Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here, and let me first say to the gentleman regarding his presentation here tonight regarding alternative energy sources, not only was it impressive and thorough, but I think he hit the nail right on the head. I think this is an issue that the next generation is going to have to deal with, and I know that our 30-something Working Group is very interested in working with the gentleman for alternative energy sources and figuring out what we are going to do.

Our topic tonight, Mr. Speaker, is what is going on here at home regarding the budget and regarding the budget deficit that the Republican Congress has run on an annual basis, but also the national debt.

The President will be coming back to the Congress to ask the Republican Congress to raise the debt ceiling, the debt limit. This is deja vu all over again. This Republican Congress continues to borrow and borrow and borrow and spend and spend and spend, really, like drunken sailors, like there is no end in sight; and our country cannot continue to go down this irresponsible path. We would like to talk a little bit about it tonight.

In order to borrow money, the Congress needs to pass legislation and the President needs to sign legislation that will allow the U.S. Treasury to borrow money; and the more deficits we run on an annual basis, the more we have to borrow. So the debt ceiling gets lifted.

The Republicans went out, borrowed more and more money till they hit that ceiling and had to pass legislation to raise that ceiling again to allow the Treasury to borrow even more money. That is what is happening right now.

To give you some perspective here, Mr. Speaker, when President Clinton came into office in January of 1993, we were running tremendous budget deficits. In 1993, a Democratic Congress and President Clinton passed a budget without one Republican vote and passed the budget that led to the greatest economic expansion in the history of the United States of America, created over 20 million new jobs. The stock market went crazy. There were benefits for everyone in our society because of the tough decisions; and quite frankly, Mr. Speaker, several Members in the Democratic Caucus lost their seats over that tough vote. They made very difficult decisions in the early stages of President Clinton's Presidency in order to balance the budget and do the right thing; but even though they made this difficult decision, we were still running tremendous budget deficits early in the 1990s, mid-1990s.

So President Clinton came to this Congress in his 8 years, and as we can see here as President Clinton came in, running budget deficits and then eventually running surplus into the later years of his Presidency, but President Clinton early on, because of the deficits that were run up through the Reagan administration, through the first George Bush administration, and then into the Clinton administration, President Clinton had to come to Congress and ask to raise the debt ceiling.

Just to give you some perspective, Mr. Speaker, in 8 years, President Clinton asked the Congress to raise the debt ceiling twice, two times, in order to fix this problem. Then we had economic growth, we had balanced budgets, we had surplus money, and we had arguments in this Chamber about where the money was going to be spent. Two times in 8 years President Clinton early on asked to raise the debt ceiling.

President Bush, current President Bush, has asked this Congress to raise the debt ceiling five times already, five times, because there is runaway spending from this Congress. I am joined by my friend, the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz). Five times, because of the runaway spending, the corporate welfare, time and time and time again to the pharmaceutical industry, to the HMOs, to the energy companies the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) was talking about earlier. We continue to give this corporate welfare, and with a blatant and reckless disregard for the fiscal responsibilities that we have here.

We all know now that we are borrowing the money from the Chinese Government and Japanese Government, the Saudi Arabian family, the house of Saud. So we are not going to the Second National or Sky Bank or Bank of America to get the money. This Congress and this President are going to the Chinese Government to get it.

I would be happy to yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz), my friend.

I think the pay as you go is basic common sense. It is the same thing that people have to do at home. You get the checkbook out, you take in so much, you can only spend so much, or you have to end up borrowing money or putting it on your credit card, and we know that is definitely a downward spiral.

But exactly what you were saying, I think the President signed it into law today, the Deficit Reduction Act, which is hysterical, because it actually increases the deficit. Now, our Republican friends are saying, well, it cuts $39 billion, the deficit by $39 billion, or there is $39 billion in cuts, but at the same time, they gave $70 billion, or close to it, in tax cuts that went primarily to people who make more than 4- or 5- or $600,000 a year. So it is very simple math to realize that, well, you may cut tell by 39, but if you are reducing your revenues by $70 billion, that there is still a deficit increase. And that is basically what happened.

Now, you can check the rolls here as far as what Democrats have voted for. Time and time again, the Democrats have supported middle-class tax cuts. We have supported tax cuts for small businesses. We supported tax cuts and credits for college tuition. But I am not ashamed to say that we are going to ask Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to pay their fair share in taxes, because right now they are getting a free ride. And I am not afraid to say, and the 30-something Working Group is not afraid to say, that we do not want to give public tax dollars to the tune of $16 billion to the energy companies. You got to be kidding me.

I mean, you know, Mr. Speaker, people who may be watching this in the Chamber or Members in their offices should be startled that we are going to go out and collect tax dollars from the public. Average people making minimum wage, or 10 bucks or 15 bucks an hour, send money down here to us, and the Republican majority is taking that money and giving it to the energy companies when, you know, Exxon-Mobil is making $39 billion in a quarter, and all of the other oil companies are doing extremely well.

Or we are going to take that money, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, we are going to take the public money, and we are going to give it to the HMOs, or we are going to make sure that we are wasting it and giving it to the pharmaceutical companies, without any kind of price controls.

Goldman Sachs is not a liberal organization?

Right. This is not a game. This is not a game that needs to be played. We switch the numbers here, and we switch them here. This is important, because as of February 8, which I believe is today, $8,200,380,327,202 is the national debt. And we will have a chart next week that is updating this. And the President is going to come and ask to rise

the debt ceiling so that we can go out and borrow more money. But your share of the national debt, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, is $27,518. That is what you owe, the debt you owe to the United States Treasury.

No. That is yours, your kids'; each one of your kids, every citizen in the United States owes $27,000 for the national debt. And the President is going to ask Congress for the ability to go out and borrow even more so that each citizen can owe even more.

Now, what we are trying to say here in the 30-something Group is that we have got to be responsible, we have got to balance the budget. We have got to make sure that we stop borrowing money from the Chinese Government, because ultimately it is going to lead to each citizen having to pay more of their paycheck in taxes to fund the debt, and we do not want that to happen.

So our friends on the other side can talk about tax cuts all they want, but as they continue to go out and borrow money with the full faith and credit of the United States Government behind it, it means our taxpayers are good for it. So if you are home, you are good for it. We can count on you to raise your taxes so that you can give the Republican majority more money so that they can pay the bills.

Now, would not it be nice, you know, if you are at home and you get your credit card statement, your credit card only allows you to borrow $10,000. Whew. Boy, I am at $10,000. I am at $9,990. Would it not be nice if I could just call up the credit card company and say, you know, I realize I am not making any more money, I am probably making less, I realize that health care costs have doubled, tuition and everything else, can you give me another $10,000 so I can borrow more?

And really the worst thing that can happen is the credit card companies says, yes, go ahead. Then you owe them more. And you owe more interest. It is this downward spiral that we are in right now. It is ultimately robbing the future of our country.

I want to kick it to you, but I just want to share one more statistic here that we have been using that I think is astonishing, astonishing. In the first 224 years of this country, from 1776 to 2000, we borrowed as a country $1 trillion from foreign interests. Okay. They were foreign holdings of U.S. debt, $1 trillion dollars in 224 years.

President Bush and the Republican House and the Republican Senate in the last 4 years have borrowed $1.05 trillion. They borrowed more money from the Chinese, the Japanese, the Saudi Arabians in 4 years than this country has borrowed in 224 years.

That is unbelievable to think that our friends on the other side, who many of them are friends, can say with a straight face, we are fiscally responsible. We are the party of fiscal responsibility. We want to cut taxes and reduce government burden. Reduce government burden? My goodness gracious. Borrowing money from the Chinese Government is somehow being fiscally responsible to the tune of $1 trillion?

So this all adds up to a real cost of the kind of corruption that we have down here, because you give tax cuts to your rich friends, you give subsidies to the energy companies, you give subsidies to the pharmaceutical companies, but you are borrowing the money on the backs of your kids.

That is correct. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30- something. And this will be the Web page that pops up, 30-something Working Group. Then you go to the bottom and it says, our posters. So you will be able to get to our posters here.

Yeah. And they are really good, because we have taken all of the information that Tom Manatos here, who is our go-to guy with the 30-something Working Group, kind of boiled it down, and you will be able to see our third-party validators.

Now, for example, this poster here, now we have added the pictures, obviously, to help make our points to see that this is President Bush, he is responsible for the last 4 years, and all of those pictures of all of the other Presidents, Andrew Jackson, President Kennedy, there is Taft, Lincoln, they are all here. But at the bottom it says, source, where we cite our source, is U.S. Treasury. We are not making those numbers up. So go to the Website and you will be able to see this poster that our crack staff has put together.

The deficit is the annual.

What is interesting about the $2.2 trillion is that is more money than this country borrowed from the inception of the country to the beginning of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. So just in the Bush administration alone we have had to raise it $2.2 trillion, which is more than whatever the math would be from Reagan back to George Washington. This Republican Congress is setting records here on this issue.

Absolutely.

Just to continue to reinforce your point on the PAYGO, on the fiscal responsibility. We call it PAYGO. It means pay as you go, which means you have to have the money to pay for it. If you have a program, you either have to raise taxes or cut the money from somewhere else to pay for it. Cut the energy subsidy if you need $14 billion or whatever to pay for Medicaid; find a way to control spending with the prescription drug program that is $700 billion and not doing anything to control the costs by allowing reimportation or allowing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down the drug prices for the Medicare program and take that money and pay for what you want to pay, whether it is some of the Medicaid cuts that came up, or whether it was some of the college PELL grants or students loan cuts that were made in this recent budget.

But just to reinforce the PAYGO, the Democrats have supported PAYGO, period, and we have tried to get it reinstated time and time again. We will talk to our staff to make sure this gets up on our new Website. March 30, 2004, Representative Mike Thompson, a Democrat from California, tried to instruct the budget conferees to include pay as you go requirements in the 2006 budget resolution. The Republicans voted, almost in lockstep to a number, 209 to 209, which I think every Democrat voted for it, to block it and to reject the pay as you go requirements to be included to instruct the budget conferees, it is a lot of mumbo jumbo. But Democrats were for pay as you go; the Republicans blocked it. That was March 30, 2004.

On May 5, 2004, Republicans voted by a vote of 208 to 215 to reject a motion by Representative Dennis Moore, a Democrat from Kansas. Again, we tried to get PAYGO established in the budget. Vote number 145. Then on November 18 of 2004, Republicans voted to block consideration of Mr. Stenholm's amendment from Texas to the debt limit increase. Last time they tried to get the debt increased, we wanted to say that if you are going to increase the debt, you better put the PAYGO requirements in. That was in 2004, and that was vote number 534. Three times Democrats have tried to institute fiscal discipline in this Chamber, and it has been rejected every time from the Republican majority.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you hear a Republican come up here, although there is a handful that have been supportive, but the leadership on the Republican side has time and time again rejected our amendments, Democratic amendments, to try to put in place fiscal restraint on this runaway spending that is going on, mortgaging our children's future by borrowing the money from the Chinese Government in order to fund their huge and their runaway spending, and we are trying to fix this.

We are just asking for an opportunity to implement some of these restraints that, as you stated earlier, were implemented in the '90s. I think George Herbert Walker Bush implemented them; Clinton; the Democratic Congress; the Republican Congress earlier that actually believed in fiscal discipline. This is a different outfit that we are dealing with now.

And I just found out, too, today Wal-Mart is going to open another 1,500 stores. Now, Wal-Mart one way or the other. Now, that is not economic development. That is not economic growth, Wal-Mart jobs. Now, they may have a place in our society. You can argue it one way or another. That is not what we are talking about.

We are talking about this President saying that we are having real economic growth; and Wal-Mart is opening up 1,500 stores is not, to average Americans, actual economic growth.

And as you stated with the budget and the deficits, let's just look at what this President has done. We saw the numbers here, that he has borrowed more than the previous 200 years. He has run up the four largest deficits in the history of the United States of America, an annual deficit of $378 billion in 2003, a deficit of $413 billion in 2004, a deficit of $318 billion in 2005, and a projected deficit this year of $423 billion.

We are going to be spending more than we are taking in, and we are borrowing the money from the Chinese Government. Now, we are putting ourselves in a very difficult position, not only because we are borrowing money and we have to pay interest on it, which is reckless as could be, but strategically trying to deal with the Chinese Government, how can you be firm in your foreign policy when the Chinese Government is your bank? You can't go to your banker and negotiate from a position of weakness. If you have a lot of money and then you want to borrow some, you are in a good position. But if you go and you owe and you owe and you owe the bank, eventually the bank has the knife at your throat and you have got to deal on their terms, not on your terms. If you really need the money, well, then, the rate is going to go up because, hey, you're a little risky here. It is a risky loan to make.

My point is that although we may have good credit, the more we borrow from the Chinese Government, then the weaker our positioning is when we need to deal with the nuclear situation in North Korea or we need help in Iraq or we need to deal with the Russians or we need to work on the human rights violations that are going on in China, as they are totally suppressing freedom of speech and they are arresting journalists, with Google and a lot of our American companies helping them. There is religious persecution in China. No human rights, no labor rights, no environmental protections in China. They are just dumping things in the river, like we did 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.

So all of this borrowing is putting us in a real weak position to negotiate on a lot of other fronts.

So we are weakening ourselves at home and weakening our position abroad. And if we want to be helpful in the world, we have to be strong at home. A stronger America starts right here in the United States.

Absolutely. And when you talk about investment and the result of the ripple effect of investment in education, the shortsightedness in making these cuts that Republicans have made, increasing student loans, or a 50 percent increase in interest rates in college loans, where rates will increase from 4.1 percent to 6.8 percent in dealing with the college loans, if you look at what countries like Ireland have done as part of a reform package which included some tax cuts, which we are for, but we have to do them in a targeted responsible way. But one of the things they did in Ireland was they made college education free. Everybody goes. There are no barriers.

I think, why is it so complicated to figure out what the student loan process is like? Why can't we just have a form for student loans and it says how much you make, how much you get, and sign on the dotted line? This should be readily available. Because we know now that investing in a kid's education is the best investment we could possibly make in the return that we get. Because with a high school diploma you make $20,000 a year, $25,000 a year. With a college diploma, you make $40,000. With a master's degree you make $60,000. You are paying back more in taxes. So let us make the initial investment and make sure these students get through college, make sure there are no barriers, and long term we will get money back.

I have used this statistic before: the University of Akron did a study a few years back that said in Ohio for every dollar the State of Ohio invested in higher education, they got $2 back in tax money, for the very reason that people with college degrees make more money and, therefore, pay more in taxes back to the State. So it is a great investment to make.

Right now, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, we are really being very shortsighted in what we are doing. Here is a chart that you can find on our Web page. The number, by the thousands of students that will graduate with engineering degrees this year. In an economy where we want to create jobs, you need engineers in order to create the kind of wealth that we need. In China, they will graduate 600,000 engineers. In India, they are going to graduate 350,000 engineers. In the United States, 70,000 engineers.

Now, I recognize that there are some population differences here, but the United States needs to compete with these folks in these other countries. And if we don't focus on making sure we reduce the barriers to college education so that everyone gets involved, create incentives for our students to get involved in engineering and chemistry and computer programming and the new high-tech jobs that are going to drive the economy and create wealth and lead to addressing some of the issues that Mr. Bartlett was talking about with alternative energy sources, we are not going to be able to compete.

You can't have a tier-one military if you don't have a tier-one economy. So these investments that we want to make in education lead to economic growth, which expands the economy, which means we are going to be able to keep our military a tier-one military and a leader in the world. And it puts us in a position of strength, because as we grow the economy, we can stop borrowing money from the Chinese Government in order to fund our deficits; and then we will be in a stronger fiscal position here at home and then better able to deal with the problems that we have abroad.

We need to begin to do the kinds of things we are talking about, investing in education and at the same time not just throwing money at the problem but making sure that parents and teachers and principals and superintendents and local communities are held accountable. This isn't going to be we are just going to throw money at the problem like our Republican friends are doing. They want to curry favor with the senior citizens, they throw money at a $700 billion prescription drug program and they do not do anything to contain the costs. They do not allow reimportation from Canada to drop the price down, and they do not allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down the drug prices. You can't just throw money at the problem like our Republican friends want to do without having any accountability.

So the Democrats are looking for opportunities and have ideas to make sure we fund these programs. We do it in a responsible way, knowing that in the end the long-term growth is going to lead to budget surpluses like it did in the 1990s.

If you look at what the Democrats are offering, they say the Democrats do not have any ideas. That may sound good, but we are the party of ideas. We are beginning to communicate them, I think, in a way that is effective. If you look at Ms. Pelosi's innovation agenda that we came up with in our caucus by meeting with high-tech companies and asking

them what they want, if you look at our competitiveness agenda that we have, investments in research and development, R&D funding has stayed flat under the President's watch, and it is way below what it was 20 years ago. If we are going to be competitive, we have to make some investments in research and development. We are blowing money by giving subsidies to the energy companies when we should invest it in basic research.

I was in Israel in November. They are doing some fantastic things with venture capital and business incubators and research and development, and the Israeli companies have just surpassed Canada on the NASDAQ, and I asked one of the top dogs over there, what do we need to do in America to try to imitate what you are doing here?

He said the biggest mistake you are making in the United States is not making investment in research and development, because of the tremendous impact that has leading to new innovations. So cutting this funding, flat-lining the research and development funding is the wrong thing to do, where the Democrats are saying we need to make targeted investments into research and development, targeted investments in education, targeted investments into broadband penetration. Everybody in the country should have access to broadband in the next 5 years.

The President wants to do alternative energy, and he says we are going to become energy competitive, and this is typical of the kind of leadership we are getting from this President. We are going to make this country energy-independent by 75 percent in the next 20 years.

It is like, come on, Mr. President, let us go. We want to get things rolling in the country. We want to get things moving. We need your help, we need your leadership, and the country is dying for an alternative energy program; not to say we are going to be 75 percent in 2025. That is not the kind of leadership we need.

Democrats have a plan to do it in 10 years. This is the broadband penetration I was talking about that is going on. These are broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants as of January 1 of last year. This is Korea, almost 25 percent; Hong Kong-China, almost 21 percent; Iceland, 15.5 percent; U.S., only 11 percent.

If we want every child to have an access to education, we need to make sure that they are not getting left behind technologically, which is what happens in many of these neighborhoods and many of these rural areas. Kids and families who do not have access to these kinds of things.

Will the gentlewoman yield?

One of the interesting things when I was over in China in August, they were talking about the engineers. And they have this tremendous advantage on us as far as numbers go. And so we were asking what is the advantage that the U.S. engineers have. And they were saying, well, U.S. engineers they are just the best in the world, they are the most creative in the world, and they work in teams better than any other engineer, any other country. And it is funny, because this week, and we have talked about this before, but this week we had the school board associations down here. And wouldn't you know, the programs that are getting cut because of lack of funding, No Child Left Behind, the burden that is being pushed, the bonds that need to be noted and the funding that needs to be gathered at a local level in order to fund the local public schools across the country, the programs that are being cut are those programs that teach our kids how to be more creative and how to work in teams better.

You hear a lot about the art programs getting cut, the music programs getting cut, the visual arts getting cut, the performing arts getting cut, language arts getting cut in a lot of these schools because they do not have the resources they need, or the school districts or the school systems are not organized the way they need to be organized.

And then you also see a lot of pay-to-play: $350. Well, a lot of families do not have an extra $350 to get their kids in activities. And if you have two or three kids, you are talking about a thousand bucks. That is a lot of money, I hate to break it to a lot of our friends on the other side who do not seem to understand this. So the very advantage that we have, we are cutting off our nose to spite our face. And those are the kinds of investments that we need to make,

not only invest, but restructure and reorganize the way that our education system runs today. And I think if we do a couple of these things and have the courage to lead, I think we are going to be able to do it.

Part of this, too, we need the parents involved; we need the parents to be accountable. We need the parents to be there with their kids. We need to make sure that the parents know that their kids have to do the homework. This is going to be a team effort. This is going to be us doing our job, the parents doing their job, the local school district doing their job, everybody coming together if we are going to be competitive in the 21st century. That is the only way this is going to happen.

And I think it is important, one final point here. I think it is important that if we are going to ask kids to get involved in the math and science and engineering and chemistry and all these things and areas of studies that we need them to get involved in, there needs to be a goal. And I think, really, the goal for the next generation is what Mr. Bartlett was talking about a little while back, about what are we going to do with the alternative energy realm; who is going to develop the new and the latest technologies? Is this going to be a national effort? Not in 2025, Mr. President. Now.

You know, we went to the Moon in less than a decade. And it is going to take us 20 years to figure out how we are going to become energy independent so we can get out of these entanglements that we find ourselves in in the Middle East and in other countries.

No.

Absolutely, I do.

Yeah. We are getting really high-tech here. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. The innovation agenda that you mentioned will be available so you can hear the new ideas that the Democrats are coming up with. And I think if you look through this, I mean, this is exciting stuff. And you know, I am not just toeing the party line here. I am very, very excited about what we are offering and what we get to talk about over the course of the next year. As we ask the people of this country who put us in charge of the House of Representatives for oversight purposes, with the war, and everything else that is going on, we need to make sure that there is balance in government, and I think that the folks at home and the folks, Members of Congress and their offices, will be able to come to the Web site, see what we are talking about.

Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. You go to the bottom, you can see all the posters that we have up. You can see our innovation agenda. We have got a lot of really good things going on, and we are going to keep plugging away over the course of the next year to try to let the people know at home that we have good ideas that we want to help move this country forward.

And one final point that I would like to make regarding all of this is that the country of China has 1.3 billion people. The country of India has over a billion people. And we have 300 million in this country. The Democratic agenda, whether we are talking about energy, investments, education, health care, we are about pulling our country together as a community, as a family and moving forward and knowing that you cannot compete against that many people and not be unified. And what the Democratic innovation agenda, our agenda on health care, energy independence, whatever it may be, is about pulling everybody together, making sure that every kid in the country has a quality education, has health care, has an opportunity to live and work and create wealth in the United States and live the American Dream as they see it. So, again, www.housedemocrats.gov/30something.

Got to give a shout out to our guy from Florida who was not able to make it here tonight, Mr. Meek. It is never the same without him. Sometimes it is never the same good, sometimes it is never the same bad.

But we miss him here tonight.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back with the gentleman again.

I think the word that needs to be applied to this conversation is ``accountability,'' and this is something that the 30-Somethings have talked about since we started. Being Democrats, we want to talk about accountability. We have a responsibility when we get the taxpayers' money that we are not just going to spend it and not ask any questions. And if the program is not working the way it is supposed to work, we are not for just throwing more money at the problem because that does not work. We want to talk about accountability.

But before we can even begin the conversation about accountability with programs and local communities, the COPS program, schools and everything else, there needs to be accountability here in this Chamber. And I believe that the Republican majority in the House and in the Senate and in the White House has really not been held accountable for what they have been doing. If you look at the budget deficits that we have right now, and the 30-Something Group cares about this because this is our generation that is going to have to foot the bill for this thing, $500 billion more spent last year than we took in in tax revenue. So we borrow it from the Chinese, from the Saudi Arabians, from the Japanese. We have borrowed more money in the last 4 years, and Kendrick will show this, from 2000 to 2004.

I appreciate you sharing, and I bet when you were in grade school that your teachers put on there ``Kendrick Meek plays well with others.''

In the last 4 years, this President and the Republican House and the Republican Senate have borrowed more money, $1.05 trillion, than any every other President before him and Congresses before this one in the last 224 years. We are borrowing money to give rich people a tax cut, period, dot. And when we talk about accountability, this is what we are talking about because this has long-term ramifications to our potential economic growth because the money we are spending to pay down this debt and to pay the interest to the Chinese government is money that we are not investing into the COPS program, we are not investing into our veterans, we are not investing into research and development, we are not investing into making sure that every household has access to broadband communications. We are not investing that money into public venture capital that will lure private investment like they are doing in Israel, and they have a lot of innovative things going on in Ireland. These are the things that we need to do, but it all starts with balancing here in budget in the United States Congress.

Mr. Meek has two beautiful kids. He cannot ask his kids to be responsible and then his example is to be irresponsible. It just does not work that way. He works hard and his kids see him work hard. So at the end of the day, they are going to learn a lesson from him.

I appreciate the gentleman's yielding to me. I appreciate his allowing me to use his chart because this has been his chart for the last few months.

A job interview.

Shakedown Street.

It has been wrong for 10 or 12 years now.

I agree. Not only the culture that you talked about, let's talk about what the cost is. Let's connect the dots. Let's talk about what happens here.

We talked about the Health Savings Accounts. This is the President's idea to solve the health care problem, and it allows individuals to take money, extra money that they have at the end of the month, spare money, and put it in a side account.

Well, that is great if you have got spare money at the end of the month to put in a side account. We have millions and millions of people in this country who do not have that extra money to put in a side health care savings account to address the health care issue, so there is going to be millions and millions of people.

I am not saying it is a bad idea. Maybe it is a good idea for those people who have money and they can set it aside. Great. But the vast majority of the people who live in this country do not have the luxury of having an extra $500 at the end of the month to put in a side account.

Forty-six million don't have anything now, and millions of others can't afford it, or can barely

afford what they have. So our goal on the Democratic side is to figure out how to reduce the cost of health care. And we tried to do that, Mr. Meek, when we had the prescription drug bill here.

The Democrats, this bill started out at $400 billion, and later after the vote we found out it was $700 billion. But all the seniors that are out there, Mr. Meek, will qualify for this, $700 billion worth.

What the Democrats wanted to do to save the taxpayer money, to be accountable for the money that we spend here, the Democrats wanted to put two provisions on to that Medicare part D, the prescription drug bill.

We wanted to allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to be able to negotiate down the drug price on behalf of all the Medicare recipients. We didn't want to create a new program, a new bureaucracy. We just wanted to give the Secretary of HHS the ability to go to Pfizer and negotiate down the drug price. You want the Medicare contract? Fine. We got to talk price. Knock 15 to 20 percent off the cost and we will give it to you. Boom, we save money, Democrats. That is our idea. The Republican majority shot it down in the dead of night.

The other idea, we wanted to allow for reimportation of pharmaceuticals, to allow these prescription drugs to come in from Canada to create real competition in the pharmaceutical industry in the United States and drive down the cost. We would save the taxpayer money, we would lower the cost of prescription drugs, and maybe we could start reducing our deficit and eventually make some investments in the education and research and development and other things.

The cost of the pharmaceutical industry giving the Republicans $100 million is higher drug prices for average Americans and the taxpayers not getting their money spent wisely because there is not the accountability here that we need.

Can I ask a question? I thought of this last night as I was sitting right over there as the President was giving his speech. It is almost amazing to me, I think, that the speech that was given here last night was dealing with the same issues that we were dealing with today.

Last night the President was talking about investing in education and research and development, and we are going to make these great investments. We came here today and did this Budget Deficit Reduction Act that actually increases the deficit, and we are cutting education, we are cutting the investments. So that was kind of perplexing to me.

But I was over there listening to him talk about energy independence and how we are addicted to oil. And I thought, wow, he actually said it, which I thought was great. It is a big first step to admit that there is a problem. So maybe it has taken 5 years, but we have now admitted, the administration has now admitted that we have a problem.

And then I was waiting for, you know, all right, this is it. And he says, and we are going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 75 percent by 2025. And I thought, my goodness gracious, we went to the Moon in 10 years. Where is the urgency?

That is exactly it, what do we do day in and day out to improve the lives and improve the position politically of our country? And the Democratic idea is to get our idea to become self- sufficient, self-sustaining with energy in the next 10 years. And you cannot tell me that if we marshall all of the intelligence and the wealth of this country that we cannot do it in the next decade.

As I said, we went to the Moon in a decade. And look at not only the economic impact that we would have in this country, the jobs that would be created with ethanol and biodiesel, and all of the hydrogen engines and hybrid cars and all of these things that we could create an economy back in the United States that we are actually producing, which I think is very positive, but let me make this final point.

Imagine the political position the United States would be in, the Secretary of State would be in, if we told all of those oil producing countries we are done. We do not need you. We do not want you. We will deal with you and help you along the way, but we are not tied to you. We are not addicted to your oil. So we do not need to get in all of this international political stuff that we have been getting in for the last 30 years.

It has been nothing but bad for the United States, to be in these different countries playing with their internal politics and puppeteering who is coming in and who is going out, and Saddam Hussein needs to be here because he is a Sunni, and we have got the Shiias in Iran. Hey, we are going to take care of home first.

A stronger America begins at home. And the Democratic idea is to take the resources of this country, the intelligence of this country, and become energy independent in the next 10 years. And no one can convenience me that it cannot happen.

Got a chart. And this chart is the gasoline prices and oil company profits. The bars, the grey bars are the profits starting in 2002. And as you can see, every year 2003, 2004, 2005 the profits have skyrocketed.

And look what happens to the price of gas. It has gone up as well. So the profits go up, the cost goes up. Unbelievable. These people continue to make money off a basic resource that everyone is dependent on.

That is why we got to get away from this. Exxon, I think it was Exxon that made $36 billion dollars in their last quarter. $80,000 per minute. Come on. It is time for the Democratic ideas to take center stage in this country.

Absolutely. I think you make several very, very good points, and what we are trying to communicate here is that we have better ideas and we want to take the country in a new direction. If you are perfectly comfortable with the way everything is right now, then you probably do not want to vote for Democrats, but if you are having some trouble and you think the country is maybe going in the wrong direction, just listen to what we are talking about and how we are going to actually implement our plan.

We have figured out in the past 10 years that we have not always made the best argument, we have not always presented ourselves in the best way. We

allowed our Republican friends to define us, and as they defined us, they continued to win elections. But over the past few years, 4 years, 5 years in particular, they have defined themselves through their actions, and we now have the ideas and the commitment and the energy to take this country in a new direction and maybe we needed that time to learn. Maybe we needed that time to figure out exactly what needed to be done, but we are talking about, on the Democratic side, making sure that every household has broadband access in the next 5 years, that the country is energy independent in the next 10 years, by taking some of the savings that we will generate through the prescription drug program, by doing a couple of the things I talked about earlier by saving money, by making government run more efficiently and not being afraid quite frankly to ask Bill Gates to pay his fair share in taxes.

The President said again last night, make the tax cuts permanent. I will agree with a part of it, making the middle class tax cuts permanent, but let us ask these people who have been making money hand over fist over the past 10 years, we need your help. You think we want to ask you for more money? You think we like it? No, but we need you to help us. The country is running a $500 billion deficit. We could either ask you for it or we could borrow it from the Chinese, which is what we are doing now.

So if we ask you for it, we get it and we hopefully balance our budget, lower interest rates, and that will lead to economic growth. Right now, we are borrowing the money because the Republican majority does not have the guts to ask the wealthiest people in the country for money, and we are borrowing it from the Chinese.

It is that simple. We are not making this up. This is not a complicated process. We are spending $500 billion more than we are taking in. So we have got to get it from somewhere, and if you run a deficit at home, you go to the bank and you borrow it and they charge you interest. That is what we are doing right now. We are borrowing money from the Chinese bank, the Japanese bank, and we are paying interest on it, and that is money that we cannot invest, that interest payment. We cannot invest that into education.

I told this story earlier on the floor as we were debating the budget reconciliation, and it really hit me. I had a meeting last week with a school board member from Youngstown, Ohio, Youngstown City Schools, and I asked him as we were sitting there what is the poverty rate for these kids that go to Youngstown City Schools, a pretty simple question. Ninety percent of the kids of the 8,000 kids that go to Youngstown City Schools live in poverty. I do not even know why I asked him because it does not really make sense to ask this question, I asked how many qualify for the free and reduced lunch. He said we do not even pass out the form anymore because so many kids qualify, it is more expensive to administer the program by passing things out and trying to figure out who we can give it to than it is to just give it to everybody in the school. Can you imagine that?

What we are saying here is that these budget deficits and these tax cuts and these cuts to education and this not funding the No Child Left Behind and not funding Medicaid, which provides health care for those kids, by not funding those programs, these kids do not have a chance. We will have certain kids that pop up and they go against the odds to be successful, but these kids do not have the opportunity that every single American should have.

What the Democrats are saying is that we want an opportunity because you know why? I will sit here for 10 hours. I have 12 years of Catholic school in me. I could make every moral argument for doing that that is necessary in the book and in the good book, how many times Christ talked about helping the poor and poverty. We could make all those arguments, but let us set them aside.

How are we going to compete with 1.3 billion Chinese workers, 1 billion workers that live in the country of India, the massive advancements that are going on in Ireland and Israel and some of these other countries? How are we going to compete if we have a school district and 90 percent of the kids live in poverty? We need those kids to be on the field with all of us competing in a global economy, as mathematicians, scientists, chemists, engineers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, artists and musicians. We need them on the field. We do not need them in a cycle of poverty.

If this Republican leadership, if they do not have any new ideas, then give us control. Give us the keys to the car because that kid should have access to broadband. That kid should have three square meals a day. That kid should have art programs after school and should have the opportunity to play in an intramural league after school.

That is how we are going to move the country forward. We are stagnant right now because we are not investing in kids, and Katrina took the veil off this. We all drive around, go through the suburbs and try to do our thing, go around these outer belts and try to stay away from that. Katrina took the veil off that, and I think that that is not only a moral issue, it is an economic issue that needs to be addressed.

We have plan after plan after plan after plan to fix that. The Democrats have ideas, and we just need the opportunity to implement them.

I did not mean to get all worked up, but I tell you, when I think of 8,000 kids in my district and there is more because I also represent a lot of other school districts, living in poverty and not having the kind of opportunity that they should have because they are born on this soil here. It gets frustrating.

Democrats.

I appreciate that, my good friend from Florida. We are about to wrap up, and I think what we are saying is, we want a chance. We want an opportunity to lead this country. As we close here, Mr. Meek, I just want to say that our caucus had an election today.

Have you?

Well, I just wanted to personally congratulate John Larson of Connecticut, who is our new vice-chair of the Democratic Caucus. We had a great race. It is sometimes difficult within the caucus. Jan Schakowsky from Illinois and Joe Crowley from New York both ran great races, both great members of our caucus. But this was something that really got everybody's juices flowing and ready for the next year.

I want to give our e-mail address out. 30- [email protected], so the Members can give us a holler, if they want to. That is 30, the number, [email protected]. Send us your e-mails and let us know what you think. You can go to the leader's Web site and find out about our innovation agenda; you can find out about what the Democratic plan is to lead this country in the next few years and in the next few decades. It is exciting stuff, it really is, and I am proud to be a part of it. I want to thank Leader Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Mr. Clyburn as well.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time.

This is kind of funny. It keeps happening. Any time we are having this debate, we hear words or phrases like ``fiscal integrity'' and how we are making these cuts because we are going to ``balance the budget.'' No one is balancing any budget here. Who are we kidding? We are borrowing the money, billion upon billion upon billion, from the Chinese to fund tax cuts that are going primarily to the top 1 percent of the people.

You are making cuts that are hurting middle-class and poor kids. That is the fact. I am not making this up. But if we try to talk about cutting the energy subsidies or cutting the subsidies to the HMOs or asking simple things like having the Secretary of Health and Human Services negotiate the drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients, or asking for reimportation for drugs coming in from Canada to help lower the price, we cannot even hear a word from the Republican majority on these issues.

I had a meeting the other day with a school board member from Youngstown city schools. And I asked him, I said, how many kids live in poverty in this school district? He said, 90 percent. Ninety percent of the kids that go to school in Youngstown city schools live in poverty. And I asked him how many qualify for free and reduced lunch, to maybe get another number. He said, we don't even hand out the form any more because it costs us more to administer the form and the program than to just give it to everybody.

Ninety percent of the kids in Youngstown and you are cutting $12 billion from giving these kids an opportunity to go to college? No Child Left Behind is underfunded in Ohio $1.5 billion a year, just in Ohio alone, while some of these other countries are graduating much higher percentages of kids in math and science.

Let us wake up. We need these kids on the field competing in a global economy, and you will not get them there by cutting education and cutting health care. You want to compete with China? You want to compete with India? Fund these programs.

We are not saying you don't need to change some things, and we are willing to work with you to do it, but for God's sake don't cut programs to kids living in poverty and middle-class kids. You are cutting their health care, you are cutting their education, and you are giving tax breaks to rich people. Period, dot.

We have been on the committee 3 years now, Mr. Spratt has been on the committee a few more years than we have, but when you first get on the committee, I think the leadership on our side has always told the younger Members who come on, you know, this is a bipartisan committee. This is one of the committees in Congress where we try to do what is best for the men and women in uniform, to do what is best to protect the security of the United States of America. And I think this tradition we have had has really been damaged throughout this whole process. I am sure Mr. Spratt knows a lot better than I do.

We talk a lot on the 30-something group here about how the Republican leadership in this Chamber and the Senate and in the White House right now consistently over the past few years have put their party's interests above the country's interests. We know on Energy and Commerce, you know, you are talking about telecommunications and there are a lot of business interests and labor. There are fights, there are scraps, and it gets very partisan.

For this kind of attitude I think to permeate into the Armed Services Committee during a time of war is outrageous. It really is. And Mr. Spratt, I cannot thank you enough, because we come down every night, and to have someone of your caliber, your experience, your understanding of the issues to come down and share with us means a great deal. But for campaign finance issues to work their way into the Defense bill is just crazy.

We heard a lot in the last few weeks, you know, that you are sending the wrong signal to the troops. You are sending the wrong signal to the troops, when we want to have a discussion about when we are going to actually pull the troops out and end the war and redeploy and how things are going to work and what does it look like and how is this all going to end. You are unpatriotic, you should not have that discussion. You are not allowed to talk about that kind of stuff, you know. The people may find out that maybe things are not going as well as we think they are going, so let us not talk about it because it will affect the morale of the troops.

I have got to tell you, when we went to Iraq, it was probably the first meeting, as soon as we got there in Baghdad, Mr. Meek was in the meeting with the troops and there was about 20 of us sitting there, and I specifically asked one of them, I think we were with the marines, specifically asked, does the debate that we are having now in the United States, that was shortly after Mr. Murtha came out for his redeployment efforts in 6 months and figuring this out, and I asked one of the kids, I said, does this hurt your morale over here? Does this offend you?

The kid said to me, this is why we are here, so the Iraqis can have this kind of discussion. We expect people in Washington to be having a debate in a democracy, in a representative democracy. The great Republic should have these debates. And he just said that is why we are here, so the Iraqis will be able to have this discussion too one day.

Would that not be great, if the Iraqis can have a parliament and get in a squabble and fight without someone saying that that is somehow having a negative effect on the troops.

So we hear that a lot, that this debate may hurt them, which it is not, hurting the morale of the troops, which the troops are telling us it is not, it is okay. But then to try to somehow take the Defense bill and put campaign finance language in it so that the Republican majority can raise more money to further corrupt the institution is an outrage.

There is no question, it is the abuse of power. And we have been given an awesome gift to just be here in the Chamber, to be here as a Member of Congress. To be in the majority is even a greater gift. And to take that and to use the power that

you are given by the American people for the sole purpose of advancing the cause of your own political party, the Republican Party, instead of looking out for what is in the best interest of the United States of America, that is an abuse of power. I think we have seen it here time and time and time again.

We saw it here during the prescription drug bill where we were here until 3 in the morning and it passed by just a couple of votes. We were told as Members of Congress voting on that bill that it was only going to be $400 billion, and then this bill ends up being over 700 almost $800 billion. And the Democrats had two provisions that we wanted to put in that bill: allow for reimportation from Canada to drop the costs of prescription drugs in the United States and, therefore, save the taxpayers' money; and also allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services the opportunity to negotiate down the drug prices and go to America and say, if you want the contract from the Medicare recipients, you have to sit down and we have to negotiate price. Just think how much money we would have saved the taxpayer if we would have done that. Just think about that.

Unbelievable.

I served on that committee my last term in Congress. I sat on the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. And that gentleman that you are speaking about had a relationship with the veterans that was unsurpassed. It was unbelievable. The veterans groups loved Mr. Smith. Loved him. And he advocated for them on their behalf as chairman of the veterans committee.

You do not have to ask me or the 30-something Working Group; you do not have to ask us. Go talk to the head of the disabled veterans groups, go talk to the head of AMVETS, go talk to any single veterans group and they will tell you that they loved them, and he advocated for them, and he disagreed with not fully funding and providing mandatory funding for our veterans health care benefits.

Who are they borrowing it from?

Mr. Speaker, when you are having your Christmas party or your Chanukah party or your Kwanzaa party or your holiday party or whatever you call things these days, because I even get nervous wishing somebody a merry Christmas anymore, when one of the billionaires, one of the millionaires are around the party table in the next week or two and they are holding up their glass, they should say, thank you, Chinese government; thank you, House of Sahd; thank you, Japan, for loaning my country the money to be able to give me a tax cut. Do not thank us. Thank the people we are borrowing the money from. Thank them, because we are borrowing money from the Chinese and the Saudi Arabians and the Japanese to give a tax cut to the wealthiest people in the United States of America.

Not only are we borrowing it, but the money we do take in, look what we are spending it on in Iraq: $1.5 billion a week. Look at these Iraqi projects: Transportation and communication, $508 million. Look what we are cutting over here in the United States: $500 million to our student loan programs. In Iraq: Electricity projects, $4 billion for electricity projects in Iraq. In the United States, we are cutting $4.9 billion from child support to go after deadbeat dads; $1.72 billion in Iraq for oil infrastructure. What are we cutting back here at home? Farm commodity and conservation programs, just about the same number, $1.76 billion, we are cutting here at home.

We are borrowing from China. We are giving that money to the richest people in our country, and then we are putting the cuts that we have to have over here, because this administration and the Republican majority cannot get the economy up and running; we are cutting here child support, student loans, free and reduced lunch. All these things are happening on the backs of the American people.

That is a great point because this is not your father's Republican party. This is not the Richard Nixon Republican party or Abraham Lincoln Republican party. This is a right wing agenda that is coming down the pike here with ANWR drilling coming in. If you are pro-environment and you are with the right wingers, you are in the wrong party because they want to drill. And they do not want to have an alternative energy program.

There is no doubt about it, and here is where not only the Dow is not growing at the clip we need it to, this is where the tax cuts are going.

And I think we have to make this point. We talk about health care and education, and the Democrats have talked about how we have reformed those systems, not talking just throwing money at them, but we need new innovative progressive ways of educating our kids and delivering health care. The Democrats have a plan to do that. These are good investments.

The gentlewoman was talking about the millions of kids who do not have

health insurance and how people in her community are smart enough to know we need to do that. Those kids end up in the emergency room much sicker than they would be if they had some preventive care. What we are advocating for is to make sure we provide this kind of care for those kids, to make sure we save the taxpayer money in the long run.

So as this is probably our last 30-something for 2005, Happy Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Merry Christmas.

Have a very happy, joyous holiday season, because we are all Americans. And I would like to now give the e-mail address here: [email protected]. That is 30, the number, [email protected].

Does the gentleman from Florida have any final words to share with the American people and his colleagues?

And also Mr. Tom Manatos, who keeps us all together down here. Tom, you are the man.

Mr. Speaker, I just totally agree. I think we are talking about some basic principles here of which the government that currently rules is not reflective of what is going on in Ohio, in Florida, in the Gulf States, in Massachusetts. We are clearly not addressing the main issues.

I know my friend from Massachusetts has some comments to make, so I am going to kick it over to him. But I think as we make our presentation tonight, this is not personal with the Republicans, because I think we have all agreed, we have got some good friends on the other side of the aisle. We are just disagreeing with their philosophy of governing.

When you see here tonight, with some great charts that Tom Manatos from our staff has put together for us, the kind of spending that our country is doing in Iraq and the kind of cuts that we have here in the United States, when you see the tax cuts, the amount and who they are going to and the cuts in the budget in specific programs that are geared towards the middle class, Medicare, Medicaid, and the level of sacrifice that average people are being asked to make here, it is unbelievable.

When you talk about Delphi going bankrupt; Ford came out last week, they are going to cut 30,000 jobs and close 10 plants. The economy may be growing, but average middle Americans are not seeing it in their paychecks, and they are seeing tremendous increases in their energy costs and gas and heating oil and the like. I know you have been very instrumental in a variety of ways in Massachusetts to help with that.

Just to clarify that, we are running an $83 billion deficit just for one month, just for the month of November, which means we do not have the money; we are not taking in the money to pay out the bills, and we have got to go and borrow the money. And this $83 billion that the gentleman from Massachusetts was talking about, we are borrowing it from China. We are borrowing it from Saudi Arabia. We are borrowing it from Japan, and we have to pay interest on it.

So we are running up a tab here for the next generation that is not fair. And we are doing things to the next generation, our generation, our generation, that we are going to eventually have to pay the bill.

Can I just make a point there, because I think it just fits right into there? $100 billion more in Iraq, $200 billion we have already spent, $100 million here for media campaigns. We have Republican media consultants slopping at the trough of the Defense Department so that they can put on a PR campaign in Afghanistan when the Afghanistan people do not even want it. The same in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, can I make a comment?

We have the poster here from Newsweek that has our esteemed leader in a bubble and it is called the ``Isolated President.'' And I think this goes to exactly what the gentleman was just saying and what Ms. Wasserman Schultz was just saying and what Mr. Meek of Florida was just saying.

The comments that Secretary Wolfowitz made and Secretary Rumsfeld just were not true. The comments about the tax cuts and what they would do for average people just did not turn out to be true. And about the war and how we would progress just did not come to be true. And the bubble here symbolizes all these people like Mr. Lindsey who are saying, no, it is going to cost us $200 billion and they fire him. And the general who said we are going to need a couple hundred thousand troops in order to do this properly, and they dismissed him too. It turns out that we needed all these troops there.

It just seems that this administration does not want to hear from other outside viewpoints in order for us to fix this problem.

Now, Mr. Meek was talking about what I found very interesting. I have the President's speech here that he was talking about earlier, and the President talks about the first milestone we had was the transfer of sovereignty at the end of June. And the second milestone was the Iraqi election, and the third milestone, if we had these milestones as Mr. Meek said, these benchmarks, when we were going to transfer, when the election was going to be, when the interim government was going to take place, then December 15, which is coming up in just a day or two, we had benchmarks.

So why would we not have benchmarks for when we are going to get out? That is all we are arguing here.

No Child Left Behind, in which we all agreed on, the Republican majority has not funded it, which was a key element, but we agreed that schools need to be accountable, and if you do not hit certain levels, you are not helping kids.

Accountability, the President talks a lot about accountability. We need to just say, Mr. President, this administration, Mr. Secretary, you need to be accountable, need to be accountable in Iraq, accountable for the budget deficit, accountable for cutting food stamps and giving tax cuts to the top 1 percent. You need to take responsibility for that.

Mr. Speaker, can I make another comment in addition to what you just said, why are not the people who are in his administration being held accountable? You tell the American people and you talk them into something by saying it is not going to cost you any money, we are going to use the oil revenue, we are only going to be there a little while, we will not need as many troops as we actually do really need; why were not any of those people held accountable for their mistakes, all the mistakes that were being made? We went to Iraq, and we are on the Armed Services Committee, and we support the Defense appropriations and body armor and up-armor. We were on all the letters, all the pressure that was applied to make sure these troops had what they needed. We were there to support them every step of the way. No one's going to tell me that I am not supporting the troops, but someone needs to be held accountable.

All the mistakes that were made, are you telling me that no one should get fired? Who is the guy who hired the contractor who committed fraud in the 1990s and then stole $200,000 in the last year or two? Who hired him? What is this Mike Brown all about? I mean, you hire cronies, they do an incompetent job, and no one gets fired.

So when they say after 5 years of all of the misrepresentation and all of the lack of accountability and the incompetence and the cronyism and the corruption, the culture of corruption that we have here, when you come to us 5 or 6 years later, in the midst of a war and huge budget deficits, and you say to the American people just trust us, it becomes very difficult for us to just trust.

I want to say, and I know Mr. Miller was being complimentary of us when he said he liked the culture of corruption, but I do not like it. I do not like it.

I do not like coming down here and trying to inform the American people what third-party validators are saying about what is going on down here in a negative way. Because I would hope we could come down here with solutions and work on it and talk about how we are making this better, how we are having oversight hearings and everything else. Do not think for one second we like it. But this is going on here and the American people need to hear about it.

[email protected]. That is 30, the number, [email protected].

Will the gentleman yield?

One of the proposals that we had was to take out the $16 billion in corporate subsidies in the energy bill. Would you be willing to support us on that?

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be on the House floor here tonight with my good friend from Florida (Mr. Meek) to continue our discussion that we have been having with the American people and with Members of Congress from all over the country the past few months and even few years.

Today, Mr. Speaker, the Republican-led Congress has once again taken a step in a direction that I think moved it and this Congress away from mainstream America.

Today, the majority has passed another wealthy-focused tax cut in which $60 billion, up to $80 billion, over the next 10 years will be spent subsidizing the wealth of the people in this country who make millions and billions of dollars, an average tax break of $32,000 to wealthy millionaires who have already received more than $103,000 in tax cuts. More than half the taxpayers making less than $100,000 a year will receive less than $30 back from this tax cut. This is a tax cut that has clearly been focused on the wealthy Americans.

And coincidentally enough, a couple of weeks ago, our friends, our good friends on the Republican side, have said that they passed a budget deficit reduction package which made cuts of $50 billion; and then they passed a tax cut which took away $80 billion, which is a negative $30 billion deficit in the hole. Only in Washington is that deficit reduction.

And before we get going here, I want to just share and read into the Record, if my friend does not mind, a letter that was sent, and I know I received one of these and a statement on behalf of several religious organizations. Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal, Anglican, Church USA, together with leaders of four other mainline denominations, has called on the United States Congress to defeat the 2006 Federal budget once and for all because it betrays the poor.

And I just want to say to Bishop Griswold and the Anglican Church in the United States of America and the other denominations that are there, Dr. Kirkpatrick of the Presbyterian Church; Reverend Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ; Mr. James Winkler, general secretary, Board of Church and Society for the United Methodist Church, thank you for speaking out against this.

Because in this day and age, morality and values have been such a strong topic of conversation in the United States, I want to commend these folks for stepping out front and saying that this budget and tax cuts for the rich while we are cutting food stamps; free and reduced lunch; child support enforcement payments; money for college, Pell grants; cutting those programs and then giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country is something that goes in direct contradiction to what they are trying to teach.

And if I could just take a minute or two to read some of these comments into the Record, if my friend does not mind:

The church leaders declare: ``At each stage of the complicated legislative process, we have viewed the budget through the lens of faith and our values and found it wanting. Now we ask that it be defeated once and for all.'

``Despite the exposure of poverty in the U.S. revealed in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the statement says, `Congress continues to make decisions which benefit the rich but are paid for by the poor and most vulnerable in our land.'

``The leaders criticized the budget's potential compromises which would cut funding for food stamps, heating subsidies, Medicaid, and child support enforcement.

``They will seek to find compromise where there should be no compromise, that is, with the lives and future of the poor of this country.'

``They asked that Congress reflect during the season of Advent, reject the budget and join with the President to craft a budget that will reflect `our Nation's historic concern for justice and the least among us.' ''

This is not Tim Ryan. This is not Kendrick Meek. This is not the 30- something Working Group. This is a group of bishops and church leaders all over the country who have stepped out front and stated that cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in our country and doing it on the backs of the poorest among us is not consistent with the values that they teach in their churches every week.

Here is Cal Thomas. Cal Thomas is one of the most conservative columnists. I do not even know if he is a Republican, but he is a conservative columnist with the Washington Times. When we are finding all this money to balance our budget, Cal Thomas says: ``Here's a suggestion: Don't start with the poor. Start with the rich.''

We passed an energy bill several months ago out of this Chamber that had $16 billion in subsidies for the energy companies and the oil companies,

the most profitable industries today. This Congress took your tax money that you send to Washington and gave it to the oil companies to basically subsidize and increase their profits. There is something wrong with that.

And the 30-Something Working Group is here and we will have charts later, talking about some of our ideas that we have and some of the ideas that Leader Pelosi has and the Democratic Party has and what direction we want to move this country in. And we believe that what is going on here is not only contrary to what we believe in, but also contrary to what the American people believe in. We should now be making investments in education. I mean, why would we give millionaires a tax cut and not have enough money to actually heat homes in the wealthiest country in the entire world?

And I know my friend from Florida wants to get in here and talk a little bit. But just today, this just happened, we were cutting taxes to the tune of $80 billion over the next 10 years. At the same time a few weeks ago, we were cutting food stamps and increasing the cost of college tuition.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek).

Allegedly.

Let us break this down. If people are saying that Members are doing things or former Members, I want to correct myself, former Members were doing things that would cost the government money or would spend money that otherwise would not be spent, that is a problem.

And I think we have to look no further than the Medicare prescription drug bill that came out of this Congress. We were told the night at 3 in the morning, when we were voting, that this bill was going to cost $400 billion. We find out later that the actual cost of the bill is $700 billion, $300 billion more; and there is nothing in the bill to reduce the cost of prescription drugs.

The Democrats, I know you remember this, the Democrats wanted to put a provision in the bill that would have allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down the drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients, so the Secretary of HHS would go to Merck and Pfizer and some of these other big drug companies and say, you know, if you want the Medicare prescription drug contract, we need to sit down and talk price.

And not only did our friends on the Republican side not put that provision in, put the Democratic provision in there, they actual explicitly put in the bill that the Secretary of Health and Human Services is not allowed to negotiate down the drug prices.

The Democrats also with what we thought was a $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill that ended up being, months and months later the truth came out, over a $700 billion bill, we also wanted to allow, the Democratic Caucus wanted to put in a provision that would allow for reimportation from Canada and some of the other G-7 countries to drive down the costs of prescription drugs here in the United States, to basically free-trade pharmaceuticals with countries who have the proper health and safety standards like we have here in the United States of America. That was not allowed in the bill, Mr. Speaker.

So two basic provisions that would have saved the taxpayer billions of dollars were not put in because it would have maybe hurt the profits of the drug companies. And the drug companies raised millions and millions and millions of dollars for our friends on the Republican side. Now the average American is left to put two and two together.

There are a lot of people who make more than a million dollars a year or a few hundred thousand dollars a year that are going to be very happy with what we did here today.

What the Republican Party did today was make a lot of rich people very happy. That is the answer.

Shakedown Street.

I got this chart here. This is the end result. This blue is the Clinton-era budget deficits that by 1997 started turning into surpluses; and by the time President Clinton left, $128 billion surplus. And that was all based on the 1993 vote that was passed, the budget in 1993 without one Republican vote.

Now, these are just the facts. I am not making this up. This is not a partisan statement; it is just the facts.

This is the Congressional Budget Office. $128 billion surplus in 2001 due to the fiscal policies, the fiscal restraint, the fiscal discipline that the Democratic Party had at that point.

But check out when Mr. Bush and the Republican House and the Republican Senate started getting in charge here, we have a $323 billion budget deficit going into 2006, and we are borrowing the money from foreign interests.

We are borrowing the money to pay for these deficits from the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Saudi Arabians to plug this deficit hole. And we are trying, Democrats are trying, to say, why would you give $80 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country when we are already running a $323 billion deficit in 2006, we already have borrowed $1 trillion from foreign interests in the last 4 years, more than any President has borrowed from foreign interests in the past 224 years?

1.05 trillion we have borrowed from foreign interests in the last 4 years.

The Chinese Government. The Japanese Government. The House of Saud in Saudi Arabia. I mean, we are borrowing money from China. I do not even want to get into the whole manufacturing and the rise of China and the competition that we have right now.

It is a real issue. So we are borrowing money from a country that we are in direct competition with. They are taking billions and billions of dollars of investment that is coming from the United States and going into China, whether it is Delphi that has filed bankruptcy, General Motors which has significant investment in China now, Ford just announced that they are going to cut 30,000 jobs in 10 plants in the United States. And we are borrowing money from the country that they are making the investment in?

Now, China is not in a bad position right now. Check it out. I mean, they are getting investments from Delphi, General Motors, General Electric and Ford and a lot of the automakers; and at the same time they are loaning us money that we are paying them interest on.

A big piece of the American pie. And I think we were talking the other day, it is over $300 billion a year this country pays just in interest payments on the debt.

The average American, the average Member of Congress is not paying attention to our $8 trillion debt that we have. That means $27,000 per American citizen. So if a baby is born today, I had a nephew that was born a couple of months ago, 9 weeks ago tomorrow. That young man, Nicholas John Ryan, owes $27,000 to his government, and this young man is 9 weeks old.

The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz), the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt), they each owe $27,000 to the United States Government because of the reckless spending that we have. So, you know, we have really got to get our house in order. We need to balance the budget.

Ladies and gentlemen, Members of Congress, my friends from Florida, you just cannot do it by giving away $80 billion to the wealthiest people in the country in the form of a tax cut.

We also have two wars going on.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back my time to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman

Schultz) as I have to step off the floor for a moment.

Mr. Speaker, it was interesting talking to Leader Pelosi the other day, and some of her conversations that she had were about she and our leadership team actually went out and engaged the technology community and sought their recommendations. They were saying we need to do this in the next 2 years. Our friends on the other side do not have a plan at all. We have a plan to do it in the next 5 years, and many people in the high-tech community are saying we need it done in the next year or two years.

This is something that we cannot wait on, and I think the difference here is that we are showing very specific proposals here, very specific goals that need to be achieved in order for America to push forward in the 21st century. It does not happen with the same old rhetoric of the supply side voodoo economics. It is just not working.

Last night, you know how you get on your computer and you just start floating around, and God knows where you end up. We got out of here late, and I could not fall asleep. So I got on my computer and I was floating around, and I got into some space stuff from the space program. Then I made my way to the space speech that President Kennedy gave in Houston in the early 1960s; and I tell you what, they have the audio version which is very cool. If any American wants to think about where we should be and the kind of leadership that they deserve from us, they just need to read that speech or listen to that speech. That was about just taking things to the next level.

We should put it on our Web site, and I think we will have to do that.

It was about here is the vision, here is why and here is why it is our call at this moment in history; and I think when you talk about something like broadband, you talk about alternative energy sources, you talk about research and development, whether it is into the human mind or the human genome or whatever it may be. It is

about setting these lofty goals for our country, not to go shopping, which is the great call from this administration.

A lot of ours are foreign born who will return to probably one of those two countries.

Think of the ripple effect. Throughout our society, from wages to new inventions, new patents, the whole 9 yards, the ripple effect throughout the community.

We have a business incubator in one of our towns, in Youngstown that is, whether it is computers or science or whatever, creating jobs in our urban centers; and you begin to put together a program where you have research, you have engineering graduates, you have business incubators, you have the arts.

One of the things that I want to add to that, when I was in China, I went for 2 weeks in August. The two things that the Chinese were saying that American engineers have that those 600,000 do not have, they really do not have the skills that we have. We are more creative and we work in teams better, and they were saying that they just cannot teach the Chinese how to do these things, no matter how hard they try. One party system, Communist system, everything is very narrow. You always look to the hierarchy. It is just very narrow thinking.

It occurred to me that the very two things, in addition to not creating enough engineers, but the very two things that give us our competitive advantage around the globe are the first two things that we usually cut in our schools, the arts programs and the team programs, the pay-to-play, where kids get boxed out. It is basketball season now for high schools, 12 varsity kids, 12 junior varsity kids and a freshman team, and that is it. No one else gets to play. We need to have an agenda that promotes teamwork, the arts, these things that create our advantage.

We are in the process, I think everyone would agree, of creating a new economy. No one really knows what direction it is going to go in; but we know some of the fundamentals, like broadband, are a very important part of that. So why not make it accessible to everybody, just like we did with roads? That was a huge subsidy for the auto industry for years. I mean, where is the auto industry, where are the car manufacturers without roads? Where are the great railroad companies without the railroad lines?

These are the kinds of things that I think we need to do. Water lines, sewer lines were the key in the industrial age; and in the high- tech Information Age, that is the road and the bridge.

I think that has been the focus of our friends on the other side. They have been so focused on taking care of their friends in particular industries that we have gotten away from the mission here, which is to strengthen the United States of America in a $323 billion budget deficit that the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan organization, is saying we are going to have. That is less money that we are able to invest in the country, and a stronger America begins right here at home.

And the agenda the gentlewoman has been articulating over the past 20 minutes or so I think separates us from even how our party used to be. Everybody has their crosses to bear, and I think we had been labeled many times as just a tax-and-spend party who never came up, at least in the last few years, with any really great ideas.

Most of the Democrats over here voted yesterday for the alternative minimum tax, to make sure that average people will get a tax cut and they will not be burdened. So I think we are moving away from that. And I would say most of us have voted for middle class tax relief on a variety of occasions. But what we are saying here is that this is the broadband and the engineering. And our approach to this thing, research and development, tax credits, our approach to this is a new approach that neither party has had, but we have it now.

The Democratic party is offering a new approach to this. And it is, in many ways, having broadband penetration for every single student and for every household in the next 5 years is an anti-poverty program. It is a jobs-creation program. These kids who live in poverty, we need to help them with heating oil and we do need to make sure these kids have the proper diet and the proper nutrition and all that. That is stuff that still needs to happen. But if that kid is caught in the digital divide, caught at the wrong end of the digital divide, that kid will never have an opportunity to hook up to any kind of economic growth that we may have because of this.

That is why it is so important to get it everywhere. And what we are saying is we want that kid, who is somewhere in rural America or somewhere in some inner city, to have access to this. Because with a quality education, access to the technology and the proper community support, that kid will become a wealth creator. They will be creating wealth and paying taxes, instead of asking can I get qualified for the earned income tax credit, am I going to be on Medicaid, or what do I need?

We want to propel people. And America needs to be a country of opportunity again, Debbie. It needs to be a country where people can say, I can be anything I want, I can do whatever I want because the proper infrastructure was in place when I was a kid to help propel me into a bright future.

Yes, this is the 30 Something Working Group. Send us an e-mail at [email protected]. Thirty, the number, [email protected].

The reason I think it is important that we are down here right now at 7:15 on a Thursday night when most Members have gone home is because we are talking about the future of our country. This is to run the deficit up another $30 billion in order to give tax cuts primarily to those millionaires. 45 percent of tax cuts that we passed today will go to millionaires. Forty-five percent.

Now 45 percent of taxpayers are not millionaires, but they are going to get 45. So it is totally disproportionate to the average income in the United States of America. Here is what we have been doing before today as far as the tax cuts go. And if you have made $441,000 and up, you have got on average $87,000 back. $87,000 back. And today the average millionaire is going to get $32,000 more back. And that is so you are talking about a millionaire getting well over $100,000, $130,000 because this is the average: $130,000 back in tax cuts.

You are talking about borrowing money from the Chinese Government, from the Japanese Government, from the Saudi Arabians in order to pay for this. We do not have money. We are not running a surplus right now.

This President has been the first President in the history of our country to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans in a time of war. Where is the shared sacrifice? I mean, average people are struggling. I have a district that has thousands of Delphi workers, General Motors workers. We are hearing now that Ford is going to cut 30,000 jobs and close 10 plants in North America. These are the challenges that people in middle America are facing, and the time and energy of this body is spent figuring out a way to reduce the tax burden.

So I tell you what, if you make over a million dollars and you are out in America today, today has been a great day for you. This Congress has treated you pretty well. You are going to have a good holiday season probably for the next couple of years because of what has been happening.

Our obligation here is to represent the public. Our obligation here, when we swear to the Constitution, is to do what is best for the entire country and to do this in a couple of different ways.

We are running a $323 billion deficit projected for 2006, $323 billion that we are going to have to borrow in order to close the hole in the Nation's budget. We are borrowing that money from the Chinese, the Japanese, the Saudi Arabians and other countries.

At the same time, because we are running those huge deficits, we are also giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country. So, if you make over $440,000, you are going to get on average $87,000, plus what we did today. So you are talking about closer to $100,000.

If you make between $34,000 and $54,000, that is what you get, $840. I think we said today that the average person who makes under $100,000, half of those people will get $30 back. So, if you make $100,000 a year, on average, half of those people will get $30 back today. That is not much of a middle class tax cut as far as I am concerned.

We are moving in the wrong direction. At the same time that we are borrowing money from the Chinese, running these huge deficits, cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in our country, at the same time we are doing that, we are also cutting programs here in the United States, the food stamp program, the college tuition program. The Pell grant program is being cut. The child support enforcement program which will help fund local county commissioners and local county organizations to go out and get deadbeat dads who are not paying their child support, that is what we are cutting.

It just does not make any sense, and I think the American people, when they start hearing this stuff, they intuitively know something wrong is happening. But I think when they hear the facts of what is going on in their government right now, this culture of corruption that is here is starting to make its way back into their households.

Let me make one final comment point. At the same time we are doing all this, the legislation that we are passing out of here is benefiting the interest groups that donate a lot of money to our friends on the other side, to the Republican majority, and this body, this Congress and this White House has been used as a sand box, as a trough to where the cronies, the Michael Browns who are running FEMA and the seven or eight top people at FEMA, this administrator who was over in Iraq who had $87 million to administer in the war and took a couple of hundred thousand in kickbacks, who was convicted of fraud in the 1990s, they hired him anyway because he was a crony of one of the administration officials. This is completely incompetence and an inability to govern, and these tax cuts are out of control, and they are happening at the expense of average people.

Again, today has been great day for the millionaires in the United States.

There is more than that.

Some people say what does that have to do with the 30 Somethings, are we not supposed to talk about the interests of college education and child tax credits and that stuff? No. The future of our country is being placed in another country's hands, which gives up control of our own destiny because we are going to have to make payments.

It is just like when you go to a bank. You borrow money, you have to pay interest on that money, and we are borrowing it from the Chinese. We are going to have to pay interest on it, and the Chinese are taking that interest. They have a lot of State-owned companies that they are going to pump our money back into. It is bad enough that General Motors and Delphi and a lot of these other corporations are investing money into China. Now they are getting it from the American taxpayer, and the Chinese Government will invest that money into their economy, whether it is in the auto industry or some other industry. They will have that money invested into their economy, long term.

This is a dangerous proposition to not balance your budget in the United States of America, and we are Democrats. We believe in a balanced budget. We believe in fiscal discipline. This long-term recklessness coming from the Republican party and Republican leadership is putting our country in danger, not just danger, grave danger.

Mr. Speaker, we know when the shareholders ask the leaders of the corporation, we want to see the books, we want to see what is going on, the leaders of the corporation or the business cannot say no, no, no, you are not allowed to see that.

And to take the analogy even further with the business, how can you just keep going on borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, borrowing? That is all we are doing right now. This is the national debt today, $8.120 trillion. That is a lot of money, $8 trillion.

And each person at home owes $27,000.

We have a notice today that we are going to finish up next week and we are all going to go home for the holidays, Christmas and Hanukah. I cannot wait to get to our Christmas Eve party. We have a Christmas Eve party every year. My mom is Italian, and my Uncle Joe Guerra, who lives in Florida now, is in charge of the sauce. He is going to be making the sauce, and he is going to ask me, what did you do last year in Congress? And I am going to say, well, Uncle Joe, you owe $27,000 to the national debt, and the country has borrowed $8 trillion, and that is what we all owe. And as I stated a couple of hours ago when we were here, Nicholas John Ryan, born 3 weeks ago to my brother and his wire Carrie, he owes $27,000, just like that.

Now that is no way to run a country. And when the Democrats are talking about balancing the budget and we talk about making some tough decisions and maybe having to go ask a millionaire to maybe pay their fair share in order to reduce the debt and to reduce the annual deficits that we are running, we cannot find anyone with any courage on the other side. But when they have the opportunity to cut Medicaid, to cut the free and reduced lunches, to cut the budget for child support enforcement agencies in our local communities, who go out and try to get money from deadbeat dads, that is where they want to get the money from.

Now, we are not saying that government does not need reform, that we do not need to streamline it. But does it not start with a lot of these contractors in Iraq? We are spending a $1.5 billion a week in Iraq, Mr. Speaker. A week. We are building dams in Iraq, roads in Iraq, schools in Iraq, training people in Iraq, training health care workers in Iraq and teachers in Iraq, and the outfit on the other side is cutting free and reduced lunches in the United States of America. They do not have the courage to go and ask a millionaire to maybe give up just a few thousand dollars of his tax cut, Mr. Speaker.

This is about leadership. We are at a critical point in the history of the United States of America, Mr. Meek. We are in a war in Iraq, we are in a war in Afghanistan, and we have huge budget deficits. A $323 billion budget deficit is projected for next year, yet we cut taxes tonight for millionaires up to the tune of $32,000 per, after giving them over $100,000 over the course of the last few years.

Are these good decisions long term for the United States of America? Because, again, we do not have surplus money to give back to millionaires in the form of tax cuts. We are running deficits. And what countries do when they have a deficit is the same thing a family does when they have an annual deficit. You have to borrow the money or you have to get out the credit card. And that is what this country is doing right now. We are putting the future of the United States of America on a credit card.

And we are asking the next generation, the same generation that we are asking to pay double the tuition that they paid 4 or 5 years ago, increasing the fees for student loans, increasing the burden of taxes on the middle class, we are going to also ask that generation to pay the national debt off; and to try to somehow close this gap by borrowing the money from the Chinese and making sure that they pay back our debts that we are borrowing from the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Saudi Arabians at the same time we are spending $1.5 billion and a half a week in Iraq.

Now, one final point. You voted for the defense appropriations bill. So did I.

You voted for probably almost every supplemental for the war in Iraq.

And so did I. We are not going to have our troops in a forward area and have them not have what they need.

But to make these cuts on the backs of the middle class and the poor in this country at the same time, at the same exact time, and this is almost funny, this would be funny if it was not so sad, at the same time we are giving millionaires tax cuts.

Now, people at home, Mr. Speaker, who hear this and read about it in the morning newspapers have got to think this place is a mad house, that it is schizophrenic. Two wars, $1.5 billion a week in Iraq, and we are cutting taxes. Tuition doubles, and we are cutting taxes for millionaires. Poverty rate goes up in Cleveland, in the State of Ohio, one of the highest poverty levels in the country. I think it was rated the poorest city in the country. We are cutting taxes for millionaires. Katrina. We have people living in their cars still, over the holiday season.

Being evicted. I mean, come on, we can do better than this, Kendrick. And that is what we are saying.

I would be happy to yield.

Well, just to back it up, and we used this earlier, because we like third-party validators. This is from the Economic Policy Institute, www.epi.org, the conclusion of a report they put together regarding a briefing paper. It is called ``The Boom That Wasn't.'' ``The economy has little to show for $860 billion in tax cuts.'' This is from the EPI. I did not do this. ``A review of economic performance over the last 4 years indicates that the series of major tax cuts enacted in that time have not strengthened the economy. Almost every broad measure of economic activity, GDP, jobs, personal income, and business investment, among others, has fared worse over the last 4 years than in past cycles.'' Let me repeat that. ``Has fared worse over the last 4 years than in past cycles. Proponents of the series of major tax cuts since 2001 had projected that gauges such as these would reflect improvements after enactment.'' The Boom That Wasn't. Because we were not cutting them for the middle class, we were cutting them for wealthy people.

And I just want to say that I do not have anything against people who make a lot of money. In fact, God bless you. That is great. But you have an obligation. You benefit from what is happening. And what is happening now in our country, and we have talked about this, I know privately a lot and here a bit, who is investing in the country? We are giving tax cuts to millionaires, yet they are investing their money into China. They are putting it in a bond fund or a mutual fund that is an international fund, or they are investing in the stocks of private companies, publicly-owned companies that are investing into China.

We are cutting taxes, and those people are giving their money over there. Delphi, General Motors, General Electric, all these companies are investing in China. And here is what the Democrats want to do to just kind of talk a little about what you were doing.

Another problem we have is the amount of engineers that some of these other countries are producing. Just this year, engineering degrees in China, 600,000; engineering degrees in India, 350,000; and engineering degrees in the United States, 70,000.

So what the Democrats are proposing is to make an investment into the people, into the technology that is going to get this number where it needs to be. You cannot have a high number here when you have 70 percent of the kids in all of these school districts, inner-city school districts around the country living in poverty. You cannot get that number up when you have kids in rural areas that do not have the skills that they need.

One of the other things we want to do in the Democrat plan. America ranks 16th in broadband penetration. Here is Korea, per 100 inhabitants, 24.9; then China; then Iceland; then the United States of America. And the Democratic caucus here in the House has a proposal, should we get the reins of government next year, that we will have a proposal together to put broadband access in every home in the next 5 years.

You want to create a strong economy; you want to get people all over the country in rural areas and inner cities, in poorer communities to start generating wealth. An automobile plant is not going to set itself in Youngstown, Ohio again. A Delphi facility is not going to locate in Warren, Ohio, and hire 10,000 people any more. If the leadership on the Republican side does not wake up and recognize the country is suffering because of this, then we are going to continue down this long road that is leading us to nowhere.

When we have Iceland that has higher broadband penetration than the United States of America, that is a shame. I was telling Ms. Wasserman Schultz I was doing some research for what we were going to do today, and I got into some of the great initiatives of the United States, and I ran across President Kennedy's speech in the early 1960s about going to the Moon. I mean, talk about setting out an agenda and leading.

Where is it?

The Democratic Caucus that is here has proposal after proposal that cannot even make it to the floor for the American people to evaluate. We offer in

committees amendments that get voted down on a party-line vote. We are trying to improve this country, and we are being shut down because the Republican majority has to cut taxes for millionaires. We want to improve this.

In 5 years, if the Democrats had control of this Chamber and the Senate and the White House, we would have a proposal that would begin to penetrate communities all over the country with broadband access.

I want to make one final point.

This is a poverty program, this right here, this innovation program that the Democratic Caucus has put together and the majority leader has put together. We want to penetrate these communities, and we want these young kids who if they miss this great technological boom, if they get caught on the wrong end of this digital divide that we have in the country, they are not going to be creating wealth in our communities. They are going to be on Medicaid and on the earned income tax credit and need public assistance.

We want to make investments now into these communities, not for the sake of saying we helped these poor kids out, but because those kids want opportunity. If presented with opportunity, like broadband access, like access to the Internet and the latest technology, these kids will achieve.

But if this kid does not get broadband access in his school and he does not have it at home and then he is asked to go out and compete with the Chinese engineer who makes $10,000 a year, he is not going to be able to do it; she is not going to be able to do it. We have to get on the stick here. We have to wake up and start leading this country.

That is right.

Mr. Speaker, the Web site is www.30somethingdems@ mail.house.gov">www.30somethingdems@ mail.house.gov, and I want to thank Mr. Meek for his leadership. He is down here every night, sometimes 2 hours a night, dedicating himself. He has two young kids at home, a beautiful wife that you leave to come down here to promote this message. I know it is difficult sometimes to balance work and family, and I want to say I am really thankful for your leadership on this, and you are really an inspiration to all of us.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.

And I think he is absolutely right. That is the most startling statistic that he has shown us with the money that we have borrowed from foreign interests because we come to the floor nightly, sometimes for a couple hours a night, to talk about the future of the country. And there is no more important part, no more important aspect, of the country than our fiscal stability. And right now we have a Republican Congress, House and Senate, and the President, who are borrowing money consistently from foreign interests, and to have one President do in 4 years what 42 Presidents could not do in 224 years is absolutely outrageous. And for anyone to stand up and somehow defend this fiscal policy that we have is an outrage, and it offends me, to be quite honest, because not only are we borrowing money which we have to pay interest on, we ran a $500 billion deficit, or close to $500 billion. We are not factoring in the war or anything else. We are spending $1.5 billion a week in Iraq, which is a lot of money, and we are close to over $200 billion already there. But to have this money and spend it is one thing, but to not have the money and have to borrow it primarily from the Chinese, the Saudi Arabians, the Japanese, to borrow that money to plug our holes here in the United States puts this country at risk, and it weakens our country.

And we do not come here because we do not have anything better to do tonight. We come here because we take a constitutional oath and we swear our allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.

Article I, section 1 of the Constitution creates this House. The first part of the United States Constitution creates this House. So we have an obligation for oversight. We have an obligation to balance the budget, and we have an obligation to protect the future of the United States of America. What more basic fundamental part of our jobs is there other than making sure this country is fiscally stable? And to go out and borrow over $1 trillion, I mean I think it is--this is very important for us to make this point again. In 224 years, 42 Presidents borrowed over $1 trillion from foreign holdings, from foreign interests. Over $1 trillion in 224 years. This President and this Republican-led Congress has borrowed over $1 trillion in 4 years from foreign interests. That weakens our country.

And, Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, people say what does the 30-Something

Group have to do with all of this, what does our group have to do with all of this? Listen, this is the future of our country. There is no greater issue for the 30-somethings or the 20-somethings or those kids in school right now or those college students right now. There is no greater issue because the money, we do not just borrow it from the Chinese. We have got to pay interest on it, and our national debt right now is $8 trillion. So who is going to pay this and who is going to pay the interest on it? And I think it is $300 billion a year we are paying just in interest on the debt that we have. $300 billion. So just imagine if we could get to a position where we were in the late 1990s.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, the Republican majority tomorrow is going to extend or reinstitute tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country.

Up to $70 billion, they are going to go to the Chinese, to the Saudi Arabians, Mr. Speaker, to the Japanese governments.

To the Koreans, and they are going to borrow the money. There is no one, Mr. Speaker, that could possibly hear this argument, no Member of Congress that could possibly hear this argument and not think to themselves why would we cut taxes by $70 billion for the wealthiest people in the country and have to borrow the money from the Chinese to pay for it?

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure, quite frankly, if there is a good answer. I mean, what could possibly be the good answer? And the rhetoric that we get from our friends on the other side is that the tax cuts are stimulating the economy. The tax cuts are creating jobs. And this is laughable. Where? Where? In the Delphi Corporation? Ford just announced they are cutting 30,000 jobs. General Motors? Who is creating the jobs? And I heard our friend on the other side say a little bit earlier he had a company in Texas that went from two jobs to four jobs.

I mean, that is laughable. Ford cuts 30,000, and the argument coming from the other side is there is one company in Texas, Mr. Speaker, that went from two jobs to four jobs. Now, that is economic growth.

I think the President needs to recognize, and I am not saying this facetiously, he is not the President of Iraq. He is the President of the United States of America. And I do not say that to be flippant. I say that because this President's sole focus throughout his first term and into the second term has been Iraq.

And to give a speech today as Ford announces that they are cutting 30,000 jobs in the United States of America, as Delphi is in bankruptcy, as General Motors is having great difficulty competing, he is giving a speech on the Iraqi economy. It is like we are having a bad dream. I mean, come on. At some point, should not someone around the President or somebody in this Congress tug him on the shirt sleeve and say, hey, Mr. President, we need you. We need your help. This country needs a domestic economic policy.

Borrowing money from the Chinese to subsidize tax cuts for the top 1 percent is not a domestic agenda

The problem with this whole situation, this whole scenario, is that as we are spending $1.5 billion a week in Iraq, and we are borrowing money from the Chinese, over $1 trillion in the last 4 years, not investing in the United States, not investing in education, not investing in research and development, not fixing our health care issue, we are weakening ourselves as a country.

Now we all as Americans want to say we want to be good to other countries. We want to be helpful to other countries. But if you are not strong at home, what good really are you to the rest of the world? We need a strong America, because if America is not strong, you are going to see a communist China rear its ugly head.

And talk about having a debate about an issue. It was in today's paper and on the news last night and today. Osama bin Laden. There is a name we have not heard for a while. Osama bin Laden is still alive leading the jihad.

Why are we not having the discussion about where is Osama bin Laden? This is the man who coordinated and organized the attack against the United States on 9/11. And we are having this huge debate about Iraq and what we should do and when we should leave and how it should go. What about Osama bin Laden?

No.

I think that the key point to this whole thing with the Katrina scenario is that the President ran on he was going to make the country stronger, that he could protect us better than his opponent, which is fine. Katrina happened. It was not a surprise attack. It was not a surprise that Katrina hit the gulf coast. This hurricane was on the Weather Channel for 5 days. And we say, were we really ready? Unfortunately, as Mr. Hamilton and Governor Kean said, that there will probably be another terrorist attack in the United States. We don't want that to happen, of course, but we are not going to have 5 days to prepare for a terrorist attack in the United States. You are not going to be able to turn on the Weather Channel and they are going to say, a terrorist attack is coming for New York City and you have 5 days to prepare for it. That is the number-one responsibility that we have. Article 1, section 1 creates this body and we have an obligation to protect this country. We are not going to have forewarning. We are not going to be tipped off by the Weather Channel. And if we cannot do it with 5 days' preparation, it frightens me at what stage we are at right now and the job we are not doing because we are so focused on all these other things.

I would be happy to yield to my friend who just strutted in from wherever she was.

I think this goes right to the point that our friends on the other side, as much as we like some of them, are unable to govern. They just don't know how to do it. There is just total incompetence, from the economy, from the poverty levels, the macroeconomic situation, balancing the budget, lack of fiscal restraint, fiscal recklessness in borrowing $1 trillion from foreign interests over the past 4 years. They just are unable to govern the country. They have had their chance. They have controlled the House and the Senate and the White House, one party, they have had a chance to implement their agenda, and nothing seems to be going right.

Iraq.

This is not a one-time event.

This country deserves better than that. That is the point that we are trying to make. We do not have to settle for a dictator like some people do in some countries. We are allowed to have high expectations for our leaders in the country.

How about the gentleman, I cannot remember his name, a couple of weeks ago came up who had $87 million worth of contracts in Iraq he was in charge of and he was stealing money, hundred of thousands of dollars. In the 1990s he was convicted of fraud, but yet, this administration hired him again. That is incompetence. That is cronyism. That is an inability to execute the proper role of government.

[email protected].

Mr. Speaker, as we come back on the 30-something Special Order, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt).

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

We have a quote over here. Victory means exit strategy, said Governor George Bush during Kosovo. Exit strategy. And here we are a couple of years into the war with no exit strategy. And if you ask for an exit strategy, you are helping out the other side.

Well, wait a minute. We are spending $1.5 billion a week. We have lost well over 2,000 lives, thousands and thousands of soldiers have been injured. Do we not have a right in the Congress of the United States, the House of Representatives, to at least ask when are we leaving? Is it 4 months? Is it 6 months? Can we at least have a discussion on why we should not talk about it, or is it just my way or the highway? I mean, we have an obligation here to do that.

I look at this like your homework when you are in school, and your teacher gives you some homework. The homework is due next Thursday. You have got to have X, Y and Z done. And, you know what, if it is due on Thursday, most kids will do it on Wednesday. Right? That is just human nature. And I am thinking that maybe we need to tell the Iraqis, your homework needs to be done by May. Okay? And it better be done.

If you do not tell them the homework needs to be done by May, then they are not going to do it. So if it is indefinite, there is no end in sight, that is not what the American people want.

They have been saying this for 5 years about this tax policy. They have.

You have people getting indicted left and right. You have contractors and administrators in the government stealing money. I will give you one story that is both full of corruption and cronyism.

An administrator in the U.S. Government who is in Iraq, who is in charge of $87 million in contracts, gets caught taking kickbacks of a couple hundred thousand dollars. That is corruption. In the 1990s he was convicted of fraud, and they put him in anyway because he was the friend of the proper person he needed to be friends with. That is cronyism, and the whole process of not being able to administer the public dollars in an efficient and effective fashion is incompetence.

The American taxpayers work very hard and they send the money down to us, and they trust us to spend that money in a way that will benefit the government and the safety and security of the United States. To put $87 million in the hands of a crook is not only incompetent, but it is wrong and it highlights their inability to govern.

They control the House and the Senate and the White House. They have been in charge for years of all three branches. They have had the opportunity to implement their Republican agenda on taxes, on poverty, on college tuition, on foreign policy, on everything. It has been a miserable failure across the board.

Quite frankly, I think it is an insult to the American people because we do not live under a dictatorship. We live in a democracy, a representative government. America has always been great, as Leader Pelosi was saying today to the 30 Something Group this morning, because we have these high expectations of what the government should do and what the government should be. I am tired of this body taking advantage of the busyness of the American people.

Why is it that just because they can get away with it they do it? That is not right because America cannot lead the world if it is not strong here at home, and these constant tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting billions of dollars out of college tuition, Mr. Speaker, how are we supposed to invest in the country?

And incompetence.

We have a few minutes, but the majority treats government like it is their own personal sandbox.

Exactly. And they can do whatever they want to do, take care of their friends, and do it using the taxpayers' dollars.

And the workers are not getting the prevailing wage.

Wait a minute. I think you guys are being a little hard on the Governor here, because his press secretary says that ``the Governor had no knowledge whatsoever of Rosemary's receiving that contract.''

No, I think you are being a little hard on him. His press secretary, Kendrick, said he did not know anything about it. Are you saying you do not believe him?

You are saying you do not believe him.

And time and time again you have the act itself, everybody knows what is happening, and then you have the press secretary come out, just like the White House press secretary said Scooter Libby did not know anything. Karl Rove did not know anything. No one knew anything, but the facts say something completely different, Mr. Meek.

And it is a shame that this culture of corruption, cronyism, and incompetence is so pervasive throughout the United States Congress and our government.

Together America can do better and a stronger America begins right here at home.

[email protected]. Thirty, the number, [email protected].

Thank you, Mr. Delahunt, Mr. Pallone, Mr. Meek, and Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 6 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 8, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We appreciate the opportunity to be here again representing the 30-Something Working Group. I want to thank Leader Pelosi for the opportunity, our favorite uncle, Bill Delahunt, who is here from Massachusetts, also Kendrick Meek from Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz from Florida, who are also members of the working group and will be here in just a few minutes.

We want to welcome, Mr. Speaker, everyone to the first-ever 30- Something Live, in which we will be interacting not only with other Members of Congress here, not only with the audience, C-SPAN audience, but also with our friends in the blogosphere. And we will be interacting with them, reading e-mails that they will be sending to us, as we have been receiving e-mails from our constituents in our offices for years on Capitol Hill.

But this is the first time ever that there will be interaction between Members of Congress on the House floor and at the same time constituents and citizens of the United States of America having direct access to this Chamber. So we are very, very excited about introducing 30-Something Live. Being the 30-Something Group, we are trying to take our communications to the next level, trying to reach out to the American people, because we have said for quite some time that if we are going to solve problems in this country, that we have to engage the best and brightest talent that is out in the country in order to do this.

So we are not only going to answer your questions, Mr. Speaker. We are going to take suggestions as to issues that need to be addressed, ideas that folks may have at home. And this is a pretty exciting time for all of us.

We have been joined here with our friend from Florida, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. And this is going to be the first ever. So this is pretty exciting stuff.

Now, you and I, we are ready to rock and roll on this. And when Mr. Meek gets here, he is going to be ready to rock and roll. But we may have to break it down for our favorite uncle.

We can break it down.

I cannot remember exactly which one of us said something, but it was to the effect that we had to tuck you in bed and make sure that you were getting your proper amount of rest.

It is very loose. Adaptable. But it is good to see that you got your nap in this afternoon.

I believe over 400 e-mails.

Well, we are not going to be able to get through them all, so we will lay down some basic ground rules here. We will not be able to get through them all, obviously, Mr. Speaker. We are going to have to take a few and maybe expound on them, but we are going to continue, Mr. Speaker, to make our arguments. We are going to lay out the case for what we believe needs to happen in the country, what direction we need to go in, and as we receive information from the public, use that to supplement our arguments that we have been making here.

I think it is important for us to recognize that we want to make cohesive, coherent arguments, and we are asking, Mr. Speaker, other Members in this chamber and the citizens around the country to help us with that, make points that we feel that maybe they feel need to be made.

Before we get into today, before we get rocking and rolling here, the big issue now is the pre-war intelligence. The President has dusted off this same old speech that he has given hundreds of times already in a hundred different viewing areas regarding the pre-war intelligence. The President has said that anybody accusing the administration of having ``manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people was giving aid and comfort to the enemy.'' So if you question the pre-war intelligence, you are giving aid to the enemy. So it seems like the President is asking us as Members of the United States Congress not to even question any of the intelligence or any of the drum beat leading up to the war.

He was in the room.

Then one of the questions we have here, Mr. Speaker, from Hayward, California asked, What is our mission in Iraq other than being targets for anyone with a weapon? That is really what we are saying. If you try to ask the administration why are we there, what is going on, when are they coming home, we get called unpatriotic. If we ask these questions that a man like Robert Veloza asks, Mr. Speaker, we get called unpatriotic. These are the questions. We have got a lot of questions that people ask, what are we still doing there? What is the plan for getting out? A lot of these. We have got 400 or 500 of these now. A lot of people are asking us, Mr. Speaker, what are we doing? If we try to say to the President, Mr. President, what are we doing, we are unpatriotic now?

That is absolutely right. Let's get this straight out. I want to kind of lay some things out here because all the rhetoric that we are now hearing and the administration is really good at getting in the huddle and then breaking the huddle and everyone goes onto the TV shows on Sunday and everyone starts singing from the same hymn book and trying to convince the American people that the world is really not what everyone thinks it is. They find a way to try to spin it. I just want to go back just for a couple of minutes for all of us to recognize who we are dealing with here and what their track record is.

The CIA leak where Scooter Libby, the chief of staff of the Vice President of the United States, was indicted on five counts for lying basically, obstruction of justice, false statements, everything else. This is right from the indictment. On July 10 or 11, Libby spoke to Karl Rove who advised Libby of a conversation that he had. Rove talked to Novak, Bob Novak, the columnist, and Novak said that he was going to basically use Joe Wilson, the ambassador who went to Africa to find out what was really going on with uranium and everything else. So Rove tells Libby that Novak is going to write about Joe Wilson's wife. That was in July. Okay?

Then we find out, here it is, 2 months later, in September, Karl Rove denies even knowing anything about a CIA leak or outing Valerie Plame. So he told Libby that Joe Wilson's wife was going to be outed in July and then in September ABC News asks him what is up with this and he says, ``I don't know.'' He lied to the American people. Scooter Libby lied to the American people. The Vice President of the United States in the same indictment told Scooter Libby about Joe Wilson's wife and then 2 months later he did not give all the facts on Meet the Press.

We have to be very careful with the Rules of the House when we deal with high-ranking administrative officials. Okay. So this is the outfit we are dealing with here. This is the group that has failed to be honest.

Now we go through the war. Remember what we heard prior to the war? We are going to use the oil for reconstruction. We are going to be greeted as liberators. They had weapons of mass destruction. All not true.

We even got a little piece of information, it will be interesting to see how this comes out with the use of phosphorus in Falujah. We were told months ago there was no phosphorus being used. Phosphorus they use in the military. We are not using any of that stuff. If we are using it, we are just using it to light the sky.

Then we find out on November 10, this is quoting from the BBC. This is not the Meek report, the Wasserman Schultz report, the Delahunt report. This is the BBC. ``We have learned that some of the information we were provided is incorrect. White phosphorus shells which produce smoke were used in Falujah, not for illumination but for screening purposes.'' That was in the March and April, 2005, issue of Field Artillery Magazine; and it was used as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes.

Now this is the use of a chemical weapon. Now I do not know if it is true or not, but what I do know is that they said they were not using it, and now they are saying they used it.

Would the gentleman read that one again about the ghost employees?

We are paying ghost employees in Iraq, and we are not allowed to question the validity of what is going on over there?

How about ghosts paying some of my Adelphi workers who are going to get their salaries cut by 60 percent? Does this administration want to ghost pay some of them?

Do we have enough money to pay people for not doing work in Iraq?

We are joined by our good friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), who was getting an award tonight. I congratulate the gentleman. Welcome to the inaugural 30-something Live.

Mr. Speaker, one of the words that our President used was irresponsible; it is irresponsible to question what is going on. Is that responsible, that kind of fiscal undiscipline, reckless disregard for a budget in the United States? That is irresponsible?

And what else is irresponsible? Cutting money for student loans, that is irresponsible.

How about Karl Rove telling Scooter Libby about Joe Wilson's wife and then going on TV a couple of months later and saying he did not know anything about it. I think that is kind of irresponsible to say that to the American public. I did not hear the President say Scooter Libby was irresponsible.

That is irresponsible.

Mr. Speaker, this is about third-party validators. This is not Kendrick Meek, Tim Ryan, Bill Delahunt; this is not just us spewing out rhetoric to the American people, Mr. Speaker.

I want to read a letter that I think may be of some interest to the Republican majority as they are all deciding right now how they are going to vote. It is about time you get on your knees, you say your prayers before you go to bed tonight. The Republican majority needs to remember this letter:

``The absolute folly and moral bankruptcy of this plan is apparent.'' He is referring to the budget reconciliation package that the Republicans are about ready to pass out of this Chamber.

This gentleman says, ``The absolute folly and moral bankruptcy of this plan is apparent to the United States Senate, who voted to bar funding for it from the appropriations bill now in conference.

``The VFW,'' I say to my friends, ``urges the Congress to put a stop to the wartime assault on past and present warriors who have fought for and continue to defend our country.''

``Understand that this situation is totally unacceptable to the VFW and its 2.4 million members and auxiliaries. We will do what is necessary to protect, in Lincoln's words, `He who bore the battle, and his widow, and his orphan.' These words are marked on the front of the VA headquarters building. I urge you to take them to heart. Sincerely, Robert E. Wallace, Executive Director, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Washington Office.''

We are not making this up. This is the VFW.

Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Mr. Speaker, I will enter the letter into the Record at this time.

November 7, 2005.

All Members of Congress: The absolute folly and moral

bankruptcy of this plan is apparent to the United States

Senate, who voted to bar funding for it from the

appropriation bill now in conference. We have heard, however,

that the House Leadership fully intends to strip this

provision from the bill, and require the VA to execute this

witch-hunt of a review.

The VFW urges the Congress to put a stop to this wartime

assault on past and present warriors who have fought for, and

continue to defend our country. Understand that this

situation is totally unacceptable to the VFW, and its 2.4

million members and auxiliaries. We will do what is necessary

to protect, in Lincoln's words, ``He who bore the battle, and

his widow, and his orphan.'' These words are marked on the

front of the VA headquarters building. I urge you to take

them to heart.

Sincerely,

Robert E. Wallace,

Executive Director,

VFW Washington Office.

Who do not give money.

The machine.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thought it was very interesting how, as we were gathering or coordinating our efforts here tonight, I thought as I was listening to our Republican friends on the other side, there were things missing that I think the American people, Mr. Speaker, need to know about. No one on the other side said that we should cut the $16 billion in oil subsidies to pay for some of the other cuts that are being made for poor children or middle-class college students. No one on the other side said anything about the $100 billion in subsidies that are going to the pharmaceutical companies. No one said anything about that. And if there is any concern about the lack of responsibility, the incompetent leadership, complete incompetence, complete inability to govern, all we need to do is look at what has happened in the last 4 years.

Mr. Speaker, we may be a little more intense tonight than normal, and the reason is that tomorrow this budget may come before this House, and all the rhetoric over the past few weeks may become reality tomorrow on this floor. And we are not going to sit up in our offices and watch C-SPAN and watch this happen. We are not going to sit in our office and turn on Chris Matthews or some MTV, VH-1 show and just relax tonight.

The American people will be hurt if this budget passes this Congress tomorrow. People who are on Medicaid will be hurt tomorrow. People who are trying to bite, scratch, and pinch to send their kids to college will be hurt tomorrow. And veterans who fought for this country will be hurt tomorrow. And if they think we are going to stand up, or lay down, in our offices and turn

the TV on or go back home to our apartments and watch this happen without a fight, they have got another think coming, because they have taken this country, and in the last 4 years borrowed over $1 trillion from foreign countries. In the last 224 years, we have not borrowed that much from foreign countries.

And the American people, for that matter.

They are just saying stop. The VFW is telling the Republican Party, Mr. Speaker, stop. Look what you are doing. You are hurting veterans. I mean, the executive director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars does not just say I am going to send a letter to Congress today, Mr. Speaker. Stop it. You are going to hurt veterans. And at the same time, you are giving tax cuts to people who make $1 million a year or more. You are giving $16 billion in subsidies to the oil companies. You are giving handouts to the pharmaceutical companies, the wealthiest corporations in the world. And you are cutting veterans benefits. What is going on here?

It had to be a joke. They had to be kidding.

Mr. Speaker, we have been talking for a little while here. I think it is important for us to just kind of recap before we get on to something else.

The Republican budget that is going to pass this House tomorrow, probably without one Democratic vote, probably anyone on this side of the aisle will not vote for this bill because of the egregious cuts in there.

I appreciate that. So we go through this bill here and we look at the cuts.

Medicaid cuts on poor and working-class families who are trying to get some health care for their kids, student loan cuts $14.3 billion; $24 billion in reduced child support collections. It is going to knock 300,000 Americans off food stamps. Many of them have been displaced because of the natural disasters. 40,000 kids are going to get kicked off school lunch programs. Foster care is going to take a hit of 7 or $800 million, I believe. Veterans are going to get cut $600 million. There is a funny thing here because at the same time all this is going on, our friends who make more than a half a million dollars a year are going to receive a tax cut worth $70 billion.

So as all of these programs on college students and their parents, Medicaid, child support, food stamps, veterans, foster care are getting cut, there is going to be $70 billion in tax cuts for people who make more than a half a million dollars a year; and before I yield over there to my friend from Florida, there is something funny about this list that we have here.

I am looking at this: poor kids and poor mothers on Medicaid, who have their kids on Medicaid; college students who are just trying to get a better life, improve themselves; kids on child support and mothers who are receiving child support; people on food stamps; kids and families who qualify for the school lunch program; veterans.

Exactly right, and there is a funny thing here. It is that none of these groups who are going to face the cuts tomorrow from our Republican friends have a lobby group on Shakedown Street, on K Street, not one of them. There is no lobby group for the college students who are going to have to pay more on student loans. There is no lobby group for the kids who need foster care.

I hope, Mr. Speaker, that the American people recognize that this budget is bought and paid for by the special interests on K Street, down on Shakedown Street, because our friends who are given the tax cuts will not take the $16 billion from the oil companies that they are giving in subsidies. They will not reduce the cost of the Medicare part B prescription drug bill. They will not do it, the billions that are going to go to the pharmaceutical industry. Those people are off the table. The Republican majority will not cut from them.

They have to go to poor kids who qualify for free and reduced lunch to go try to balance the budget; and at the same time, they are giving more tax cuts. It is frustrating to me as a Member of Congress, from a district that has a high unemployment rate, a district that 50 percent of the people in my district who pay taxes did not even receive a tax cut and many who either qualify for these programs or want to qualify for the student loans and the Pell grants so they could improve their lives are going to get hurt because of this.

At the same time, the lack of leadership, the incompetence, the inability to govern in a way that will improve the country and invest in the country continues down here, this is a disgrace.

This budget is an absolute disgrace, and you take any American and you ask them to come down here and be the distinguished gentleman like the movie and come down here and try to make the decisions that we have to make and you look at what we look at, there are not many Americans who would say giving tax cuts to people who make $1 million a year and cutting from the middle class, cutting from Medicare, cutting from our seniors' health care program or the poverty programs in this country is somehow okay.

One final comment. We heard from a lot of the religious organizations through the course of the last election, the Christian Coalition. I spent 12 years in Catholic schools, and I remember the Christianity I learned about had more to do with helping people who were not doing so well and trying to do your best to lift them up. To listen to the rhetoric come out of the organizations, not the members of the organizations because there are a lot of Christians in my district, these cuts offend them. The people who work at Catholic Charities, this offends them; and for the organizations who say they are religious to be deaf on this issue is an outrage.

Good man.

If the gentleman will yield, this is about protecting their party. If the Republicans control the House and the Senate and the White House, and they are not being investigated to find what went wrong, whether it was Katrina or the CIA leak or Karl Rove or ``Scooter'' Libby or the Vice President's role in all this, or how are we going to balance the budget, if the Republican Party is not willing to investigate those problems, those situations, then they are putting the Republican Party before the interests of the country. And that has been the consistent modus operandi of this institution.

You get punished.

We want an opportunity to take this Congress and this country in a new direction, change the way we are going and derive some independence. We are at [email protected]. That is 30, the number, at mail.house.gov.

Mr. Speaker, we appreciate the opportunity for the 30-something Working Group to be back in action, and our friend from Iowa has not solved all the world's problems tonight. We will take it from here. We are ready, willing, and able to take the country in a new direction. A couple of the issues that the other side has addressed, one is the meth labs. I had a meeting recently with some sheriff deputies in Trumbull County, Ohio, from Geauga County, Ohio, and Ashtabula, Ohio, who were saying that they were unable to confiscate the methamphetamine labs because the drug program, the Federal drug task force program has been cut. So maybe we can work together in a bipartisan way to try to increase the funding for that, and you will be supportive, I am sure, so that we can make sure we crack down on these methamphetamine labs. This is something that we want to do.

Also, Mr. Speaker, the other side brought up the fact that a CIA agent was outed, and there was some disagreement. The prosecutor here, Mr. Fitzgerald, said that the reason Scooter Libby was not charged with outing a CIA agent is because he lied so much to the grand jury that he could not prove it. And he used the example, he said that I am like the umpire. I am the Federal prosecutor. I am the umpire. And as I was trying to make a decision here of whether or not he outed the CIA agent, Scooter Libby threw sand in my eyes. So I was not able to get to the point where I could actually charge him with outing a CIA agent because he threw sand in my eyes.

So he charged him with two counts of making false statements to a Federal agent, two counts of perjury to a grand jury, and one count of obstruction of justice. And how the other side could somehow say that that is all right, that is okay, I cannot believe that they would just charge him with that. You just lied to a grand jury? That was all you did? Okay. Well, that is all right. You did not out a CIA agent, or at least we could not prove it. And before we get going here, there are some CIA agents, former covert operatives that I think would disagree.

That is absolutely right. Here is one CIA agent, Jim Marcinkowski. This was on ``60 Minutes.'' He says exposing Brewster-Jennings, let me give a little background here. When Joe Wilson's wife was outed, when it became public, the world all of a sudden knew that everyone she was associated with and affiliated with was a part of the CIA in some way, shape or form, and so they also outed Brewster-Jennings, which was a front company, CIA front company in Boston, not to mention the 20 years' worth of contacts that also got outed.

But here is a quote from Jim Marcinkowski on ``60 Minutes,'' a former covert CIA agent. He said exposing the Boston firm Brewster-Jennings could lead foreign intelligence agencies to other spies. There is a possibility that there were other agents that would use the same kind of a cover so they may have been using Brewster-Jennings just like her. Another one from The Washington Post, a small Boston company, listed as Valerie Plame's employer, suddenly was shown to be a bogus CIA front and her alma mater in Belgium discovered it was a favored haunt of an American spy.

By Karl Rove and Scooter Libby and the executive branch outing Joe Wilson's wife, they put a lot of people in jeopardy, and they hurt our intelligence capabilities all over the world because now people who have dealt with Americans who went to the University of Belgium or who had dealings with Brewster-Jennings are now being looked upon as suspect.

Not only that, the word now is that the spouses of American ambassadors are being looked at suspiciously because now people think just because Valerie Plame was the spouse of an American ambassador and she was a CIA agent that every other spouse of an ambassador all over the world may be a CIA agent. This has ramifications, Mr. Speaker, that we do not even realize yet. And that has done nothing but weaken the country.

Now, here is the ultimate third-party validator on why the corruption going on in the White House right now must stop, because it is hurting our ability to fight the war on terrorism. They are weakening our ability to fight this war. This is Melissa, who was a 14-year covert CIA operative, and she was asked a question on ``60 Minutes.'' She says because we are talking about lives, and we are talking about capabilities, we do our work. We risk our own lives. We risk the lives of our agents in order to protect our country. And when something like this happens, it cuts to the very core of what we do. We are not being undermined by the

North Koreans. We are not being undermined by the Russians. We are being undermined by officials in our own government. That I find galling.

Mr. Speaker, to come to the floor, for our Republican friends to come to this floor and to somehow defend this is crazy.

It is outrageous. I would be happy to yield.

MS. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Because, you know, I think most people would understand why a CIA agent, a fellow CIA agent, would be outraged at the conduct coming from the Vice President's chief of staff, that he would do anything that would potentially put their lives or the lives of their colleagues in jeopardy. So some people might say, well, of course that would upset other CIA agents, and of course they would think that that was a problem. But in the spirit of continuing our desire to demonstrate that this is not just our opinion, and that we have some other third-party validators who agree, let us look at what Ed Gillespie, who is the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said.

He was speaking to Chris Matthews on ``Hardball,'' and Chris Matthews asked him what he thought of it. And his comment to Chris Matthews then was that I think if the allegation is true, to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative is abhorrent, and it should be a crime and it is a crime. And then Chris Matthews went on to ask Chairman Gillespie, he said, it would be worse than Watergate, would it not? And Gillespie's response was, Yeah, I suppose in terms of the real world implications of it, it is not just politics.

I mean, if that is not the ultimate third-party validator saying that it is abhorrent and it should be a crime and it is a crime to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative. Now, let us just make sure we say that Mr. Libby has only been accused of conduct related to that likelihood, not convicted of that. So, you know, of course we want to remember that this is a democracy and in our democracy you are innocent until proven guilty. However, it is really deeply disturbing that this is the first time in 130 years, 130 years, that we have had a White House official indicted on anything, never mind betrayal of this country's deepest secrets. And we have a long list of people who have commented on that possibility. We also have in the White House, still, I mean, Scooter Libby has left. Scooter Libby has now resigned from the White House. But you still have Karl Rove there in the White House as the right hand of the President with full, the highest level of security clearance.

Deputy chief of staff.

He is the deputy chief of staff in the White House, in the West Wing.

Why is that? Can I ask, can we have a discussion here, a serious discussion, you know, at 11 o'clock at night? Why would the President not fire him?

Maybe we should clear up exactly what happened here. In the indictment on or around June 12 or 13, Karl Rove told ``Scooter'' Libby about Joe Wilson's wife. On or about June 12 Karl Rove told Libby about Joe Wilson's wife and that Bob Novak was going to probably write an article about it. So Rove was tipping off Libby that this article was going to be in the paper and we need to deal with this somehow. That was in June.

On September 14, Karl Rove tells ABC News that he does not even know who Joe Wilson is or his wife or anything else. And then 2 years later, I think it may have been last summer, he reiterates the fact.

Okay, so we have Karl Rove telling Libby one thing about Valerie Plame and then telling the American people a few months later he does not know anything about it. That is why Karl Rove is no longer fit to serve the American public because he did not lie to ABC News. He did not lie to CNN. Karl Rove lied to the American people. Period. Dot. End of story. And he tried to revise, he tried to recant but he just cannot do it. This is the fact.

The indictment says he lied to the American people. He needs to be fired. I mean, no one here would accept that from their staff.

I would love for the gentleman to be the majority right now.

How many under this administration?

$40-some million.

Almost 60 percent of the American people believe that Karl Rove needs to resign, 60 percent. This is not me or my colleagues or the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt), who failed a little bit on us tonight. We tried to squeeze him into the 30- something Group. We tried to help him out, then he faded on us, got a little sleepy, started yawning. We had to dismiss him.

But here it is. There is a poll. This is a Washington Post poll in November of 2004. Fifty-nine percent of people in this country believe Karl Rove needs to resign.

Article 1, section 1 of the United States Constitution creates this Chamber right here, the people's House. And we have oversight of everything else that happens in the government, over the executive, over all the agencies, the Cabinet, departments and everything else. This is the people's House.

And as my friend from Florida likes to say, you cannot get appointed to this House. You have to run if I pass out here and I die.

I do not want that either. I am not ready. But if I pass out here and I die, the Governor in Ohio will call a special election and people will run for my seat and have to get elected here. That is the bottom line. This is the people's House. We directly represent the people in our district. And we have the ability in this Chamber to oversee every other aspect of the government.

But our Republican friends refuse to investigate the CIA leak. They refuse to have an independent or create an independent investigation. This has become so political here that we cannot get straight answers on how to fix the way our government runs.

One of the things, among others, what we would try to do, as we try to reconcile the budget, is not give $70 billion in tax cuts that go primarily to the people who make more than half a million dollars a year.

The whole idea of this whole thing was to somehow find in the budget $50 billion to pay for Katrina, and instead, they found the $50 billion to pay for Katrina supposedly, but they also gave $70 billion in tax cuts, which means their deficit, this is what is great about Washington, their deficit reduction package actually increases the deficit by $20 billion because they just cannot resist giving people who make more than $500,000 i.e., their campaign contributors, a tax cut.

Sure.

Supposed to be. The words at the top are supposed to identify what is happening.

You would think a deficit reduction bill would reduce the deficit.

Let us be a little more specific. Maybe the 30 Something Working Group will offer an amendment to the House rules to say that a bill specifically called the Deficit Reduction Act.

Yeah.

Let us try.

They call it the bootleg: fake left, go around the other side.

Can I say something. What we are trying to do here is move away from a country that says if you are born in the right neighborhood, with the right family, you are going to be fine, and if you are not born in the right neighborhood to the right family, the heck with you. That is what this is all about. I mean, if we have got to boil this down 30-Something-style and lay it out there, that is what it is. You cannot cut Medicaid. You cannot cut food stamps, foster care, child support enforcement, raise the fees on student loans.

What are we doing? This does not make any sense. We are a bit younger, on average, than most Members here, but this makes no sense. I do not know any other way to say it than this is crazy, what we are doing here. This makes no sense, at the same time we are giving half a million people, making half a million more here, huge tax cuts.

It is late, and I appreciate my colleague correcting me.

It is what we are fighting against.

Those are new people. Those are not people who were probably on food stamps.

And there are a lot of other people in the country because the poverty rate has gone so high.

We are not kidding here either. If you are watching at home, you might think these guys are out there telling a story.

This is real stuff. It is why we are up at 11:35 at night talking about it.

The American people did not give the Republican Party the power that they have to use it to suppress good ideas or to suppress other Americans' voices.

So the question may be, as we are talking about the closed rule and all the parliamentary procedures used here to shut down Democrats, many people would be saying, Well, what would you offer?

Well, a couple of things I can think of off the top of my head, one of the amendments we would offer on this floor is to strip the $16 billion that we are giving right now to the oil companies in corporate welfare. We would take that back. The Democrats, Mr. Speaker, would offer an amendment to repeal the $16 billion.

And the Democrats would offer an amendment on this floor tomorrow during the budget debate to pull back the prescription drug Medicare Part D and put in the bill a provision to allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down the drug prices.

We would also put in there that we would allow reimportation to drive the costs down. We would save the American taxpayer, with just those two or three amendments tomorrow, billions and billions and billions of dollars. And probably, over the course of the next few years, we would be able to pay for Katrina and be able to invest in our students through the Pell Grant and the student loan, and be able to make sure that every child has adequate health care.

That is what we would offer. So if you are sitting at home paying attention to this debate, those are a couple of the basic things the Democrats would do.

I yield to my colleague.

We have the new ideas to take the country in a new direction and get away from this corruption and the cronyism of hiring friends to run major organizations like FEMA.

How rotten is the system, how corrupt is a system that the Republican majority will not go to the wealthiest people, will not go to the oil companies or the pharmaceutical companies to pay for Hurricane Katrina or invest in the student aid and those kinds of things because they need the money for their campaign contributions. That is a corrupt system. That is what we want to change.

We want to move away from that and allow this body to once again become the independent body that it should be, that the Founding Fathers wrote up Article I, Section 1 in the Constitution providing the oversight for the executive branch, like the Republican majority has shown they know how to do.

They did not do it for a great reason. They did it to get into the personal life of President Clinton.

But now we have public violations, violations of the public trust through CIA leaks, leaks of CIA prisons, and all of this nonsense that has been going on. Let us restore some integrity back to this place and get rid of the three C's: corruption, cronyism, and the lack of competence.

People are going to make career decisions tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, the Web site is [email protected]. Send an e-mail recommendation to the Members of this body tomorrow. And bring your PJ pants. We may be here into the wee hours of the morning. We want to apologize in advance to the veterans organizations we are supposed to be at Friday morning for speaking engagements because we may be here voting on this budget.