Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, we've heard a lot about fairness, which the Democrats have defined to mean taxing businesses to finance a variety of welfare programs.

The problem is businesses do not pay business taxes. Business taxes can only be paid by consumers through higher prices; by employees through lower wages; and by investors--mainly pension funds--through lower earnings. There is no other way to pay a business tax.

So the net effect of pursuing their definition of ``fairness'' is to push more consumers into debt, push more employees into unemployment, and push more retirees into poverty, which in turn requires more and more government welfare spending until their financial house of cards collapses. That's the economic spiral their policies are producing in our time.

The House budget, which this act advances, breaks that cycle and restores policies that throughout our history have lifted our Nation from times of want and despair to eras of prosperity and abundance.

I thank the gentleman for yielding to a dissenting point of view.

Mr. Speaker, this program dragoons American taxpayers into subsidizing loans to foreign companies, making it cheaper for them to buy products from politically favored companies, which in turn use those products to compete against less-favored American companies. Past beneficiaries include such upstanding enterprises as Solyndra and Enron.

Since 2007, almost half of its money goes to support that plucky little start-up called Boeing. Air India got $5 billion to purchase Boeing aircraft, allowing them to undercut American carriers like Delta with their own tax money.

We're told we need this to compete with other nations that do the same thing. Well, Mr. Speaker, if other nations want to impoverish themselves in this manner, we don't need to imitate them.

We're told this doesn't cost the taxpayers money, and the last few years this turned to profit. Well, that's what they told us about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--until they blew up in our face.

Legitimate companies have plenty of access to private capital. They don't need these subsidies. The illegitimate ones shouldn't be propped up with the hard-earned dollars of working taxpaying Americans.

Madam Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chairman, this amendment cuts more than a quarter-billion dollars in unauthorized appropriations from the International Trade Administration.

What does the International Trade Administration do? Well, it's got some legitimate functions in forcing trade agreements and treaties, and this amendment leaves those functions untouched. But ITA also--and this is from their own material--``provides counseling to American companies in order to develop the most profitable and sustainable plans for pricing, export, and the full range of public and private trade promotion assistance, as well as market intelligence, and industry and market-specific research.''

That's all well and good, Madam Chairman, but isn't that what businesses and trade associations and the chambers of commerce are supposed to do with their own money? Why should taxpayers be subsidizing the profits of individual businesses? If a specific business or industry is the beneficiary of these services, shouldn't they be the sole financiers of those services, either individually or collectively through trade associations?

It's true this program has been around for generations, but Franklin Roosevelt--who was hardly a champion of smaller government--had the right idea when he slashed its budget back in 1932 and closed 31 of its offices. The problem is that reform didn't take. Today the ITA has some 240 offices.

The ITA's authorization lapsed way back in 1996. That's 16 years ago. It's not been reviewed or authorized by Congress since then, but we still keep shoveling money out the door at them. Although it hasn't been reviewed by Congress in all of these years, it has been thoroughly weighed by the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and most recently the President's fiscal commission, and they have all found it sadly wanting.

The Simpson-Bowles report summed it up quite nicely when they said:

Services provided by ITA's U.S. commercial services and

other divisions directly providing assistance to U.S.

companies should be financed by the beneficiaries of this

assistance. While the agency charges fees for those services,

its fees do not cover the costs of all of its activities.

Additionally, it is argued that the benefits of trade-

promotion activities are passed on to foreigners in the form

of decreased export costs.

Simpson-Bowles goes on to say:

According to a study by the Office of Management and

Budget, businesses can receive similar services from State,

local, and private sector entities. The CBO option to

eliminate ITA's promotion activities or charge the program's

beneficiaries saves $267 million in 2010 and $1.6 billion

through 2014.

Madam Chairman, if the CBO, the OMB, and the President's fiscal commission agree this is wasteful, and Congress hasn't bothered to reauthorize it since it expired 16 years ago, why do we continue spending money that we don't have duplicating services that the beneficiaries of those services either don't need or are quite capable of funding on their own? If the companies that we are told directly benefit from all of these essential services are not willing to fund them, maybe that's just nature's way of telling us that we shouldn't be fleecing our constituents' earnings to pay for them either. Why would we tap American taxpayers to subsidize the export activities of foreigners, as Simpson-Bowles notes?

Madam Chairman, the rules of the House were specifically written to prevent this type of unauthorized expenditure. And they provide for a point of order to be raised if it is included in an appropriations bill, which is what we're talking about right now. But alas, that rule is routinely waived when these measures are brought to the floor, making this amendment the only possible way of ferreting out this kind of duplicative program and outright waste.

This is a prime example of corporate welfare. We ought to be done with it.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Madam Chairman, I rise in strong support of the amendment offered by the gentleman from Kansas.

The new House Republican majority was elected last year with the specific charge to bring wasteful spending under control. We can't blame the Senate or the President if there is waste in the budget anymore. Money doesn't get spent by this government unless the House says it gets spent. In a very real constitutional sense, the buck starts here.

Now, here we have an appropriations bill originating in this House that still has outrageously wasteful and indefensible programs in it, and the flagship of that waste is the $182 million in unauthorized-- there's that word again--in unauthorized spending for the Economic Development Administration. This is solely and simply a slush fund that gives away money for the most dubious of local projects. Local projects that benefit local communities should be funded locally. We shouldn't be robbing St. Petersburg to pay St. Paul. We have to ask ourselves, if these projects are so important to local communities, why are those local communities unwilling to pay for them?

If the communities that directly benefit from these projects are unwilling to pay for them, why are we spending Federal money that we don't have?

To add insult to insanity, this particular Agency is sitting right now on $845 million. Why on Earth would we provide it with another $180 million? We ought to abolish this Agency and recover the unspent funds, not throw good money after bad.

Tim Carney hit it on the head in The Washington Examiner last October when he wrote this:

Nearly every Republican voted against President Obama's

stimulus in 2009, arguing that the deficit was too high, that

government shouldn't be in the game of picking winners and

losers, and that Washington doesn't create jobs. But the EDA

adds to the deficit, picks winners and losers, and purports

to create jobs. If Republicans vote to continue the EDA, they

flaunt their hypocrisy to critics.

I have to agree.

I appreciate that the appropriations bills are making incremental improvements in the status quo, but these are times that demand much, much more than that. When Members vote for these appropriations bills, they become responsible for the spending in them and for the waste in them. And I, for one, do not intend to explain to my constituents that a ``culinary amphitheater'' was worthy of $2 million of their hard- earned taxes. This spending is simply indefensible. Doling out grants with little, if any, accountability, this ought to be the poster child for waste in government.

I appreciate the fact that the leadership has agreed to an open amendment process, giving us the opportunity to correct this particular oversight on the floor. But the fact of the matter is that the House is ill-equipped to comprehensively address this kind of waste from the floor, and we must do better in both the authorizing and the Appropriations Committees in combing these bills earlier in the process for these kind of unconscionable and indefensible expenditures.

I commend the gentleman from Kansas for offering the amendment. I wholeheartedly support it.

Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I submit remarks made by Ambassador John Bolton at a conference on U.S. Obligations and Policy Options on Iran held at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC on Friday, April 6, 2012.

Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here today

with all of you. It's sad that we're on the first anniversary

of the attack at Camp Ashraf. It's a brutal reminder of the

danger the people at Ashraf and Camp Liberty live in. And a

continuing representation and a failure of American policy.

But I do think that we are coming to potentially decisive

points on a number of fronts. Number one, on the status of

the MEK listed on the list of foreign terrorist organizations

and on the question of the regime and Tehran's nuclear

weapons program. Both absolutely critical in how they're

resolved.

So I just want to take a few minutes here today to talk

about that and specifically to talk a little bit about why

this designation of the MEK as a foreign terrorist

organization has been wrong from the outset, wrong throughout

the duration of its being on the list and wrong for it to

continue.

You know, this is a, as Judge Mukasey and Professor

Dershowitz said, this question of listing organizations is a

statutory question. It's not a question of whether you like

the group, you know, we could go out on double dates with its

members? Would they win an election in their home country? Do

they have customs that are a little bit different from yours?

If those were criteria to be listed on the list of foreign

terrorist organizations, that would be a pretty long list,

but it's not.

And the list, the criteria that Congress has given is very,

very specific and those criteria have not been met.

I know this in part from my own personal knowledge. I think

I first heard of the MEK early during the George W. Bush

administration when we were concerned, among other things,

about the efforts by the regime in Tehran to acquire a

variety of weapons of mass destruction and specifically and

in particular nuclear weapons.

As we looked at what the regime was doing, the progress it

was making, the steps it was taking to conceal its effort, I

read from time to time about information that came from

Iranian exiles in the United States, in Europe disclosing

aspects of the regime's nuclear weapons program. And that was

the first time that I saw the name MEK. I didn't know what it

was. That it was perhaps a profession of ignorance of

history, but that's the fact.

So I was quite interested in the information that was being

released over a period of time. Some of it was information

that the government of the United States already knew about,

but had not disclosed publicly. Some of it was information we

hadn't learned about, but learned about later. Some of it was

just information we didn't know about.

And I can say with considerable force that because of the

importance of understanding the progress that the nuclear

program is making, that all sources of information were

potentially important to us and the accuracy

of the information, even more so. I never saw any information

that the MEK disclosed that was in any material respect

inaccurate as far as we knew. And I thought this was

significant in many respects because within the U.S.

Government there was a disagreement about how to deal with

Iran and how much of the information that we knew about to

make public. How much to share with the International Atomic

Energy Agency. How much to talk about in public. I generally

felt that more public discussion was useful because the

threat of a nuclear weapons program in Iran was a very real

one to me.

So I have to say I lost a lot of battles in the immediate

administration about what to talk about publicly. I was not

unhappy to see someone else making that information public so

that the rest of the world could appreciate the progress the

regime was making towards its long sought objective of

nuclear weapons and how dangerous it was.

What I think was really striking came in the days after

U.S. invasion of Iraq and part of our effort to overthrow

Sadam Hussein's regime. I remember in particular one staff

meeting that Secretary Powell had as the military action was

under way when someone around the table said that the U.S.

military had arrived at someplace called Camp Ashraf and had

secured the location and was providing protection for the

residents. Make sure they didn't suffer from reprisals.

I said to myself, I'm not going to listen anymore just to

what's being said in the newspaper. I want to find out more

about what the MEK is and why this group that seems to know

so much about Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program is

listed as a foreign terrorist organization.

So I did what you would expect. I asked around. I asked

career civil servants and diplomats. I looked into the

records. And I was stunned that the uniform response was that

the MEK had been put on the list of terrorist organizations

in the late 1990s in the hope that it would be a signal to

the regime in Tehran of the bona fides days of the Clinton

administration's desire to open active negotiations with the

government of Iran. That that was the reason. Over and over

again that was the reason.

So I asked for information about the MEK. And there were

facts back in the late '70s and early '80s that were pretty

unappetizing, but there was no having to deal with the regime

of the Shah and its overthrow.

But nothing in nearly 20 years since then. Nothing that I

saw during my time at the State Department that would justify

listing the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization.

Then we came to find in late 2008 that Secretary Rice was

given the opportunity whether to decide to de-list the MEK

and she chose not to because she hoped that that would give

the incoming Obama administration flexibility to deal with

the government of Iran. It would be an occasion of continued

interest in trying to deal with the regime.

Now, both of these decisions were political decisions. You

can agree with them or disagree with them. I disagree with

them. But they were political. They were not based on facts.

They were not based on the criteria in the statute.

I think that does a disservice to the whole concept of

having a list of foreign terrorist organizations. If you

don't allow the facts to fall where they will, then the list

itself is discredited.

I think this problem of politicization isn't limited to the

FTO list. I felt one of the Bush Administration's worst

mistakes was taking the government of North Korea off the

list of state sponsors of terrorism. A government that to

this day has never provided satisfaction to the government of

Japan and South Korea for kidnapping their innocent civilians

and holding them in North Korea. And why was North Korea

taken off the list of state sponsored terrorism? In hopes of

negotiating with North Korea about its nuclear weapons

program. You see a pattern here?

This is the State Department making decisions not intended

by Congress but for political and diplomatic purposes.

Now, it's interesting in all of these cases the political

and diplomatic purpose has not been achieved. You would think

that would teach people something. But I'm not that much of

an optimist.

But even worse, we had seen within the past weeks Secretary

Clinton say that the conduct of the MEK in transferring

residents from Ashraf to Camp Liberty would be a factor in

deciding whether the MEK would stay on the list of foreign

terrorist organizations.

Now we have all heard she's very busy, not busy enough,

though, not busy enough that she couldn't make that point.

Another fundamentally political point.

So if the original designation was bad and it was, and if

the decision in 2008 to continue the listing was worse, this

is worst of all. This isn't just political, this is using a

humanitarian catastrophe to attempt to achieve political

objectives.

Governor Rendell just asked what I think is a very

pertinent question and providing some telling insights into

why there is no good answer. Why does the State Department

keep doing this? What is the rationale here?

I think the rationale emerges from what we know about the

State Department's history dealing with this regime. They are

convinced to this day that you can negotiate with this

authoritarian regime.

I believe you cannot. But I believe what's going on here is

that the State Department is fearful that if it does what

it's supposed to do that the government in Tehran will cut

off the last chance to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the

nuclear weapons program. Now, I don't think there's any

chance that we're going to get a satisfactory, diplomatic

resolution anyway. But I think what's happening now is that

the State Department knows it doesn't have a shred of

evidence to continue this designation. If they did, and I'll

steal this point from Louis Freeh who made it before, but not

here, if there was information that justified the continuing

listing of the MEK on the foreign terrorist list in

Washington as we know it, it would have leaked out, we'd be

reading about it. And the silence is deafening.

And it's because if the State Department can say to the

regime in Tehran, we didn't take them off the list, that

court made us do it, that they hope the regime will say, oh,

it's okay, now we'll talk to you.

I just find that completely irresponsible. I'm perfectly

content to say that if there are facts to justify a listing

on the FTO list, list the organization. If the organization

is on a list for political purposes, or it's taken off for

political purposes, that's wrong. I don't personally know any

reason why the MEK should be listed and I'll guarantee you

neither does the State Department or it would have presented

the evidence to the court.

So the issue here turns not just on this abuse of our legal

process, not just on the humanitarian tragedy that we see

unfolding in Ashraf, but on our country's ability to deal

effectively with the growing threat of the ayatollahs in

control of the world's most dangerous weapon. And every day

that goes by that we take our eye off that eventuality is a

day that makes the world much less safe.

It is time, if the State Department won't act, then the

court should act. I think it will. And I think hopefully in a

few months we'll be back here having a very different kind of

conversation. Thank you very much.

Mr. Speaker, under the Fourth Amendment, if the government wants to snoop through a person's email, it must first convince a judge that there's probable cause to believe that person has committed a crime, and it must specify the documents it believes are relevant to that charge.

Yesterday, the House passed a measure that makes a mockery of this cherished protection. Under the guise of cybersecurity, it allows the government to pressure and cajole Internet providers to turn over their subscribers' data and for the government to then use that data without the consent or even the knowledge of the individuals affected for a wide variety of vague purposes unrelated to cybersecurity, all without a warrant.

This is a truly Orwellian measure that our Bill of Rights was specifically written to prevent. I hope the House will have second thoughts as it reflects on the ramifications of this act.

Mr. Speaker, the House just passed H.R. 9, purporting to give a temporary tax cut to small businesses. I say ``purporting'' because it doesn't cut spending at the same time, and thus it merely shifts current taxes into the future. Once a dollar has been spent, it has already become a tax, taken either from today or from tomorrow to pay off deficits.

Nor does H.R. 9 do much to promote economic growth because it does little to reward new productivity at the margin. At best, it produces a 1-year sugar high until the bills come due.

Tax cuts without either spending reductions or real economic growth are an illusion. Real tax reform would permanently reduce the marginal tax rate for all businesses and cut government spending concurrently. This would encourage and reward growth, shift investment decisions from politicians to entrepreneurs, and not rob our economy of its future. I hope before the end of this session that we will do so.

Mr. Speaker, a defining aspect of the American tradition is that groups of citizens band together for a wide variety of civic purposes. They recruit volunteers, raise funds, and spend those funds to promote whatever project or cause brings them together.

For more than a century, our tax laws have recognized that such voluntary associations--nonprofits as we call them today--should not be taxed because their proceeds are devoted entirely to improve our communities through education, advocacy, and civic action. Section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code recognizes them today, and civic groups as diverse as MoveOn.org, the League of Conservation Voters, the ACLU, the National Rifle Association, and various taxpayer groups have always been included in this definition.

We don't apply a political test to these civic groups. We recognize the fundamental right of Americans to organize and to pool their resources to promote whatever causes they believe in, left or right. Indeed, whatever their political persuasion, these civic groups perform an absolutely indispensable role in our democracy by raising public awareness, defining issues, educating voters, promoting reforms, holding officials accountable, and petitioning their government to redress grievances. Abolition, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement--all would have been impossible without them.

In order to be recognized as nonprofit groups, these organizations must register with the IRS--a purely ministerial function that in the past has been applied evenly and without regard to their political views. At least until now. It seems that Tea Party groups are today being treated very differently than their counterparts on the political left. For the last 2 years, many have been stonewalled by the IRS when they sought to register as nonprofits. Most recently, they have been barraged with increasingly aggressive and threatening demands vastly outside the legal authority of the IRS. Indeed, the only conceivable purpose of some of these demands is to intimidate and harass.

A Tea Party group in my district is typical of the reports that we are now hearing across this country. This group submitted articles of incorporation as a nonprofit to the State of California, and they received approval within a month. But then they tried to register as a nonprofit with the IRS. Despite repeated and numerous inquiries, the IRS stonewalled this group for a year and a half, at which time it demanded thousands of pages of documentation and gave the group less than 3 weeks to produce it.

The IRS demanded the names of every participant at every meeting held over the last 2 years, transcripts of every speech given at those meetings, what positions they had taken on issues, the names of their volunteers and donors, and copies of communications they had with elected officials, and on and on. Perhaps most chilling of all, the organizer of this particular group soon found herself the object of a personal income tax audit by the IRS.

Mr. Speaker, these are groups of volunteers who pass the hat at meetings to pay for renting the hall. They give of their own time to research issues and pay out of their own pockets for printing flyers. The donations made to them aren't tax deductible, so there is no legitimate purpose in asking for the names of their donors, let alone of their volunteers, unless--and this is the fine point of it--unless the purpose is to harass and intimidate.

Ironically, the same tactics we now see used by the United States against tea parties were once used by the most abusive of the Southern States in the 1950s to intimidate civil rights groups like the NAACP.

No such tactics have been reported by similar civic groups on the political left, so the conclusion is inescapable--that this administration is very clearly, very pointedly, and very deliberately attempting to intimidate, harass, and threaten civic-minded groups with which they disagree, using one of the most feared and powerful agencies of the United States Government to do so.

Mr. Speaker, these facts speak for themselves. They need no embellishment or interpretation. They should alarm every American of goodwill regardless of political philosophy, for if this precedent is allowed to stand, no one's freedom is safe. I bring these facts to the attention of the House today and ask that they be rigorously investigated and, if found accurate, that those officials responsible be exposed, disgraced, dismissed, and debarred from any further position of trust or power within our government.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Chairman, this Nation is on a collision course with a sovereign debt crisis, the magnitude of which we have never experienced. This is not some moonless night on the Atlantic. We are spending full speed ahead toward that iceberg of debt in the full light of day, and we can all see that plainly.

The House budget turns the ship just barely enough to avoid hitting that same hazard which has already wrecked Greece. The RSC budget turns us promptly and safely. It builds on the House Budget Committee's work, but within the budget passed by the House last year as adjusted by the sequester.

I've heard the descriptions--it's draconian, it's radical, it's extreme. It returns us to the spending levels before the Obama-Pelosi spending binge began in 2008. That might sound extreme to my friends across the aisle, but I assure them many families have been working within flat or even diminished family budgets since then and they have every right to expect that their government, over the next 5 years, does what they have already been doing over the past 5--work hard, waste not, and live within your means. If we were to do so, this Nation could see a balanced budget again within 5 years and redeem its rightful place as the respected financial leader of the world.

We know the challenge. We see the American Dream at risk. And we know that we have but a fleeting moment in history to avoid the hardest times our Nation has ever known.

We still have a chance to place our retirement systems on a sound financial footing, arrest the debilitating spiral of debt that threatens the very survival of our Nation, and return our economy to the prosperity it has known when it has enjoyed what Jefferson called a ``wise and frugal government.''

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for his vision and courage. It has truly been an honor to serve on the committee under his leadership.

Mr. Chairman, a year ago, the House passed a budget that would have put our Nation back on the path to fiscal solvency and ultimately paid off the entire national debt. It would have saved Medicare and Medicaid from collapse and put them back on a solid and secure foundation. According to Standard & Poor's, it would have preserved the AAA credit rating of the United States Government. That plan was killed in the Senate, which has not passed a budget in 3 years.

The Senate majority leader complained that it threatened the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, Nevada. An allied group ran a smear campaign depicting Congressman Ryan as a monster willing to throw his grandmother off a cliff. Sadly, that's what passes for reasoned discourse from today's left.

The result is that today our country is another year older and more than $1 trillion deeper in debt. We've lost our AAA credit rating. We've watched our Nation's debt exceed our entire economy, putting us in the same league as the worst-run European governments.

Mr. Chairman, this is not a perfect budget, no budget ever is, but it will save our country from the calamity that is now destroying Greece. That should be reason enough for adopting it with a resounding and, dare I hope, bipartisan vote.

A year ago, a panel of experts from left to right warned us that we were, at best, 5 years from a sovereign debt crisis. I wonder how many more years we've got. How many more chances will we have to set things right before events overtake us and we enter the inexorable downward spiral of bankrupt nations?

Let's not find out the answer to that question. Let us act now to redeem our Nation's finances and restore our Nation's freedom while there is still time. That is our generation's responsibility. That is our generation's destiny.

Mr. Chairman, I claim time in opposition.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 5 minutes.

I want to congratulate the Progressive Caucus on producing a budget that actually addresses our crushing deficit, unlike the President's budget. Their budget produces deficit numbers that are right in line with the House Budget Committee's path to prosperity.

The difference between the two is that the Republican plan reduces the deficit by reorganizing our government services in a much more efficient and streamlined structure, saving trillions of dollars, while the Progressive Democrats would radically increase spending, supported by $6.8 trillion in new taxes over the next decade.

What does that mean in real numbers, $6.8 trillion? It comes to about $22,000 of taxes for every, man, woman, and child in America. That's about $88,000 for a family of four. Don't worry, we're told, we're not taxing working class families, just rich people and corporations.

Let's get a few things straight here. First, it turns out that many of the rich people aren't rich, and they aren't even people. They are small businesses filing under Subchapter S, the very same small businesses that we're depending upon to create two-thirds of the new jobs that Americans desperately need. To whack small businesses with crushing new financial burdens and then expect them to create more jobs is simply absurd.

Second, remember that ultimately businesses do not pay business taxes. Business taxes can only be paid in one of three ways: They're paid by consumers through higher prices; they're paid by employees through lower wages or no wages at all as jobs disappear; or they are paid by investors, mainly pension plans, through lower earnings. That's the only three ways they can possibly be paid.

Let's talk about fairness. In 2008, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, folks earning about $344,000 per year, earned about 17 percent of all income and paid 37 percent of all income taxes. As a class, they are paying their fair share, but the Progressives are right that some individuals within this class pay less than their fair share because of their disproportionate access to tax loopholes. The Progressives rightly want to get rid of some of these loopholes, and that's a good thing. But at the same time, they want to increase loopholes for others. They don't mind the government picking winners among their friends; they just want to do the picking.

The Republican plan calls for the ultimate elimination of these loopholes while lowering overall tax rates so that no American pays more than a third of their earnings to the government. That is fairness.

The underlying problem that's destroying our Nation's finances can be summed up with three simple numbers: 35, 33, and 76.

Between 2002 and 2012, population and inflation combined grew 35 percent. Despite the recession and the recent tax cuts, Federal revenues have grown 33 percent in the same period. Very close.

The third number is what is killing our country. Seventy-six percent is the increase in spending, twice the rate of our revenues, twice the rate of inflation and population growth. By the way, has anybody seen a 76 percent increase in the quality of our roads or our institutions or our law enforcement or our border security? We paid for it, but we're not getting it. That's what's out of control about this administration.

No nation has ever taxed and spent its way to prosperity, but many nations have taxed and spent their way to economic ruin and bankruptcy.

When we're told this is the worst recession since the Depression, I remember a time much more recently when we had not only double-digit unemployment, but double-digit inflation, mile-long lines around gas stations, interest rates at 21\1/2\ percent. That was the end of the Carter administration.

Maybe we don't remember those days as vividly. It's because they didn't last very long. We elected Ronald Reagan, whose policies were very different than the current administration. He cut spending as a percentage of GDP. He cut the top marginal income tax rate from 70 percent all the way down to 28 percent. He reduced the regulatory burdens crushing the economy, and he produced one of the most prolonged periods of economic expansion in our Nation's history. This isn't a partisan policy. Warren Harding, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and most recently Bill Clinton all followed similar policies with similar results.

Phil Graham recently estimated that if the economy today had tracked with the Reagan economy, 17 million more Americans would be working right now and income would be $5,700 higher per person.

We need to choose wisely, Mr. Chairman, here and at the polls in November.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the Member from Indiana, a member of the Budget Committee, Mr. Young.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Flores).

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to my friend and colleague from Oklahoma (Mr. Lankford).

Mr. Chairman, we have no more speakers. I will reserve my time until the gentleman has concluded.

Mr. Chairman, I think the reason these times are so impassioned is because we've arrived at a moment when two very different visions of society are competing for our Nation's future, and they're very much reflected in the budgets put forward by the two parties in this House.

America's prosperity and greatness spring from uniquely American principles of individual freedom, personal responsibility, and constitutionally limited government. America's Founders created a voluntary society where people are free to make their own choices, enjoy the fruits of their own labors, take responsibility for their own decisions, and lead their own lives with a minimum of government interference and intrusion.

When someone needs help, we freely give that help, but we ask in return that they make the effort to support themselves to the extent that they can. Our government views no one person or group as more or less worthy than any other.

We are Americans. We'll be judged on our own merits, and we'll make on own choices, including what kind of car we'll drive, what kind of toilets we'll have in our homes, how we'll raise our children, what kind of light bulbs we prefer, what we'll have for dinner tonight.

Today, a very different vision competes for our future, that of a compulsory society, where our individual rights are subordinated to the mandates of government bureaucrats, where innocent taxpayers are forced to bail out the bad decisions of others, and where consumers are compelled to purchase the products or underwrite the losses of politically favored companies.

Under this vision, the purpose of government is not to protect individual freedom, but to improve society, however those in power decide it should be improved, to take from those it declares are undeserving to give to those it declares are deserving or, to put it more succinctly, to take from each according to his abilities and to give to each according to his needs. That's what this is all about.

Not more than 100 steps from where we debate right now, Thomas Jefferson reviewed the bountiful resources of the Nation and asked:

With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us

a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more,

fellow-citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall

restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them

otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and

improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the

bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

This is the Path to Prosperity put forth by the House Budget Committee. And let us be clear: the various Democratic plans, including the one before us now, fundamentally reject these principles and replace them with values alien and antithetical to those that built our Nation.

That is the question that our generation must decide in all of its forms, including the question put to us today by this substitute amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I move that the Committee do now rise.

The House is about to consider a budget in a dangerous hour in the life of our country. Last year, we barreled past several urgent warning signals--the loss of our Nation's AAA credit rating; the size of the national debt surpassing our entire economy; and a record third straight year of trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits. I believe this is one of the last opportunities to avert a financial crisis unprecedented in our Nation's experience and on a magnitude far greater than that which is now destroying Greece.

The blueprint passed by the House Budget Committee last week is a disappointment to those who believe that the budget can and should be balanced much sooner, and I certainly don't entirely disassociate myself from those sentiments. But the immediate issue before us, as Lincoln put it, ``is not `can any of us imagine better?' but, `can we all do better?' ''

The approaching financial crisis demands first and foremost that we turn this country away from the fiscal precipice and place it back on a course to solvency. This budget does so. Indeed, it improves upon last year's House budget that died in the Senate, which, according to Standard & Poor's, would have preserved the AAA credit rating of the United States Government. This budget, I believe, will restore it.

It is, of course, a long road back, balancing by the late 2030s and ultimately paying off the entire debt by the mid 2050s. But even relying on the static scoring of the CBO which presents a worst-case scenario, it still means that my children, who are now in college, will be able to retire into a prosperous and entirely debt-free America.

True, there's a great deal in it for conservatives not to like, but that is not the issue. The issue is will this Congress and, ultimately, this government change its fiscal trajectory enough to avert the sovereign debt crisis that fiscal experts across the spectrum warn us is just a few years dead ahead.

This is not some moonless night on the Atlantic. We can see this danger right ahead of us, and we can see that it is big enough to sink this great ship of state. We have precious little time remaining to avert it. This budget will turn us just enough to avoid that calamity-- and I fear we won't have many more opportunities to do so.

The alternative is unthinkable. The President's budget would subject our Nation to one of the biggest tax increases in its history, striking especially hard at the small businesses that we're depending upon to create two-thirds of the new jobs that Americans desperately need. And even so, by its own numbers, it never balances and, thus, courts the fiscal collapse of our Nation.

Hemmingway asked, ``How do you go bankrupt?''

``Two ways,'' he said. ``Gradually, then suddenly.''

For the last decade, this Nation has been going bankrupt gradually. History warns us that if we don't change course very soon, we will cease going bankrupt gradually and start going bankrupt quite suddenly. It may happen through a chain reaction set off by a seemingly minor international incident. It may happen one day when a routine bond auction sours. Interest rates will start rising rapidly. Financial panics will begin. The government will have to respond by increasingly frantic efforts to maintain a stream of capital, either through massive policy dislocations or catastrophic inflation.

The approach of great cataclysms that are so obvious to historians in retrospect are often unheeded by contemporaries at the time. Just 30 days before the outbreak of World War II, Neville Chamberlain recessed Parliament to go on extended holiday. Let that not be how history remembers this Congress. This budget is not perfect, but it is adequate to spare our country from the convulsions of Greece.

I wholeheartedly support this budget for that reason, and I expect that we'll have the overwhelming support of this House. I can only hope that the Senate this time will put aside its own differences and heed Lincoln's plea that:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy

present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we

must rise--with the occasion. We must disenthrall ourselves,

and then we will save our country.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, this rule brings to the floor one of the most simple and sensible bills on energy development that we have yet heard. It is H.R. 2842, offered by the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tipton).

What it promises is this: At precisely no cost to taxpayers, freeing up absolutely clean electricity on a scale so vast that it would take several hydroelectric dams to duplicate, simply by relaxing the regulatory stranglehold, simply by getting government bureaucrats out of the way, this bill has the potential of adding thousands of megawatts of absolutely clean and renewable electricity to the Nation's energy supply, reducing utility bills, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and, to answer the gentlelady from New York, adding thousands of permanent high-paying jobs to the Nation's economy. All that is necessary for this to happen is for government bureaucrats to get out of the way and allow people to place small hydroelectric generators in thousands of miles of existing pipelines, canals, and aqueducts.

This doesn't involve new construction. The facilities are already there. It doesn't involve any adverse impact to the environment. These are water pipes and canals in which there are no fish of any kind. And yet this administration forces water users and developers to go through a lengthy, costly, and pointless environmental review process that literally doubles the cost of these projects and makes them cost prohibitive.

The reason there are so few applications is because the requirements of this absurd law simply make these projects cost prohibitive, and it simply doesn't make sense to move forward with them. This bill simply says this: You don't need to go through that nonsense anymore.

Now, why isn't this bill being taken up on suspension? It would be one of the all-time no-brainers. It passed the Natural Resources Committee on a bipartisan vote. The reason that this debate is required is because this commonsense legislation is vigorously opposed by the environmental left; that is the measure of extremism from which this movement now suffers. Perhaps the best way to alert the American people to this extremism is through debate that this rule makes possible.

A generation ago, in the 1960s, electricity was so cheap that some communities didn't even bother with electricity meters, and there's a reason for

that. In those days, we were building hydroelectric dams that not only protected us from floods and droughts, but that delivered electricity for as little as 3 cents per kilowatt hour. At that price, an average household's electricity bill would come to about $30 a month. That dream seems surreal today.

Today, government regulations are literally threatening the ability of this Nation to generate sufficient electricity to keep people's air conditioning and refrigerators running in the summer, just as similar policies prevent Americans from prospering from our vast petroleum reserves and nuclear power potential.

It's no coincidence that the States with the most stringent regulations also have the highest electricity prices and the sickest economies. People of my State of California, the land of vast unrealized hydroelectric potential and a pioneer in nuclear power, now use less electricity per capita than any other State in the Union, and yet we pay among the highest electricity prices in the country. We also suffer from one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, despite ceaseless empty promises of green jobs.

Now along comes this bill by Mr. Tipton of Colorado that does everything the environmental left claims it likes: It produces absolutely clean and renewable electricity in vast quantities at precisely no cost to taxpayers. It requires no new construction. All that's necessary to achieve this is to put small generators in existing pipelines and canals that have already passed environmental review and pose no conceivable environmental impact. Yet, instead of embracing this measure, these radical elements instead throw a conniption fit.

Well, let them do that in public. Let the American people see this debate. Let them see for themselves the nihilistic ideology behind this movement and how it is practiced by those in this Congress who share and support it, and then let the American people judge. I think the debate over this bill will offer our fellow citizens a real insight into this movement, and I support the resolution that makes this debate possible.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I would say to the gentleman from Massachusetts that nothing in this measure has anything at all to do with oil production. Quite the contrary, this bill reduces our reliance on fossil fuels by bringing hundreds of thousands of megawatts of new, clean hydroelectricity to the grid.

I don't understand the objection to this bill. This measure by Mr. Tipton does everything the environmental left says that it likes: At precisely no cost to taxpayers, it produces absolutely clean and renewable electricity in vast quantities, on projects that have already undergone environmental review, simply by installing small generators in existing pipelines and canals where there are no fish or no flora or no fowl of any kind.

This is the alpha and omega of Mr. Tipton's bill. Authorize these simple projects on existing Bureau of Reclamation facilities. That's it.

There are untold thousands of miles of pipelines and canals and aqueducts attached to these facilities that convey water by simple gravity. There is water in these existing facilities that is utterly devoid of any life whatsoever, and there is no conceivable environmental impact whatsoever. These existing pipelines, if equipped with simple hydroelectric generators, could generate electricity that would take several major multibillion-dollar hydroelectric dams across the West to produce.

In fact, our committee took testimony that, in Colorado alone, the hydroelectric facilities' small generators that would be encouraged by this bill could produce as much power as is currently produced by the entire Glen Canyon Dam. Now, multiply that throughout the United States, and you begin to realize what a huge impact this could have on new, clean, affordable energy for America.

Those hydroelectric generators are not going into these pipelines right now for one simple and utterly absurd reason: government regulations make it economically impossible to do so. Our subcommittee took testimony from farmers in water districts who were trying to install these generators; but instead of doing everything it can to assist them, this administration smothers them with endless regulatory delays, demands for wildly expensive environmental studies and exorbitant permitting fees.

According to testimony before the committee that the gentleman from Colorado cited, the net effect of these environmental regulations can more than double the cost of these projects, simply pricing them out of reach. In one case, a witness told us that a $20,000 small generator project would have required $50,000 in permitting costs, and so it doesn't move forward.

Congressman Tipton's bill, instead, welcomes these small hydroelectric generators by authorizing their placement in existing Bureau of Reclamation conduits. It invites existing operators and users to invest in these generators at no public cost. It establishes an office within the Bureau of Reclamation with the responsibility to assist projects, and it exempts them from paying for another costly, time-consuming, and pointless NEPA study when there is no conceivable environmental impact involved. These facilities already underwent the environmental process when they were built, when they were upgraded, or when their repayment contracts were renewed. It is simply a waste of time and money to put them through yet another review before these small generators can be installed.

I mean, think about the implications just to farming alone. Some irrigation districts are forced to use diesel generators to pump water to the fields. Put hydroelectric generators in existing canals and pipelines, and they become virtually self-sustaining while reducing their reliance on other sources of electricity that produce air emissions.

In addition, sales of canal-based electricity could generate local revenue for irrigators, which would help upgrade existing facilities and infrastructure, create jobs and relieve exhausted Federal taxpayers of these costs. The construction of these generators would mean new high-paying jobs for Americans.

It is truly mystifying that a nation plagued by prolonged economic stagnation, chronic unemployment, and increasingly scarce and expensive electricity would adopt a willful and deliberate policy obstructing the construction of these inexpensive and innocuous generators in already- existing facilities.

Mr. Chairman, there are fewer Americans working today than on the day that Barack Obama took office more than 3 long years ago. During that period, he has taken well over a trillion dollars from the earnings of hardworking American families to funnel to well-connected companies, claiming to create jobs. In the case of Solyndra, it penciled out to $450,000 per job, jobs that disappeared as soon as the government money ran out.

I thank the gentleman.

Yet here, with this measure, at no cost to these hardworking families, at no cost to the environment, simply by getting absurdly and utterly duplicative government regulations out of the way, we could add tens of thousands of megawatts of clean and cheap electricity to our domestic energy supply, produce permanent jobs, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and lower the utility bills of American families.

Our Nation desperately needs clean, affordable, and abundant electricity; and it desperately needs permanent jobs. To get them, it most of all needs common sense restored to its government. The progress the American people have made in doing that, as well as the unfinished business remaining before them, will be very precisely measured by the roll call on this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment, as the gentlelady has pointed out, strikes the NEPA exemption for small hydroelectric projects. Perhaps she hasn't been listening to the debate for the last hour. The NEPA exemption is the entire point of the bill.

As our subcommittee heard earlier this year, it's precisely this duplicative, costly, time-consuming, and entirely unnecessary process that has more than doubled the cost to small hydro projects which simply makes them cost-prohibitive. They don't apply for permits because they know they don't pencil out once all of the studies are factored into their costs. The Bureau of Reclamation doesn't deny permits; it simply demands such costly environmental studies as to make these projects cost-prohibitive. The bill authorizes these projects so they don't have to go through the costly, time-consuming, and pointless environmental studies.

The gentlelady, several times, mentioned the fact that the Bureau of Reclamation was moving ahead with three permits in Colorado. So what's the problem? Well, let's look at those three permits. One of these wasn't conduit hydropower, one was specifically approved by Congress in the 1980s, and the third took a full year to get the permitting done on an existing canal outlet. Now, if that's what the gentlelady describes as success, I think she has just proven our point.

Let me ask her this: What is the point of requiring expensive and time-consuming environmental reviews when all you're doing is putting a small generator in an existing Bureau of Reclamation pipe that has already undergone extensive environmental reviews?

FERC already provides for the categorical exemption on non-Federal projects. The Bureau's own NEPA manual, updated a decade ago, clearly allows categorical exemptions for--and this is from their manual-- ``minor construction activities associated with authorized projects which merely augment or supplement or are enclosed within existing facilities.'' These small hydro generators precisely meet this requirement. The problem is the agency ignores its own guidelines. That is precisely why this bill is necessary.

Mr. Chairman, either placing generators in pipelines is environmentally damaging or it's not, and anybody with a lick of sense already knows the answer to that question, and I would expect them to be supporting the bill of the gentleman from Colorado.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim time in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment would give to the Secretary of the Interior the ability literally to unilaterally veto this measure if he finds it would result in a loss of jobs.

Now, let's be clear of what we're talking about here. This is the same Secretary of the Interior who came to the Natural Resources Committee in 2009 when Federal water diversions in California's Central Valley were throwing thousands and thousands of farm workers into unemployment. Before the committee, he admitted that he had the authority to stop the diversions and stop throwing these thousands of hardworking families into poverty, but he chose not to do so because he said it would be like admitting failure.

This is the same administration that blissfully threw thousands of gulf war workers into unemployment by declaring a de facto moratorium on oil production in the gulf. This is the same administration that's blocking energy development in the Arctic tundra. This is the same administration that's torpedoed the Keystone pipeline and the thousands of jobs it would have created. And now the gentleman from Minnesota would give this same official and this same administration the power to shut down small hydroelectric facilities that could add thousands of megawatts of additional electricity to our energy supplies.

I would assure the gentleman that the reason for this bill is because we fully expect it to produce a quantum leap in demand for small generators; and somebody's going to have to build them, and somebody's going to have to install them. That means more jobs.

Now, if the gentleman is worried about jobs being lost in the regulatory bureaucracy because they won't have as many businesses to harass, I can assure him they have demonstrated over the years a tremendous creativity in finding new businesses to harass and new reasons to increase their budgets.

But I say again, I don't believe it would be a good idea to put in the hands of this Secretary and this administration yet another tool to obstruct energy and job development. Now, high electricity prices might not be a problem in Minnesota, but I can assure the gentleman they are a serious problem in California; and that's why his amendment is so dangerous.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Mountain Quarries Railroad Bridge near Auburn, California.

The bridge opened for business in 1912 as the longest concrete-arch bridge of its time. Its purpose was to deliver mine material across the American River Canyon to and from the mountain quarries outside of Auburn via a privately-built railroad. For three decades trains rolled over the bridge, allowing the development of the vast quartz deposits in the area and employing thousands over the years and providing untold wealth to the community.

After the train tracks were removed for scrap metal to aid in the production of World War II materiel, the bridge continued to serve as a public crossing connecting El Dorado and Placer counties. The soundness of the bridge's design and construction allowed it to withstand multiple floods in the canyon that brought down no less than four other bridges along the American River. The Mountain Quarries Bridge was even pressed into service to replace the Highway 49 Bridge, which was destroyed when Hell Hole Dam broke in 1964, until a replacement bridge could be built.

But the Mountain Quarries Bridge has done more than serve the simple commercial purpose of transport across the river. Since 1955, the bridge has been a defining stretch in countless endurance rides and foot races. In the famed Western States Endurance Run, Mountain Quarries Bridge serves as the final landmark of the course and the transition out of the California wilderness into Auburn and the finish line. For the many adventurers, riders and runners who have used the bridge on hikes and races over the years, it serves as a monument to the trials endured in their journeys and the satisfaction and joy of their accomplishments.

Standing a few miles from the confluence of the North and Middle Forks, the Mountain Quarries Railroad Bridge is a testament to bygone times when the beneficial use of our public resources was both frequent and celebrated. Having served the many commercial and recreational purposes of the area for a century, the Mountain Quarries Railroad Bridge is a fine model for the responsible utilization of the public lands for the public's use.

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to rise today and join the communities of El Dorado and Placer counties as they celebrate this auspicious occasion.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, in 2009 and again in 2010, hundreds of billions of gallons of contracted water were expropriated from California farms and instead dumped into the Pacific Ocean in the name of the delta smelt.

This tragic policy fallowed hundreds of thousands of acres of some of the most fertile and productive farmland in America. It threw thousands of hardworking families into unemployment. It devastated communities throughout the region, and it created the spectacle of unemployed farm workers standing in food lines to receive carrots imported from China in a region that, just a short time before, had produced much of American-grown fruits and vegetables; and it contributed to rising grocery prices that families felt far beyond the congressionally created dust bowl of California's Central Valley.

In the last Congress, the then-minority Republicans begged and pleaded for hearings to address this catastrophe. The majority turned a deaf ear.

Last year, we returned as the new House majority to take testimony on what could be done to correct this disaster. The result of those hearings is the bill by Mr. Nunes that this rule brings to the floor.

This bill restores the water allocations established under the historic Bay-Delta Accord in 1994. When that agreement, commanding broad bipartisan support, was signed, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt assured all parties:

A deal is a deal. And if it turns out that there is a need

for additional water, it will come at the expense of the

Federal Government.

The water diversions shattered that promise. This bill redeems it.

The Federal Central Valley Project is part of a coordinated operating agreement with the State Water Project at California's request and consent. The two are inseparable. In order to protect the water rights of every Californian, this bill brings the full force of Federal law to protect those rights so that there is no ambiguity. This protection has earned this provision the support of the Northern California Water Association, representing the water districts that serve the farms and communities and families throughout the areas of origin in California.

My opponents just said this preempts State water rights. It doesn't preempt State water rights. It specifically invokes and protects State water rights against infringement by any bureaucracy--local, State, or Federal--a legitimate constitutional function of the Federal Government established under the 14th Amendment and made essential by the terms of the State-approved joint operating agreement of these intertwined water systems.

The bill also restores common sense and practicality to protections for endangered native species like salmon and the delta smelt. One of the greatest threats to these endangered native species is nonnative invasive predators like the striped bass. Indeed, it is common to find striped bass in the Sacramento Delta gorged with endangered salmon smolts and delta smelt. This bill allows open season on these predators, and it encourages the use of fish hatcheries to assure the perpetuation of thriving native populations of salmon and smelt.

It replaces the cost-prohibitive provisions of the San Joaquin River Settlement Act, which contemplates spending an estimated $1 billion to achieve the stated goal of establishing a population of 500 salmon below the Friant Dam. That comes to $2 million per individual fish. This bill replaces the absurd mandate of a year-round cold water fishery on the hot valley floor with a warm water fishery that actually acts in concert with the habitat. It removes disincentives in current law that discourage groundwater banking in wet years. It allows for the recycling of environmental flows by communities once they've achieved their environmental purpose.

Mr. Speaker, the movement for stronger environmental protections began over legitimate concerns to protect our vital natural resources; but like many movements, as it succeeded in its legitimate ends, it also attracted a self-interested constituency that has driven far past the borders of common sense and into the realms of political extremism and outright plunder.

This bill replaces the cost-prohibitive and unachievable dictates that caused so much human suffering in California with workable, affordable, and realistic measures based on real science and not on what one Federal judge rightly called the ``ideological zealotry'' of rogue bureaucrats.

This debate will determine if we are about to enter a new era when common sense can be restored to our public policy and when a sensible balance can be restored between environmental and human needs. I welcome that debate, and I ask for the adoption of the rule to bring it forth.