W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. So there is a fundamental disconnect in the logic here somewhere. Understand that it's all for glorious and super ends and supposed to be a good deal and all, but how does it specifically help us and how does it increase U.S. security? That is not clear at all. The idea of us reducing capabilities seems to be completely counterproductive. Because it's going to encourage either third-world adversaries to take advantage of our vulnerability that we created voluntarily on ourselves, self-inflicted wounds, or the people who are our friends are going to develop additional nuclear capabilities to protect themselves. So I don't see how this thing works.

Mr. AKIN. So let me just recap what you're saying. If you don't have the industrial base to produce the kinds of missiles that we need for missile defense, the way that that can work is, one, you're not going to have the rocket scientists. In other words, a rocket scientist is a rocket scientist. You've got to have some of them around if you want to make rockets. Those people are being employed currently for this particular solid rocket that is noted more for space exploration than it is for defense, but it's the same technology. So, first of all, your industrial base is eroded by the fact that you can't keep those engineers around and they don't have anything to work on, so they go do something else. The second thing is, because you don't have the production facilities, now the cost of materials goes up. And it goes beyond that, doesn't it? You don't just build one of these things in thin air. You've got to have a building to build it in. You've got to have the machines that are used to package the fuel and the design of how the pressure is contained, and how you control burn rate and the direction--all kinds of things that go into building a rocket; right?

Mr. AKIN. Well, the thing that strikes me about this whole situation is, first of all, if you want to deal with the nuclear proliferation thing, that's one thing, but to connect it to missile defense seems to be the height of stupidity, just really an irrational decision. And to walk away from the fundamental principle that the job of the Federal Government more than anything else should be the defense of this country, the security of the citizens who pay for that defense, and to give that idea up for the old concept of mutually assured destruction, just makes no sense whatsoever. We were on the right track to develop missile defense. The people that said we couldn't do it were all proven wrong. We are doing it. We not only hit a missile with a missile, we hit a spot on a missile with a missile, metal-on-metal collisions. And not only have we been able to do that and shown that we have the technology to do that, but now what we're talking about doing is even going beyond that to the airborne laser system, which just this last year, firing its last shots before it was going to be shelved, it was called by the Democrats a big science experiment--I suppose that's a pejorative term saying we don't think much of it--and yet this aircraft flying off the west coast engaged two targets. One was a liquid rocket motor missile. It was launched from some considerable miles away, in excess of 100 miles, I believe, and this airplane locked onto the missile with its--it has two small lasers. The first is just to find where the missile is, and it's putting that first laser on the missile. The second laser checks the optics of the atmosphere. The third laser, which is tremendously powerful, fires a beam, and it just destroyed that liquid fuel missile in air. Then it turns around and does the same thing to a solid rocket missile, and yet this is another thing that the administration is scrapping. And the question is, if we're interested in U.S. national security, why in the world do we want to bow down to the Russians? Ronald Reagan was there at Reykjavik, and there was a great big idea that they were going to have this big treaty. Reagan walked away from it. He said to the Soviets, he said, Look, I'm not going to agree to that because I'm going to protect my people with missile defense. And here we are going back in history, and now we're going to stop this missile defense. And what you're talking about, Congressman, is a part of one of the supplier base that has to be there to do missile defense. Why are we going to dismantle that? It just doesn't make sense.

Mr. AKIN. So the bottom line should be about U.S. security. I mean, that's what we should be focused on. Yet how does it get us more security if we reduce our nuclear capabilities and other nations than become encouraged to increase theirs?

Mr. AKIN. Okay, so it seems to me we have got a couple of different issues here that you brought up. The first question is, does it even make sense for us to do the ``what if'' question? If somebody does this, this, and this, well, we are not going to do that. What is that bias, you know, and is that really helpful? And particularly when these things tend to be nuanced the way they are phrased, it adds a lot of haze and uncertainty. But certainly answering that ``what if'' question probably doesn't make us a more secure country. But let's go to what I think is your second point.

Mr. AKIN. Assurance to our enemies. But the second thing was the idea that somehow we are going to move toward this world without nukes, and the way we are going to do it is to reduce not only our number of nuclear weapons but reduce our development or deployment of nuclear weapons. I mean, it sounds so good on the surface, but let's just take this apart a little bit. Let's just say, you have got America now. We have a bunch of nuclear weapons, and we just say, hey, this is such a great idea. We are just going to get rid of all our nukes, and we are not going to develop any. Or we are going to get rid of a certain percentage of them, and we are not going to develop any new ones, which is what this treaty is supposed to do. My question is, how is this going to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world? First of all, think about there are 35 or more nations that depend on us to create this nuclear umbrella of protection. So they are not developing their own nukes because they know that the U.S. is going to protect them. So what are they going to do logically if that umbrella of protection of the U.S. having this overwhelming nuclear force, if we take that down, if you are one of those 35 nations, what are you going to be thinking?

Mr. AKIN. So just stop for a minute. Let's do a what-if, because that's apparently what this treaty is trying to define, these what-ifs. So some country has maybe signed agreements that they're not going to develop biological weapons. They do that on the sly, hit our cities with biological weapons and people are dying with some strange kind of virus or something running around, and we're losing a whole lot of population--and of course I think we have a pledge that we're not developing biological weapons so we can't respond with biological weapons somewhere. So what are we supposed to do then? We've already guaranteed them that we're not going to use nuclear weapons.

Mr. AKIN. Sure.

Mr. AKIN. So we are reducing weapons, but these other nations are going to want to increase, so that doesn't really compute with the logic of this thing. Now let's go to the next class of nations, third-world nations, maybe some of them that are more likely to be our opponents, adversaries, or troublemakers. Now we tell them we are going to reduce our number of nukes and our development of new things. What is their logical response to that? Well, let's see, they say, well, we could never whip them in conventional forces, so we have got to find some other way.

Mr. AKIN. A good industrial area, too. Good for you. Thank you, Mike. Please.

Mr. AKIN. Could I interrupt for a second? I think what you brought up is an interesting point. First of all, the President said all of the options are on the table. And here we go again seeing him say one thing and doing the exact opposite. It reminds me of a question. I'm a pretty old geezer. I've been around here for a while. I remember the Ronald Reagan days. And I remember it was kind of the height of the Cold War and people would ask him, Now, President Reagan, what would happen if this and this and this. And he would kind of look at people with his big old grin and he would say, You know, I've told you before, I don't answer ``what if'' questioning. Now, he said that in a nice way, but his point was why do we want to answer what if and then lock ourselves into some particular means of responding when it isn't really appropriate when the actual day arrives.

Mr. AKIN. It's answering a whole lot of what-if questions. Why do we have to do that?

Mr. AKIN. So what are they going to do?

Mr. AKIN. We're about to start on a journey on an interesting topic of discussion and one that has hit the papers and one that could very much affect the shaping of how the world develops and the safety of the world. And that is the new discussion on the Nuclear Posture Review. That's a report that the Federal Government has just released along with the new START Treaty which the President has been working on negotiating with the Russians. And these are talking about the future of our country, the future of our world, particularly as it relates to nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. And the initial kind of read on what's going on sounds pretty good. We want to try to reduce the amount of proliferation of nuclear materials to make the world a safer place. We want to talk about a day when there won't be any nuclear weapons in the world. We want to try to, in general, reduce the amount of threat and risk to our own Nation and other nations. And it all sounds pretty good when you first look at it, until you start to take a look at the troubling assumptions that have been built into these two documents. First of all, they call the Nuclear Posture Review the NPR and the START Treaty, of course, is going back to the 1991 historic treaty. And so I'm joined here on the floor by some good friends of mine, some people who are good thinkers. But I think I will mention some of the topics that I would like to see us be talking about here in the next number of minutes. And I think we need to take a look at assumptions. Many times people have good intentions, but the assumptions that are built in are not so good. There was once a guy who was a pharmacist and he had good intentions; but, unfortunately, he prescribed too much of a particular chemical and killed his patient. He had good intentions, but the result was the death of the patient. That could easily happen to many Americans with the false assumptions that are built into the START negotiations and this Nuclear Posture Review. The first thing I would like to take a look at is going to be the world without nukes and is that a reasonable assumption; is that something that we should be working toward and exactly how are we going to produce this world where there are no longer nuclear weapons. The next assumption is whether or not it's reasonable to trust Russia when you negotiate arms treaties. The third question would be the overall whether or not we're going to be advancing missile defense and whether or not we're going to develop a missile defense. Is that connected to the idea of the START Treaty? The fourth point would be does it make sense to say we're not going to develop any future nuclear weapons or devices. And, lastly, to define when we might or might not use a nuclear weapon. These are all kinds of assumptions built into these documents. I think they need to be discussed and discussed very carefully by those of us who are dealing with our nuclear posture. I'm going to start off by recognizing my good friend, Rob Bishop from Utah. Congressman Turner also is joining us, Mike Turner from Ohio. And I know that they have their own perspectives on this and are very well qualified in certain areas here, and I also have some charts we could go to. But I would like to take a look at some of those assumptions because the devil is often in the details. I would yield time to my good friend, Congressman Turner from Ohio. What part of Ohio are you from?

Mr. AKIN. But shouldn't the focus be on U.S. security? Shouldn't that be the question? And are we going the wrong way?

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this flawed health care bill.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I think a lot of Americans feel that there are things that need to be fixed in health care, and a lot of our colleagues that are Republicans think there are things that need to be fixed in health care, but we don't think you melt the whole system down. One of the things that I was asked in my town hall meeting--and I think maybe there are people that have this question in their minds, so maybe I'll ask myself this question and try to answer it. They said, Okay, you big-mouthed Republican--they didn't quite say that, but they said, You were in the majority for 6 years and you never fixed any of these and now you're bad mouthing them when the Democrats are doing it. Let me tell you about when I was a Republican for the 6 years that I was here when I was in the majority, and that was we passed a whole lot of bills in the House, a number of them, to fix health care that nobody has ever heard of or knows anything about. What happened to those bills? They passed the House. They went to the Senate, and there were Democrats in the Senate that basically filibustered it because we didn't have 60 Republican votes to push it through reconciliation so you could get it out to a vote on the floor. I know it's not reconciliation. Whatever they call it on the floor. The 60 votes in the Senate, we never had them. What sort of bills did we pass? Well, we passed a bunch of energy bills to deal with the high prices of gasoline that were killed by Democrats in the Senate. We passed a bill to deal with Freddie and Fannie that were being improperly managed financially that were going to cause a big crisis, and that was killed by the Democrats in the Senate. We passed associated health plans to allow small businesses to combine their employees together to get a better price on health insurance. That bill was killed. We passed it numerous times. It was never taken up. They never had the 60 votes in the Senate to deal with that. We did tort reform, which various States have passed. Dropped health care costs by 10 percent in some States. That went to the Senate, was killed by the Democrats in the Senate. So it wasn't that we didn't pass things or try to fix things as Republicans. We had a lot of reforms, but they were always killed because of the 60 votes in the Senate. So when people say, Hey, you guys were in the majority, how come you didn't do anything? We did things, but it was because of the way the Senate is set up, none of those things passed. And I think that's helpful for people to understand that because Republicans do have ideas, but they were more selective things that we knew were going to save money, going to give people better health care and solutions that we knew from other States that would work. So I think that's important to kind of get that out. Let's see. This thing here. Benefits trial lawyers by failing to enact meaningful lawsuit reform. Well, these bills do benefit trial attorneys. The weird thing about these bills is they are actually sort of antitort reform. It's not that they don't deal with those huge punitive damages which run the cost of health care up. In fact, the States that have tort reform, it makes it so they can't use their tort reform. So this thing is, from a tort reform point of view, is actually hostile to tort reform, and I'm sure you see some of that. Thank you, Madam Speaker, for allowing us to deal with this very, very important subject. I know the American public is interested.

Mr. AKIN. Not only confusing, but in the telephone town hall I did, I sense an anger and a frustration in the public. First of all we are told that you don't have to read the bill, just vote on it because we haven't even put the bill together. You don't have to read it. Now we are being told, not only you don't have to read it, you don't have to vote on it. That seems like the silliest thing I ever heard. And yet that is what is being talked about, about bringing a bill to the floor, you just vote for a rule instead of actually voting on the bill. And it is questionable whether it is even constitutional. My good friend, Dr. Fleming.

Mr. AKIN. Sort of like fraud, waste, and abuse is like a line item in the budget and you can just line it out and make it go away? All these years, if we had fraud, waste, and abuse, we try to get rid of it, but they say we're just going to line--it's really amazing. I didn't mean to interrupt.

Mr. AKIN. I do yield.

Mr. AKIN. Boy, I really appreciate your putting that in perspective. Because we sort of rush through each day, each day is so busy, and we sometimes fail to just take a look and say, oh, my goodness, what is going on here? You know, first of all, a President of the United States firing the president of General Motors? And then surrounding himself with these people not approved by the Senate that he calls czars. That's weird. I don't know where that idea comes from. And then taking over AIG, a great big insurance company. And then you go through all of these other things, the bailout for Wall Street and this supposedly stimulus bill, which cost $700 billion and is not creating jobs, 10 percent unemployment. We have just heard people critical of President Bush for spending too much money. You take his very worst year, which was '08 with the Pelosi Congress here, and it was $470 billion I think he overspent if I remember. You are the expert on numbers. And yet here we go in 2009, $1.4 trillion. That is a record since World War II. We keep setting these bad records and then here comes this piece of legislation. My constituents are going crazy. They are telling me, Todd, what can we do? What can we do? What do you want me to do? We had a great big meeting and thousands of them showed up to protest. The media covered it. But what can you do? I mean, they are shutting the phone boards down. Sometimes I don't know what to say, gentlemen. We are joined here by my good friend, Congresswoman Foxx. I think of her as somebody who is just one of those Americans who has common sense, and she's tough. She's tougher than nails because she believes in commonsense American values, and she doesn't put up with a whole lot of baloney. I am just delighted to have you on the floor joining us tonight.

Mr. AKIN. There is something that smells, doesn't it? This thing has been sitting around for about a half a year, and the more people find out about it, the more they hate it. A week or two ago, I just started making a list of all the people who would hate this bill, and there are just circles of Americans, one on top of the other. If you are an older person you don't want all that half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare. If you are pro-life you think, well, I don't like abortion. Well, if you don't like abortion, how do you like the fact that your taxpayer dollar that you are forced to pay is paying for abortion? That to me is different than just--I mean one thing people talk about is choice. I don't call it choice, I call it killing children. But even if you accept the idea of choice, some people think abortion is okay, some people think it is not. But to take the people who think it is not and force them to pay to do abortions where they think it is killing a child even if other people don't, no wonder people don't like this thing. Or illegal immigrants getting medical care on the back of the taxpayer. I could see there are so many people that wouldn't like it.

Mr. AKIN. I think that's part of the reason why you see this tremendous opposition to this legislation. And, you know, one of the things we did, trying to get some kind of perspective on some of these main points, imposes half a trillion in Medicare cuts. The Republican alternative didn't do that, but the President's bill and the Senate bill does. It enacts a job-killing tax hike and government regulations costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The old Democrat bill and the President's new bill do that, and the Republican thing doesn't do it. I mean, we have a lot of reforms. I think you're a cosponsor/sponsor of a bunch of bills that reform things in health care, but it's not a complete government takeover of the system, and we're not talking about raiding Medicare and all of these other sad provisions. Now, one of the things that I think Americans are sensitive to is unemployment. I mean, there are a lot of people out there without a job. According to the government numbers, there are about 10 percent unemployed Americans. And that is not counting the people who have been out of a job more than a year, because they take them off. They just wipe them off the charts. So you have got a lot of unemployment, and now what you're going to do is you're going to enact these tax hikes on small businesses, which is no better way to get them to want to get rid of employees than to run their taxes up or their costs of having employees. So you're a small business owner, and all of a sudden it's going to cost you more to have an employee. You've just created a big economic incentive to get rid of some employees because now you've got to get rid of the taxes. You're also being encouraged not to invest in your own business to put the new wing on a building, to get the new machine tool or whatever is going to create new jobs. You're not going to do that when you're going to get hammered by this new tax increase. And I think Americans are sensitive, from what I found in my district. And I don't know about yours, but in Missouri, people don't like unemployment and they'd like to see us--they know government doesn't create jobs, but they'd like us to create an environment where small businesses can prosper. And this is the exact opposite to me. This doesn't make sense either, that we're not thinking about the unemployment component.

Mr. AKIN. That is called free enterprise, I guess.

Mr. AKIN. So when the government doesn't have enough money to pay, they just say, well, we're not going to cover certain things because they're too expensive.