Floor Statements

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

Mr. Speaker, on June 1 of 2009, only about a week ago, Private William Long, only 23 years old, was shot and killed as he worked at the Army Navy Career Center, which is a military recruitment center, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Private Quinton I. Ezeagwula, age 18, was also shot in the attack that day. Thankfully, Private Ezeagwula survived; although our latest information is that he remains still in critical condition.

Mr. Speaker, most persons who are listening today are hearing about Private Long's death for the first time. It's likely that most Americans haven't heard of his killing because Private Long's murder forces the issue that the mainstream media does not want to confront or report on, and that is Islamic terrorism within and coming from within the United States.

The man accused of shooting Private Long and Private Ezeagwula was formally known as Carlos Bledsoe. Bledsoe converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. He later traveled to Yemen where he was there studying under an Islamic scholar. Yes, Mr. Speaker, we have millions of law-abiding Muslims in this country. Acts of terror committed by some members of a religion should never be used to condemn all members of that religion. At the same time, however, we cannot be blind to the jihadist ideology of some Muslims of this country who believe that they have a religious duty to murder the innocent.

The mindset of radical Islamic terrorism which today seems to find fertile ground in the soil of jihad claims that the cause of justice is advanced by killing the innocent and by killing those who seek to protect the innocent. This is the fundamental reality. And when the American media and we, as a people, refuse to call evil by its name, it imperils us all and it dishonors all of those, like these two soldiers who have sacrificed and bled to protect the innocent from that evil.

Mr. Speaker, the American soldier does not fight because he hates what's in front of him. He fights because he loves what is behind him. Private Long's so-called crime was his commitment to defending the innocent against those who would cause them and all of us harm. That commitment is the price required oftentimes to maintain our freedom. That commitment was carried deeply in the heart of Private William Long. He displayed it bravely by wearing the uniform of the United States armed services and dying in it for all of us. That commitment will forever be the legacy of his life on this Earth.

Mr. Speaker, today there are approximately 1.2 million Reserve component members of the Armed Forces protecting America; more than 8,000 Army and Army Reserve recruiters; and more than 7,000 Navy recruiters serving at more than 1,500 military recruiting stations and centers in the United States, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Europe. This attack could have ended the lives of any one of those noble men and women. Each of them risks his or her life every single day to preserve America's freedom and to defend the right of every American to live free, to be free, and pursue their dreams.

So today, Mr. Speaker, I've introduced House Resolution 515 to offer our deepest condolences to the family of Private William Long on behalf of the United States House of Representatives, to offer our hope of a full and complete recovery for Private Quinton Ezeagwula, and to urge the prosecution of the preparator of this senseless shooting to the fullest extent of the law, and finally, to urge the American people to join together in condemning such horrific acts of violence upon the noble men and women of our Armed Forces.

We pray especially that the hearts of all of those that Private Long knew and loved would find comfort and peace in the knowledge that in dying, because he wore the uniform of the United States military, their loved one laid down his life for the sake of human freedom and on behalf of those who could not defend that freedom for themselves. No legacy could be more noble, Mr. Speaker.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, just a personal thought on my part.

Sometimes a country oftentimes asks itself the question of what really is the source and fundamental essence of our security. And oftentimes, we think that that is the length and breadth of our military might, and I would only remind us all that thousands of years ago, China built the Great Wall to protect China. This was a wall that would have challenged some of our modern day tanks and they thought that they were completely secure, but in that time China was invaded three different times because the enemy simply bribed the guard who opened the gate and let them in.

I would submit today that the greatest and most important factor for the freedom of a people is the commitment in the heart of its people, and especially those who put on the uniform, to be committed enough to stand in the way of the aggressor and their homeland. And that is exactly what Private Long and Private Ezeagwula tried to do.

There is a verse that says, Greater love hath no man than this; that a man lay down his life for his friends. It is the most noble of all acts that we can accomplish on this Earth. Sometimes I think we forget how much some people give for the freedom that we have. Privates Long and Ezeagwula are good examples.

Mr. Speaker, I think sometimes we also forget the price that families pay. You know, it is easy for us to focus upon only the fallen, but those who remain and the grief that is laid upon their broken shoulders is often sometimes something we cannot identify with.

I was in the Press Club here a few days ago, and I saw a diamond- shaped picture of a cold, icy, windy day out at Arlington National Cemetery. A woman stood alone with her back to the viewer standing at a tombstone. There was no one else in the cemetery and the wind was blowing and her clothes were out to the side. It was the loneliest thing I had ever seen. And the title was simply, ``The Widow.'' Now, I understand that Private Long was not yet married, but I am sure there was someone out there that loved him, and I know that his parents loved him. And the family has faced a loss that none of us can even imagine. So as we salute Private Long, I also think it is in order to salute his family, who have paid such a high price so we can stand here in this Chamber and talk about freedom.

Mr. Speaker, with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

I am.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 292, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 294 I was unavoidably detained.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I appreciate what you're doing here tonight, Congressman Akin.

Ever since mankind took up arms against his fellow human beings, there has always been an offensive capability that essentially, in time, has been met with the defensive capability. And first it was the sword or the spear and the shield, maybe, and then--

When we came to having firearms and bullets, we came to find armor and came up with a tank, and it has been an ongoing back-and-forth for a long time. But now that we face the most dangerous weapons in the history of humanity--that being a nuclear warhead borne by an intercontinental ballistic missile which can reach thousands of miles with accuracy--all of a sudden there became a debate whether we needed a defense for something like that. Now, for a time, there wasn't really the technological ability to defend against something like that.

And as you said, when the Soviets had thousands of warheads and hundreds of missiles that were capable of destroying every city that we had that was of any size, we had to come up with this equation to where they knew that if they attacked our cities and they

killed our women and children, that our missiles would leave almost shortly after theirs left the launching pad and they would suffer the same fate. And it was such an unthinkable scenario that there was this grim achievement that said we will have mutually assured destruction and, therefore, each will be afraid to launch against the other.

In a sense, as frightening as it was, it gave us a real tense time when we could have a chance to feel relatively safe because we placed our safety in their sanity, as they did with us.

That was the ABM Treaty that you speak of. And fortunately Bush, this last George Bush, was wise enough in this day and age recognizing that the coincidence of jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation gave us a different equation than we had with the Soviets because all of a sudden deterrence wasn't enough. We were dealing with an enemy that was willing to see their own children die in order to attack our children.

And so he knew that we needed to discard this outdated ABM or antiballistic missile treaty, and he did that, and unfortunately, tremendous strides seemed to be made very quickly in the area of missile defense.

The truth is that Ronald Reagan was, indeed, the father of modern missile defense. And there is a great irony there because, while we owe him everything, in a sense, to where we are, he said, Isn't it better to protect our citizens rather than to avenge them? And I thought that was the quote that, in my mind, started it all out.

But the tragedy is that somehow now the modern-day liberals who disdain Ronald Reagan as much as they do, sometimes they are biased against missile defense simply because it was Ronald Reagan's idea. And we don't discuss it in the realm that it should be discussed, which is what is best for the country rather than we don't want to give Ronald Reagan too much credit. This is the ironic tragedy of it.

Two things have happened since then.

First of all, Democrats in Congress have begun to see that missile defense does indeed have a very, very important role to play in this age of nuclear proliferation. That's a good thing. It's a good thing. The downside, of course, is that the Democrat President in the White House right now is incredibly, in my judgment, naive as to the danger that we face and to his approach with our allies.

He has now, under his budget, submitted numbers that would cut the European missile defense site by 89 percent, nearly 90 percent, which is effectively killing the program. And this was the system that we were putting in place under the Bush administration to protect the homeland of the United States, to protect Europe and our forward- deployed troops against an Iranian missile.

No. The radar site is in the Czech Republic. That was the X-10 radar there, and they went through tremendous political machinations to accomplish that overcoming a 2-1 dissent among their public. And yet they had the leadership to say, This is important to us, this is important to the world, and we're going to move forward. And they put tremendous capital in that, and now they're being betrayed by the country that asked them to do it.

Yes. The intercepter field itself, with 10 intercepters, it would have been in Poland.

The tragedy--and this goes back to the statement that I said about the naive way of approaching this--because the Russians said that somehow they could exert influence over Iran or over other countries, that we would give up defending our homeland, our physical mechanism to defend our homeland in order to gain the influence of the Russians over Iran. Well, this is unbelievable.

Unfortunately, the Russians have sold us their influence over Iran about a dozen times now and never have really given us anything of substance to be helpful. And I think this is incredibly dangerous.

Iran has continued to go forward and defy the world community. This solid fuel rocket that they have used today is something that you said was very,

very important. And the ability to stage is incredibly significant because it ultimately means that if they have the guidance systems--and they've already proven that they do by launching the satellite--that they will have almost an indefinite range across the world, because once they learn to stage, they can do almost anything in terms of reach.

This is a Sager, a solid fuel rocket that is something that we've known about for some time, and we knew the Iranians had it and at some point they would test it. But the danger of--

Yes. I'm convinced that it is.

The danger, of course, is that Iran is not only a dangerous enemy, to have these types of weapons, but they can sell and proliferate this type of weaponry. And when they prove that it works, it makes the price go up and it makes other countries who are trying to gain this technology much more interested in the technology. And I believe that it's important that we do whatever is necessary to prevent them from having successful tests in the future, including--and this is a big statement--including shooting those missiles down with our own missile defense capability, our Aegis capability when they come over international waters.

If you will permit me, I can get through this just briefly.

You know, the age-old argument against Ronald Reagan's perspective is that this like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Well, as General Obering, the former Defense agency head said this, he said, We don't just hit a bullet with a bullet. We hit a dot on the side of a bullet with a bullet consistently.

And interestingly enough, in recent days, you know, now they say well, there's so much fratricide, if there's some type of collision, that if there are multiple reentry vehicles or multiple vehicles, we wouldn't be able to hit all of them. But just recently we, in a test down in Hawaii, we shot a Scud missile off of a destroyer and it went 218 kilometers into the air and then, off of a THAD battery in one of the islands there, we shot two interceptor missiles 16 seconds apart to try to intercept this. The theory is if the first one hits, the second one will fly on by, and it's no big deal. If the first one misses, the second one will hit.

But here is the amazing thing that occurred. At 218 kilometers into the air, literally exo-atmospheric, into space, the first THAD interceptor hit the target dead center and blew it to smithereens. Fratricide was everywhere. And the second missile, they had it almost coordinated at that time to only 2 seconds apart, it picked the biggest piece, which was a little over a meter long, and hit it.

Now, let me suggest to you, if that doesn't light your fire, your wood is wet, because this was an incredible accomplishment by our missile defense agency, and it showed that our sensors have the capability of finding that most important target, even in an environment of that kind of fratricide, and it was an incredible accomplishment and you didn't hear it on the news.

Well, the gentleman speaks of a system called GMD, or ground-based mid-course defense, and it is our only system capable of defending the homeland against an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile from either North Korea or, in some cases in the United States, from Iran.

And the significance, as he said, just a year ago, there was a conviction that

we needed at least 44 interceptors, and as you go through the war colleges here in the area, nearly always when they go through their scenarios, they say we need even more than the 44. But now all of the sudden--and we only have 26 actually now. We're capped at a number of 30. Now all of a sudden we're going to cap it at 30, and I think that's very dangerous. Because keep in mind, this is not just one interceptor per incoming missile. We want to do everything that we can to have some redundancy where we sometimes shoot three and perhaps even four to one where if we have one missile coming in, we want to make sure we get as many shots off as possible to make sure one doesn't land. Because if a nuclear missile lands in one of your cities, it will ruin your whole day.

The gentleman is correct on a number of different points. Once we don't build those, not only are they not there for the defense capabilities, but we also eventually lose our industrial base to build them at all. We can't just go out in the street and find someone on the sidewalk and say come on, we would like to build a missile defense capability; we'd like to have you come in and be one of our rocket scientists. It takes a great deal of time and energy to have that industrial base which is in place now, and I think we make a terrible mistake.

No, sir. The KEI is an extremely fast missile, and it was made to intercept other missiles in the boost phase, and the airborne laser and KEI were our only boost phase systems, and both of those have been cut precipitously, and that's the most important place to try to interdict a missile because it's moving slower. There are no countermeasures. There are no decoys deployed, and of course, if you have an impact, then the fratricide falls back upon the offending Nation. So this is the most important phase that we could ever attack or intercept an enemy missile, and we're essentially doing away with both of those programs, leaving only the ABL in place as an experiment, as a research project.

The airborne laser has been cut precipitously and is now essentially a research project, rather than a deployable future system.

That is correct, and of course, the other irony here is that there's really only one payload that makes any sense to put on a missile like that, and that's a nuclear warhead. The other applications don't make a lot of sense.

Well, that's correct, and of course, to try to make the rhetoric they say, well, there are other mechanisms that we have potentially to defend Europe, which may be a land-based SM-3 system with the augment of Aegis, but there are two things wrong with that. Number one, it's more than twice as expensive to do that, and number two, those systems do not protect the homeland of the United States against any ICBM from Iran.

The total missile defense budget, in total, is less

than $9 billion, and the administration wants to cut it almost $2 billion more.

The thing that's important to remember is that Iran gained most of its missile technology from North Korea, and Iran has actually outpaced North Korea now in their missile capability, but North Korea has nuclear warheads now, and if North Korea sold Iran missile technology, is it unthinkable to think they might sell them nuclear warheads at some point? It may not be even necessary for Iran to build their own warheads.

And here's the really astonishing tragedy about this. Rhetorically, some of the liberals say that the reason that we should cut our GMD system is because we need more testing. Well, under this system, where they're cutting down on the number of interceptors we have, we won't be able to test this system again until after 2014.

That's exactly right.

Ostensibly, the whole purpose of cutting missile defense is so that we can use the money somewhere else. But sometimes we forget that when we suffer some type of weakness in our military system it invites or it provokes some type of attack from an enemy which nearly always costs us much more than any savings that we had. When airplanes hit our buildings and our Pentagon, they cost us in our total economy, around $2 trillion. And so this is not only bad defense. It's bad economics.

And if some day, if we build a system and we don't need it, I will stand before the American public and say, you know, we used this system every day because it deterred an attack. But I'll still apologize to you for spending all the money.

But God save us all from the day when we have to stand before the American people and apologize to them because some type of an attack left hundreds of thousands of our people dead in a city or worse and we had the ability to defend them and we didn't out of political correctness.

And with that I yield back to the gentleman and thank him very much.

It is my honor to join you, Congressman Akin. I thank my friend from Missouri for the work that you do not only on this area but so many others. You are a man committed to doing what is right for America and making sure that future generations have a little more time to walk in the sunlight of freedom. I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for all that you do and for who you are. It is my honor to be here with you.

I think that you stated so many things so effectively that it is hard for me to add to the fundamental premise. But as you said, there was once a time not so many years ago when America and the free world faced a Soviet Union that was armed with massive stockpiles of weapons that are the most dangerous weapons that have ever really entered the arsenal of mankind, ballistic missiles that can travel several thousand miles an hour and can deliver warheads that can decimate an entire city or even potentially interrupt the electrical systems of entire nations.

It is a very daunting challenge indeed. And you again laid out so well that we adopted this strategy of mutually assured destruction not because we really wanted to, but because we didn't have much alternative. We really embraced this grim equation that if the Soviet Union launched their missiles and killed our men, women, and children across our cities, that we could launch a counterstrike almost simultaneously, even before their missiles landed, that would do the same thing to their nation. And that was something that was so repugnant and so horrifying to all of us that it created this grim kind of an understanding between us that we wouldn't shoot each other because we knew that it meant sudden and horrifying death to both of our nations.

I suppose one could say, given the fact that we didn't blow each other to atoms, that there was some efficacy to the strategy. And, ironically, it still is the centerpiece of our own strategy to deter aggression on our homeland. A nation that knows that if they attack the United States with nuclear missiles, that we can calculate that trajectory. We know where they live and that we have a response capability second to none, and that we can respond in ways that are totally unacceptable to them. It is such an important subject.

We really are. What has changed it so dramatically the fundamental aspect that Ronald Reagan put forward, that it is much better to defend our citizens than to avenge them. But what has changed so much, Congressman Akin, is that now

we are in a world where the coincidence of Jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation could change the concept of our freedom and of every calculation that we have made for homeland security, because they can no longer be deterred.

When we were dealing with the Soviet Union, we placed our security to some degree in their sanity. We recognized that they wanted to live, they wanted their nation to continue. And that was a tremendous impetus on their part to try to work with us, to try to keep it safe.

It is absolutely a different formula. Not only do we have rogue states and, really, non-state players, as you say, that don't have that risk that a nation-state does, but we have a different mindset. That is the part that frightens me the most. A terrorist that will cut someone's head off, while they are tied down in front of a television camera while the victim screams for mercy, with a hacksaw blade, we had better be very thankful that that hacksaw blade is not a nuclear capability. Because that kind of intent, that kind of a mindset that literally has been demonstrated to be willing to kill their own children in order to kill our children is the thing that frightens me the most, that intent.

It really is, Congressman, because the reality is that this mindset cannot be deterred. This whole notion of mutually assured destruction was a deterrence strategy, and I am not sure that Jihad can be deterred.

There are really two factors to every threat to individuals or to nations, and that is the intent of your enemy and the capacity of your enemy. In this case, the Soviet Union had tremendous capacity, but their intent was tempered by their desire to survive themselves. You could even say that many of the Soviet people had a desire to see people live and let live. Their government wasn't quite of that mindset. But now we face an enemy that is committed to the destruction of the western world. And if they gain the capacity to proceed, I am afraid that my children and yours will potentially see the day of nuclear terrorism.

North Korea, in my judgment, is the least free nation on Earth. This is a nation that has just a completely inhumane mindset in their government, and I am not sure that we recognize just how dangerous that country is.

Ironically, the Soviets--well, not the Soviets now. The Russians--I have to be careful; a lot has changed--the Soviet Union collapsed on itself. But there is still some remnants of that Cold War mentality. They assured America that it would be 20 years before Iran could launch an ICBM capability, and they assured us many years ago that North Korea was far from being able to produce a nuclear capability. But that happened much more quickly than we realized. And, as you know, North Korea just launched an additional test that went twice as far as their first one did. They have nuclear warheads now.

You have got it exactly correct. One of the key technical challenges of an ICBM is the ability to keep the missile stable during staging, where one stage drops off, and the missile can become unstable in that situation. In this last test, North Korea demonstrated that capability, and that to me from a technical perspective was the most frightening aspect of it.

I will say this on the floor of the House of Representatives. I believe that North Korea represents a potential threat to the homeland of the United States and that when the next missile from North Korea gets over international waters, that the United States and its allies should do what they can to shoot that missile down for a couple of reasons: To demonstrate our resolve. But, more importantly, to keep them from being able to demonstrate to their potential customers that they now have perfected missile technology that they can sell to potential nations or even rogue states or just groups like al Qaeda that could use this in a way that would be very devastating to the country.

I am very concerned about that. We must not let them demonstrate to the world that kind of capacity. They have already shown that they are willing to sell this technology. They were the ones primarily who gave Iran their missile technology. Iran now has surpassed North Korea in missile capability, and yet they probably would not have been anywhere close to where they are had it not been for North Korea.

Well, that is correct. I believe that there is no greater danger to the peace of the human family today than a nuclear Iran--I think they are even more dangerous than North Korea. And ironically, if North Korea was able to give Iran missile technology, how is it that we would forget that they could certainly give them warhead technology if they need it, or even a warhead?

So I am really concerned that the world in general must recognize the danger that we face, both with a nuclear North Korea--which is already de facto now, this has happened--and with an Iran that is working with missile technology that, before long, they are working with solid propellants. And I believe that they can range parts of the United States even now. And I believe that an Iranian missile poses a profound threat to the country and to the world.

But even more so, probably the point I would make most strenuously is that an Iranian nuclear program means that an Islamist nation now has their finger on the nuclear button. And they have that technology in their hands where they could pass it along to terrorist groups where they don't even need a missile, where all they need is a Volkswagen to carry it across our border, or a small aircraft, anything. There is a lot of danger there.

Well, I appreciate, first of all, the gentleman's comments about history. Ever since mankind took up weapons against his fellow human beings, there has always been a defensive response to an offensive capability, whether it was the spear and the shield or whether it was bullets and armor; I mean, it has always happened that way. And yet there are those today that would debate whether we need a defense against the most dangerous weapon that has ever come into the arsenal of mankind, which is a ballistic nuclear missile.

As Mr. Akin said, the primary divisions of missile defense are as follows; we have the boost phase, which is where potential enemy missile is coming off of the launch pad--or it doesn't have to be a launch pad, it is just where it is beginning its flight. This is the most vulnerable stage for an enemy missile. And this is, in my judgment, where we need to do everything that we can to make sure that we have the capability.

One of the tragic things about the defense budget--that looks like it is going to be put forth here, Mr. Akin--is that they are cutting one of our main boost-phase systems, the airborne laser. I believe laser will some day be to missile defense what the computer chip was to the computer industry because it travels at Mach 870,000. It is very, very fast. It can reach anywhere on the globe, if the reflections are properly made, in a second.

Well, boost phase can be several seconds. To give you an example: Say a missile left--well, let's say Russia now, because they have the largest arsenal of missiles. I don't suggest that they are going to be our biggest danger. It would probably take somewhere between 28 and 31 minutes for that missile to arrive. And its longest stage is the boost stage. And this is the opportunity that if we have the airborne laser or if we have what we call the kinetic energy interceptor or, in some cases, in the future, where we are coming up with faster missiles that could even be shot off of our ships, so we could potentially catch those missiles in their boost phase. With airborne laser, it could get six inches off the platform and we could destroy it.

Right. And the characteristics of the laser are that it has exactly parallel sides, and it can be a directed energy that you can increase almost without bound, depending on the focus of the energy.

That's right. What you do is you use the fuel of the missile to blow it up.

Of course, there are other ways. Even if you're not shooting at a fuel tank on a missile, if you hit it with laser and damage the outer casing of the missile, you can cause it to become aerodynamically unstable and fly to pieces at that speed.

The airborne laser program is more than one aircraft, but they're doing everything they can to decimate the budget there. It is potentially possible even under the Obama administration budget that we will be able to maintain the one aircraft, which is a 747-400B aircraft with a chemical iodine laser aboard. And it has three different lasers. One's an aiming laser, one's a compensating laser, and one is a kill laser. And this is one of the most advanced mechanisms that we have in our entire arsenal, and it will do so much to build the entire technology if we can show that it's effective.

You mentioned two key things. Congressman Lamborn mentioned the GBI, the Ground-Based Interceptors, with our GMD, our Ground-Based Midcourse system. This was meant to have 44 interceptors. The Obama administration said we will build no more than 30. And, of course, at that point then the system could atrophy and we may not even sustain it. But it is the only system that we have. I want to emphasize this. GMD is the only system that we have in the United States capable of defending us against incoming ICBMs.

Yes, that's the GBI.

Right now we're scheduled to build a total of 30. We have around, I think the Congressman is correct, around 26 or 28 in the ground now.

But we're saying that we will build no more than----

Those are not only fast missiles and not only do they have a very complex DACS, they call it, which essentially what we do here is we take our sensors and we run them directly into the incoming missile and the kinetic energy destroys the incoming missile.

But the reality is that in many cases we would want to shoot more than one of our interceptors at an incoming missile to make sure that we have the best chance of hitting it. Sometimes it can be two or three to one or even more. So this is a capability of maybe stopping as many as 10 or 12 incoming missiles. And that's not that many. We have a limited capability against a growing threat, and GMD is the only thing that we have that will protect our homeland against ICBMs at this time.

Well, in all the ways in the past, what we have tried to do is to say what is the capacity of our enemy, what is the intent? When we are talking about enemies like North Korea and enemies like Iran, we're not completely clear of their intent. Some of their goals are rather irrational and sometimes they've acted very irrationally. So the only wise thing for us to do for our people is to make sure that we have the capacity to meet that threat. They are now gaining the capacity to have missiles that can range the United States, and we need to make sure that we can meet that threat. We have a limited capability now, but if we back away now, we could be in a situation in the future where we will not have the ability to meet that threat.

No, you are essentially correct. The budget was about $9.4 billion. It is being cut about a $1.5 billion and then some of the other systems are being moved around to where the total effective cuts are about $1.8 billion.

But here's the bottom line. All of the money that we have spent on missile defense is just a little over $100 billion since we started 25 years ago. And it took almost that much just to clean up after 9/11 hit New York, and 9/11 cost our economy about $2 trillion.

So if we are talking about being cost-effective here, we should remember that if that attack on New York that morning had been an ICBM with, say, 100-kilo ton warhead, it would have killed maybe 120,000 people instantaneously and half a million more within a couple or 3 weeks.

I am just astonished that we are so shortsighted that now, in this kind of an age that we live in, that we would cut missile defense. And I pray that we don't have to, in some future date, look back on this debate and say how could we have forgotten? If we build a system and we don't need it, then it must have worked.

And I would just say in closing that I will be glad to apologize if we build one that we don't have to use, but I don't want to stand before the Nation and have to apologize to them for failing to building a system that could have protected them.

Mr. Speaker, with all the challenges that we have

in this Nation, we still hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and that they are equal because they are all God's children. Therefore, the essence of America is that all people should be treated with the same respect and protected completely equally under the law. Whenever we begin to divide ourselves into groups and afford one group more protection than another, we necessarily diminish the protection and equality of all the remaining groups.

Mr. Speaker, regardless of whether a person is white, black, handicapped, healthy, old, sick, young, homosexual, heterosexual, a veteran, a police officer, a senior, whatever the case is, they deserve equal protection under the law.

That is the foundational premise of this Nation, and this legislation moves us all directly away from that basic foundation in a profound and dangerous way.

This legislation would prosecute individuals, not on the basis of their crime, but on their alleged motivation for committing it. It requires law enforcement officials and prosecutors to gather evidence of the offenders' thoughts, rather than their actual actions and their criminal intent.

Furthermore, under this bill, such individuals who may not even have been aware of the crime could receive the same or similar penalties as the criminal himself. It would only take some arbitrary prosecutor to construe that the individual had influenced the beliefs or thoughts of a perpetrator of a crime and thereby somehow caused hateful or violent acts. One unscrupulous government entity, plus this hate crimes legislation, equals the perfect recipe for tearing away from American citizens some of the most basic constitutional rights in our Nation.

Mr. Speaker, the fundamental purpose of this body is to protect the lives and constitutional rights of the American people regardless of who they are or what they believe. Unfortunately, this legislation would do just the opposite by granting unequal protections based on personal beliefs and thoughts, and it would endanger the constitutional liberties of millions of Americans.

I thank the gentlelady for the time and urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''

Madam Speaker, with all of the challenges that we have in our country, the wonderful reality is that we still hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are all equal because they are all God's children.

In fact, Madam Speaker, the essence of America is that all people should be treated with the same respect and should be protected completely equally under the law. To break up people into different categories and say that one group is more worthy of protection than another and then to grant special protection to some groups and not to others, it fundamentally diminishes the protection of all of the other remaining groups.

Madam Speaker, a short time ago, this body voted to pass H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, and I believe that it did just that. Regardless of whether a person is white, black, handicapped, healthy, sick, old, young, homosexual, heterosexual, rich, poor, a janitor, a Senator, a veteran, a police officer, a senior, or whatever the case is, he deserves equal protection under the law. That is the foundational premise of this Nation. The legislation that we voted on today moves us all directly away from that basic foundation in a profound and dangerous way.

This legislation would prosecute individuals not on the bases of their crimes but on their alleged motivations for committing those crimes. It requires law enforcement officials and prosecutors to gather evidence of the offender's thoughts rather than of his actions and his criminal intent. This should strike us all as inherently dangerous.

The First Amendment of our Constitution was crafted because our Founding Fathers recognized that the freedom of thought and belief is the cornerstone of every other freedom. It is the foundation of liberty, itself, because, without it, every other freedom, including the freedom of speech, becomes meaningless.

Madam Speaker, there is another insidious aspect of this legislation which, I believe, would have the most tolerant Americans up in arms if they were truly aware of it, which is, not only does this legislation require law enforcement to investigate an individual's motivations-- those are the thoughts and beliefs that seemingly motivate him or her to commit a crime--but it would expand the scope of the prosecution to include individuals or members of organizations or religious groups whose ideas or words may have influenced a person's thoughts or motivations when he committed a crime.

Under such a bill, individuals who may not have even been aware of the crimes could receive the same or similar penalties as the criminal, himself, receives. It would only take some arbitrary prosecutor to construe that an individual had influenced the beliefs or thoughts of a perpetrator of a crime and, thereby, somehow caused hateful or violent acts. This raises the very real possibility that religious leaders or members of religious groups could be prosecuted criminally based on their speech, association or other activities that have been specifically protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution for the last 220 years.

Madam Speaker, this would have a devastating and chilling effect on free speech in America. Who could blame pastors, educators or any other cultural leaders if they chose to cease expressing their beliefs for fear of being thrown in prison and charged with a Federal crime? This is not rhetorical speculation. It has already happened in the case of the Philadelphia 11 and in other cases. In the Philadelphia 11, 11 individuals were jailed, and they faced $90,000 in fines and 47 years in prison for simply speaking the gospel openly and publicly.

One unscrupulous government entity plus this hate crimes legislation equals the perfect combination for tearing away from American citizens some of the most basic constitutional rights in our Nation's history. Advocacy groups and religious organizations will be chilled from expressing their ideas out of fear of criminal prosecution. In fact, ``chilled'' is probably a profound understatement. Many will be simply terrified or intimidated into complete silence.

The fundamental purpose of this body is to protect the lives and the constitutional rights of the American people regardless of who they are or what they believe. Unfortunately, the hate crimes legislation will do just the opposite by granting unequal protections based on personal beliefs and thoughts, and it will endanger the constitutional liberties of millions of Americans.

Mr. Speaker, the Salvadoran presidential elections will be held on March 15. If the FMLN wins the election, it would be devastating for the people of El Salvador as well as for the relationship between our two countries.

FMLN party leadership is expected to follow the anti-U.S. agenda of Venezuela's radical president, Hugo Chavez, and join Cuba in a pro- Chavez, pro-Cuba, pro-Iran axis.

Moreover, Mr. Speaker, the FMLN is a pro-terrorist party with direct ties to sponsors of terror. After the 9/11 attacks, they marched in their capital city to celebrate the attack by al Qaeda, and they burned the American flag. The leader of that march was Salvador Sanchez Ceren, who is now the FMLN's candidate for vice president.

Mr. Speaker, should the pro-terrorist FMLN party replace the current government in El Salvador, the United States, in the interest of national security, would be required to re-evaluate our policy toward El Salvador, including cash remittance and immigration policies, to compensate for the fact there will no longer be a reliable counterpart in the Salvadoran government.

It is my hope that the El Salvadoran people continue the history of a positive relationship between our two countries and ensure that they elect pro-freedom, pro-peace, life-loving officials to their government.

I certainly thank the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, today's resolution marks the 50th anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King's visit to India and the positive influence that the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi had on Reverend King's work during the Civil Rights Movement. Likewise, later this month, we will also celebrate President Lincoln's birthday because of his work to lay the foundation for what would become the greatest of American achievements, the recognition of the God-given equal value of all individuals regardless of their race, and the consequent and natural equal protection of the law for everyone.

Reverend King and President Lincoln had many things in common. But most prominently of all was their life's work to humanize the dehumanized, to give value to a human life that the law had previously regarded as being lesser than other more politically powerful persons.

Reverend King reminded us in his 1963 Letter From the Birmingham Jail that ``injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.'' Like Gandhi, Reverend King looked to his faith to transform society. Reverend King ultimately paid with his life the price for working to extend the equal protection of the law to all.

Mr. Speaker, those were the struggles of the past centuries. And those were the heroes of the past centuries. But their work is not done. The 21st century has its own civil rights struggle, Mr. Speaker. As Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union, has said, ``The biggest struggle for civil rights today is for the civil rights of the unborn child.''

Last year I joined black activists and black mothers from around the country at the corner of 16th Street Northwest in D.C. to protest what has been the deadliest form of discrimination in our country's history, the systematic elimination of millions, fully one-half of all black Americans conceived in this country, primarily at government-funded family planning clinics placed in our inner cities. Every day, Mr. Speaker, almost 1,500 unborn black children are aborted. Black babies are aborted at between four and five times the rate of that of white babies. Mr. Speaker, this equates to a genocide against black America. And yet our U.S. Government continues to increase the annual appropriation to Planned Parenthood and to other abortion providers every year.

Mr. Speaker, I have every conviction that if he were alive today, that Reverend Martin Luther King would not be silent in the face of such an outrage. Dr. King noted in his Letter From Birmingham Jail that the early church ``by their effort and example, brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide.'' He didn't know that in 1973, 10 years after he wrote those words, that the U.S. Supreme Court would revive the practice of killing the innocent and that the black community would pay a higher price in blood than any other. Abortion on demand is called sometimes the exercise of hard-won rights. But in reality, Mr. Speaker, it is the extinguishing of a legacy.

The greatest failure of human government is the failure to recognize the inherent value of every human life. Unborn children in America are the greatest example of that today. It is the civil rights struggle before America in this century. Reverend King once said that ``The law cannot change a heart, but it can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me.'' This Congress, I will introduce the PreNDA bill, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, to end sex-selection abortion and race-selection abortion in America.

It is time to reject the discriminatory disgrace of aborting a child based on race or sex. Doing so might remind us all it is also time for the equal protection clause to realize its full meaning finally, that every human being is a child of God, with the God-given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of their dreams. Nothing, Mr. Speaker, nothing, would honor the work of Reverend Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi or President Abraham Lincoln more.

Mr. Speaker, today I stand here to honor the NAACP. We all honor the NAACP in this House. It has been at the forefront of the civil rights struggle in this country for 100 years, and though 100 years have passed since the founding of the NAACP, there still remains great work to be done.

Mr. Speaker, last summer dozens of black pastors and black mothers attended the 99th annual NAACP conference in Cincinnati to call on the NAACP to help expose one of the least known and yet one of the most pervasive forms of racism at work still in this country, the targeting of the black community by abortion providers. Many of these advocates who gathered at the NAACP I have the privilege to call precious friends. Dr. Alveda King, who leads King for America, is the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Bishop Harry Jackson; Reverend Johnny Hunter, the founder of LEARN, America's largest African American pro-life organization; the Reverend Clenard Childress of LEARN Northeast; Catherine Davis with the Georgia Right to Life; Lawson Lipford-Cruz, the president of Black Students for Life; and David Owens, among many, many others. Their goal was simply to fulfill the mission of the NAACP, and that is to ensure equality and, most importantly, equal protection of the law for all.

Mr. Speaker, I want to quote Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, who helped lead the rally outside the NAACP conference.

``Racism lives at Planned Parenthood. I say to my fellow NAACP members: It's time to tell the government to stop funding racism. Planned Parenthood will gladly accept donations for the specific purpose of aborting only black babies,'' King said. ``It locates its clinics in or near minority neighborhoods. It has led the way in eliminating African Americans to the point where one quarter of the black population is now missing because of abortion.''

King called on the Nation's oldest civil rights organization to remember its mission statement: ``To ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.''

Day Gardner, the president of the National Black Pro-Life Union, said, ``As a child, I thought the NAACP to be a superhero organization, an organization that would fight racism right down to its very core.'' She stressed that the NAACP leaders need to have their eyes opened to the agenda of government-supported abortion providers and to what she believes is their strategic marketing to the black community.

According to reported statistics, Mr. Speaker, a black child is nearly five times more likely to be aborted than a white child.

Gardner continued. ``We are here to rally the NAACP, to make our voices heard as we shout in unison `all across this great Nation the struggle is not yet over. The evil hand of racism is still at work.' ''

Gardner also spoke about the Federal tax dollars that go to Planned Parenthood. She said it was time for Congress to end that funding. She asked, ``Why are we forced to pay well over $300 million to an organization that is overtly racist? We are calling on the NAACP to stand boldly with us to defund Planned Parenthood and even lead the way in this, the greatest struggle for civil rights.''

Mr. Speaker, I just want to echo and agree with the words of Dr. King and of Day Gardner, that for the NAACP to fully advance the cause of the black community, it must take a stand and fight on behalf of the most helpless, voiceless, politically unempowered members of the black community--those being the unborn.

Today, one out of every two black babies conceived in this country is lost to abortion. That is an astonishing reality that I cannot find the words to describe. I just want to thank those courageous members of the NAACP for their fight against this unspeakable tragedy. We must all open our eyes to the racist history of abortion-on-demand movements in this country and its devastating impact on black America. It is past time to defund such a movement in this country.

To that end, I will also be reintroducing the PreNDA bill, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, to end sex-selection abortion and race- selection abortion in this country. It is the duty of all of us to come together and to eliminate this deadly form of discrimination in this generation.

Mr. Speaker, I know that another legislative day has come to an end and that sunset approaches fast in Washington, DC. So tonight, I want to stand before this House with what I call a Sunset Memorial.

You see, it is January 22, 2009, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And before this sunset today in America, almost 4,000 more defenseless unborn children were killed by abortion on demand. That is just today, Mr. Speaker. That is just today, 36 years to the day from Roe versus Wade. That is more than the number of innocent lives lost on September 11th in this country, but it happens every day.

It has now been exactly 36 years to the day since the tragedy called Roe versus Wade was first handed down. Since then, the very foundation of this Nation has been stained by the blood of almost 50 million of its own unborn children. Some of them, Mr. Speaker, cried and screamed as they died. But because it was amniotic fluid going over the vocal cords instead of air, we couldn't hear them.

All of them had at least four things in common, Mr. Speaker. First, they were just little babies who had done nothing wrong to anyone. And each one of them died a nameless and lonely death. And each one of their mothers, whether she realizes it or not, will never be quite the same. And all the gifts that these children might have brought to humanity are now lost forever, Mr. Speaker.

Yet, even in the glare of such tragedy, this generation still clings to a blind invincible ignorance while history repeats itself over and over again and our own silent genocide mercilessly annihilates the most helpless of all victims, those yet unborn.

Mr. Speaker, perhaps it is time for those of us in this chamber to remind ourselves of why we are really all here. Thomas Jefferson said, ``The care of human life and its happiness, and not its destruction, is the chief and only object of good government.'' The phrase in the 14th Amendment capsulizes our entire Constitution. It says, ``No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.''

Mr. Speaker, protecting the lives of our citizens and their Constitutional rights is why we are all here. The bedrock foundation of this republic is that clarion declaration of the self-evident truth that all human beings are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, the rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Every conflict and battle our Nation has ever faced can be traced to our commitment to this core self-evident truth. It has made us the beacon of hope for the entire world, Mr. Speaker. It is who we are. And yet today, another day has passed, and we in this body have failed again to honor that foundational commitment. We have failed our sworn oath and our God given responsibility as we broke faith with nearly 4,000 more innocent American babies who died today without the protection we should have given them.

So, Mr. Speaker, let me conclude this part of my remarks, this sunset memorial, in the hopes that perhaps someone new who heard it tonight will finally embrace the truth that abortion really does kill little babies; that it hurts mothers in ways that we can never express; and that it is time we stood up together again and looked to the Declaration of Independence; and, that we remember that we are the same America that rejected human slavery, and marched into Europe to arrest the Nazi Holocaust; and, we are still the courageous and compassionate Nation that can find a better way for mothers and their unborn babies than abortion on demand.

And, Mr. Speaker, it is such an appropriate time to discuss these things. Only a few hours ago, probably no more than 200 yards from this well, President-Elect Barack Obama put his hand down on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln was sworn in and took his oath to the Presidency, and he took an oath that made him President Obama. And I just would remind the country somehow that we need to ask ourselves

again, why do we respect Abraham Lincoln the way we do? Why have we made a monument to him down at the Potomac River? Because, you see, generations from now they will still be talking about Barack Obama putting his hand on the Lincoln Bible.

And I think that the significance of it and the symbolism is powerful beyond words. But many voices will also ask, did he hold in his heart those same truths that Abraham Lincoln held in his heart when he put his hand on the Bible? And when he found the courage as President of the United States in the days of slavery and the humanity within himself to reach out to slaves that the Supreme Court said were not human and that the tide of public opinion didn't recognize as protectable under the law, I can say to you, Mr. Speaker, this is one Republican that somehow hopes that history will find that Barack Obama found an epiphany in his own heart and soul and recognize that these little unborn children look to him now for help. And I hope that somehow he can recognize that just as Abraham Lincoln was a good steward of the deliverance and the hope that was so necessary to protect innocent life in the days of slavery, that somehow Barack Obama will understand that it is now in his place to have the hope and deliverance in his own heart for these little unborn babies.

Mr. Speaker, I hope if nothing else that at least the President now can remember that the Bible in which he laid his hand, the pages beneath his hand, had the words written in red, inasmuch as you have done unto the least of these My brethren, you have done it unto Me.

It is still not too late for us to make a better world and for America to be the one that leads the rest of the planet, just as we did in the days of slavery, from this tragic genocide of murdering 4,000 of our own children every day.

Now, Mr. Speaker, as we consider the plight of the unborn on this 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, maybe we can each remind ourselves that our own days in this sunshine of life are all numbered and that all too soon each one of us will also walk from these Chambers for the very last time. And if it should be that this Congress is allowed to convene on yet another day, may that day be the day when we will finally hear the cries of innocent unborn children. May that be the day when we find the humanity, the courage and the will to embrace together our human and our constitutional duty to protect these, the least of our tiny little American brothers and sisters, from this murderous scourge upon our Nation called ``abortion on demand.'' It is January 22, 2009, 36 years to the day since Roe v. Wade first stained the foundation of this Nation with the blood of its own children. This, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Now, Mr. Speaker, since it is January 22, and since we have made a great transition in this country, I feel as if it is also appropriate for me tonight to say some words in tribute to one George Walker Bush who had the courage, the commitment and the compassion in his soul to stand up for these little babies who couldn't stand up for themselves. A few days ago, George Bush made his last Presidential speech. When he had finished, he graciously wished the Nation and the next President success. He said good night. And then he asked for God to bless America and all Americans. And he walked down the steps from the podium in the hall in the White House as President of the United States of America for the very last time.

And President Bush may be gone from us now, but there will always be so many of us who deeply honor him, as I try to here this moment, for the man he is and the President he has been to America.

As with many great Presidents, it will take a broader and more developed perspective of history for most to truly comprehend the purpose and impact of the Bush administration. Mr. Speaker, I believe history, if it's unbiased, will be very kind to George Bush, not only because of his achievements, but because of the obstacles that he overcame.

In his Presidency, George Bush faced the catastrophic disaster of September 11, the deadliest terrorist attack or any other enemy attack against America in her entire history. He faced the calamity of Hurricane Katrina, one of the five deadliest storms to ever strike American soil. And then President Bush faced a worldwide financial crisis demonstrated by the largest 1-day drop in the Dow Jones in the history of the Nation.

Now, Mr. Speaker, any sane mind knows President Bush did not cause any of those disasters to happen. And any honest mind knows that his response to those disasters was due to trying to do what he truly thought was the right thing for the country instead of what was right for him politically.

There are, indeed, so many tangible threads to the noble legacy of President George W. Bush. President Bush, first of all, gave gallant and unwavering leadership to America, to our military forces and freedoms's march in the world. The men and women in our Armed Forces were honored to call President Bush their Commander in Chief. He implemented the largest reorganization of our national security apparatus in the history of our country. And for 7 years, the deadly 9/ 11-scale terrorist attacks against our country that all the experts said would follow September 11 were prevented.

The American people may never fully know the number of attacks on America that were thwarted because of the intelligence gleaned under the leadership of President George W. Bush. We may never know how many lives have been spared because, in those uncertain and fearful days following 9/11, President George W. Bush had the courage to defend us all from the virus of jihadist terrorism, whose proponents believe it is the will of God for America to be wiped from the face of the Earth.

Mr. Bush proactively protected America by taking the fight to the terrorists. He dismantled their networks and toppled two dangerous regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their collective population of 50 million now live in a freedom that they have never known before. How can any of us forget the blue-tipped fingers on the hands held high in celebration by millions of Iraqis who had voted for the very first time in their lives in a nation that has not known freedom since before it was called Babylon, Mr. Speaker? I truly believe one of the great legacies of President Bush will be the kindled light of liberty in the eyes of those who once recognized that their future could only be an ever darkening, hopeless oppression. And now they are free.

Throughout his war on terrorism, and our war on terrorism, President Bush often had to walk like a knowing lion, like a knowing lion, Mr. Speaker, through the chattering of hyenas and endure the incessant insults and thoughtless criticisms of those whose vision only reached to the selfish partisan advance of the moment. But if those critics do not devour themselves in the meantime, Mr. Speaker, some day they may face the bared teeth of an enemy that will make us all wish the lion still walked among us.

But because President Bush did not capitulate to the voices of surrender and appeasement to terrorists, some of which came from this very Chamber, Mr. Speaker, today victory in Iraq has come, and a beachhead of freedom in the Middle East has been gained. And if that beachhead is maintained and protected in the days ahead, it may serve to inspire liberty in other nations in the Middle East and turn the whole of human history in freedom's direction, that because George Bush was once President of the United States of America.

President Bush was willing to fight, not because he hated what was in front of him, but because he loved what was behind him. He loved America. He loved freedom. And he loved the innocent.

Mr. Speaker, he was indeed a man of deep, abiding conviction and compassion. He launched the PEPFAR initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and treating malaria victims which has brought lifesaving treatment and care to more than 10 million people worldwide, mostly mothers and their babies, who would otherwise never have had it. Mr. Speaker, I personally saw his tears when he looked at the pictures of children born in Third World countries with their faces severely deformed. I saw his tears again when he stood in the White House and watched John

Roberts be sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court because he knew, Mr. Speaker, that the Constitution and its protections of the basic human rights of life, liberty and property for all of God's children would be safe in the hands of Chief Justice John Roberts.

Mr. Speaker, I believe the noble and faithful legacy of George Bush will be borne for generations to come by the judicial fidelity of John Roberts and Sam Alito to the plain and timeless meaning of the United States Constitution. Posterity will never be able to thank him enough.

President Bush also advocated fearlessly for human rights and for religious freedom for the literally one-third of the world's population that lives under oppression and human rights abuses. He doubled funding for veterans and worked to protect free trade and enacted the largest tax relief in an entire generation. He supported numerous successful democratic revolutions in countries such as Lebanon, Ukraine and Georgia, all in the belief that the surest hope for peace and the protection of human dignity is still through liberty inherent to every person.

And Mr. Speaker, even though, as we talked about earlier, unborn children could never vote for George Bush, he stood unequivocally for their right to be born and to one day walk in the warm sunlight of freedom in America like the rest of us.

Now, Mr. Speaker, there are many reasons I will remember President George W. Bush. I will remember him for his courage. I will remember him for his patriotism, for his love of freedom, for his thankful heart and his commitment to human dignity and protecting, once again, those innocents that could not protect themselves. I will remember him because he vowed to keep us safe, and he did. I will remember him because he saw the greatness in America. And the greatness of America always lived in his own heart. I will remember him because he recognized that indeed there is a good and evil in this world. I will remember him because he rejected the liberal intelligentsia's posture that there was moral equivalence between murdering innocents to advance an ideology and liberating the innocent to advance freedom. I will remember him because he had both courage and conscience. And moreover, he had the courage to follow his conscious. I will remember him because he brought honor and dignity to the White House. I will remember him as a man who loved and honored his Savior, his wife Laura, his daughters Jenna and Barbara, his mother and father and brothers, his entire family. He loved his family with all of his heart, Mr. Speaker. And I will remember him for loving and holding the entire human family as his very own.

But the most touching thing I will forever remember him for, Mr. Speaker, was his tender and compassionate heart toward those whose only plea was mercy. It is something that God remembers about him, too, Mr. Speaker.

Like George Bush, Winston Churchill was used of God to protect the world from falling under the sway of a hateful ideology for what might have been generations. In the election that followed, the voters turned Churchill out of office. And when the press asked him, now what do you think, Mr. Churchill? He spoke words that I hope can speak to the heart of President Bush.

Mr. Churchill said, the only guide to a man in this life is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his own actions. And it is very imprudent to walk through this life without that shield, because we are all so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, no matter how the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

And Mr. Speaker, like Winston Churchill, in the hearts of so many of us, George Bush will always march in the ranks of honor.

Now there are so many things I wish I could say directly to this President as he honorably steps away from public life and embraces the next great task God has for him on this Earth. Mr. Speaker, if I could just talk to him face to face, I think I would just say something like this, I would say, Mr. President, I encourage you to remember that popularity has been and will always be history's pocket change. It is courage, it is courage and love for humanity that are history's true currency, and these will always be the transcending hallmarks of your Presidency.

Mr. Speaker, I would say, thank you, Mr. President, for protecting the citizens of the United States from the dangers of jihadist terrorism. I would say, thank you, Mr. President, for protecting my two little babies, Joshi and Gracie. Thank you that they will live in a brighter, more hopeful future because you were once President of the United States. And then, Mr. Speaker, I would simply say to him, Mr. President, don't worry too much about America. You left us strong in so many ways, in the ways that really count. And I hope you will remember the words quoted by one of the wisest and most loving and noble Presidents as he spoke of America in the last line of his own inaugural address. He said, an angel still rides in a whirlwind and directs this storm.

God keep you forever, sir.

That is what I would say to him, Mr. Speaker.

And with that, Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield to Congressman Mike Pence for such time as he may consume.

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

I thank the gentleman from Indiana.

I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

I thank the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. Speaker, it has been an absolute honor to serve with Steve King in this body. He and I came in as freshmen a little over 6 years ago. And time has a way of getting away from all of us, but I just want him to understand what a hero I think he is.

Today has been sort of a remembrance of heroes. We've talked a lot about George Bush, we've talked a lot about Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, it is so appropriate to do that on January 22, isn't it? Because we are reminded that, just as America was used after 6,000 years of rampant slavery in the world, we were the ones that had a moral conflict with it. And yes, we had a little disagreement called the Civil War over it, but we were used of God to change this tragedy of slavery, and now it is at least discredited all over the planet. And I believe that this country will be the country that will lead the world to discredit this tragic practice of killing our children before they're born.

And so, Mr. Speaker, I would just suggest, on this January 22, 2009, that all Americans remember what makes us special. And what makes us special is because we once held these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That's what made us special once. And if we look back to those great foundational truths that made us the greatest Nation in the world, our best days are still to come.

God bless George Bush. God bless Abraham Lincoln. God bless every little unborn child trying to come to this country and to walk in the freedom of American liberty. And God bless America.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 25 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, January 23, 2009, at noon.

Madam Speaker, the most fundamental purpose for any government is its national defense and the protection of its citizens. I stand here today in heartfelt support for Israel and for its right to defend its innocent citizens from the attacks of a relentless enemy that seeks its destruction. The conflict unfolding in Israel's heartland today is not unfamiliar to the Israeli people.

Since its establishment in 1948, the tiny State of Israel--22 of which would fit into our State of California--has faced enemies on every side that openly oppose its right to exist and work actively to bring about its destruction.

Indeed, Israel has never known a reality where its very existence was not threatened by this insidious ideology called jihad; an ideology so sinister as to make men and women leap for joy at killing their own children in order to be able to kill the children of others, whether that means flying commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center or sending a Qassam rocket into the side of a bus carrying small school children in Israel.

Madam Speaker, in Imperial China, there was a terrible form of execution known as death by a thousand cuts. It was an unspeakably cruel demonstration meant to terrify observers into submissions. Israel is fighting to stop the ``death by a thousand cuts'' strategy used by Hamas to inflict constant, incessant destruction and terror on the Israeli citizens; and the nation of Israel has acted nobly for the sake of innocent Israelis, as well as innocent Palestinian civilians to justly refuse to allow the bloodletting to continue.

Hamas was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States in 1995. And it is a known proxy of the Iranian regime which openly seeks to see Israel wiped from the face of the Earth. The governing charter of Hamas openly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel, with the goal of raising the banner of jihad over every square inch of the State of Israel.

And still, Madam Speaker, time after time, Israel has acted in good faith and has extended gestures of goodwill towards its Palestinian neighbors and Hamas, including its complete disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and its commitment to target only military installations of its enemies despite the routine attacks against its own women and children on almost a daily basis.

Madam Speaker, in all of its conflicts, Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties; Hamas has sought to maximize them. Hamas has broken every cease-fire agreement and every honorable rule of war by deliberately embedding their terrorist militants and weapons caches in the homes of private citizens, and in schools, and in hospitals, and mosques; and Hamas has repeatedly used innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields while they deliberately target Israeli civilians.

There is no moral equivalence here, Madam Speaker. Hamas and Israel are guided by two completely opposite philosophies: One is committed to equality and human dignity under God, and one is committed to a totalitarian ideology of hatred and intolerance; one is devoted to protecting innocent human life, and one commands its destruction.

When a cease-fire agreement was reached between Israel and Hamas last June, Hamas used that opportunity to build up its stockpiles of rockets and weapons that now threaten approximately one million Israelis. And now, Madam Speaker, in a struggle for peace and survival, Israel is once again forced to carry out defensive action against Hamas in order to stop the terrorizing of its innocent civilians.

And once again, once again, Madam Speaker, certain members of the international community are calling on Israel to ``exercise restraint.''

Madam Speaker, if 6,000 rockets had fallen on an American city over a space of four years, what would we say to anyone who called upon us to restrain ourselves in the effort to protect our own citizens? If those same members of the international community who so harshly criticize Israel for the defensive actions had to suffer for 1 week--just 1 week--under these indiscriminate incessant attacks against their families and their loved ones as Israel has done for decades, Madam Speaker, I would submit that the layers of Hamas would have been made ashes once and for all long ago.

Madam Speaker, Charles Krauthammer recently wrote in the Washington Post something I wish every world leader could understand. He said, ``Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israeli-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare, but excruciating.''

Madam Speaker, I could not agree with those words more.

If the beleaguered Jewish people have learned anything in their struggles for survival over the millennia against enemies who have sought their complete annihilation, it is, as one Holocaust survivor said, ``When someone says they intend to kill you, believe them.''

Madam Speaker, consider some of the things that terrorist enemies of Israel have said they intend to do to Israel.

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah stated, ``We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take from them. We will win because the Jews love life, and we love death.''

Wael al-Zarad, a Hamas Cleric, said, ``As Muslims, our blood vengeance against them will only subside with their annihilation . . .''

And Egyptian Cleric Safwat Higazi gave this mandate to jihadists on Hamas television. He said, ``We say to you: Dispatch those sons of apes and pigs to the Hellfire on the wings of the Qassam rockets. Jihad is our path . . . This is our strategic option, and not peace. . . . They [the Jews] deserve to be killed. They deserve to die. You should not care if you hit a man, woman, or a child. . . . Destroy . . . everything . . .''

Madam Speaker, those are horrifying words even when we hear them here in the safe enclaves of our own homes and work places of America. But for the people of Israel, such words mean terror and death.

Madam Speaker, America's enemies and Israel's enemies in this war are the same. Both of us face the reality of radical Islamic jihadists who would see our nations wiped from the face of the Earth if they could. Both of our nations have been struck deeply, and Israel, in its case, has been repeatedly, by any stretch of imagination, has been struck by this same ideology time and time again; the same ideology that murdered Olympic athletes in 1972, that took American hostages in Iran, that murdered Marines in their barracks in 1993, that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, that bombed Riyadh in 1995, the Khobar Towers in 1996, the embassy in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000. And then, Madam Speaker, this murderous, hellish ideology massacred nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11.

And this enemy makes little distinction between those who support Israel and Israel itself, and for that reason, Madam Speaker, we must realize that an attack on Israel is an attack on America and freedom itself.

Listen to the words of Sheikh Ahmad Bahr, acting speaker of the Palestinian

Legislative Council. He said, ``Allah willing, America and Israel will be annihilated . . . kill them all, down to the very last one.''

Madam Speaker, any policy of the United Nations or the United States must articulate three concepts as prerequisites reached to any agreements reached between Israel and Hamas. First, it must reject any moral equivalence between the goals of Hamas and Israel. Secondly, it must place the blame for this current conflict squarely on the shoulders of Hamas, and third, it must clearly restate that America's commitment to the State of Israel remains unshakable.

We stand with Israel not as Republicans, Madam Speaker, not as Democrats, but as Americans and fellow members of the human family, equal heirs of those unalienable gifts of God we call life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; these basic human freedoms. We stand with the innocent people of Israel who have been terrorized on a daily basis, some for as long as they can remember. And we also, Madam Speaker, stand with those courageous Palestinian souls who also long for freedom and peace with their Israeli neighbors.

Madam Speaker, President Harry Truman, who formally recognized the State of Israel only 11 minutes after Israel had declared its independence, said, ``I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have faith in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it-- not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.''

Madam Speaker, we recognize those words to be true and believe that the cause of liberty will prevail in the land of Israel as it has so many times before and that Israel indeed does have a glorious future before it.

Throughout its history, the hand of God has been upon Israel, and today we join in the solidarity with the State of Israel, and its people, with the innocent Palestinians, and with all of who love peace, and we pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 40 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Tuesday, January 13, 2009, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.