $3.84 cents a gallon, we were doing cats and dogs here in the United States Congress.

It goes over $4, and you think, man, we're going to get to the bottom of it now. But the majority determined that the most important thing we could do on that day was declare the International 2008--a lot of my constituents didn't know this either--2008 was the International Year of Sanitation.

Gas crested at $4.14 a gallon in my part of the world on June 17 of 2008. Surely we're going to talk about energy; surely we're going to talk about gas. No, we were too busy. We had to pass the Monkey Safety Act on that particular day.

So we thought maybe folks had learned as a result of that because, clearly, when gas has gone up to that price, the Monkey Safety Act isn't the foremost thing on my constituents' minds.

So we come to this year. And this year, as we've talked about during this hour, there are a lot of people at Chrysler losing their jobs. So at the beginning of this Congress, January, 4,000 people at Chrysler are losing their jobs. And you'd think that we'd have a discussion here. I would think. But we're too busy because on that day we needed to honor the life of Claiborne Pell, who was a former Senator. He deserves to be honored. But why are we taking floor time to do that when 4,000 people are out of work just at Chrysler.

It goes up to 9,500. The most important thing that we can do on that day is to support the goals and ideals of national teen dating, an issue that we're all concerned about certainly, but now we have 9,500 Chrysler workers out of work.

It goes up to just shy of 10,000 and, son of a gun, we have to, we've got time to come back, this year, and pass the Monkey Safety Act again. And I want to be clear. I don't want anyone to read my words in the Congressional Record and think that I want monkeys who aren't safe. I want safe monkeys. But when you've got 10,000 people out of work at Chrysler, maybe we could do something other than save monkeys.

And son of a gun, and now you're up to 13,000 people, and I guess the Senate didn't pass the cat and dog legislation, so we have to consider that again.

Sixteen thousand people are out of work; the most important thing they can schedule on the floor is honoring Arnold Palmer. I like Arnold Palmer, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, great golfer, deserves to be honored. But how about dealing with the people that are losing their jobs and their livelihoods at Chrysler, General Motors, and the people at the auto dealers?

And then it sort of peaks with the announcement, 18,365 people, just at Chrysler, out of work. And again, all we can do is National Train Day.

Now, I want to be fair to the majority because we do do other stuff here. And I don't want anybody to believe that all we do is monkeys and cats and dogs. Just since the beginning of this year, when Chrysler and General Motors are going belly up and bankrupt, we have also named, and I have to add to this list because we did a couple this week, we've named post offices. And so these 16 post offices, we took an hour of debate here in the House of Representatives, 16 hours, to make sure that--and if anybody, Mr. Speaker, who happens to see this list, they live in these towns, they should feel assured that they can now go in and buy those 44 cent stamps because the United States Congress has named their post office.

And again, it's an important part of what we do here, honoring people who deserve to be honored. But 16 hours, when we could have been talking about Chrysler, when we could have been talking about General Motors, when we could have been talking about the dealers, instead we were naming post offices. And I don't think that the country is better off for that enterprise.

But then again, to be fair, let's say that you're in the majority and that you didn't see this coming and that perhaps, you know, you didn't recognize it was going to be as serious as it was.

We came back last week and went back into session last week. Surely, over the Memorial Day recess, people got an earful from their constituents, saying, What are you going to do about these car companies? What are you going to do about the dealerships? Yet, when we came back last week, you know, maybe we weren't quite ready. Maybe we hadn't formalized how to get at the problem. We passed bills directing fish stocking in the lakes of Washington; we recognized the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains; and we shifted from soccer to basketball, and we honored the University of Tennessee Women's Basketball Team.

Then you say, okay, that was the first week back. Everybody is a little sleepy. We haven't quite gotten up to speed with our legislative agenda. This week, rather than dealing with Chrysler, rather than asking some questions of the unelected task force appointed by the President and that doesn't own cars, we recognized that this was National Physical Education and Sport Week.

Also, I didn't know this, but maybe my colleagues know this--and I apologize for being ignorant. June 10 is National Pipeline Safety Day, and we spent an hour of time here on the floor making sure that everybody understood that June 10 is National Pipeline Safety Day.

Mr. Speaker, this is a big problem. I mean we have a double delegation here. The Congress has punted to the President. The President has punted to this task force of people who don't own American cars, the majority of them, or they don't own any cars, and they have no experience in the car business. They are making decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Mr. McCotter talked about the letter that we sent to the President. Thirty-six of us sent a letter to the President, saying, Mr. President, please pull these people back. Let's have a dialogue. Let's bring the best and the brightest.

You know, Mr. McCotter talked about Chrysler. We made $35 million on the Chrysler deal in 1979. The only problem was nobody expected it, and Congress didn't know how to spend the money. Now, people need to rest easy. We figured it out, but nobody knew how to spend that money. Let's talk about it, and let's do this the right way. Let's not have this unelected group of people who have no experience run roughshod over the American worker.

I yield to the gentleman.

I give you 30 seconds.

I thank the gentleman. I thank the Chair.

I yield back.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 58 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, June 15, 2009, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

Thank you, Mr. Diaz-Balart, for the recognition. And I want to thank Mr. Boccieri of Ohio for introducing this piece of legislation.

Mr. Boccieri--I can't call him Congressman Regula's replacement because nobody can replace Congressman Regula, but he is his successor. And, unluckily, I also happen to be his successor as the dean of the Ohio Republican Delegation because in the last two elections you guys have wiped everybody out, and at eight terms, I'm the head guy on our side in the State of Ohio.

But, as has been mentioned, Ralph served 36 years here. And 36 years is the longest that any Republican Member of Congress has served from the State of Ohio. He had a lot to do, and I think Mr. Petri is going to talk about his work with the parks when he was the chairman of the Interior Subcommittee, but Ralph's real gift, when it came to our side of the aisle at least, back in happier days--and Mr. Boccieri, happier days are when the Republicans were in the majority, that definition. Ralph guided us. And if you looked at the Ohio delegation back in the 1990s, most of us were the chairmen of full committees. We had two cardinals, Mr. Regula and Mr. Hobson of Springfield. And that was all Ralph's doing. He made a commitment to make sure that there was an Ohioan on every committee that mattered.

When I was elected--I'm a lawyer by training--I said, Ralph, I think I would like to be on the Judiciary Committee. And he said, What are you, nuts? We need a Republican from Ohio on the Transportation Committee. And he put me there, and it was one of the happiest times of my life.

There are two things that I want to talk about. Mr. Serrano is right about his observations, but I came in the Class of 1994, so I'm one of those Republican revolutionaries that created the first majority since 1954. And Mr. Speaker, you may remember--and others may remember--that at that time there was a lot of rhetoric in this Chamber and there were some things that became targets. And parks became targets. But what I will always remember is that it was the desire on my side of the aisle to zero-fund things like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And I thought that was misguided, and Congressman Regula, as the chairman of the Interior Subcommittee, also felt that that was misguided. And as a result, although those agencies saw reductions during that time, they were never zeroed out. And I think in this appropriation cycle we will finally get back to the level of funding that they received prior to 1994.

I will tell you that a few years before Congressman Regula's retirement he was in line as the most senior guy to become the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. And he worked very hard at that. He created an organization called CARE, and worked hard--raised a lot of money in what you had to do and all that other business--and he was denied that honor, that opportunity. I will tell you that, in my mind, it had a lot to do not with the quality of the other candidates, who were both excellent. It had a lot to do with the fact that Ralph had angered people back in the 1990s because he wouldn't eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, he wouldn't eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities, he wouldn't agree to shut down the Department of Education. And as a result, even though Ralph had a long and distinguished career here, I think he was punished.

The other thing I want to say about Ralph is his partner, his life partner, Mary--Mary, of course, is the brains behind the First Ladies' Library. Mr. Speaker, if you ever happen to be traveling through the State of Ohio and you have to take a restroom break or you have to get off and get a soda, stop at the First Ladies' Library, because it really is an amazing creation that wouldn't be in existence today if it wasn't for Mary Regula, with the support of her husband, Ralph Regula.

So, Mr. Boccieri, I again want to thank you very much. This is an amazingly wonderful bipartisan effort on your part, and Senator Brown, who you mentioned, to name something after somebody who really deserves to have something named after him. I never have served with a finer public servant than Congressman Regula. I know that that building will make him proud, and it should make the citizens of Canton, Ohio, proud as well. And I thank you for honoring my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the recognition, and I thank the minority leader for giving me the opportunity to take some of the Republican time this evening. And we're going to talk about a couple of things that, one, we've talked about before, and two, we're going to talk about this mess.

Never in my lifetime did I think that the United States of America would not only own a lot of banks in this country, but also two of the big three automakers are soon to be owned by the American taxpayers.

The first issue of business, just to do some cleanup, you will recall, Mr. Speaker, that earlier in the year, in President Obama's stimulus bill there was a provision, originally it was inserted by the Senate, and the Senate indicated that AIG executives should not receive exorbitant bonuses unless there were some conditions put on it.

That legislation, that section of the stimulus bill was authored by a Democrat and Republican: Senator Snowe, the Republican of Maine, and Senator Wyden, the Democrat of Oregon. And the House version was silent. And then it went into this conference committee and, Mr. Speaker, you know well that when we pass something and the Senate passes something and they're not exactly the same, we have to have a conference and we have to work out the details and resolve things.

So there was a conference committee. Sadly, there weren't any Republicans on the conference committee. The conference committee was comprised of all--completely of Members of the Democratic Party. And in that conference room, somebody took out the Snowe-Wyden language that put restrictions on the AIG bonuses and instead put in this paragraph, about 50 words over there to my far left, that not only removed the Snowe-Wyden language but it put in that paragraph--and that paragraph, if you read it closely, indicates that not only were we not going to put restrictions on the AIG bonuses but that specifically protects them because it says any bonus that was entered into before February 11 of this year--which happens to be the date that the stimulus bill passed, the conference report passed--is protected and you're not going to mess with it.

Well, a lot of people were embarrassed, and I would dare say--and I don't cast aspersions on my Democratic friends. I suspect a lot of them didn't know about it. But every Democrat in the House of Representatives voted for the stimulus bill with the AIG bonuses protection language included in it except for 11, and every Republican voted against it. And we had made kind of a simple argument. If you remember, the stimulus bill was a thousand--it was over a thousand pages long and it spent upwards of $790 billion of taxpayers' money. And we had sort of this novel idea, and that was maybe Members of Congress should have the opportunity to read the bill before we are asked to vote on it.

So the Tuesday of that week we had a motion on the floor and everybody, every Republican, every Democrat voted that we would have 48 hours to read the bill. And as a matter of fact, it further stipulated that it would be put on the Internet just in case some of our constituents were wondering how the government was going to spend $792 billion of their money.

A funny thing happened between Tuesday and Thursday at midnight, and that is apparently the President had promised he would have the stimulus bill on his desk for signature for the President's Day weekend, and that weekend was the President's Day weekend. So the bill was filed at about midnight on Thursday night and it was brought to the floor. And rather than having 48 hours, we had 90 minutes--90 minutes-- to read a thousand pages of how the hundreds of billions of dollars were being spent. And son of a gun, it got missed that this paragraph was in there protecting the AIG bonuses.

The next day, if you remember the news, Mr. Speaker, everybody was shocked. The President was shocked, Members of Congress were shocked. We can't believe it. We couldn't believe that $173 million was going to be given out to AIG executives in the form of bonuses. How can this happen? You have to do something about it. You have to lock them up.

They came up with a goofy idea to put a bill on the floor--and I said it wasn't a fig leaf, it was a fig tree--that we should tax these bonuses at 90 percent. And oh my gosh. First of all, the thought that we would use the United States Tax Code to punish people that we're mad at to the tune of 90 percent is nuts; but then secondly, if you look at the top bonus receiver at AIG, he was getting $6.4 million. And so if we're really, really mad at them, why are we only taking 90 percent away from them in taxes? Why don't we take the whole thing? That guy or gal--I don't remember if it was man or woman--still got $640,000.

Somebody in my district making 40,000 a year has to work 16 years to get $640,000. So clearly stupid, clearly people were embarrassed.

So we have been on the floor the last little bit, and most people who grew up in my generation are familiar with the very fine Hasbro game Clue, and we have been trying to determine how that paragraph got into the bill 'cause nobody wants to claim it. It just all of a sudden showed up, but we know that can't be right. Somebody had to physically take out the Snowe-Wyden language and put in this language.

So we do have a game of Clue that we're working our way through. And I think, hopefully, we're going to be close to solving it.

And just around the board, Mr. Geithner, who is the Treasury Secretary, Rahm Emanuel--who happens to be the President's chief of staff--Charlie Rangel, who is the Ways and Means chairman, Senator Dodd from Connecticut, who was the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi, and the leader of the Senate, Mr. Reid of Nevada.

If you remember, in the game of Clue you have to identify where the thing happened, what was the weapon used and who did it. And over the last couple months we've made amazing progress. We know that the weapon used was a pen--might have been a computer but we're going to go with a pen. We also know from the President's reports that it either happened in the Speaker's office where there was shuttle diplomacy going back and forth, or

the conference room. And now we just have to get down and figure out who did it because nobody is willing to stand up and say who did it.

Mr. Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, has testified that he got instructions from Senator Dodd's staff. Senator Dodd says, Okay. Maybe we put it in but we did it at the request of the Treasury. We ruled out Mr. Rangel because we don't think he had anything to do with it. But Mr. Emanuel, the Speaker, and the majority leader were in the room when the deals were being cut. And so we're just trying to figure out who did it.

And it would be nice so we could move on to other things if the person that did it would come forward and say, You know what? I wrote those 50 words to protect $173 million in bonuses at AIG and here's why I did it. But sadly, we haven't had anybody step up to the plate and be willing to talk about that.

So we filed what's known as a resolution of inquiry, and if there is a very cooperative bipartisan person in the story, it's Barney Frank, who is the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and he moved that legislation out of his committee--I think the vote was 63, 64-0. Everybody said let's get to the bottom of it. But now sadly--and somebody who's not pictured here is the distinguished majority leader of the House of Representatives, Mr. Hoyer of Maryland. He has the power to schedule things and not schedule things, and sadly, we're now entering our third month and Mr. Hoyer has not seen fit to schedule this legislation on the floor for consideration.

But Chairman Frank did organize a meeting with folks at the Treasury, and they had promised to send us a letter. And they have indicated in this letter that we might finally be able to say that it was, for instance, Senator Dodd in the conference room with the pen. So we hope to get there from here.

But, sadly, this isn't where it stops.

The automotive world has been shaken by the bankruptcies, forced bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors. And the auto world has been shaken with the forced bankruptcy of Chrysler and now General Motors this week. And a couple of things happened that have again spawned our curiosity and we can't quite get to the bottom of it.

Chrysler. We'll start with Chrysler. Chrysler filed a viability plan with the Treasury on February 17, and that was rejected. They then filed another one and it was accepted. And they sent on the Wednesday of the week that the President made his announcement on April 30, anybody that was a UAW member, United Auto Worker, who worked for the Chrysler facilities went to the ballot box, if you will, to determine whether or not to authorize a new contract that gave pretty serious concessions in terms of wages, health care benefits, retirement benefits to Chrysler.

And one plant in my district--I'm from northeastern Ohio, Twinsburg, Ohio, stamping plant there, 1,200 people employed--they went and they said, Look, we want to keep our jobs and so even though these are pretty significant reductions in pay and benefits, we're going to vote for it. And they did. Eighty-eight percent of the autoworkers in Twinsburg voted for the contract. They were further emboldened and happy because this paragraph that's on this chart was specifically bargained for by the Twinsburg workers with Chrysler--and you can read it for yourself, Mr. Speaker--but it basically indicates that Chrysler has agreed to bring more work to Twinsburg. So 88 percent of the people voted for it. And as a matter of fact, all across the country the contract passed pretty handedly.

Then you fast forward to Thursday.

Thursday, if you were interested and you are a Member of Congress, you could get on a conference call with the President's automotive task force and they indicated to us that it's a great day for Chrysler and we're saving a lot of jobs. There will be no disruptions. There will be no displacements. People aren't going to lose their jobs and communities aren't going to be affected. So I was pretty happy. I sent out a press release saying ``thank you'' to the President, ``thank you'' to his task force, ``thank you'' to Chrysler, ``thank you'' to the UAW, that this looked like pretty good news.

Then at noon that day, that's what President Obama had to say on noon on April 30. He indicated, Lest no one should be confused about what a bankruptcy process means, it will not disrupt the lives of the people that work at Chrysler or live in communities that depend on Chrysler.

So that's pretty good news.

So the President says no people's lives are going to be disrupted who work at Chrysler and no communities will be disrupted. Which, again, just from my parochial view was pretty exciting because 13 percent of the tax base where this stamping plant is located is based upon the stamping plant and the people that work there.

So the mayor was relieved. She sent out a press release. Everything was good.

So then at 1 o'clock on April 30, we had a conference call with Robert Nardelli. He was former chief executive officer at Chrysler. And it was a question-and-answer session. And the first question was asked by the Democratic Governor of the State of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm. And she said, Congratulations, guys. This is great news. I just heard the President, but I want to make sure that the President wasn't speaking in code because I heard him say that this deal saves 30,000 jobs and we, especially in Michigan, know that more than 30,000 people work for Chrysler. It's about 39,000. So I'm just asking it to make sure that he wasn't saying we saved 30,000, but we couldn't save the other 9,000. And the answer was, Absolutely not. The President was just giving us a round number and there would be no disruptions to people's lives and no disruptions to the communities.

Well, son of a gun, that afternoon there was a pretty famous picture in most of the newspapers of this young guy with a truck taking these bankers boxes into the bankruptcy court up in New York. And buried in that set of documents is an affidavit by a guy named Robert Manzo. Mr. Manzo happens to be one of the consultants who was guiding Chrysler through this process. And in there it identifies eight plants and 9,000 people that are going to be shut down, including the Twinsburg plant. And, clearly, that came as kind of a shock to people. And I have an article that talks about--they interviewed the President of Local 122 in Twinsburg, and he said, Well, what do you think? And his response-- Doug Rice is his name--he said, I don't know if I was told the whole truth on everything. I don't feel like I was. It would be a shame if this was something that was known for some time. If they kept this back from people, that's wrong. That's wrong.

He was later on a radio program, and the host of the radio program asked him, Would that vote have been the same had you had the information you have now? And he says no. Needless to say, people ain't gonna vote to eliminate their jobs. And I think Mr. Rice is right. What autoworker would go to approve a contract on the belief that their jobs are going to be saved if they really think their jobs are going to be gone?

So we have developed, Mr. Speaker, Clue, the travel edition now, to supplement our work on AIG. And in this case clearly--I mean, the documents that were wheeled into the bankruptcy courts on the afternoon of April 30 with Mr. Manzo's affidavit, clearly somebody knew. Somebody knew that when the President got up and delivered this happy news, this good news that five plants--eight plants were going to be closed and 9,000 people across the country were going to be out of work.

And here's how silly it got. One of the next questions was by a Democratic Representative from Wisconsin, Gwen Moore, who represents the Milwaukee area, and she said, Hey, Mr. Nardelli, how about our plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin? Eight hundred people and we are really proud of it. It has a long history of manufacturing automobile parts. And so are we going to be okay? And Mr. Nardelli says, We're proud of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kenosha is part of the new Chrysler, and we very much look forward to continuing that partnership.

Sadly, like my stamping plant in Twinsburg, the Kenosha plant was one of the eight scheduled to be shut. Obviously, Representative Moore had some

questions and said, Well, I asked you. It's not like I didn't ask you. I asked you about Kenosha, Wisconsin. And Mr. Nardelli's response was he got confused. He confused Kenosha, Wisconsin, with Trenton, Michigan. They don't sound alike to my ear, but when he was saying that Kenosha, Wisconsin, was safe, he really meant Trenton, Michigan.

In addition, the mayor of my town, Katherine Procop, wrote Mr. Bloom on the President's task force and said I heard the President say no communities were going to be affected. We're just taking a pretty big whack here; what's going on? And she got a nice letter back, and the letter said, well, what the President meant to say was that no communities were going to be disrupted other than the eight with the plant closures and the 9,000 people out of their jobs

The problem with that is that was known by no one. Nobody knew, at least the auto workers, the elected officials, the mayor and others, that this was going to happen. And when you ask them, they said, well, we couldn't tell anybody, it was a secret. Somebody knew, because it was in the documents.

So we have created Clue, the travel edition, and this time instead of a pen, we know that the weapon is an ax, because they axed 9,000 people who work in this country and had good, paying jobs. And again, we have the same rooms where these negotiations took place, and our suspects this time are the President of the United States. President Obama is up there; Larry Summers, who is the President's economic adviser; down here Mr. Nardelli, who I referred to, the former CEO of Chrysler, the ax of course; Ron Bloom, whom I referenced and communicated with my mayor; again, Mr. Geithner, the Treasury Secretary; and up here is President George W. Bush.

Now, somebody in this Clue edition knew that eight plants were going to be closed and how easy would it have been for the President's speech writers to give him the information that, great news, we saved 30,000 jobs, we saved all these plants, but we can't save them all. It's like four words. But rather than diluting the happy message, somebody didn't tell eight cities, eight plants, 9,000 workers, that their jobs were to be lost, and I think it's a shame.

And again, I should just tell you, nobody is stepping up yet. The call that I referenced with Governor Granholm and Representative Moore was tape-recorded, and I called up the Chrysler guys. And I said, hey, the thing was tape-recorded; why don't you let us have the tape. And first response was, it wasn't tape-recorded. And I said, well, you know, my hearing isn't what it used to be when I was in my 20s, but I do remember people saying it was recorded. And then they called back and said, yes, it was recorded, we have a transcript. And I said, well, send it over, and they said, sure. And I said, how about that courier? They said sure. And so that was in the morning.

About 5 o'clock in the afternoon. You know, I'm looking around, I don't see any package from Chrysler. And so I called back and was told that the lawyers have it. And listen, anytime the lawyers get a hold of something, you know you've got a big problem. And so I was beginning to think that I wasn't going to get this transcript. And then a couple days later, they called and said, I'm sending you a letter. And I said, I think that means I'm not getting my transcript. And they said absolutely not, we're not sending you the transcript.

And again, if the facts were not as I just laid them out, the transcript speaks volumes. I mean, it is what it is. And again, in the game of Clue, I mean, who knew? Who knew? And I yield to my friend, Mr. Tiberi.

That's a great question, and the reason that President George W. Bush is up here is that there's some people that blame him for everything bad. And so as a result, I thought to be fair, just in case, even though he was back in Crawford, Texas, when all this was going on, just in case, we should have President Bush up there to satisfy those that blame him for just about everything that has happened.

I want to move on for just a second before I yield to my friend again, and the news has gotten worse. And the news has indicated that in addition to the 9,000 people who worked for Chrysler that aren't going to be able to work for Chrysler anymore, for some reason, through the bankruptcy, first Chrysler indicated and sent notices to 789 auto dealers across the country that they needed to shutter their doors. And according to the National Association of Automobile Dealers, about 60 people work on average at each auto dealership. And then this week's news, with General Motors news, 2,600 General Motors dealerships, and again, 60 employees.

So the first job loss is projected to be 47,000 roughly, second job loss 156,000. So another 200,000 people are going to be out of work. And you know, some people don't understand how an auto dealer costs the car company any money. And some people further think it's a strange business model to have less stores. You want to sell more stuff, and in particular in rural areas and in particular when it comes to their service department.

On top of that, The Detroit News reported on May 11 that this task force that Mr. Geithner's on and Mr. Bloom's on indicated that during the bankruptcy proceedings not only were we going to have to approve these closures of these 789 Chrysler dealerships, they also said they didn't want Chrysler spending any money on advertising during the course of the bankruptcy. And finally, when it was indicated to them how stupid that was, they let Chrysler spend half of what they intended.

So, again, you have a business model where the thinking is that Chrysler's going to be more successful with less stores, and Chrysler's going to be more successful with no advertising, especially when it's in the news and people have concerns about buying a car from a company that's in bankruptcy.

So some strange decisions have been made, and it's caused some people to ask Harley Shaiken, who is a labor expert at the University of California, Berkeley, certainly not a hotbed of conservative thought; he said the auto task force tends to be a little tone deaf. A large part of their approach tends to be at cross-purposes with the stimulus package. The Obama administration is trying to spend money to create jobs at the same time that they're cutting jobs.

I know my friend from Ohio knows that another colleague of ours from Ohio, Mr. Jordan from the western part of Ohio, participated in a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee. And the question came up, These people on the task force, do any of them have experience in manufacturing, manufacturing cars, selling cars, making parts? And the answer was none, nobody has. They had plenty of Wall Street experience, but they don't have any experience when it comes to the automotive industry.

And the witness went on to say--and this was really startling--that most of them don't own cars, and not only don't they own cars, those that do own cars drive foreign cars. But again, this is a group of people that are making--and they're not elected, they're appointed-- this is a group of people that are making these decisions that is going to cost, if you add in the Chrysler stuff, we're getting north of--and you have to put in the GM workers, another 21,000 workers this week, you're north of 250,000 jobs. I yield to my friend.

I thank you very much, and I want to go back to Mr. Manville because we know already that the President's task force determined that Chrysler shouldn't have an advertising budget that they wanted to have, and now with the GM news, it's sort of been like Pontius Pilate; they're washing their hands. These are all decisions that have been made by the car companies, we don't have anything to do with it.

But here's an e-mail that was exchanged the day before the bankruptcy filing between Robert Manzo and Matthew Feldman, who is an attorney on the President's automobile task force. And just to indicate the depths and the breadth to which these unelected folks who have plenty of bankruptcy experience and Wall Street experience but don't have any automobile experience will go to, Mr. Manzo is saying, well, do you think it's worth giving us one more shot. And the one more shot that he's referring to, he testified in court, was maybe we don't have to go to this bankruptcy route, maybe we can come to some agreement with our bondholders, and do we have to do this?

Well, the rather professional response from Mr. Feldman is that I'm now not talking to you, you went where you shouldn't. And Mr. Manzo backs up and he apologizes, and Feldman writes him another e-mail, it's over, the President doesn't negotiate second rounds. We've given and lent billions of dollars so that your team could manage this properly, and now you're telling me to bend over to a terrorist like Lauria.

And Lauria is another bankruptcy lawyer who represents some of the bondholders in the GM suit, and I think he might--I may be wrong about that--but I think he represents the Indiana Teachers Pension Fund. And he was basically saying, it's all well and good that you want to do this, but I invested teacher pension fund money in Chrysler and you're now telling me that I have to go back to my clients and say that I agreed to take five or ten cents on the dollar. He could be sued. He might be able to be put in jail. So I don't think that's the definition of a terrorist. And of course, Mr. Feldman signs off with an affectionate ``that's BS.''

So the day before you still have Chrysler trying to work it out and the President's task force telling him to take a hike. And the same thing happened this week. And if you look at how this thing is being manipulated, the same thing happened when--as you know, the GM bankruptcy is in New York as well, and people think that, well, that's kind of strange because we thought General Motors was either organized under the laws of Delaware or the laws of Michigan certainly. And as a matter of fact they are, and you don't get into Federal court in New York without some kind of nexus.

Well, lo and behold, the brainiacs at General Motors and on the President's task force found one General Motors dealership in Harlem, New York, and they are the lead pleader in the bankruptcy so that they could get a New York bankruptcy judge rather than having it decided where the company actually does business and people who work there, you know, live.

Well, I'm going to tell you, first of all, you don't have the affected parties, and so all of the people that worked for General Motors, all of the dealers that depend on it, they're not in New York. They could only find one dealer in Harlem, and so you avoid that problem.

In addition, you are able to judge shop. I mean, it's called forum shopping, and every lawyer would love, I mean love--lawyers like to win--every lawyer would love to be able to go out and pick his judge or her judge, because who wouldn't? I mean, this judge is tough, this judge is not so tough; this judge is smart, this judge is not so smart. So I mean if you could pick where your case goes, you could do pretty well. And it appears exactly what our friends at the task force did and our friends at General Motors did.

And then on top of it, I go back to the job losses at the auto dealer. It's worse than that chart because every dealer who sells GM products has gotten a letter, and it's either a you're gone letter or you're safe letter. But the guys that are safe, they are going to be required, the dealers that are going to be part of the new GM, to sign participation agreements. And if they don't sign the participation agreement, they're out and they will lose their franchise, their livelihood--their 60 people are out of work. And we have both State and Federal legislation that says, look, the car companies are pretty powerful. They have bargaining power that the small dealer doesn't. They've got lawyers, they've got millions of dollars.

And so we're not going to let this sort of unfair stuff happen. But, again, the beauty of picking a New York bankruptcy judge is that they are arguing that we should preempt all of those laws, and the car dealers no longer have protection.

So they're telling them things like, Well, you have to buy so many cars from us, even if it's a horrible business decision. And they used to have these noncompete clauses that the car company agreed not to put another GM dealership within 2 miles or 5 miles, or whatever the case may be. If we decide to put a new GM dealership right next to you, tough. That's just the way it goes.

It's unconscionable. The Sopranos would be proud of this letter by General Motors. It's clearly not--I never thought I'd see the day that this was happening in the United States.

I'd be happy to yield.

General Motors has made clear that there's going to be a new Chrysler and an old Chrysler--the bad assets going to old Chrysler; the new Chrysler, the good assets. The same thing with General Motors. The letter to the dealer is clear that if you don't sign these participation agreements and agree to whatever terms we can think of, you're out. And you're going to go under the old General Motors. Not much of a choice.

We were talking about you, my friend; our friend from the western part of Ohio, Mr. Jordan. We were talking a little bit about your experience in the Judiciary Committee. Maybe you can share, since you were there. I tried to relate it as best I could, but maybe you could chat about what happened.

I thank you, Mr. Jordan, for saying that. Listening to your story, I couldn't make that conference call. I made one the next day with Fritz Henderson, who's the CEO after the President fired the old CEO of General Motors.

Hearing your description, it sounds like the Supreme Court used to wrestle with the definition of pornography. They don't know what the definition is, but they'll know it when they see it. So perhaps a major event will be known by the President's task force when they see.

Sure.

I'm glad my friend brought that up, because one of the people that has been sent out as a member of the auto task force, Mr. Montgomery, and he was in Twinsburg, and rather than explaining how Twinsburg got picked and these 1,200 people are out of jobs, they were there to announce a great new initiative, a nationwide initiative, $50 million, to take now 30,000 unemployed autoworkers, $5 million for 30,000 unemployed autoworkers, and transition them to green jobs.

Now, I made the observation, and the Labor Secretary didn't like it very much, but I made the observation at the rate these guys are going, the only green jobs that are going to be left are cutting the grass of the Wall Street guys that got the $700 billion bailout. So some of this defies logic.

I just want to close the loop on these auto dealers, not only the workers, but the dealers. Because if you look who's being negatively impacted, it's the bondholders who had $27 billion in General Motors and they are being forced to settle for peanuts or they're called not patriotic.

You have 30,000 autoworkers whose livelihood and their family's livelihood depends upon getting up and going to work for this company. You have the communities that are impacted, and you have over 200,000 people that work at auto dealers.

Mr. Nardelli was on the witness stand in New York and he was being questioned by Amy Brown, who's an attorney for the Chrysler dealers who doesn't seem real happy about this decision. And the question was, Well, what is it that these dealers are costing the company? Mr. Nardelli's response was, Well, there's a host of expenses relating to such things as tooling, service training, advertising, and sales incentives.

But when Ms. Brown asked him to quantify how much those things cost the automaker, Mr. Nardelli said he could not, and he wasn't sure if the automaker had ever determined those exact costs.

So I don't think that that's what's going on here. I think that you have people taking advantage of a bankruptcy situation, a crisis, to engage in an agenda that they perhaps have been wanting to engage in for a very long time. And I think that it's disingenuous. And that's why we have unveiled Clue, the Travel Edition. We would like to know.

I want to yield to my friend now, one of the great champions of the auto industry from the State of Michigan that's been more impacted. I think at lunch today I heard his State may crest 25 percent unemployment as a result of some of these decisions.

My friend, Mr. McCotter from Michigan.

I thank my friend from Michigan. I just want to bring to a conclusion this evening, we hear a lot that we can't deal with some of the problems in the country because we're really busy here in the United States Congress, and so we don't have floor time.

I talked a little earlier about the AIG thing and the majority leader can't schedule it on the floor because we're really busy doing other stuff. As a matter of fact, when we broke for the Memorial Day district work period, the Speaker and the majority leader and the Democratic leadership had a big press conference hailing all of the great things that we did. But I can tell you we didn't do anything about Chrysler, we didn't do anything about General Motors.

And so I went back, and in the last Congress, Mr. Speaker, you may remember that gasoline was going through the roof. In Ohio, it topped $4 for the first time in my lifetime. And you would think that we would be doing something about a national energy policy here in the United States Congress, the greatest deliberative body in the world.

When the majority changed--and, again, as Republicans, we did such a swell job that the voters threw us out and they installed the Democrats as the majority. They took over and began their legislative responsibilities on January 29, 2007.

Gas was about $2.22. On that day, the most important thing that the majority leader could schedule was congratulating the University of California at Santa Barbara's soccer team. Gas goes up a little bit to $2.24, and that's getting people's attention. The most important thing we could do in the United States Congress is pass a resolution honoring National Passport Month. Gas goes over $3, which has people alarmed. My phones are ringing off the hook, and my colleagues' phones are ringing off the hook. On that day, the most important thing we could do is commend the Houston Dynamo soccer team.

You see a pattern here, Mr. Speaker. We are told, in order to be successful in elective office, we have to get the soccer moms. So, as gas is going through the roof, we are congratulating a soccer team in California and one down in Texas. Just to make sure nobody is confused, we like soccer and we like soccer moms.

Gas goes up to $3.77, and the most important thing that the majority can put on the floor is a resolution honoring National Train Day. Most of us like trains, but gas is $3.77. Gas goes up to $3.84. We passed-- and I had to look this up because I didn't know what a ``canid'' was. When gas hit $3.84, we passed the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act. Again, if you have trouble with canids, Mr. Speaker, that's a dog. So gas is $3.84. Our constituents are suffering as they fill up their tanks, and we're talking about cats and dogs here in the United States Congress. It gets up to $4.09. It crosses $4 for the first time. Do you know what? A lot of people in my district don't know this, but 2008 was the International Year of Sanitation. So that was the most important thing we could do. Then out here, when we get to $4.14, which is about where it crested in Ohio--it might have been higher or a little bit lower in other States--the most important thing that the majority can put on the floor is the Monkey Safety Act.

So, again, when talking about tone deaf, that made some of us think that perhaps the new majority was tone deaf, and we talked to them about it. We said, Hey, you know, maybe we could do other stuff. So this year, when hundreds of thousands of people in this country who work in the automotive industry are losing their jobs, we're thinking, oh, they get it; they understand you can't do goofy things and commemorative things when people are losing their jobs.

Earlier this year, 4,000 people were axed at Chrysler. On that day, we honored former Senator Claiborne Pell. He had a long, storied career, but we've got 4,000 people out of work, and maybe we could be doing something else; 9,500 Chrysler people are out. On that day, the most important thing that the majority can put on the floor is a resolution supporting the goals and ideals of national team dating. All of us think team dating is important unless you happen to be the father of one of the team members; but we passed that resolution. You get up here just south of 10,000 Chrysler workers who are losing their jobs; and son of a gun, we pass the Monkey Safety Act again.

So we had time not to deal with gasoline prices, not to deal with an energy policy, not to deal with the automotive industry, but we did have time to take up floor time, 2 years in a row, on the Monkey Safety Act.

Then we got out here where 13,000 people are losing their jobs, and son of a gun, I guess the Senate didn't pass the bill about cats and dogs, and so we take more floor time talking about

cats and dogs even though 13,000 people have lost their jobs.

Then you get out here. This is another guy who, I think, we all like, but now 16,000 people are out of jobs, and the most important thing the majority can put on the floor is awarding a gold medal to Arnold Palmer. I think most of us like Arnold Palmer, and we think he has had a nice career, but 16,000 of our friends and neighbors are without jobs. Then when it hits the top at 18,365, son of a gun, it's National Train Day Again.

So there clearly are difficulties with priorities here in the House, and I don't want to disparage the Democratic leadership too much. I would be happy to yield to my friend in just a second because it's not fair just to talk about the Monkey Safety Act and National Train Day and the International Year of Sanitation.

I want my colleagues to know that, since the beginning of this Congress, the majority has also taken up floor time at 40 minutes a pop to name all of these post offices in the United States of America. So, if you live in one of these towns, Mr. Speaker, you can rest assured that the United States Congress is on the job and that we have named your post office. So, when you go in and get that 44-cent stamp, it has got a name on it. The folks know that each one of these takes about an hour of floor time and a vote. I think there are 14 of them. There may be a few more. So that's about 14 hours of precious time when the United States Congress could have been talking about jobs at Chrysler, about jobs at GM and about gasoline prices last year when we couldn't quite get there.

Just to close the loop on that thought, as we know, 11 plants have closed this week, GM plants, and another 21,000 people are out of work. So you would think, okay, because Chrysler is smaller than GM, maybe we didn't think it was that huge; but Flagship GM, as my friend from Michigan has talked about, is a national icon. So we came back from our district work period yesterday, and just to make sure that people don't think that I'm somehow bad-mouthing the Democratic majority, they really did stuff yesterday to take care of the GM situation other than naming post offices.

Yesterday, we debated legislation on the direct fish stocking of certain lakes in Washington State, and we commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains. Apparently, the soccer moms have been replaced with basketball moms, and we honored the University of Tennessee's women's basketball team.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Michigan.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Tiberi, I would yield to you for an observation.

To answer the gentleman's question, I think it's both. I think we'll see the administration taking credit for saving 2,000 jobs and for creating 2,000 jobs. It will be too bad for the folks in the Miami Valley, and that's just the way it goes.

I would close with: we sent the President of the United States, President Obama, a letter that was signed by 36 of our colleagues. I believe all of the Members on the floor signed it. It basically asked the President to take a deep breath. As Mr. Jordan has indicated, this unappointed task force, in my opinion, is not serving the President of the United States well. So take a deep breath.

Go back to 1979. There was Jimmy Carter, Lee Iacocca and the problem with Chrysler back in 1979. Have thoughtful hearings. Have thoughtful discussions. Have people who are experienced in the automotive industry or who, at a minimum, own a car, and let's have this conversation. In that case, my colleagues will remember, the United States not only got paid back, but we made money. We made $35 million on the first Chrysler bailout. The problem that the government had is nobody ever expected us to make money on it, so there was no provision on how to spend it; but people at home need not worry--that Congress at the time figured out how to spend it rather quickly. It goes to show that, when done thoughtfully, it can be done okay.

So we come to Clue, the travel edition--and oh, by the way, we haven't heard back from the President yet. I know he is overseas and that he is a busy person being the leader of the Free World, so he hasn't had a chance to get back to us. I hope that he does. I hope he takes our suggestion. It is a bipartisan letter--I want to say that-- from Republicans and Democrats who are concerned about the autoworkers, the plants, the auto dealers, and the people who invest money.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I think it's a shame. You know, if our constituents want safe monkeys, they can rest easy tonight because we've passed that bill twice. If you like cats and dogs, they're okay. You can rest easy. If you like trains, it's not a problem. If your post office hasn't been named this year, call your Member of Congress, and I'll bet we can slap a name on it sometime rather than dealing with the problems that ail the country.

If you're a union member who works for the United Autoworkers, too bad. We don't have time for any legislation for you. We will train you for a green job--cutting somebody's grass. If you, God forbid, were a stockholder in one of these companies or invested money in one of these companies, you're now being told your investment is worthless, so things like secured debt don't mean ``secured debt.'' It's a little bit like the mortgage crisis. If you're tired of paying your mortgage, don't worry about it. We'll pay it for you.

There is the supply chain that Mr. Tiberi talked about, and there are the dealers that, I think, we've all talked about. We're talking about 200,000 people. Again, it doesn't make sense.

I think Mr. Jordan's observation was right on the money. First of all, we have got to solve Clue, the travel edition, to figure out who did this. Secondly, I think they owe people an explanation. Why did my plant get closed and not somebody else's? Why did this dealership get closed and not somebody else's? Why are 1,200 people out of work in my district and not someplace else? Why are we picking on the dealers when, according to Mr. Nardelli, he

doesn't know if they cost him any money? It is, indeed, a strange business model to think that you're going to sell more Chryslers with less stores and with no advertising, but maybe that's just me.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you. I thank my colleagues--two from Ohio and one from Michigan--for joining us for this hour.

I yield back our time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 26 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, June 4, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information for publication in the Congressional Record regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 915, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2009.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steven C. LaTourette.

Bill Number: H.R. 915.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Lake County, OH

Address of Requesting Entity: 1885 Lost Nation Road, Willoughby, OH 44094 USA.

Description of Request: To authorize and make funds available to Lake County, OH for the purchase of Lost Nation airport from the City of Willoughby. The transaction will help maintain the capacity of the national aviation system. Up to $1,220,000 will be made available to Lake County, OH for the purchase.

I want to thank Mr. Mica for yielding to me.

I want to commend the chairman of the full committee, Mr. Oberstar; the chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. Costello; the ranking member of the full committee, Mr. Mica; and the subcommittee ranking member, Mr. Petri, for bringing us, again, this well-crafted bill. It looks a lot like the bill that was successfully passed by a big margin here in the House during the last Congress. Sadly, the Senate couldn't see its way clear to pass it.

I want to speak specifically on one issue. My time on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has come to an end, sadly, but I'd like to consider myself an ex officio member as we talk about this one issue. That is the issue of the air traffic controllers. I'm a Republican, and I'm proud to be a Republican but I have to tell you that one of my great disappointments during the last administration is that I do believe President Bush was ill-served by his advisers who told him to declare an impasse in the negotiations between the administration and the air traffic controllers and to basically impose a contract on them.

I think everybody on this floor now engaged in the debate has been inside an air traffic control center and has seen these dedicated men and women who are peering in the dark at screens, controlling 10, 12, 15 jetliners filled with 138 or 150 Americans and travelers to our country, making sure that they get there safely.

Now, it's not my belief that everybody who works in this country is entitled to have a contract that they're happy with. It is my belief, however, that everybody who works under a contract, a labor-negotiated contract, has the right to be happy about the process in which it was reached. This contract imposed by the last administration was not fair. I give credit to the Obama administration for appointing Jane Garvey to move that process forward.

These people do an important job. Some people say they make too much money, but I'll tell you what, that's what you work out in negotiations. So they're entitled to have a contract where their representatives sit down and, eyeball to eyeball, talk to folks in the administration and get this done.

Madam Speaker, I thank you for the recognition, and I want to thank Leader Boehner for granting me the leadership hour on our side to share some thoughts this evening with you, Madam Speaker.

As the Speaker's well aware, our economy is in pretty tough shape, and people all over the country are suffering. But despite the fact that people continue to suffer, there is sort of this bailout fever here on Capitol Hill, and it's not uncommon for me to go home to Ohio and have somebody come up to me on the street and say, Hey, where is my bailout like the guys on Wall Street and like many others? Literally billions and billions of dollars. Taxpayer dollars. People get up, work hard, pay their taxes just trying to raise their kids and keep a roof over their head. Billions and billions of dollars have been sent out in these bailouts.

And we have come to the floor on a pretty regular basis to talk about AIG, the insurance giant on Wall Street, that, to date, has received about a $185 billion of taxpayers' money in the form of a bailout. We were told that they are too big to fail, and quite frankly, even though I happen to be a Republican, this started on the former President's watch when his Secretary of the Treasury, came to us and said, If you don't give us $700 billion, here's a three-page bill, if you don't give us $700 by the end of the week, we're going to have a collapse. And sadly, in my opinion, some Members of this body abdicated their responsibility of oversight and bum rushed $700 billion to Wall Street.

But a funny thing happened in that bill that has caused some in this House some chagrin and has led us to come to the floor on a regular basis and talk about a game that's pretty well known by most people in America. It's a game I loved playing as a kid. It's a game I continue to love playing with my kids called Clue made by Hasbro.

And the reason we bring Clue to the floor and have is that in the conference, first of all, is this $700 billion--have to fast forward to the President's stimulus request earlier this year. As this bill was being crafted, there was an amendment placed into the stimulus package that said that you know what, we've given billions and billions and billions of dollars to these Wall Street firms, but perhaps we should put some conditions, or strings, on the multimillion-dollar bonuses that are being paid out to these folks.

And the amendment was put in over in the other body, in the United States Senate, by a Democratic Senator, Senator Wyden from Oregon, and a Republican Senator, Senator Snowe from Maine. And that was in the bill. It wasn't in the House bill; it was in the Senate bill.

So you get together in a conference report. Madam Speaker, you know, but some folks don't necessarily know, that when the House and Senate pass a separate version of a bill, we have to have a conference committee. And the conference committee works out the details and then that conference report is brought back to both Chambers for a vote on the conference report.

Well, in the conference committee somehow the Snowe-Wyden language that indicated that we were going to put some restrictions on these million-dollar bonuses--multimillion-dollar bonuses to AIG and other executives, that language was taken out and, over on the second easel, this language, subparagraph (iii), was inserted.

And this language, Madam Speaker, not only removed the Snowe-Wyden language, it put in these about 40 words that specifically protected the bonuses paid to AIG executives and other executives on Wall Street who had received, again, billions of dollars of

money through the TARP program. And so the stimulus bill came to the floor with this language protecting the bonuses.

It was a partisan vote on the stimulus bill, pretty much. And all of the Democratic Members of the House, save 11, I think, voted for the President's stimulus initiative. And by casting that vote, they were approving, among other things, a piece of legislation that specifically protected the $173 million in bonuses that were then paid to AIG.

Well, shortly after it was brought to light, because this was a big bill--and I should tell you that I don't think that a lot of my colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle did this intentionally, because this was a bill of over a thousand pages. And the Tuesday that the stimulus bill was being considered on the floor, there was a motion made that Members of the House should have 48 hours to read whatever the final bill was, a thousand pages, and that, here's a novel idea: It should be put on the Internet and anybody in America that was interested in what was in these thousand pages would have the opportunity over 2 days to reflect on it and, if necessary, if they felt the need, to correspond with their Member of Congress or their United States Senator.

Well, a funny thing happened to that. Even though every Member in this body that was present that day voted to give every Member in this body 48 hours to read the bill and the American public 48 hours to read the bill, we came up and the bill wasn't ready until Thursday night at midnight that same week. Somehow, the commitment to give everybody 48 hours was forgotten and this thousand-page page bill was filed at midnight on Thursday.

It was voted on the next day, Friday. And Members who arrived to work that Friday morning basically had 90 minutes to read a thousand pages.

So I don't think, Madam Speaker, that everybody read that bill prior to casting their vote. I think some people were embarrassed when they found out they voted to give out $173 million in bonuses to AIG executives. I know that the President of the United States, President Obama, didn't like it, because he came on television and he said, I'm shocked. I can't believe that this has happened. Why is AIG giving out the bonuses?

Well, he may have been shocked because he hadn't been informed either. I don't know. But there are some people that should not be shocked. They are the people who form the conference committee, where somebody took out the Snowe-Wyden language that would have put some restrictions on these bonuses and inserted this paragraph that protected those bonuses.

And so the conference committee is a small group of representatives and senators and, using the Clue set of observations, we know that somebody that put this language in--the weapon, if you remember the Clue game--was a pen. That they used a pen to put in the language that's under discussion.

Here, we have the Clue board slightly modified to reflect the United States Capitol. I think over the course of days we have--the times we have discussed this--we have been able to eliminate some people and we have been able to eliminate some rooms.

And the people that we have been able to eliminate are down here. Charlie Rangel, who is the distinguished Chair of the Ways and Means Committee. He has been quoted in the press as saying when he came out of this conference committee, It's pretty tough to work with a government that's run by only three people. And so I don't think he had anything to do with it. But we're left with this sort of list of suspects.

Suspect number one that the press is blaming is Senator Chris Dodd of the State of Connecticut. He is the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. There was some discussion that he and/or his staff inserted that language.

We know also that the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi, was present during that discussion. Senator Reid, as the leader of the Senate, was involved in those discussions. And over here we have Rahm Emanuel, who is the President's chief of staff, and the Secretary of the Treasury as well, Mr. Geithner.

Well, somebody put this language in. All we are trying to find out is who put the language in, why they put it in, and why people were shocked and amazed that these bonuses went out when the legislation specifically permitted it.

Now we have made great progress. And I have to give great credit to the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank of Massachusetts. We filed what is known as a Resolution of Inquiry because nobody would sort of own up to this. We filed a piece of legislation here that said, Hey, Treasury, how about handing over the documents and communications so we can get to the bottom of this, so we can figure out that it was one of these people with the pen in the Speaker's office or in the conference room.

Chairman Frank moved it through his committee. Everybody that was present that day voted for it. But now, sadly, it's languishing at the desk and the majority leader of the House, Mr. Hoyer, has chosen not to call it up. But, again, to Chairman Frank's credit, he has indicated to the Treasury that he wants this thing resolved.

There was a meeting this week with members of my staff and members of the Treasury, and they have promised to produce some documents that, maybe the next time, Madam Speaker, that we are able to talk about this, we can identify who it was that inserted the language, on who's instruction, and why. And I think, Madam Speaker, the American people are entitled to know.

Now, as the Speaker knows, aside from the financial services bailout, the bailout of Wall Street, there's a lot going on with the American automotive industry as well. Chrysler was given 30 days to reach an agreement with the Italian automaker Fiat. And has recently gone into bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, we have another clue--this time, Clue, The Travel Edition, because some of the facts that have been sort of laid out there are not, as we dig further, as they appear.

And so to set the stage, Madam Speaker, as you know, the Union, the United Auto Workers of America, were asked to make significant concessions in order to keep Chrysler alive. As a matter of fact, on the 28th and 29th of April, every union hall, every UAW union hall that was involved in Chrysler operations, had an election. And the election was whether or not to ratify this new contract with the concessions.

As a matter of fact, in my area in Ohio, we have a Chrysler stamping plant in a great city by the name of Twinsburg, Ohio. In Twinsburg, Ohio, the UAW local, Local 122, had done an outstanding job of negotiating language in this concession package that indicated that additional work was going to come to Twinsburg. I will show you that language in just a minute, Madam Speaker.

So people voted. All the union members voted on the 28th and 29th. The contract with concessions was approved. As a matter of fact, in Twinsburg Local 122, 88 percent of the union members who cast ballots voted in favor of the new contract because they thought by making these sacrifices, it would make a stronger Chrysler and they would get to keep their jobs and they would get to continue making automobiles.

Fast forward to the next day, April 30. The President of the United States, President Obama, announced this deal that Chrysler was going to go into bankruptcy and the contract had been approved and good things were going to happen. And on that date at his press conference this quote on the far board, Madam Speaker, the President of the United States said, ``No one 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 communities that depend on it,'' meaning Chrysler.

Now I have got to tell you, back in Cleveland there was news coverage of this series of events. And after the President made this announcement on April 30th, the champagne corks were popping. People were happy. They had approved a contract. They had taken a hit in their wages and their benefits. But they knew that no one should be confused that this decision wasn't going to disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or live in the communities that depend on them.

As promised, Madam Speaker, the chart now on the easel, this paragraph is the specific language that was negotiated by the UAW in Twinsburg, Ohio, that indicates when they went to vote

to approve this contract on April 28 and 29, they believed they were agreeing to a provision that was separately negotiated for their plant that said during these discussions, the company, Chrysler, agreed to-- and basically find ways to bring more work to the stamping plant in Twinsburg, Ohio.

Well, after the President made his announcement at noon, there was a conference call between the former CEO of Chrysler, Robert Nardelli, and interested parties--Members of Congress, governors, people who were interested. And the first question that was asked on that conference call--and I should say I have asked for the transcript of that conference call from Chrysler, and they are refusing to give it to me. We will try another way. There's always a couple different ways to skin a cat.

But the first question came from Governor Granholm from the State of Michigan, and she said, basically, Congratulations. This is great news. As a matter of fact, Governor Granholm had a press conference and she said, Not only does this agreement preserve jobs, the opportunity for expanding growth in jobs in Michigan is very well. At the end of this path--which is the temporary idling while the company is in bankruptcy--we can see that the jobs are going to be there. It's a defining moment for Michigan, and certainly a defining moment for Chrysler.

Well, her question to Mr. Nardelli was, We just heard the President's announcement. Great work. But he said that by this agreement, 30,000 jobs at Chrysler had been saved. We know that there are 39,000 people who work for Chrysler in the United States. So was the President speaking in some kind of code that we saved 30,000, but we couldn't save all 39,000?

The answer back from the officials at Chrysler who were on the telephone call: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. The President just had the number wrong. And there's going to be no plant closings. Nobody is going to lose their job.

Well, during that same phone call, Representative Gwen Moore, who's a Democratic Member of Congress, does a great job on behalf of her constituents in Milwaukee, asked Mr. Nardelli directly about the future of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, engine plant, which employs 800 people. And he specifically indicated that they loved the Kenosha plant; it had a long history; it was productive; it made money; and the 800 people up there in Kenosha, Wisconsin, didn't have to worry about anything.

Sadly, what happened after that conference call, after the President's announcement--I think we've all seen the pictures--this picture of the sort of nerdy-looking guy with all those bankers boxes taking the bankruptcy filings to the court in New York.

They were filed that afternoon--the same afternoon; April 30. Buried in those documents was the fact that eight Chrysler facilities in the United States of America were going to be closed as a result of the bankruptcy and, among them, Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Twinsburg, Ohio.

So, again, you had Mr. Nardelli saying Kenosha is great and you had the UAW in Twinsburg negotiating an agreement where they think work is going to come to them, but the news was, when the bankruptcy filings were read, that they're going to be closed and they're going to be out of jobs beginning next year.

Now, to be fair, Mr. Nardelli--you know, obviously there were some questions asked about it. So they asked, What happened? He said Kenosha was okay. He wrote to Representative Gwen Moore of Milwaukee that he mistakenly conveyed the status of the Phoenix investment.

He confused Kenosha, Wisconsin, with a plant in Trenton, Michigan. So not only isn't it the same State, Wisconsin. You have sound-alikes. We have a lot of Madison, Ohios, and all this other business. He apologized to Representative Moore because he said that he confused Trenton, Michigan, with Kenosha, Wisconsin and that Trenton, Michigan, is going to be okay. Don't worry about it.

The mayor of Twinsburg also was obviously confused because people were celebrating. If you think about it, Madam Speaker, 88 percent of the union in Twinsburg voted to approve this contract. Well, you'd have to be pretty dumb to vote for a contract that was going to end your job. In conversations with the union leaders and membership, they didn't know. They didn't know that by the company going into bankruptcy, that they were going to be out of a job. Clearly I don't think 88 percent of them would have voted in favor of a contract that meant that they had no job. They were heartened by the President's comments the day before that no one should be confused about what a bankruptcy means. It will not disrupt the lives of the people who work for Chrysler or live in communities that depend on it. Now maybe this is like a Major League Baseball statistic. He needed to have an asterisk next to it and in small print say, oh, except for those eight plants, those eight cities and those 9,000 people that work there. But that isn't what the President said, and I think the President meant this. Again, it's my view that the President may have been ill-served by those who report to him about what was going on at this moment in time.

Also, the mayor of Twinsburg, Katherine Procop, who is a great mayor, expressed some concern. She wrote a note to Ron Bloom, who was part of the President's automobile task force about, Hey, wait a minute. We were watching TV. They said no plants were going to be closed. Nobody was going to lose their job. Now in Twinsburg, it's 1,200 jobs. We find out our plant's closing. It's 13 percent of our tax base, and 1,200 people are going to be out of work. What's the deal?

So Mr. Bloom wrote back to Mayor Procop on May 6; and he indicated the pertinent paragraph, While the original February 17 plan submitted by Chrysler was not deemed viable by the task force, the more recently proposed Fiat/Chrysler alliance plan has been approved, which is true. This plan included the same plant closure schedule as the one originally proposed by Chrysler, and the President's comments were meant to convey the message that the bankruptcy of Chrysler had in no way changed these plans. Now that's a fine observation, except that nobody ever identified any plant closings in the February 17 filing or in the subsequent filing because they said they couldn't. I think what Mr. Bloom's letter is saying, that no lives are going to be interrupted, and no communities are going to suffer, except for those eight plants, 9,000 people, and eight communities that nobody knew about, which is a stretch. I mean, I have to tell you, it's a stretch, and people have questions.

So the question now is--and we have, again, filed a resolution of inquiry asking the administration to have the automobile task force get with us and talk about how this happened. This time we have the Clue travel edition. We have the Clue travel edition. This time it's not a pen, but we know that the weapon was an ax. Nine thousand people with an ax are going to lose their job. Their jobs have been axed in eight communities across America at Chrysler.

So this time on the board we have the President of the United States. I do not think President Obama knew all of the details when he made this announcement. I have sent him a letter saying that I give him great credit for the leadership he has shown. But again, my observation is that he has not been well served. On that conference call and part of the team, Larry Summers who is an economic adviser to the President; Robert Nardelli, who I have talked about, the former chief executive officer of Chrysler; Mr. Bloom; Mr. Geithner, the Treasury Secretary; and former President George W. Bush. The last time we talked about this, somebody said, Why do you have President Bush up there? This all happened this year. But I just wanted to be fair because I know that there are some people in this country that blame President Bush for anything that happens that is bad. So I wanted to have his picture up there as well.

So somebody in this group--and I think I can safely exclude the two, the former President of the United States and the current President of the United States from this list--but when the President went to the microphone on April 30, 2009, and said no communities were going to suffer, somebody in this Clue game knew that when the bankruptcy--think about these banker

boxes. If you've seen that picture with the guy with the cart and the bankers boxes. He filed them at like 3 o'clock in the afternoon the same day. I know that the lawyers are quick, and we've got all kinds of computers and stuff. But those documents didn't get written between noon and 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Somebody on the President's task force or somebody at Chrysler or somebody someplace knew that when those documents, those bankers boxes were opened, we were going to find eight plant closings and 9,000 people losing their jobs. I think the thing that bothers me more than anything, even though people being thrown out of work is horrible enough, it is that these 9,000 workers at these eight plants went to vote on a contract where they were giving up big time wages and benefits; and they voted, not knowing that by casting that vote, they were going to lose their job. Again, I don't think any reasonable person would make that vote in the days before the President's announcement, knowing that it meant that their job was gone.

So we are going to attempt to determine now, and we've asked the President if he would direct his automobile task force to share with us who knew prior to April 30, who knew at the time the President was saying that nobody was going to suffer that, in fact, 9,000 people were going to suffer. Because I have to tell you that again, I think the President's achievement here is significant. It would have been real easy for his advisers to say, You know what, we saved 30,000 jobs, we couldn't save them all, and so there's going to be some suffering in eight cities and in 9,000 homes; but overall, we saved three-quarters of the jobs at Chrysler.

Nobody said that. What they said was, nobody was going to be without a job, and nobody was going to suffer.

So, Madam Speaker, we're going to work diligently over the next little while and see if we can identify who in this particular game of Clue took the job, took the ax and basically axed 9,000 people out of a job. In addition, the news this week in the bankruptcy court and something that we need to find out about is who's responsible. It's not just 9,000 jobs anymore. It's not just eight Chrysler plants. The news today, or this week, was that they are directing 789 Chrysler dealerships to close, that they're going to take their franchises away. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, about 60 people on average work at each Chrysler dealership in the United States of America. So these 789 dealerships times 60, another 47,340 people across America, in Ohio, everywhere else, are soon to lose their jobs. That is going to be on the back of this next week, it's anticipated that General Motors, which is also having difficulty, that they are going to attempt to get rid of 2,600 franchise dealers. Again, using the math of an average of 60 people at each dealership, that's another 156,000 people that will lose their jobs at General Motors dealerships.

So altogether, you now have, in addition to the 9,000 people at Chrysler, 203,340 additional people that are going to be out of work as a result of these bankruptcies. Again, I don't think that the President of the United States has been well served by his advisers or else I don't think he would have uttered the statement that no one should be confused about what a bankruptcy means, that it will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or live in the communities that depend on them.

We're now up to, Madam Speaker, over 210,000 people that are going to be out of work as a result of this decision. And because I know that the President of the United States is a man of character, I know that the President of the United States didn't have in his mind when he made that observation that 210,000 people would be out of work because clearly that number, by any calculus, means that a lot of communities are going to suffer, and a lot of families are going to suffer, and a lot of people across this country are going to suffer.

Some of us can't figure out how the car company, Chrysler or GM, saves money by closing car dealerships. I mean, they don't cost the car companies any money. It's kind of a strange marketing proposal that you can sell more stuff by having less stores. So let's have less stores, maybe we'll sell more cars. That logic is lost on me. But maybe somebody on the Clue travel edition can explain it to me.

Also, in the April 17 edition of Time magazine, there is something here that in response to pressure from the Obama administration, Chrysler has proposed more plant shutdowns. Again, that is April 17, almost 2 weeks before the President says that nobody's going to suffer, no plants are going to be closed, and we're not going to have a problem.

On top of that--and this one kind of puzzles me too. The first thing that puzzles me is how you sell more cars with less stores. The second one is--and this is from the Detroit newspaper on May 11 that says that Chrysler wanted to spend $134 million in advertising over the 9 weeks that it is expected to be in bankruptcy; but the auto industry task force originally told them, we don't want you spending any money on advertising and then begrudgingly said, Okay, you can spend half of it. That comes as a result of Robert Manzo, who is the executive director of Capstone Advisory Group, who is a consultant to Chrysler. He testified in bankruptcy court that the task force--again, the administration's auto task force--believed that it was not feasible to spend anything on marketing and advertising over this period of time.

So just as it confuses some of us that you can sell more cars with less stores, stores that don't cost the car companies any money, how you don't damage your sales by not having any advertising. But that is where we find ourselves.

So, Madam Speaker, we're going to do Clue the travel edition. And I hope, unlike the AIG Clue edition, we have people that are willing to come forward and say, Yeah, I didn't think Chrysler needed to advertise, or, Yeah, I knew that those eight plants and those 9,000 people were going to be out of a job, but here's why we kept it from them when they were asked to approve the contract with concessions.

Now, Madam Speaker, we hear a lot that we don't have the time here in the United States Congress to deal with some of these issues. I just want to do a quick review of the last couple of years when that argument has been made and share with you the things that the United States Congress has been dealing with, rather than dealing with a variety of subjects, such as gasoline prices last year when gasoline went to over $4 a gallon and now these many, many people who work at Chrysler who are losing their jobs.

Madam Speaker, I apologize for taking a long time. I don't have assistance. You will be pleased to know I have also dog-eared the corners because the last time I did this, my fingernails couldn't reach under the sticky notes and take them off in a timely fashion.

Last year gasoline prices went through the roof, and there were a lot of reasons for that. There was a feeling when Congress went on its district work period a year ago August that perhaps we should have a debate on a national energy policy. I can remember calls of ``drill, baby, drill.'' There are people who want nuclear power. There are people that want green renewable energy, hydropower, geothermal power, solar, wind.

The request was made that we should really have a discussion, and let's talk about all the alternatives, and again, the ideas that get the most votes from the most Members will succeed. But we have to do something about gasoline prices in this country because our constituents are suffering.

Well, January 29 was when the Republicans did such a bang-up job of being in charge of the Congress that the voters threw us out in 2006 and replaced us with a Democratic majority, and that Democratic majority started on January 2007. At the time, gasoline was $2.22 a gallon. And people said, okay, that is getting up there, but it is not horrible. And so on that day, January 29, the most important thing that the leadership of the House could decide to put on the floor was a resolution congratulating the University of California Santa Barbara soccer team. Now, I assume that every member of that team, their families and their fans are proud of their accomplishment. They certainly deserve to be complimented. But I don't know, when people at home are suffering with increasingly high gas prices, if that is the most important thing we can do.

Well, it creeps up. We get out here to September 5 of the same year. Gas has now moved up. The national average is $2.84 a gallon. And on that day, the most important thing we could do here on the House of Representatives was recognize National Passport Month. And I guess September is National Passport Month. You might want to go home and jot it down on the calendar, Madam Speaker, because I actually forgot that was right.

Gas continues to go up. Here we are out here, February 6 of the next year, gas $3.03 a gallon, and the most important thing that we can do on the House floor on that day is commend the Houston Dynamo soccer team. When you are in elected office, you know this, Madam Speaker, we are told that if we want to be elected, we have to go out and get the soccer moms. And so by having two of the most important things, while gas is going up to over $3 a gallon, commending soccer teams, I think we have the soccer mom vote taken care of, and maybe we could have gone on to talk about energy.

Well, we get into May of 2008. Gas is $3.77 a gallon. You would think we would be talking about a national energy policy. But on that day, the most important thing we could come up with was to celebrate National Train Day. And I used to be the chairman of the Railroad Subcommittee. I like trains. But for crying out loud, my constituents were paying $3.77, and they were calling the office in droves saying, when are you going to do something about gasoline prices?

Well, we get out here, it continues to go up to $3.84 on May 20, and the most important thing we can do, rather than talking about gasoline prices, is to pass a resolution honoring or protecting great cats and rare canids. And I can tell you, Madam Speaker, I voted for that legislation because I know what great cats are, lions and tigers and things like that. I didn't know what a canid was. I had to go back to my office and look it up. It is a dog. So on the day that gas was $3.84 a gallon, we were celebrating and recognizing lions, tigers, and dogs here on the House floor.

We are up to June of that year. Gas goes up to $4.09. I'm sure we are going to talk about energy because people can't even afford to fill up their car and go to work. But on that day, June 10, rather than talking about gasoline prices, the most important thing we could do here in the United States Congress was to recognize 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation. And a lot of people back home in Ohio, when they were filling up their cars, didn't know that 2008 was the International Year of Sanitation. And I don't know that their lives were greatly improved because of that.

Then it finally peaked out on June 17, 2008, when gasoline hits $4.17 a gallon. Gasoline was over $4 for the first time in my lifetime, and I'm 54. And I'm sure that we were talking about energy on this occasion in June. But we weren't. The most important thing we could do was pass the Monkey Safety Act. And I don't know any Member of the House, Republican or Democrat, that wants unsafe monkeys. But clearly, when gas prices were going through the roof, the most important thing that the greatest legislative body in the world could be working on, I would hope, wouldn't be the Monkey Safety Act.

So they said, okay, we get it. Now we are going to be serious. We start this new Congress. And in the new Congress, we have this horrible problem at Chrysler, which is the subject of the Clue travel edition. And it began in January when 4,000 people at Chrysler lost their jobs. And rather than talking about that, we honored the life of Claiborne Pell, a former United States Senator. And he certainly was deserving of recognition. But 4,000 people are out of work.

We get over here to right before March, and now we are up to 9,500 Chrysler people are out of work, and we passed a resolution supporting the goals and ideals of National Teen Dating. Now, as a father, I want teens to be safe, and I want them to be dating. But again, 9,500 people are out of work, and we are recognizing the goals and ideals of National Teen Dating.

Still before we get to the middle of March, before we get to a little bigger jump up to almost 11,000 people out of work, the most important thing we could do, and here is a repeat, Madam Speaker, apparently, we don't have time to talk about gas prices. We don't have time to deal with people being thrown out of work. But apparently the United States Senate didn't act last year on the Monkey Safety Act, so we debated the Monkey Safety Act again and passed the Monkey Safety Act.

Now you get out here to mid-April, and you are now up to 13,000 people at Chrysler who are out of work. And you would think maybe we are going to be talking about that. But instead, son of a gun, I guess the Senate didn't honor cats and dogs last year either, and so we had to bring back on the floor the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act.

You get out to May, and now there are 16,000, a little over 16,000 people at Chrysler out of work. And the most important thing we can do on that day is to award a Gold Medal to Arnold Palmer for his sportsmanship in golf. Now I happen to be an admirer of Arnold Palmer of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. I think he is deserving of whatever recognition comes his way. But when 16,000 people have lost their jobs and we have these issues with how we are going to help the car companies, how we are going to help the people that work there, I think even Arnold Palmer would have said, honor me next week.

And now we get out to last week we are now up to 18,365 people out of work at Chrysler, only Chrysler, and again, we are about to have another 200,000 at automobile dealerships all across the country. I'm sure that obviously we should have been talking about Chrysler and the auto industry on that day, but, son of a gun, they say that history repeats itself. We again had to recognize National Train Day here in the United States Congress.

So I would suggest, a little bit more than tongue in cheek, that we had time. We had time to deal with this, Madam Speaker. And for whatever reason, those who are charged with scheduling legislation in this floor felt that our time was most well spent honoring soccer teams, recognizing cats and dogs, making sure that monkeys are safe in the United States, not once but twice, and some of the other things.

But that isn't all, Madam Speaker. You're aware that on the day we come back, we do suspensions. Suspensions are bills that are brought to the floor. They are debated for 40 minutes. Republicans get 20 minutes. The Democrats get 20 minutes. And then we have a 15-minute vote. So if we put the vote together with the suspension, it is 55 minutes. Just since the beginning of this year, this list of bills here on the left and their dates of passage, we had time to name--these are post offices. This list of legislation are post offices. So everybody across America should be happy that when they go into a post office it probably has a name on it. And these are the post offices that we have taken 1 hour a piece to name since the beginning of the year. And 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 14 hours of putting a name on a post office when we could have been talking about gas prices. We could have been talking about Chrysler. We could have been talking about the billions of dollars that we are bleeding on these bailouts for everybody. But again, when you walk in, if anybody, Madam Speaker, lives in any of these communities, they can rest assured that in Rye, New York, for instance, if you go to buy stamps in Rye, New York, your post office now has a name, named after somebody, thanks to the United States Congress.

Now the difficulty with that is that the people at Chrysler, the 18,000 people at Chrysler who have lost their jobs, and the 203,000 people who are about to lose their jobs at the car dealerships across this country, they can afford to go in and buy the 44-cent stamps in the post office. But clearly, they have names.

Madam Speaker, this is problematic. And I think that the people who work at Chrysler, the 9,000 people in those eight communities and the citizens of those eight communities who popped champagne corks when they heard the President of the United States, and reaffirmed by Mr. Nardelli, the CEO of Chrysler, indicate that their jobs were going to be okay and their plants were going to be open, and that they cast ballots in large numbers signifying that they were willing to give up how much they made an hour, how much they had to contribute in health care,

what their pension looked like, because they believed that they were going to be able to keep their job.

And that wasn't true.

So again, Madam Speaker, we will come back again until somebody, somebody helps us solve the game of Clue. Who took an ax in the Senate leader's office, the Speaker's office, the conference room, who took the ax to 9,000 hard-working Americans in this country, their plants and the communities that depend upon those tax revenues for police protection, fire protection, and schools? Who took the ax and ended those jobs?

And again, President Bush was meant in jest. I don't think President Obama did this. But others on this board, I would posit, had to know, had to know prior to the President's announcement that this was going to happen. And I just don't think that that is right in the United States of America.

Likewise, the 203,000 people that are about to be out of work at the dealerships across this country, again, some of these dealers, these automobile dealers, some of them paid upwards of $2 million to have a Chrysler franchise or a General Motors franchise. And it really boggles my mind that in the United States of America if you are a car company you can come in and say, I don't want to honor these franchise agreements.

And the news just last week was the lawyers for Chrysler are arguing that this Federal bankruptcy should supersede State franchise law. And even though State franchise law says, if you sold this guy a franchise for $2 million, he is entitled to keep it, they want to terminate him and just say, you got no business.

Again, Madam Speaker, I don't know how it goes in your hometown, but in my hometown, the car dealers have been there, in some instances, for generations. They support the little league teams, the bowling teams, and the Chamber of Commerce. A lot of the lifeblood of our community is supported by auto dealers. So I know that the President didn't mean that this set of conditions, this set of circumstances, wasn't going to disrupt people's lives and wasn't going to impact negatively on communities all across this country. And I am baffled that in the United States of America, if you, Madam Speaker, took $2 million, and I wish I had $2 million, but if you took $2 million and bought something, that the government could come in and just say, guess what? You don't own it anymore. And do you know those 60 people that work for you, who in some instances have worked for you 20, 30 years? They are out of work. They are out of work.

So Madam Speaker, we will attempt to unravel this mystery. I appreciate very much the time. And I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to determine how this could happen in the United States of America.

I thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tonight, I return to talk about an old topic and also to talk about something that's just happened in the last couple of weeks.

The Speaker may recall that a number of weeks ago there was outrage at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue when it was determined that located within the $792 billion stimulus bill there was a provision that authorized $173 million in bonuses to executives at the insurance company AIG. At the time, a number of us thought, Well, how could that happen?

It seems, just to review, Mr. Speaker, that when the stimulus package was considered on the other side of the Capitol in the United States Senate, two Senators, in a rare display of bipartisanship--Senator Snowe, a Republican of Maine, and Senator Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon-- authored an amendment that would have put restrictions and basically indicated that if you were a firm like AIG that has received billions and billions of dollars in bailout money, perhaps there should be some restrictions on executive compensation and what people should make.

Well, a funny thing happened, however, on the way to the conference committee. The Snowe-Wyden language was removed and instead this paragraph was inserted.

Now this paragraph, if you read it carefully, Mr. Speaker, indicates that rather than placing restrictions on the bonuses, it specifically authorizes and exempts any bonus at AIG or any other Wall Street giant that received billions and billions of taxpayer money. Any executive compensation scheme that was entered into before February 11 of this year, which happened to be the date that the stimulus package was considered, would be exempt and the bonuses would be paid.

Now I have indicated a number of times on the floor that I know that a lot of people were embarrassed by that. I would suggest that that's what happens when you legislate in a sloppy, rushed, haphazard, nonpartisan fashion.

The Speaker will recall the week of the consideration of the stimulus bill, the members of the Republican Party--the minority party--put forward sort of a novel proposition, and that was since we were talking about spending $792 billion in the stimulus bill, it might be a good idea if Members had 48 hours to read the bill, and further suggested it should be put on the Internet so anybody in America could take a look at this over a thousand pages of legislation.

Well, that proposal passed. It came to a vote here in the House, and every Member who was present that day, Republican or Democrat, voted and agreed that that was a good idea. That we should have 48 hours to read the bill. That was Tuesday.

On Thursday, apparently the majority leadership forgot about the vote on Tuesday. And the bill was filed about midnight on Thursday.

The next morning--and I have apologized to my constituents that I didn't read the thousand pages at midnight. It didn't come to my attention that we had a thousand-page bill that we were going to consider on that Friday until I arrived at the office that morning.

But the debate was 90 minutes and, basically, Members, both Republican and Democrat, had 90 minutes to digest a thousand pages and determine whether or not that piece of legislation deserved an up or a down vote.

It was a bipartisan vote, in that every member of the Republican Conference voted against the stimulus bill, together with some Democrats. But the overriding majority of the Democratic Party voted in favor of it. And it passed and went on to be signed by the President of the United States.

What is strange is that everyone who voted for the stimulus bill voted for this paragraph that authorized the bonuses to AIG. Yet, the next day or days

after the bonuses were announced, everybody was coming to the floor beating their chest and pulling out their hair and saying, I'm shocked. I can't believe it. I don't know how this happened. We want our money back.

Well, nobody should have been surprised, nobody should have been shocked, because anyone who supported the stimulus package in the House or the Senate voted--the final conference report--voted to specifically allow AIG and anybody else that had received billions of dollars of taxpayer money and bailouts to receive those bailout payments.

But people were shocked. And so they came up with--I will call them goofy--they came up with goofy pieces of legislation in an attempt to cover their political rear ends.

And so the first one was, Let's tax those bonuses at 90 percent. Well, what a dumb piece of legislation that was, Mr. Speaker. So tomorrow we decide we're mad at somebody else. Maybe tomorrow we're mad at the oil companies so let's tax them at 90 percent. Day after that, we're really not happy with the airlines so let's tax them at 90 percent.

To use the Tax Code to punish a small group of people when the mistake was made when this paragraph was inserted in the stimulus package is inappropriate and, thankfully, the President of the United States--President Obama--expressed his opinion that it wasn't a worthy piece of legislation, and it has died a natural death over in the United States Senate, where it exactly should have.

The next dumb idea that people came up with was, Well, I know. Let's not tax these bonuses at 90 percent. Let's have the United States Treasury--the government--tell people how much money they can make. What a dumb idea that is.

So, today it's the AIG guys. Again, tomorrow, let's say that we are not so crazy about the amount of money that bus drivers make. Well, why doesn't the Department of Transportation--Secretary LaHood--just figure out what the bus drivers in the country should make? Another cover- your-rear-end piece of legislation.

So in response to all this we have been coming to the floor on a semiregular basis to try and determine, because even though everybody was outraged, no one will say how the first language was removed from the bill and how this paragraph was placed in the bill.

And so we have devised a game that most Americans are familiar with-- the game of Clue. A great game, and I recommend that everyone think about running out to Hasbro to get either the original edition or this edition.

This is the case of ``The Hidden Hand.'' And that is: Who took out the Snowe-Wyden amendment and who wrote that paragraph that I had displayed on the chart before?

Now there are a number of suspects. We have taken some out, we have put some in. But if you read the news reports of the final negotiations on the stimulus bill, we know that it either happened in the Speaker's office or the conference room, and there was this shuttle diplomacy going back and forth as to what the final bill was going to look like.

As a matter of fact, the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel of New York, was quoted in the paper the next day words to the effect that, It's difficult to get stuff done when only three people run the institution. So we excluded a couple of weeks ago Chairman Rangel. He's not the hidden hand. He didn't do it.

So, like the game of Clue, we know that it happened in the Speaker's office or the conference room, and we know that the weapon that was used was a pen. What we can't figure out and what people haven't owned up to at this moment in time is: Who did it? It's pretty simple. Quite frankly, somebody did it. The thing didn't appear from nowhere.

Someone had to actually say to the drafters of the document, take out Snowe-Wyden, and put in what's commonly been now referred to as the Dodd amendment. Put in the Dodd amendment.

Now we have asked repeatedly, and we have asked everybody we can find, Did you do it? And no one has answered the question, I did it or why.

So because we couldn't finish the game of Clue on our own, we embarked on another tack. About a month ago I filed what's called a resolution of inquiry. It was directed to the Secretary of the Treasury, and it basically asked the Treasury to provide to the United States Congress all of the documents and communications with AIG and others to try to figure out who the hidden hand was, how the Dodd amendment had got into the stimulus package.

Well, I want to recognize a champion, somebody who's been more than good to his word, the chairman of the full Committee on Financial Services, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, after it was filed came to me and said, I'll do whatever you want me to do with this resolution. If you want me to not consider it, I won't consider it. If you want me to consider it, we'll consider it. And I said, I would like you to consider it.

So Chairman Frank took it before the Financial Services Committee. Everybody would have 48 hours to read the bill. The resolution of inquiry was called up, and everybody on the Committee on Financial Services, every Republican and every Democrat voted for this resolution of inquiry.

And I'm thinking to myself, Now we're going to get someplace. Now we're going to figure out who the hidden hand is. Now we are going to figure out who sought to protect the $173 million of bonuses paid to

Madam Speaker, in honor and in celebration of National Nursing

Week, I'd like to recognize the achievements of Francis Payne Bolton and the impact of the Bolton Act on the field of nursing.

Madam Speaker, the Bolton Act of 1943, introduced by Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton, created the Cadet Nurse Corps. The Corps provided Federal funds to nearly 125,000 nurses during World War II to facilitate their training and greatly increase the wartime supply of nurses and care for American citizens on both the home and war fronts. It also significantly improved post-World War II nursing education, replacing the apprenticeship-type training approach in nursing schools with an academic approach and encouraging nurses to study related areas of public health, pediatrics, psychiatric care, and convalescent care. It further benefitted the nursing field by prompting attention and Federal financial aid to graduate nursing degrees, and contributed to the integration of African-Americans into the nursing field.

Madam Speaker, Francis Payne Bolton was the first woman in Ohio elected to the House of Representatives. She served fourteen consecutive terms and later served as trustee of Lakeside Hospital (Cleveland, OH), Lake Erie College (Painesville, OH), and the Central School of Practical Nursing (Cleveland). Trustees at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, named their School of Nursing in her honor. She died in Lyndhurst, OH, on March 9, 1977.

Madam Speaker, last year, I introduced legislation with the late- Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) recognizing the 65th anniversary of the Bolton Act. Frances Payne Bolton single-handedly made sure we had enough nurses at home and overseas during World War II, and helped elevate nursing as an important and critical profession. I am honored to recognize her and her contributions during National Nursing Week, and I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to thank my good friend from New York (Mr. Weiner) and his involvement in getting this bill to the floor today. I am pleased to support its passage, and am proud to be the lead Republican on this bill.

Mr. Speaker, not to date myself, but the Community Oriented Policing Services

(COPS) program was established the year I had the privilege of being elected to this body, in 1994, by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (the '94 Crime Act).

The COPS program has aged better than me, enabling more officers to be hired, contributing to lower crime rates than would otherwise be the case, and increasing the technology and equipment available to our law enforcement officers to do the job we ask of them. According to the Department of Justice, the COPS program has helped state, local and tribal governments hire more than 117,000 officers and has awarded more than $11.4 billion to over 13,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has estimated that COPS funding contributed a 2.5% decline in the violent crime rate between 1993 and 2000. In my own district, nearly 300 officers have been hired since the program started. Statewide, the COPS program has funded more than 3,700 officers and sheriff's deputies, more than 225 school resource officers, and has provided more than $55 million in technology grants for departments. It's hard to argue with fighting crime, lowering crime rates, hiring trained officers in our local communities, and providing equipment and technology upgrades otherwise not available to cash-strapped communities.

As my colleagues know, the recent stimulus bill contained $1 billion to hire or rehire laid-off officers. Some may say: Why are you authorizing this program again when you just gave it a considerable amount of money in the stimulus bill?

Mr. Speaker, last week was the deadline for departments to apply for a slice of that stimulus money to hire officers. The COPS office tells me that the $1 billion in the stimulus bill will pay for 5,500 new police positions nationwide. The COPS Hiring Recovery program--the stimulus program--received applications from a staggering 7,200 departments nationwide! That's $8.4 billion in requests for 40,000 officers. Again, the stimulus program contained $1 billion and will fund just 5,500 officers. So, when the funding is doled out, departments in every corner of the country are going to be greatly disappointed because more than 34,000 of the officers requested will not be funded.

Also, the COPS office tells me that the vast majority of applications for the stimulus funding were for new officer positions, not to replace laid-off officers, so clearly there is a need for this program. To give you some perspective on the number of applications just received by the COPS office, when the program started in the mid-1990s, the office received about 6,000 applications. When the application period ended last week, there were 7,200 applications, so clearly police departments are in need and the COPS office is swamped.

Mr. Speaker, this popular community policing program will reauthorize through Fiscal Year 2014 the COPS program. I am pleased to see it includes Mr. Weiner's Troops-to-Cops Program, which would fund the hiring of former members of the Armed Forces to serve as law enforcement officers in community-oriented policing, particularly in communities adversely affected by military base closings. It also includes technology grants and authorizes up to $350 million a year for grants to departments to obtain or upgrade technology and equipment.

Mr. Speaker, the COPS program has advanced community policing in all jurisdictions across the United States by enabling law enforcement to hire and train law enforcement officers to participate in community policing, purchase and deploy new crime-fighting technologies, and develop and test policing strategies. You'd be hard pressed to find a program that is better liked by the law enforcement community and city officials. More importantly, the COPS program is well run and an effective use of taxpayer money. I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I asked the whip to yield to me so I may inquire of the designee of the majority leader. Today, the House Financial Services Committee by a vote of 64-0 reported H. Res. 251. And as the gentleman is aware, the AIG bonus issue is something that has roiled both parties. Both parties are embarrassed that somebody slipped a paragraph into the stimulus bill. H. Res. 251 is a resolution of inquiry that directs the Secretary of the Treasury to provide not only the documents that he might have in his possession, but they also relate back to Secretary Paulson and his administration of the TARP program. So it clearly is a bipartisan measure. I think the vote of 64-0 speaks for itself.

And I note that on next week's schedule the majority has scheduled the other bill that was just reported this morning out of the Financial Services Committee, and I would ask the gentleman if we are going to see H. Res. 251 next week. And if not, I would make my request that we do. And I would further make the request that since the vote was 64-0 and we appear to have run out of post offices, perhaps it could be a suspension next week.

I thank the gentleman.

Well, I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina.

You know, I think the gentlelady from North Carolina and the gentleman from Georgia have correctly hit on the fact--and I think anyone who realistically looks at the budget that we are going to be asked to pass judgment on next week--spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much from future generations, but of as much concern or maybe of more concern to me is, basically, that there are things occurring in this House that I never thought would occur.

This is my 15th year in the United States Congress. I am proud to represent my corner of Ohio. There is this notion that we can rush legislation through without reading it and without knowing what is in it. Especially on our side--and I will talk about the stimulus bill in a minute--we got about 90 minutes to read 1,000 pages, 1,000 pages in the stimulus bill. They gave us 90 minutes to read it, and then people are surprised when funny things happen. The funny thing I want to just mention and why I hope we don't go down this road with the budget that spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much is what happened in the stimulus bill.

So, again, this was put forward as ``we have to get it done.'' We had to get it done by the President's Day recess for some reason. I don't know what the reason was, but we had to get it done and get it done in a hurry. On the Tuesday of the week that we considered the stimulus bill, we had a vote here in this Chamber. The proposition was--and it was a silly proposition--before we would be asked to vote on the stimulus bill, every Member would be given 48 hours to read the bill, and it would be posted on the Internet so our constituents and anybody who was interested could also read the bill and could have 48 hours to sort of digest it. Everybody voted. Everybody who was here that day voted to do that--every Republican and every Democrat.

Well, then we came along to Friday, and the bill was filed at a little after midnight on Thursday night. I apologize that I wasn't up to receive the 1,000 pages to read it then, but when I did get into the office, there were 90

minutes to read 1,000 pages between the time I got to work and the time that we had the vote. That was the length of the debate.

People said, ``Well, don't worry about it, you know. It's only 1,000 pages. It only spends $1 trillion. Why would you want to read the thing?'' Well, sadly--and we warned--what happens when you do things like that is that people get embarrassed, and in fact, people did get embarrassed.

Some folks may remember that, for the last couple of weeks, people have been upset about these million-dollar bonuses, these multi- million-dollar bonuses, included in the bill, that went to executives at a company called AIG, which many point a finger to as at least participating in the economic decline that we, sadly, are experiencing.

When the stimulus bill was considered in the United States Senate, across the Rotunda on the other side, two Senators--a Democratic Senator by the name of Wyden from Oregon and a Republican Senator by the name of Snowe from Maine--authored an amendment that went into the stimulus bill that said--and it was pretty simple--that if you are a firm that is getting billions of taxpayer dollars, do not give million- dollar bonuses to your executives. I mean that is something that I certainly support. As a matter of fact, it passed just like our thing-- that we were going to get 48 hours to read the bill. It passed in the Senate by voice vote. Every Senator said, ``Aye.'' Again, that sounded pretty reasonable to a lot of us.

Now, there are those people who may not follow how everything works here--and God help you if you do follow everything that works here--but know that, once they have passed their bill on the Senate side and once we have passed our bill over here, we each appoint conferees. They go into a conference room, and they hash out the differences between the House bill and the Senate bill, and then it comes back to each body. We vote on it and we are done.

Well, there's a funny thing. One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was ``A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.'' A funny thing happened on the way to this conference report. The Snowe- Wyden amendment, which said no bonuses for people who got billions of dollars of taxpayer money, was taken out. What was put in instead, Madam Speaker, are these 47 words that are next to me. The 47 words not only removed the Snowe-Wyden amendment that said ``no bonuses,'' but this language specifically protected the bonuses, and authorized AIG and anybody else who got TARP money--who got billions of dollars in financial help from the Federal Government, from our taxpayers--to pay out the bonuses. I'm going to talk about how it got in there in just a minute.

The thing that was amazing last week was that we had people all over town who were shocked. ``I am shocked that they paid out bonuses.'' ``I am shocked that we all had this happen.'' ``We want our money back.'' ``I am shocked.'' Well, it is a little bit, Madam Speaker, like the guy who takes a bath with the clock radio on the side of the bathtub, and the thing falls in, and he's surprised and he's shocked. Clearly, anybody who voted for the stimulus bill voted to approve the bonuses to AIG and to all the other banks that have sort of led us into this mess, but then they were shocked.

I would be happy to yield to the gentlelady.

That is my recollection, yes.

That would be correct.

The gentlelady is correct.

I would just say that, in talking to my Democratic colleagues who voted for the stimulus bill, I think some of them were surprised that this had happened, but I think the point is that this is not the way to legislate. You don't give the power to three or four people to go into a room, to take out an important provision, to then put in an important provision, to not give anybody time to read it, and then say you are surprised that there might be something goofy or embarrassing in the piece of legislation. So, basically, anybody who voted for the stimulus bill voted to give millions of dollars of bonuses to AIG officials and to everybody else.

Now, when they found out and people were embarrassed--and we went through this political theater last week, a charade--a lot of people got up on the floor and said, ``We want our money back.'' You know, ``give us our money back.'' So they used the Tax Code in a way that I have never seen, which said we are going to tax these bonuses at 90 percent. That was their fix. You know, even that fix is--I will use the word--``stupid'' because it is only 90 percent. So the top guy at AIG got a $6.4 million bonus. Even under their fix, he still gets to keep $640,000. They are either entitled to some money, to all of their money or to none of their money. There is this notion that we fixed it and that we were mean to these people in that we only let them keep $640,000.

You know, the gentlelady, Ms. Foxx from North Carolina, a person who works in my district outside of Cleveland, Ohio who makes $40,000 a year would have to work for 16 years to make $640,000.

Anyway, we had a lot of fancy speeches, and people said, ``We are going to fix it.'' So we have been talking for 2 weeks, Madam Speaker, about how it happened, and nobody is willing to take responsibility. I mean, obviously, the thing, you know, didn't just drop down from the sky, and one paragraph goes out and this paragraph comes in. Somebody had to do it. We started last week with a number of our colleagues, and we said, you know, there are 435 Members of Congress. There are 100 Senators, and so we started with 535 suspects.

Through good detective work by a lot of my colleagues, we have been able to narrow that down because sadly, not one Republican was invited in this room where this deal was cut. So you can take out all 178 Republican Members of the House, all 38 Republican members of the Senate. And then we continued to cram it down.

And we have had public statements from a number of people. There was a report by CNN's Dana Bash that this thing was hashed out over 8 hours. And the President's chief of staff was here and the President's director of the budget was here. And so while we got down and eliminated a lot of Members of Congress, we had to add some people.

So, Madam Speaker, what we have arrived at--and this was one of the favorite games that I played when I was a young person, and I enjoyed very much playing it with my children, and I bet a lot of people in America have played the game of Clue. With apologies to our friends at Hasbro, we now find ourselves with the sad situation where somebody put into this bill the authorization to pay out these millions of dollars of bonuses to AIG and everybody else, and now we're shocked.

Well, those of you who play the game of Clue know you need to have a suspect--or the person that committed it--where it happened--in the House--and what the weapon was.

Now, we started with a great advantage here because we didn't have to go lead pipe, wrench, gun, all of that other stuff. We know the crime was committed with a pen. So we're one-third of the way home. We also have the rooms located here in the Capitol that indicate where activity took place. And I will tell you that we're not there yet, and we really are seeking the person that did this. Just come forward. Just tell us you did it and we can move on to something else. And then maybe you can tell us why you did it, and we will be happy.

But the reports indicate, first of all, they were all pointing to the senator from Connecticut, Senator Dodd. And why? Because he was the Chairperson of the Senate Banking Committee, and he is the person who has made some observations that his staff put it in at the suggestion of somebody else's staff and so forth and so on. And I don't know. But it went to him.

But I am not really suspecting Senator Dodd because I think he has a vested interest in making sure we clean this up. And, you know, when there is a mystery and you can't solve it, people begin to speculate and people begin to pass out nasty rumors and you become the subject of rumors.

And two rumors that have coordinated around Senator Dodd that makes people think, well, he must be the guy. Well, one, is he is the largest recipient of campaign donations from AIG and their executives. And that makes some people say, ``Well, of course he did it. He's paying back AIG.'' I don't think that's true.

Second, there was a second report in the Hartford Courant this week that his wife was employed by a subsidiary of AIG. So that causes the tongue waggers to say, Hey, you know what? We really think it's him.

But, Madam Speaker, I am a big fan of Agatha Christie novels. And the great thing about those novels is you read them, you always think it's the butler and you get to the end of the book, it's not the butler. So I really don't think it was Senator Dodd who did this.

The other folks that we have listed here--and I am also ready to give up on the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel of New York. And I think the only reason that we have him here still is was he was quoted coming out of the room--because he was in the room--but when he came out of the room, he said, ``It's very frustrating when the Congress is run by only three people.'' So I think since he's expressing disappointment by that, I don't think he's one of the three people that actually got it done.

Press reports indicate there was shuttle diplomacy between the Speaker's office and the Senate leader's office, and that's why we have the distinguished Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi of California, and the distinguished majority leader of the Senate, Mr. Reid of Nevada, over there. And these are their offices.

And we are told that these two people--well, we will start with this fellow. He used to serve with us in the House. He is a fine fellow. He is now the President's chief of staff. His name is Rahm Emanuel from Illinois. And he was here for 8 hours shuttling back and forth between these two offices. And so is this fellow, who may not be as familiar to the Members as Mr. Emanuel, that's Peter Orszag, who happens to be the budget director for the new administration.

So we know from events that a lot of shuttling back and forth over an 8-hour period between these two offices, a deal was eventually struck, this language is inserted, the Snow White language is removed. And the problem we have is nobody will say they did it. And I think that that is a sad state of affairs. I think whoever did it should come forward and tell the American people you did it. Because whoever did it embarrassed--anybody that voted for the stimulus bill has to be embarrassed by the fact that they authorized the bonus to AIG.

I would be happy to.

Well, the gentlelady is right. And that's why we have really done some hard work. I have to give credit to a lot of my cohorts on this. They've really done a lot of work from going from 535 that I think we really are down to these 6 and 7 people.

I should explain the question mark down there because the Secretary of the Treasury has twice appeared before the Financial Services Committee and given testimony. And when asked directly who did it, he said staff at the Treasury communicated with staff and Senator Dodd's office. Now, listen, that is the biggest ``what, are you kidding me?'' I've ever heard because staff can't write legislation, the Treasury can't write legislation. Members of Congress write legislation. And to hide behind the skirts of some unknown, unnamed staff member I think is a tremendous act of cowardice, and so just come out.

But I put the question mark there because that question mark we hope to eventually fill in with the staffer at Treasury who apparently is somehow involved. All we're going to ask that staffer is, ``Who told you to do it?'' It has to be somebody in power. It can't be the staff got together and said, ``Hey, I got a good one. Let's give out some bonuses to AIG.'' So we are going to continue this quest.

But the point in your special order that I just wanted to raise is that we have this budget next week. And this bill where this horrible thing happened only--and I can't believe I have been in Washington so long I can say ``only spent a trillion dollars,'' the proposal next week on the floor proposes to spend $3.6 trillion.

And I would just hope under the straight-faced test, can I look at myself in the mirror when I wake up in the morning, that whoever is in charge, whoever happens to be in the next room where this is being negotiated says, You know what? I've got a novel idea. Why don't we let everybody read the bill, understand the bill, so we can have an intelligent debate on the bill. And when it goes to the conference committee and it goes in these rooms and there are only five or six people involved, maybe you check back and say, ``You know what? I have made this change. Here's why I made the change. I hope can you go along with it.''

But this back door, backhanded sneaky stuff, it doesn't belong not only in the United States Congress, it doesn't belong anywhere.

So I thank the gentlelady for yielding, and I would enlist the gentleman from Georgia, the gentleman from Pennsylvania and the gentlelady from North Carolina as junior sleuths. And we will continue this discussion next week, and we're going to find out who did it, what room it happened in, with the pen.

I thank the gentlelady.

I absolutely am moved by the conversation. And one of the things that puzzles me as we go through this financial mess is that people have decided to target trips and conventions and destinations and tourism, and that's exactly the wrong message.

I don't know how it is in your part of the world. In Cleveland, where we have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and we

have great hotels, There are people who have to work in the hotels, there are people who cook the food, people who serve the food. And when you choke down and just make fun of people that go and have conventions or go traveling, you really are cutting off your nose to spite your face because you are drying up those jobs and you really are having a huge impact on the local economy. And I don't know any local economy that doesn't have as a component a healthy dose of dollars from tourism.

And so as people sort of say this is bad, that's bad, don't do this, one thing that they shouldn't target is, in fact, people need to travel, people need to have meetings, and people need to rent rooms and eat meals.

I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

I thank you for the recognition, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the minority leader for granting us this hour. I'm going to be joined by at least two other Members, Mr. Tiberi and Mr. Austria, also of Ohio.

We're going to talk a little bit about what occurred last week and the week before. I know the Speaker will remember that the Capitol was sort of roiled, and our constituents continue to be upset, as well they should, over the news that somehow, after getting billions of dollars of taxpayer funds, the insurance company, AIG, awarded $170 million in bonuses.

A lot of people came to the floor last week and said they were shocked. As I said last week, I'm really shocked at the shock. Because I can't figure out how some people in this Chamber and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue can be shocked when they approved the language that authorized the bonuses.

Just a little bit of history here, Mr. Speaker. When the economic recovery plan or the stimulus bill was making its way through the United States Congress, there was an amendment offered by two Senators, a Democratic Senator from Oregon, Senator Wyden, and a Republican Senator from Maine, Senator Snowe. That would have put a limitation on bonuses like in the AIG case and in other cases that basically said that if you're receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to bail you out, perhaps you shouldn't be giving millions dollars away in bonuses at this moment in time. If you're not taking the taxpayer money, you run your business the way you see fit.

Well, that amendment by Senators Snowe and Wyden was adopted by a voice vote in the Senate and was included in the Senate version of the stimulus bill. So I read about it in the newspaper and I thought: Okay, the bill is in pretty good shape.

When the bill went into the conference committee--and, Mr. Speaker, I know you know this, but for those who may not be conversant with how things work here, we pass a bill over here, the Senate passes a bill over there, then each House appoints a few Members and they meet in a room and they sort out the differences between the two bills and then we eventually get a conference report.

Now, in years past--this is my 15th year in the Congress--that conference committee always included Republicans and Democrats. We, being Republicans, were in the majority party for 12 years. The Democrats would come into the room, the Republicans would come into the room, the Representatives would come into the room, the Senators would come into the room, and we'd hash out the differences and then at the end of the process everybody who's on the conference committee would sign the report, and that's what you have.

Sadly, even though people have discussed this being the most transparent administration, the most transparent Congress in the history of the country, no Republicans were invited into the conference room. Clearly, what we have seen--sadly, what we have seen--is that this Congress is about as transparent as this envelope. We are not being included. You know what? We don't have to be included. We are in the minority, and clearly the majority party can write legislation as they see fit. But what they can't do is what happened last week.

So in this conference room all of a sudden somehow the Snowe-Wyden language is removed that would have stopped these bonuses from happening. And the words behind me--they're only about 50 words on the chart behind me--were inserted.

This language specifically authorized the payment of millions of dollars of bonuses to people at AIG and anywhere else. So anybody who voted--when it came to us back in the House for a vote, this language was included in the bill.

So the reason I said I was shocked at people's shock is that anybody that voted for the stimulus bill voted to give and authorize and protect the bonuses at AIG and any other company that has taken billion of dollars through the bailout program.

We don't know--and I know the Speaker will remember last week we were on the floor for about an hour trying to figure out how it did it happen. We started with I talked about the fact that there's a face book. There are 435 Members of Congress, 100 Senators. We began crossing them out. We got down to about 520 during the course of that hour. I indicated we would come back and report to the Speaker the progress of this search. I'm pleased to report to you that we have made significant progress. My friends and I are going to talk about that this evening.

First of all, we can remove all 178 Republicans because there were no Republican Representatives in the room. We can also remove all 41 Republican Senators because they were not in the room. And I mentioned that we also have this Senate race that is unresolved in Minnesota so we can cross off

Al Franken and Senator Coleman. They are not the culprits in this particular case.

So we got down to a smaller group that we are going to talk about. But then our group expanded because there are a couple of news reports out that there were people from the administration that were also participating in these negotiations. So we had to add a few suspects to figure it out.

What is disappointing is that in a transparent administration, in a transparent Congress, people make mistakes. Everybody makes a mistake. I probably made three before lunch today. But when you make a mistake, you should say: I made a mistake.

What is not acceptable is to compound the mistake by pretending you didn't know about it; and then when you are caught, you come up with some goofy piece of legislation like we had on the floor last week to tax people at 90 percent.

And I have got to tell you, that was political theater. It never is going to become law. These people that are so outraged about AIG executive bonuses, they are going to get their bonuses because that bill is not going anywhere. My friend Steve Austria is going to talk about that in just a second, but that is never going to become law. That was to provide cover for people who voted for the Economic Recovery Bill, because they found out, sadly, that they had authorized these 50 words that protected the AIG bonuses, and now they are shocked.

Now, on our side, I have to tell you that we were kind of saddened. Even though we don't need to be invited into the rooms, we don't have to be invited to negotiate, before the stimulus bill came to a vote in the House a motion was made, and the motion said that before any Member of Congress is asked to vote on the stimulus bill we are going to have 48 hours to read it. Every Member of this House, every Republican and every Democrat that was here voted to give the Members 48 hours to read the bill. And if you think about that, Mr. Speaker, that is probably a good idea, because the bill was over 1,000 pages long.

Well, sometime between Tuesday when every Member said we are going to get 48 hours, and Friday when we voted on the bill, people forgot that promise. And on our side, at least, we were given 90 minutes, 90 minutes to read 1,000 pages to determine whether or not we could be supportive of the President's most important domestic economic policy position.

I voted ``no,'' and I don't have any problem with the fact that I voted ``no.'' There were some good things in the stimulus bill, there were horrible things in the stimulus bill. But I couldn't go home to Cleveland and say to people, yeah, I voted for it, because I didn't read it. And I don't think any Member of this Chamber read the bill. If they did, more power to them, but I doubt everybody read the thousand pages.

But what that leads to is an embarrassment, and the embarrassment is everybody that voted for the stimulus bill voted to give the bonuses to AIG. And then to cover their tracks, they come up with this, oh, let's tax at 90 percent.

Which, if you think about it, that is pretty silly, too, because let's say the guy at AIG got $5 million in the bonus. Under that bill, he still gets to keep one-half million dollars. So if you are so outraged, why don't you take all of the money away from them? Forget about the Constitutional arguments and the bills of attainder and all that other business. It was political theater, and it makes you sad when that happens.

So we are going to spend the remainder of our time this evening attempting to sort of ferret out who was in the room. And I have good news, because the Secretary of the Treasury was at the Financial Services Committee today, Mr. Geithner, and the Secretary was asked if he was in the room when this happened and he said he was not. So we can cross off the Secretary of the Treasury; he was not in the room when this was done.

Last week, during the course of the debate on Ms. Kilroy's resolution saying that the administration was doing everything that they could to stop these bonuses, we asked the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank of Massachusetts. He said he wasn't in the room, so he is off the list as well. And the Speaker actually indicated the other day, Speaker Pelosi, that nobody from the House did it, and so we have to look elsewhere, I guess. And we are going to talk a little bit about that.

But first, to sort of set the table on this bill, this 90 percent tax bill that was political theater, that was a farce, that was a fig tree to cover people who had made a mistake, I want to yield for a minute to my friend Steve Austria from Ohio just to talk about what we think the prognosis is for this tax bill.

I want to thank my friend from Ohio (Mr. Austria). Your comments really bring out why that tax piece of legislation that was political theater, that was a fraud was such a lousy piece of legislation.

If we take the fellow, or it might have been a woman, that you have just identified that got $6.4 million worth of bonuses, the Democratic tax bill that used the Tax Code to punish people for the first time, at least in my memory, to that extent, that person still got to keep $640,000. Why? Why? If they shouldn't have gotten any money, they shouldn't have gotten any money. So why do you give them just 10 percent?

I promised, Mr. Speaker, that we would attempt to move forward and try to solve this mystery. Now, it would be easier if somebody would just come forward and say ``I did it.'' You know, ``I did it. I am Professor Plum; I am Colonel Mustard, and I did it.'' But we don't have anybody that has been forthcoming on Capitol Hill or down at the White House or at the Department of the Treasury, except for Mr. Geithner and Barney Frank and the people that I mentioned that were not in the room when this happened.

So with apologies to our friends from Hasbro, we have sort of put this in the form of the game of Clue, which a lot of us, Mr. Speaker, played as we were growing up, we play with our kids. And if you are not familiar with the game of Clue, Mr. Speaker, basically a crime is committed and the junior detectives have to try and solve the crime. And the successful person, the winner, identifies where it happened, who did it, and with what weapon.

Now, we start with a pretty good advantage here this evening because we know what the weapon is. We know that somebody took out the language that would have prohibited these bonuses that were paid out and put in the language that is over Mr. Tiberi's shoulder. And so we know it was done in writing, and the weapon at the bottom of this chart was a pen. So we are one-third of the way there, and now we just need to figure out where it took place and by whom.

And just to sort of go around with the whoms, we don't have Colonel Mustard, we don't have Ms. Scarlet, but what we do have are people who were either conferees or made observations or news accounts that we will get into in a minute indicate were in the room.

Beginning at the bottom on my right is Charles Rangel of New York, who is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; he was a conferee, he signed the conference report.

Next is Rahm Emanuel, who is the President's Chief of Staff, used to serve with us here in the Congress representing a part of Illinois in the United States Congress.

At the top, the former president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, who is now an economic advisor to President Obama.

At the top is Senator Dodd. Now, I have to say Senator Dodd in a lot of early news accounts was blamed for it. I am feeling kind of bad for Senator Dodd, because the last thing I saw him say was that, ``Somebody at Treasury said to put it in, and so my staff put it in.'' But clearly Senator Dodd is getting fingered for a lot of this. But if he did it, he should say so. If he didn't do so, he should say, ``I didn't do it.''

Over in the upper left-hand corner is the Speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi of California. Again, the news accounts kind of indicate that this took place in her office, but we are not going to get there yet.

Harry Reid, if you read, Mr. Speaker, yesterday's Roll Call, people have expressed concern as to the fact that he appointed himself as the majority leader in the Senate as a conferee, and that he may or may not have ties to AIG, and some questions are being raised.

And, at the bottom is David Obey, the very distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee who was also a conferee and in the room at least some of the time.

But let's talk for just a minute, Mr. Tiberi. Can you shed any light based on what you know or what you have heard that may help us sort of narrow this thing down?

Taking 1 minute of my time. I have not seen that news report. The news report that I'm familiar with--and if that is true, that is kind of shocking--is that 11 people of the 73 didn't work for the company anymore. So you have 11 out of 73 who aren't even at AIG anymore, and so if they are retention bonuses, they didn't work so well, because they don't work for AIG anymore.

I yield to the gentleman.

Well, you could. And taking back my time, I will tell you that there are telephones, but the gentleman is making our task much more difficult if you continue to widen the net and now we have to deal with Mr. Waxman and others. But sure, conceivably.

I would just say that today--I don't think it was under oath, but you're not supposed to lie to Congress--the Treasury Secretary did indicate that he only found out about it on March 10, which is pretty amazing, and that he understands that staff did it, but he really doesn't know a lot about it, and he knows he didn't do it. So, yeah, it could have been somebody outside the room.

Taking back my time, I thank the gentleman for that. And I hope we don't need to have an investigation. I would hope that whoever screwed up would come forward and say, do you know what? I did it. And then tell us why he or she did it rather than hiding behind the skirts of staff and hiding behind this bogus tax bill that we did last week. I would really hope somebody would come forward and do it.

But the other thing I would tell my friend is we don't need to wait for an investigation. Tomorrow in the House Financial Services Committee chaired by the aforementioned Congressman Frank of Massachusetts, a number of us have filed something known as a ``resolution of inquiry.'' And the resolution of inquiry requests the Treasury Department to provide to the Congress, not to me, not to the Republicans, but to the Congress, all documents that they have in their possession that will help us identify--if the person won't come forward and say, ``I did it,'' then this resolution of inquiry would direct them to give us the documents so we can figure it out and not add expense on top of the taxpayer in trying to ferret out who did this thing.

Again, I wish somebody, as I said last week, would just man up and say they did it.

Well, that's exactly right. The resolution not only asks for documents, but it indicates that the American public now own, as Mr. Austria has indicated, 80 percent of AIG. And quite frankly, I will say something bad about the Republican administration. I thought President Bush and his Secretary of the Treasury were wrong in asking for this $700 billion. The mantra was that these institutions are too big to fail. Well, most Americans now recognize that they are too big period. And as a result, they should be broken into pieces, going back to Teddy Roosevelt and the trustbusters. Let's break these things apart.

So we do have legislation to divide this thing up. And I hope that it is favorably considered. And as you mentioned, about 60 percent of the American public think that is a good idea.

We are not. And I do want to--well, let's do that now, and then we will come back to seeing if we can move along in the game of Clue. And maybe if the gentleman will help me.

And you could sort of be my Carol Marol. I would appreciate that.

Last year we used the chart that Mr. Tiberi is going to give me a hand with. And people may remember back home that gasoline prices started high and they ended up even higher. And for the entire month of August, we spent time on the floor arguing that perhaps we should have an energy policy in this country that considered everything, renewable energy, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear in the mix, together with additional exploration for fossil fuels which we are going to need in the near term at least. But we were told we were too busy. We were very, very busy here in the United States Congress. And so we didn't have a chance to get things going.

As, Mr. Speaker, you will remember, the Republicans did such a bang- up job in the majority that they threw us out in the 2006 elections and installed the Democratic majority. And we are honored to have Speaker Pelosi being the first woman to serve in that position since the beginning of the country. So when Ms. Pelosi and her colleagues became the majority party, gas was about $2.22, and the most important piece of legislation that folks thought we could discuss here on the floor was congratulating the University of California-Santa Barbara soccer team for winning something. Now I like soccer. And I'm sure that everybody's parents of that team are proud. And gas was only $2.22. So, okay, let's congratulate people.

Then gas went up to $2.84, and the most important thing that we had to do on the floor that day was to declare it--that was about September 6--declare it National Passport Month. And I began getting calls, I'm sure you guys got calls from people saying, Hey, it's really costing a lot of money to fill up my tank. Well, gas went up to $3.03, and on that day, the new majority determined that the most important thing we could do was commend the Houston Dynamo soccer team for I suppose winning something as well. And we are told that as elected officials you really have to get the soccer moms. And I guess this was an attempt to really make sure we had the soccer moms squared away, because we passed two pieces of legislation dealing with soccer.

Then gas went to $3.77. And so clearly, we are going to talk about gas prices now, right? No. We declared it National Train Day was what we did then. And then gas goes up a little more to $3.84. And what did we do that day? Oh, we passed the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act. And I didn't know--talk about reading things, I know what a cat is. I didn't know what a canid is. It is a dog. And so we celebrated Dog and Cat Day when gas is $3.84.

It goes up to $4.09, and the most important thing to do is to declare the International Year of Sanitation. That's what we did around here. Then the price of gas goes up to $4.14. My phones are ringing off the hook. So clearly, we are going to talk about gas prices then. No, we passed the Monkey Safety Act here in the United States Congress. So you would think that maybe people would be chastened by that when we are no longer talking about gas prices. And sadly I hope we don't go the way that we did in the 1970s. Now that gas is down to about $1.89, I hope we don't forget about when it was $4 a gallon and make those serious investments in renewables and get us off of carbon-based fuel and make us not dependent on countries around the world that don't like us.

Well, this year, as everybody knows that isn't living under a rock, we have a little bit of an economic crisis going on. And you would think that we would attempt to deal with that in a constructive way. On January 6 of this year, which was the first day of the 111th Congress, that is the opening day of this Congress, the stock market, the Dow Jones industrial, was at 9,015 points.

We get to January 20, and that is the day, of course, our new President, Barack Obama, became the 44th President of the United States. It was a very exciting day. All of us were pretty happy about it. But the stock market took a little dip. Now that is not President Obama's fault, because he was just getting sworn in that day. But the Congress, however, had a responsibility because we had already been in almost 1 month now by the time you get to February 2. The stock market goes down to 7,936, and the most important thing we can do on the House floor is to pass a resolution supporting the Goals and Ideals of National Teen Dating. That was a pretty important issue back in Ohio. I'm glad we took care of it.

The stock market dips a little bit further, and on that day, I guess because it didn't go down quite 100 points, and so we commended Sam Bradford for winning the Heisman trophy. Now, I'm sure that Mr. Bradford's family is proud of him. I'm proud of him. And anybody that wins the Heisman trophy is deserving of our congratulations. But when the stock market is in the tank and people are losing their 401(k)s, I don't know if that is the most important thing, but now it takes a precipitous dip down to 7,114, and, oh, son of a gun, 2 years in a row, we passed the Monkey Safety Act. And I don't want to make light of it this time because there was a horrible situation in Connecticut where a woman was attacked by a chimpanzee and suffered horrible injuries. And so clearly our thoughts and prayers with her, and that is a terrible event. However when the stock market is down to 7,114 and people have lost their life savings, clearly, the Monkey Safety Act was not the thing that was foremost on the mind of my constituents.

Actually, the interesting thing to show you how busy we were on that date of February 23, and it had only been 8 days before that the chimpanzee attacked the woman, and so we, as the greatest legislative body in the world, rushed in 8 days to pass the Monkey Safety Act. Then it went down a little bit further, and we, you know, like the soccer moms, we like animals, and so we passed the Shark Conservation Act on that particular day, not dealing with the economic crisis.

Then we sort of roll out to March 9. And this probably was my favorite resolution. We supported pi. And when I read the schedule that morning, I like pie, just look at me. And I thought what kind of ``pie'' is it going to be? Well, it is not p-i-e, it is p-i, which you know, Mr. Speaker, is 3.1416. And apparently we felt that when the stock market had lost 3,000 points in value in 2 months, rather than helping our constituents deal with that and using the full might of the United States Congress to get to the bottom of that, we recognized pi here in the United States Congress.

So I don't think--and this has been sort of tongue in cheek, but I don't think we are too busy.

I thank the gentleman for his observations. And if the gentleman would go to the jump on Page 8, you will find a quote from the President of the United States, President Obama that I think sort of echoes at least my sentiments. And he said we shouldn't use the tax code to punish people and that is why he is not in favor of this bill, which is why that bill was a piece of political theater to give cover to people who are embarrassed because, by voting ``aye'' on the economic recovery package, they specifically authorized, with the amendment that is on the chart that we were talking about before--thank you Mr. Tiberi--that specifically authorized this paragraph, these 50 words. And when you voted for the economic recovery bill, you voted to give the people at AIG and everywhere else the bonuses. And then, you know, because nobody read it, we are shocked. And so now we are going to use the Tax Code to punish people.

But you know, the President has said that is wrong, and apparently the Senate majority leader has said it is wrong.

Before we go back to our exercise in Clue, however, as we want to narrow this thing down if we can, because we are going to come back every week until somebody has the--I promised my wife I would be really tactful this evening and not use words that people find offensive. So somebody has the courage to stand up and say I did it and here is why I did it and sort of, you know, be a grown up about it.

But you were here, you have been here now to four or five terms, Mr. Tiberi, and I am going to yield to you. I mean, is it your experience as a Member that we are just so busy that we don't have time to deal with gas prices?

Taking back my time. I want to get back to that, but before I do, the gentleman's point is right on the money. In the last 2\1/2\ years, the American public can rest assured that they will not go into a post office in this country that doesn't have a name on it because we spend a lot of our time naming Post Offices. But what they can't rest assured is who put those 50 words in the economic recovery bill that authorized the payments of bonuses to these AIG officials; and now they are horrified, shocked and everything else.

And just before we leave this, so that the three of us don't get a lot of e-mails and hate mail from animal lovers, all three of us want sharks to be conserved, and all three of us think that we should have safe monkeys in this country. But we don't, none of us think that it is the most important issue facing the country last year or this year.

Now, back to the Clue, and I think that Mr. Tiberi makes a pretty good point because we do have--when you play Clue you try to collect clues. And there have been some clues recently. And I want to refer to one. On Anderson Cooper, a show on CNN, Dana Bash, who some of us see as a reporter that covers politics here in Washington, I have a transcript of her reporting on the night that this happened, that the crime happened. And I will submit it for the Record, Madam Speaker.

And Dana Bash says, ``well, Anderson, as we speak, the White House Chief of Staff, Mr. Emanuel, and the President's Budget Director are inside Nancy Pelosi's office.''

Well next time we come back we are going to put the Budget Director because he is up there too. And then she goes on to report, and, in fact, they have been coming up on 8 hours straight. Eight hours straight shuttling between the House Speaker's Office, and that is why we can't get quite to the Speaker's office yet because of this reporting. But maybe we will get there a little bit later. Shuttling between the Speaker's office and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid's office urgently trying, attempting to broker a compromise between House Democrats and Senate Democrats. And you know what is interesting about that sentence is I didn't hear the word Republican in there. So this was Democrats negotiating with Democrats negotiating with Democrats. And we now know that we had the President's Budget Director was here for 8 hours shuttling back and forth, a little shuttle diplomacy, together with the President's Chief of Staff, Mr. Emanuel, who was also there. So I think we are getting closer.

And if it is all right with you gentlemen, I would like to exclude Mr. Obey because I don't think his fingerprints are on this. And Mr. Rangel, I do have an observation from Mr. Rangel, who indicated that, Mr. Rangel, in this same report, and actually this was in the Congressional Quarterly, House and Senate Democratic negotiators met in the Speaker's Office--and we are really getting close to the Speaker's Office here, Madam Speaker--with the White House Chief of Staff, Emanuel and White House Budget Director Peter Orzag into the evening Tuesday, breaking at 9 p.m. and then Chairman Rangel is quoted in this reporting, ``it is so difficult to talk with a body that is controlled by three people. You have no idea.''

So I think that the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is expressing frustration that three people, basically, figured out how to spend $792 billion in an economic recovery package and okayed these 50 words that authorized the payment of bonuses to AIG and other people similarly situated. So I think we are getting a little closer.

Well, I do too. And let me just get to that for a second. And there was another article that appeared on March 19, and the headline is that the ``White House Staff Botched It''. And this was, appeared in something called the Huffington Post, which is clearly not a conservative Republican organization. But I would submit this for the Record as well.

It quotes an AIG executive, well, the article says according to AIG, the payments were okayed by the White House last Thursday. Why? Because it appears that David Axelrod, now we have got to add somebody else, senior policy advisor to the Obama administration and Rahm Emanuel grossly underestimated how infuriating this would be.

The quote from the AIG executive is this: ``We were not authorized until Thursday night,'' that, is to give out these millions of dollars in bonuses. ``We were negotiating with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Treasury indicated that they needed it cleared by The White House as well. We hit the go for the payments on Friday,'' after they got the clearance from the White House.

Maybe. Well, the smoking pen. We have got the pen.

We know it is the pen.

New Albany, I think.

I thank the gentleman. And I think we are making some progress because we have a weapon, it was the pen. We are getting down in the suspect list. And I am comfortable, if you gentlemen are comfortable saying that this crime was committed either in the Speaker's Office or in the Senate leaders office because all of the--

Well, the conference room was where the conferees met. Well, I'd say the conference room too. I think we know it didn't happen in the Appropriations Committee or the Ways and Means Committee. The Banking Committee is still out there. And the reason that the Senate Banking Committee is still out there is that the person that really came under the harshest scrutiny at the beginning was the Senator from Connecticut, Senator Dodd. And I would just suggest, Madam Speaker, that he has a vested interest in finding this out just like we do, because when you don't know who did it, when you won't help us find out who did it and have people come clean, people begin to circulate ugly rumors. And I have heard, for instance, that the distinguished chairman of the Senate Banking Committee is one of the largest recipients of campaign contributions from AIG. Now people will say, oh, well, he must have done it because he got campaign cash. Well, I think that is unfair to the Senator, quite frankly, and I think that he should join with us and let's find out who did it.

Today, and Madam Speaker, I will submit an additional document from the Hartford Courant, if I may, into the Record. And today, this article starts with ``No wonder Senator Dodd went wobbly last week when asked about his February amendment ratifying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives at AIG. Dodd has been one of the company's favorite recipients,'' so an ugly rumor is out there. But it turns out that Senator Dodd's wife also benefited, in that she was employed by an AIG subsidiary.

So, look. I don't know who did it, and I hope that the Senator from Connecticut didn't do it, but now people are throwing mud at him and are basically saying, you know, to the average Joe Sixpack at home, well, of course he did it. You know, he got a bunch of cash from him, and his wife used to work for one of their companies, so of course he did it. So the Senator should come out and identify--somebody knows who did it. That's the problem. So just tell us. Move on. They screwed up. Move on.

Madam Speaker, I'll ask how much time we have left.

I thank the Speaker.

I'm happy to yield.

Right.

Well, taking back my time, I am a big fan of Agatha Christie's, and as you read through those books, you're sure it's the butler or somebody else, and it's never the butler. So, you know, I don't think we can exclude the Senator, but I'm with you. I think, you know, when everybody is shooting at the Senator from Connecticut, it's probably somebody else.

Right.

In just taking back my time, what troubles me about this is, the last time I checked, the Constitution does not let anybody in the administration write a law. So somebody could have suggested it at Treasury, said the President wants it, the Secretary wants it, whatever the facts are, but the fact of the matter is that nobody at Treasury can write legislation. That is the job of the United States Senate and of the United States Congress.

Oh, I'm happy to.

Well, taking back my time, I do hope that in the markup of the resolution of inquiry tomorrow that we do see transparency and bipartisanship. Both Republicans and Democrats on that committee want to answer the question as much as we do and as much as, I'm sure, Senator Dodd would like to have this cloud lifted from his shoulders, and so I hope it moves in that direction.

I have to tell you I am not optimistic. I mean I will not be surprised when I get a telephone call tomorrow that the Financial Services Committee has somehow made it impossible for that to see the light of day, which it can by a majority vote--they have the votes--and we'll see what happens. But you know what? I'm a big fan of Chairman Frank's, and he is a fair man, and I think he'll give it fair consideration tomorrow. I look forward to that telephone call.

Mr. Austria, is there anything you want to say before we leave here?

I would be happy to.

Well, listen. I thank you.

Mr. Tiberi, would you like to close?

Well, I thank both gentlemen for participating.

Madam Speaker, I thank you for your courtesy.

To reinforce Mr. Tiberi's point, I think Senator Dodd has a vested interest in helping us with this because, currently, it looks like ``Senator Dodd in the conference room with a pen.'' Now, I don't think that that is true, so I hope that whoever did this will tell us about it.

Dana, what is happening?

Dana Bash, CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent: Well,

Anderson, as we speak, the White House chief of staff and the

president's budget director are inside House Speaker Nancy

Pelosi's office.

And, in fact, they have been here coming up on eight hours

straight--eight hours straight--shuttling between the House

speaker's office and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's

office, trying to urgently broker a compromise between House

Democrats and Senate Democrats in order to get the

president's stimulus package to--to his desk by this week.

And I just spoke to a Democratic source who says that, in

these talks, they are narrowing their differences.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

Bash (voice-over): House Democrats are not happy that

Senate Democrats cut some $100 billion in spending from their

stimulus package, tens of billions slashed from Democratic

priorities, like education.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now signaling, they will

likely have to live with it.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House: As

President Obama cautioned the nation, that we cannot allow

the perfect to be the enemy of the effective and of the

necessary. And we will not.