W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize a great tragedy that occurred in Kirkwood, Missouri, in my district this last Thursday. On what seemed to be a typical night in what has long been considered an almost idyllic community, Charles Lee Thornton shot and killed Police Sergeant William Biggs outside of the Kirkwood City Hall. After entering City Hall, Mr. Thornton then shot and killed four dedicated civil servants and severely wounded the mayor before he himself was shot and killed by responding Kirkwood police officers. Today, Kirkwood Mayor Mike Swoboda continues to struggle for his life. Those killed in the City Hall were Police Officer Tom Ballman, Councilwoman Connie Karr, Councilman Mike Lynch, and Public Works Director Kenneth Yost. Kenneth Yost had served in that position for 35 years. As Kirkwood and surrounding communities lay to rest officers and public servants, one cannot help but be moved by the deep sense of faith expressed by the family and friends they have left behind. What has also become so clear is the deep commitment that these individuals had for their community. With that service in mind, I would like to refer to Matthew 20:28, which states: ``Among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the willing servant of all, like the Son of Man; He did not come to be served but to serve and to give up his life as a ransom for many.''

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Jill Mueth from St. Louis , Missouri and to congratulate her on her nomination as 2008 School Counselor of the Year award. Jill is a dedicated school counselor at LaSalle Springs Middle School in St. Louis, Missouri. Out of the several hundred nominations the American School Counselor Association, ASCA, received, Jill is one of 10 finalists to be honored at the First Annual School Counselor of the Year Awards Dinner on Friday, February 1. ASCA's School Counselor of the Year program honors school counselors who are running a superior, comprehensive school counseling program at the elementary, middle or high school level. Through a highly competitive selection process, finalists were chosen from a panel of judges representing principals, district offices, school boards and chief state school officers. I thank Jill for her service to the community and congratulate her on her nomination.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, February 1 is an extremely important date for us in terms of American security. You might wonder why that is, and that is because a law that we passed last summer is expiring and our intelligence agencies are going to be greatly crippled in their ability to make intelligence intercepts because of the change in the law. What has happened is the Democrats are trying to get us to go through a very complicated procedure with the FISA court to check on surveillance before we can actually make the wiretap. What the result is going to be is that it is going to make it very, very difficult to do these intercepts. Now we debated this at the end of last year, and we found that with the law that was being proposed, we wouldn't be able to arrest bin Laden even if we knew where he was going to be and what time he was going to be there. Since World War II, we have done these intercepts. We have intercepted Japanese and German wire transmissions. The bottom line is quite simply we are going to lose 60 percent of our intelligence gathering if this law is not fixed.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Thank you very much. I'm just so thankful for your willingness to take this special hour and organize things here on the floor of the U.S. Congress, and your leadership. The people of Minnesota are blessed to have you, and I'm just very thankful to be able to be a small part. But one of the things that those of us who are Members of Congress do, as you can imagine, is that we do give speeches. We talk to different groups of people, young and old, on all kinds of different issues. But one of the questions that I love to ask, and it's something that we should know the answer to rather quickly, and yet, most Americans don't really have the answer quite on the tips of their tongues, and that would be to ask the question, what is it that has made America such a unique and a special place for all of us to live? Now, if you live here, sometimes you can take for granted some of the things that we enjoy every day. But America is extremely different. First of all, there are all these people from other countries that want to come here because they believe that this is the land of opportunity; this is where your dreams can become true. Aside from that, America has been engaged in a number of huge and colossal wars. We find ourselves as the dominant military power on the planet. And so through these different wars, did we create empires? Did we build kingdoms? The answer is, of course, no. We have named no emperors, no kings. In fact, what we did was we voted to tax our constituents to rebuild our enemies after we had defeated them. America is a unique and special place. But what is it that makes America so special? Why do all these different people from different nations all come together here for the American Dream? What is it, if you were to define it, if you're looking at it like an onion and you're to say you peel off the outer layers of fireworks and apple pie and the flag and you get to the center of what makes it tick? One of the words when I ask this question frequently is the word ``freedom.'' But freedom doesn't really describe the core principle or the logic of on which basis America tips. You know, the people in Tiananmen Square, they wanted freedom. They stood up for freedom. They were willing to die for freedom. They were greased underneath the treads of tanks and they gave their lives, but they didn't get freedom. So what is it that produces the freedom? What is it that makes America what it is? What is the formula? Well, if I were asked that question, I would cheat a little bit. I would go back to our first great war when America wrote a statement of what we believe and what we stand for as a people. It is, of course, called the Declaration of Independence. It was the reason why we would dare to challenge the biggest military power in the world. And that second paragraph, the sentence, ``We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'' And then the sentence goes on after ``pursuit of happiness,'' and says, ``And governments are instituted among men deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.'' And it goes on to say, the purpose of the government is essentially to protect these basic rights. What rights? Well, life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So the engineer in me says, now, let's break this down. How does the formula that defines America work? Well, it's based on these ideas: One, that there is a God; second of all, that that God grants basic fundamental rights to all people; and lastly, the job of civil government is to protect those rights. Now, if you take a look at that equation then you say, well, what does that mean? Well, first of all, we can take away from that the fact that if you take God out of the equation, you don't have any fundamental rights and the whole American system starts to come unglued. Second of all, you notice that the rights are not just Americans' rights. These are rights for all human beings. This is a powerful idea. This idea is being exported overseas, and other people are enthused and caught up in the possibility that there is a gracious, loving God that gives fundamental rights to all people. Another rather straightforward conclusion would be this: that a government that does not protect the most fundamental right, the right of life, is a government that is not doing its job. It is broken. And for those of us in America over these years to have tolerated selling the lives of our unborn down the river of convenience, we have violated the most fundamental and basic logic of what America has always stood for. Abortion is so un-American. It's something that people weren't paying attention on, and the Court slipped it in on them, and pretty soon people started to wake up and say, Oh, my goodness, this is horrible. And all across America, people are starting now to wake up. Now, because of the nature of the way that the Court usurped their power and authority and decided to take the power to themselves to create law out of thin air, we have one of the most polarizing issues that has confronted our Nation since the days of slavery. And yet, just as slavery is fundamentally un-American, so, even more so, anything that violates the most fundamental right, the right to life, is contrary to everything that Americans have stood for and fought for. Now, some people are aware of the fact, now that we're engaged in a great war, a war against terrorists, should that surprise us? Well, think about it a little bit. What is it that terrorists believe? Terrorists believe that, hey, it's okay to blow up a few people to make a political statement. And what do we believe? We believe right to life is a fundamental, God-given right. We are completely on the opposite side of the page of the terrorist. The terrorist is a terrorist. And what does that mean? Well, it means he wants to compel you into doing something because you're so afraid of him. That's not very similar, is it, to what we believe; that God gives people the right to life and then the right to liberty. The right to liberty is to be able to follow your own conscience without being terrorized by some opponent. So it is no big surprise that we fight the terrorists because they are fundamentally un-American. And yet we have terrorists in our own culture called abortionists. One of the good pieces of news why we are winning this war is because there are not enough heartless doctors being graduated from medical schools. There is a real shortage of abortionists. Who wants to be at the very bottom of the food chain of the medical profession? And what sort of these places do these bottom-of-the-food-chain doctors work in? Places that are really a pit. You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other lawbreaking, the not following good sanitary procedures, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things, the misuse of anesthetic so that people die or almost die. All of these things are common practice. And all that information is available for America. And the day is coming when this public discussion will continue and America will say we're tired of abortion because it's so fundamentally un- American. And this, like a bad nightmare, will pass away, and there will be a day, just as there is today, where people say who would ever support slavery. In the future there will be a day when men will say who would ever have supported something so un-American as abortion. I'm so thankful for the gentlelady for her leadership and for allowing us to have a time to engage in this public discussion, something that's not going to be done by political tricks, but by the conscience of the American public being raised to the point where they say, No more. The bad dream is over. We are going to once again honor what Americans have always stood for, the God-given right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. God bless you.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Catholic Schools Week 2008. From January 27 to February 2, 2008 nearly 2.4 million students who attend the Nation's 7,800 elementary, middle and secondary Catholic schools will celebrate Catholic Schools Week. I laud the efforts of faculty and parents who provide our Nation's children with an excellent education focused on faith and values. The 2008 theme, ``Catholic Schools Light the Way'' focuses on the leadership that Catholic Schools provide to our Nation by producing graduates who ``light the way to a brighter future for all humankind.'' The Archdiocese of St. Louis has a longstanding tradition of leadership. I thank the Archdiocese for their commitment to enriching the lives of children. Catholic Schools Week is a testament to the outstanding work by the Archdioceses across the country.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, as we start a new year, one of the things that we are seeing in the economy is signs of stress. The unemployment is rising somewhat, we see the trouble with the housing market, the savings and loan crisis. Over the past year, the Chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, warned that the Democrat tax increases increasingly threaten our economy. Last year, the Democrats passed a $528 billion tax increase here in the House and proposed the mother of all tax increases, a $3.5 trillion tax increase, the largest in the history of our country. That is exactly the wrong medicine in an economy that is struggling. Instead, what we should be doing is we should be returning a portion of that money that people earn so that it can be invested and strengthen the economy and put us back on the road to recovery, just as we did in 2001 and 2002. It's time for us to understand that tax increases are exactly the wrong medicine when the economy is struggling. I hope the Democrats remember that.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, the authorization bill that is in front of us here today stands in some contrast to other pieces of work of this last year. It stands in contrast because it isn't dolled up with all kinds of partisan and very controversial kinds of things. It's a bill that is just quietly getting the job done. I think the Members of the House, both Republican and Democrat, should be pleased with the quality of what has been put together. It does the job. It funds our troops. It lays out the proper kinds of equipment and spending priorities that are absolutely necessary for the defense of our country. I'm thankful that we were able to reject the hate crimes legislation that had no part on this bill, that was done also by this House for standing strong, and what was just the simple accomplishment of the job of funding Defense and providing for the defense of our country, so hats off to the staff, and hats off to the different people that were able to put this together.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, we all have to struggle from time to time with the bad practice of being late. We don't like to be late, and the reason we don't is, of course, when we're late, we inconvenience somebody. If you're late to the car pool, a couple of people have to sit there and wait and you've got to choke your breakfast down a little bit quicker so you don't inconvenience someone. But you know the Democrats have been very late. But when the Congress is late, it is really a big inconvenience, because the Democrats knew that they had to pass the AMT patch some months ago and they didn't do it. And so what does that mean? It means not just a few people in the car pool. What it means is 32 million Americans will not get their tax refund; $87 billion will be late to 32 million Americans because the Democrats are late in dealing with the AMT tax patch. They tried to put it together with a $3.5 trillion tax increase, the mother of all tax increases. Of course that didn't work, and now we're late.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I was unable to participate in the following votes. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: November 15, 2007: rollcall vote No. 1116, on the McHenry of North Carolina Amendment I would have voted ``aye''; rollcall vote No. 1115 on the Garrett of New Jersey Amendment I would have voted ``aye''; rollcall vote No. 1114 on the Price of Georgia Amendment I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, one of the things that can be a problem here in Congress is tardiness or lateness. And we've certainly seen some examples of that. One of the examples is the alternative minimum tax. It's something that every year just keeps reaching down and taxing more and more Americans. And so through the last years, Republicans passed patches to push that alternative minimum tax back. Unfortunately, this year, we're late. We don't have that done. The IRS has got to have that done by tomorrow, or else they're going to take a whole long time to change tax forms, and 50 million Americans will have their tax returns and the money that's owed them by the government late because we're just not on time with getting the AMT patch fixed. It's also true with the veterans bill. We passed a bill, Republicans and Democrats agreed to it, put more money into the veterans, take care of post-traumatic stress and all kinds of other things that are expenses that the veterans face. The trouble is that bill's been sitting around. We're late again. Let's get a move on.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Chairman, on rollcall Nos. 1114, 1115 and 1116, had I been present, I would have voted ``aye'' on all 3 votes.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it's a treat to be able to join you and take a look at a very interesting subject, a subject that we in America will all be thinking about here before so very long, the subject of Thanksgiving. There are, of course, many different Thanksgivings that each of us have enjoyed with our families. But I am here to talk particularly about a little group of marines, they might be considered, a group of marines that undertook a great adventure to America, and that is, of course, the story of our Pilgrims. There is some debate and some belief that there was a Thanksgiving celebration in the area of Berkley or the Jamestown area in maybe the 16th, 17th-ish vicinity. But the one that springs to most people's minds is the story of the Pilgrims. Perhaps the reason is because the Pilgrim story is such a fantastic adventure. It sparks the imaginations of not only children but adults as well. It goes back some time. So I thought what I might share this evening is this great adventure story, but with a purpose. The purpose is to suggest that there was something far more significant. In fact, a number of things more significant than the Pilgrims brought us, even in the tradition of our turkeys and cranberry sauce, better than the tradition of Thanksgiving, and far more significant to particularly those who meet in this Chamber. The story of the Pilgrims goes back a long way. The idea and the thing that separated the Pilgrims, to a certain degree, were the writings of a theologian from Scotland that followed Knox. As he looked into the Old Testament, he saw a pattern that had been overlooked by many in European history. He looked into the Old Testament and he noticed that there was a Moses, and that Moses seemed to run the government, but there was Aaron, who seemed to run the worship of that which you might call a church. Through the Old Testament he noticed there was a difference between church government and civil government. Now this was, in a way, a novel idea because those two had been confused for hundreds of years in European history. So he started to write about the idea that really maybe the church should be separate from the civil government. Now in those days in jolly Old England it was James who was King. He wasn't exactly the model of a good church leader, perhaps. So there were those who, as they read these writings, took them to heart. They were called Brownists or Separatists. They came up with the idea that they would start their own church separate from the King. Now this idea didn't go over politically very well at all. So this group of people met together, created their own little, if you would, New Testament church. They elected their own leaders and they met in a manor house in Scrooby, England. Well, the King, in response to these things said, I am going to hurry them out of England. So he put them in stocks and he taxed them and harassed them and charged them falsely with all kinds of things and persecuted them to the point that these Separatists had to leave England, one group after the next. There weren't that many, maybe several thousand in England at the time. They went, as many of you know to Lieden, over in the Netherlands and Holland. There they worked a very, very hard existence and had their difficulties there trying to learn a new language and trying to find a way to make a living. One of the things they found after they had been there some period of time was that their children started picking up some bad habits, in their opinion, of the Dutch children. So they determined that they needed to do something different. It was then that they looked around for the idea of perhaps finding a different place to build a new civilization based on new ideas that they had been thinking about. So the Separatists, particularly under the leadership of their pastor, John Robinson, started to consider the idea of coming to America and planting a colony. That, of course, required a lot of money. So they looked for some people to finance this expedition. They found the merchant adventurers. The merchant adventurers helped them raise the capital to fund the Mayflower. They also hired another smaller ship called the Speedwell. The picture of the Speedwell you can see on the rotunda, as the Pilgrims were having a prayer meeting aboard the Speedwell. So it was after a period of time these Separatists or Brownists, as they were called, got onboard. They traveled from Leiden, which was their hometown, to Delfthshaven. You can see in the Capitol Rotunda Delfthshaven in the background, and the Pilgrims at prayer about to leave to come over to England, where they would rendezvous with the Mayflower and other separatists who were going to be making this expedition, along with just some plain old families, jolly old blokes off the street of England. So this expedition was taking shape. The trouble was the Speedwell was a pretty leaky ship and the captain wasn't too enthused about going across the ocean. They put the gear into the ships, started to try to get off in the summertime and made one start. And the Speedwell started leaking after 3 days. They had to turn around and come back. They re-caulked the ship and set off again. It started leaking again. They could find no leaks in it. They finally decided to leave the Speedwell behind. The Mayflower had to put off with just the people they could fit in the Mayflower. Now, as they took off, you can imagine what started to happen. You have got men and women and children, a little over 100 of them, cramped in very tight quarters aboard the Mayflower. And if you have been at ship at sea for a little while, you know what happened. They started turning greenish in color and started getting violently seasick. In the meantime, they had a bosun that made kind of a sport of making fun of them, saying, ``Puke socks, we have seen this before. We will be soon wrapping you up in a sail and sending you down to feed the fish.'' So it was that they started this very long and difficult voyage in the Mayflower across the stormy North Atlantic. Now, these people were praying people, a good many of them, and you can imagine they were hoping they would get a nice, easy voyage. But it didn't happen that way. Instead, the storms just howled around them, and they continued seasick. And it was about a 66-day voyage that they were pretty much not quite locked, but kept completely underneath the deck. There was one of them that just couldn't stand this, the foul air down in the cabin with all of these kids crying and mothers and everybody seasick, who came up on deck, and a wave about washed him overboard. And he was in the ocean for a while, and he put his arm out, grabbed a rope and was hauled back into the ship. He was about blue, he was so cold, and he went down under the deck and didn't stick his head out again until they finally sighted land. Well, as they were about two-thirds or so away across the Atlantic, the ship was pitched from side to side in the huge storms. There was a groan and a terrible creak as the main beam that supported the mast, the main mast of the Mayflower started to give way. It was cracking and sagging under the weight of the mast and the duress of the wind and the sails of the Mayflower. The captain, taking a look, thought they might have to put back, but they were in very bad shape with the beam cracking this way. It was then that some of the passengers remembered the big printing press that was in the hold of the Mayflower. They wrestled it into position, jacked it up and forced the huge oak beam back into place, and the Mayflower continued on. Finally sighting land, not in Virginia where they had intended to go, but blown north of their course by the heavy storms and sighting the windswept coast of Cape Cod. Now, they immediately tried to sail south to get down toward the Hudson River. The south side of the Hudson River in those days was known as the Virginia area. It was really what we think of as New York. And the storms did not allow the Mayflower to make that. The ships are not very good at running close hull to the wind, and the treacherous shoals and sandbars around Cape Cod were threatening. The decision was made then to anchor in Provincetown Harbor and then to find a suitable location for their plantation north up in the area that we now know as Cape Cod and Massachusetts. This brought on a little bit of a political crisis, and it is one of the beginning and most amazing stories of the Pilgrims, because when they were there in Provincetown Harbor, the people that were not so much known as Christians, the jolly old blokes off the street of England, they were known as strangers. There were saints and strangers. The saints were known as the Christians. The strangers were just the people off the streets of England. The strangers said, hey, when we get to shore, no rules, mate, like down under, and we will do whatever we want. Sensing a certain amount of anarchy, the saints decided on a course of action. They took out a piece of paper and they wrote the Mayflower Compact. It starts out, ``In ye name of God, Amen. We do covenant and combine ourselves together unto a civil body politic for the glory of God, for the advancement of the Christian faith,'' and it goes on to say ``to frame such just and equal laws as would be meek and necessary for our little plantation.'' In other words, what had happened, the very first time in all of human history, a group of free people under God created a civil government covenantly and elected their own leadership to that little civil government. This was the first written constitution in all of history that we know of, and it was the very beginning of all of American civil government. If you think about that formula, under God, a group of free people creating their own civil government to protect their basic rights to make basic laws, this was essentially the Declaration of Independence 170 years earlier. And it was in extreme contrast to what was going on in Europe, because in Europe, the basic model of all of government was the divine right of kings. When the king says ``jump,'' everybody is supposed to say ``how high?'' But here in America, there was a new model, completely new technology, the idea of a written Constitution, that under God a group of free people could create a civil government to be their servant. And so it was that the Pilgrims at this very time in Provincetown had taken their idea of a New Testament church, a group of free people under God, covenanting together to create a church, and they picked up the idea, even though they knew very well that there was a difference between church government and civil government, but they used the same pattern, and they picked it up and carried it across and applied it in the Mayflower Compact. So you have in the first time in history the beginning of a whole new view of how a country should be built. Now, this was very much in keeping with the sermon that Pastor Robinson had given to the Pilgrims as they left. He had been a wonderful pastor to these people in Leiden and steered them from a lot of dangers. But as he said good-bye to them, knowing probably that he would never see them again, he said, Now, be very careful when you go to America to plant this Christian civilization, be very careful what you adopt as true, sayeth he, for it is unlikely that a Christian civilization should spring so rapidly out of such anti-Christian darkness. What he was saying was that the patterns of the way things had been done in Europe were maybe not consistent with the Bible, and that they should be very careful how they built this new civilization. And this first step, this creation of a covenant, the Mayflower Compact, is essentially the beginning of all of our civil government in America. Well, of course, they couldn't stay in Provincetown forever. They took a prefabricated boat called a shallop that it was put together in the hold of the Mayflower in pieces. They took it out and assembled it on the shore. It had been damaged by the storms, and they continued to explore around the inside of Cape Cod. As they did, they had an encounter with the Indians who attacked them. Fortunately, nobody was hurt on either side. The Pilgrims continued on around, almost freezing and getting caught in the surf, and, miraculously, almost at the time when there was no more sunlight, the wind was blowing hard and the ice was freezing on their clothes, they came into the shelter of an island, which they didn't really know quite where they were, and they had sailed around the inside of Cape Cod over to Plymouth Harbor. In the morning they discovered that they were on an island that was safe, there were no other Indians there, and they made a whole series of discoveries that they were in a harbor that was more than twice deep enough for the Mayflower. They found there was land that had been cleared and nobody appeared to claim it, fresh water coming down the hillsides of what we now know as Plymouth, even a pretty good size rock, I suppose, that they could land on. So, taking the shallop back to the Mayflower, the Mayflower came across from Provincetown over to Plymouth, anchored in the harbor, and they started there late in December on putting together their little civilization. In fact, it was Christmas Day that they started in on some of the buildings in Plymouth Plantation. Well, things became very difficult for the Pilgrims at that time. They started to die. They died from what they called the general sickness. It was probably caused by scurvy and colds and pneumonia and various things that weakened them. In December, eight of the 100 or so Pilgrims died. And then it got worse in January and February. By the time they got to March, almost half of the crew and half of the Pilgrims had died. Now, that I suppose would be kind of a discouraging thing for people who felt that they had come over here with this noble expedition in mind, the idea of building a new civilization on new principles. At that time the captain of the Mayflower, who had been standing with them, the Mayflower had been anchored in Plymouth harbor, said: it is about time for us to go back to England. It has been a great try, but half of my crew is dead and half of you are dead. You need to get on the Mayflower and come back to England with me. You can picture yourself now on the shore of Plymouth and the boatswain is giving the calls. The anchor cable is winched up from the bottom of the harbor, covered with seaweed. The boatswain gives the commands and the yardarms are swung to the wind. At first large and then small, the Mayflower disappears over the horizon. The wind is blowing through the pine trees behind and 50 people, a little over 50 people, the Pilgrims, left standing on the shore amid some primitive huts they had been able to build. You may ask: What was the dream? Why would these people dare take such a tremendous risk? And the answer was found by the sermon Robinson preached about the idea of building a new civilization on new ideas. So it was then not so many days later that they were greeted by a cry from the lookout: Indian coming. You mean Indians? No, Indian coming. Here walking down the main street of their little village was an Indian with nothing but a loincloth. It was very cold weather, and he said in very broken English, Do you have any beer? What an interesting thing to ask for. It turned out it was Samoset. He was an Indian chief from up in Maine. He had a little bit of wanderlust and he was down visiting Massasoit. He heard about the settlers that were trying to make a go of things at Plymouth, and he came over to see how they were doing. After they fed him a good meal, they told him about the Indians they had seen in the distance, but none had bothered them at their site in Plymouth. What they found out was that the Indians that had lived in the land there at Plymouth were the Patuxets, quite a war-like tribe, but the war-like tribe had been destroyed by a plague a few years before. Almost all of the Patuxets was dead. There was one at least alive. He had been taken by a sea captain and was going to be sold into slavery in Spain, and he was rescued by some monks and managed to get to England and later got across the ocean back ultimately to find his village and home gone because of the damages of the plague that had come before. So it was that Samoset introduced them to another Indian by the name of Tisquantam, one of the last of the Patuxets. Tisquantam, or Squanto, as we know it, had not really had a whole lot to live for. But when he came to see these hard-pressed Pilgrims, he felt sorry for them so he taught them how to plant corn and how to find those eels by going barefoot in the mud by the side of the streams. And he helped them to survive through the first year. And following that and their being able to plant some corn, they celebrated in the fall their first Thanksgiving. The idea was that the settlers, the Pilgrims, invited Massasoit, who turned out to be a very fine Indian chief, and contrary to some people's understanding of history, was very loyal and followed all of the treaties they set up and was a good chieftain, as was his son. Massasoit was invited to celebrate the first Thanksgiving that the Pilgrims had, and he decided to bring some of his other Indian friends along, quite a few Indian friends, so you had even more Indians than there were Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving. They had a good meal. The Indians weren't in any mood to leave, and so Thanksgiving continued for 3 days. There was wrestling and foot racing and sort of military drills, and all kinds and manner of things. The Indians did the hunting for turkey and deer and the Pilgrims were cooking and baking fruit pies, perhaps, and things like that. So they celebrated Thanksgiving, not just for a day but for 3 days, and it was an event that was a great celebration and was a great success. So we have the tradition that particularly the Pilgrims and other groups passed on to us. Thanksgiving became a popular day in the colonies. All sorts of towns celebrated it on different days and times of year. To my knowledge, the first national Thanksgiving was declared in 1777 by the Continental Congress many, many years later. That was to celebrate the victory at Saratoga. That also is depicted in our rotunda in the beautiful, large Trumbull-painted rendition of the surrender of the British at Saratoga. So that was a national day of Thanksgiving that was recommended by the Continental Congress. The words of these Thanksgivings, for instance the actual declaration of Thanksgiving by the Continental Congress, were explicitly Christian. It starts out: ``Forasmuch as it is the indispensable duty of all men to adore the superintending Providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with gratitude their obligation to Him for benefits received and to implore such further blessing as they stand in need of; and it having pleased Him in his abundant mercy not only to continue to us the innumerable bounties of His common Providence to smile upon us as in the prosecution of a just and necessary war for the defense and establishment of our unalienable rights and liberties.'' And it goes on to talk about Christ and the Holy Ghost. This is a product of the Continental Congress in 1777 after winning the Battle of Saratoga. There were other Thanksgivings, and then eventually George Washington declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789. He says: ``Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protections and favor.'' That is Washington as he declared a day of Thanksgiving in celebration of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. So that is the tradition of Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims passed Thanksgiving along to us, and of course this first Thanksgiving was a pretty good one. It lasted 3 days with the Indians. If we look back and think about this little group of heroes that came to America, what we find was it was an awful lot more than Thanksgiving they gave us. They gave us a whole view of civil government, the idea that government is created by a group of free people and that there is no sovereign. In fact, in the War of Independence, the battle cry was ``No King But King Jesus.'' It was the idea of a group of people created under God to defend a set of rights. And as we later worded it, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So they give us this idea of a written Constitution in 1620. They also understood that we celebrate civil government from church government. That may seem ho-hum to most Americans, but we have to realize that the Europeans still use tax money to pay for their churches. And, of course, the Islamists tend to mix civil and church government completely together. So this technology that the Pilgrims brought us was extremely significant, far more significant probably than the celebration of Thanksgiving. So we have the whole constitutional form of government, the separation of civil and church governments, and then later in the fall, the Pilgrims took another step. The loan sharks in England who had arranged the journey over on the Mayflower had insisted that everyone work in a common store. That was socialism, that is, everybody owned everything. Well, that didn't work. Governor Bradford took a good look at that. It was not working. The people were going to starve to death, and so they basically canned socialism and he wrote in his history of ``Plymouth Plantation'' as though men were wiser than God and the ancient conceit of Plato and others who thought that they were smarter than God and he said this thing has been tried among Godly and sober people, and it just doesn't work. And so they pitched socialism out and were able to do a lot better in the colonies. Even so, it would be another 7 years before Governor Bradford would write that they could relax and taste the goodness of the land. It was a very hard time for the Pilgrims in this time period. But I think it is important for us to remember as we join together with our families and we enjoy the wonderful tradition of Thanksgiving, to remember the other blessings that this little group, this adventuresome little group of men and women and children that came to this land. Of course, Jamestown was settled by men; they called them adventurers. But they were not women and children so much. These were people that put their families onboard ship and risked it all to make a beachhead in a new land. And they came with new ideas, ideas that have been a great blessing to us. I think it is important for us to remember how it was that God heard their prayers and used them. And Governor Bradford would write a little wistfully saying that he hoped that as a candle can kindle other candles, yet that they might be a bit of a light to a whole new country that would be born. Little did he know what would happen as a result of the blessings that they brought us across the ocean, this first little group of waterlogged marines as they landed in Provincetown and then Plymouth Harbor. And so the story of Thanksgiving is mixed tightly and connected tightly together with our heritage as a Nation, and I think it is important for us to remind our children and our families the high price that was paid even at an early date. Another thing that many people don't understand or don't know is that when the first Constitution in the Mayflower Compact was 1620, it was only 18 years later in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut that you had the entire U.S. Constitution, the whole technology for our U.S. Constitution pretty much in place in Connecticut in 1638. The license plates in Connecticut say ``The Constitution State,'' and with good reason, because the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut had federalism and most of the developments in terms of civil government that we now have in the U.S. Constitution. People sometimes say, well, this was the product of enlightenment thinking. This was way, way before the enlightenment. This was the result of a group of people who came here, first of all, the Pilgrims, who took their principle of a new testament church and simply applied it to government; and, following that, by a pastor by the name of Hooker, who was Cambridge educated, came from England, first landed in Boston, was a friend of Winthrops, and then went to found Connecticut. And as a result of his sermons, this Fundamental Orders of Connecticut is drafted. I think the only thing that is missing possibly is the bicameral nature of the legislature, and some of us in this body are not sure that the Senate was a good invention anyway. But be that as it may, you had this Constitution, which is pretty much the U.S. Constitution, as early as 1638. And so as we celebrate Thanksgiving once more, I think we can remember the idea of separating civil government from church government, the idea of a written Constitution, the idea of pitching socialism out, and the tremendous courage and dream that they had for a new Nation, which we have inherited and have been blessed with. So it is a beautiful time to celebrate Thanksgiving. Thank you for sticking with me as we think a little bit about this little group of courageous people that settled these shores.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today in recognition of the eighth annual National Adoption Day. On November 17, 2007, a record number of courts across the country will open their doors to finalize the adoptions of thousands of children from foster care. Every child deserves a permanent and loving family and today there are 114,000 children in foster care who are still in need of adoptive homes. I laud the goals of National Adoption Day 2007 which include: Finalizing adoptions from foster care in all 50 States; celebrating and honoring all families who adopt; raising awareness about the 114,000 children currently in foster care waiting for adoption; encouraging others to adopt children from foster care; building collaboration among local adoption agencies, courts, and advocacy organizations. I applaud the efforts of the hundreds of volunteer lawyers, foster care professionals, child advocates and local judges who will come together to celebrate adoptions. I hope the goals of National Adoption Day are met and far exceeded.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, before us tonight is yet another Democrat plan, a plan for failure. I guess it's really not quite so much a plan as just a schedule for failure. It seems ironic to me that when there is actually success, the Democrats are having a hard time seeing the success. And that's, perhaps, because the success that is going on in Iraq is not a big government, Washington, D.C. beltway kind of success. It's not the Parliament in Baghdad where the success is going on. No, it's a uniquely American and a special success. It's the success that bubbles from the hearts of the very people that are involved, from the local communities, from the streets, and particularly from the sheiks. It's the kind of thing that happened in America where local communities stood up against the biggest military power in the world and defended our declaration in the same way these sheiks now are paying a tremendous price. One, Sheik Meshin al-Jamari, he was encouraged to come back from his safe haven in Jordan. He came back to take up responsibility for his tribal area just to the east of Fallujah. And what was the cost when he turned on al Qaeda? First, his daughter was killed, then his brother shot, and then his family rounded up inside a house in Karma, and the house imploded upon their heads. And yet, that sheik is standing firm because he does have a vision for the possibility that there will one day be an Iraq where people can be free. Our General Allen was asked by some of the Iraqis in his tribe, they said, When the British left, they left us a big skyscraper. When America leaves Iraq, will you leave a skyscraper? And General Allen said, No. We'll leave the ideas that leave you a free people. And one day there will be Iraqis who come to us and they will say, Hey, GI Joe, we believe it too. We believe that there is a God that gives inalienable rights to all people, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and we will also stand with you because you have that hope. It is my hope that the Americans and the Democrats will rediscover why we have always gone to war in America, because we do believe in our battle cry from years ago that there is a God that gives basic rights to all people and that we must have the courage to stand behind those things. I hope that the Congress will vote to reject a plan of defeat.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Westchester Elementary in the Kirkwood School District and Conway Elementary in the Ladue School District of St. Louis, Missouri. These two schools were recently awarded the prestigious title of No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon Schools. As many of my colleagues know, the No Child Left Behind-Blue Ribbon Schools Program honors public and private K-12 schools that are either academically superior in their states or that demonstrate dramatic gains in student achievement. In 2007, only 5 Missouri schools and 287 nationwide have earned the high honor of Blue Ribbon Schools. It is the efforts and demand for excellence exemplified by Westchester and Conway Elementary that will pave the way for the successful futures of our Nation's children. I applaud the dedication of teachers and staff at Westchester and Conway. I sincerely hope their high standards of teaching are emulated by other schools in Missouri. I am pleased to be able to honor Westchester and Conway Elementary today. They are remarkable examples of the great teachers we have in Missouri and I ask my colleagues to join me in wishing them the best in their future endeavors as educators in Missouri.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I was unable to participate in the following votes. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: November 5, 2007: rollcall vote No. 1034, on motion to close portions of the Conference on the FY2008 Department of Defense Appropriations, I would have voted ``aye''; rollcall vote No. 1035, on motion to suspend the rules and pass, as amended, H.R. 513--National Heroes Credit Protection Act, I would have voted ``aye''; rollcall vote No. 1036, on motion to suspend the rules and agree, H. Res. 744--Recognizing the contributions of Native American veterans and calling upon the President to issue a proclamation urging the people of the United States to observe a day in honor of Native American veterans, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, it's been 144 days since the House passed the Veterans Affairs appropriations bill. This is a bill which does research on prosthetic kinds of devices. It helps to rebuild veterans facilities. It helps to treat things like traumatic stress disorder. That's the purpose for the money that has been waiting now since we passed it 144 days ago. Unfortunately, that bill has been held up in order to connect it with other legislation ladened with pork on the HHS bill. Now, it's been many years since I was a combat engineer in the Army, but my son is freshly back from Fallujah, and to hold our veterans hostage in order to try to slide greasy pork through Washington is the wrong thing for the Democrats to be doing. They need to allow the bill to stand on its own base, let the people take a vote, and respect the veterans that we want to respect.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize Mr. Robert A. Reynolds, Jr., an exceptional leader from my district in St. Louis, Missouri. Since 2000, Bob has served as President and CEO of Graybar Electric Co., Inc, a Fortune 500 company employing nearly 8,000 men and women at more than 250 distribution centers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Prior to his election as Chairman of the Board at Graybar in 2001, Bob served in various capacities at the company. He joined Graybar in 1972 as an office salesman, was transferred to the Philadelphia unit as a sales representative in 1977 and was later appointed manager of the national consumer products accounts at corporate headquarters in 1979. After serving as a branch manager in New York and Connecticut, he was appointed district manager in Seattle. Bob eventually became Vice President of Communications Markets and Vice President of Communication and Data Business before he was named Senior Vice President of Electrical Business in 2000. During his tenure as President and CEO, Graybar was on the Fortune America's Most Admired Companies list for six consecutive years. Bob's leadership over the years has proven invaluable not only to Graybar, but to the community as a whole. He currently serves on the boards of the National Association of Electrical Distributors, the Boy Scouts of Greater Saint Louis, the United Way of Greater Saint Louis, the Saint Louis Club, the Log Cabin Club, Civic Progress of Saint Louis, and the Saint Louis Regional Commerce and Growth Association. He is the former Chairman of the Board at the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) and now serves as Past Chairman of the Board. I am pleased to be able to honor Robert A. Reynolds, Jr. today. He is a remarkable example of the great leadership we have in Missouri and I know all of my colleagues join me in wishing he and his family the very best as he finishes his service at NAW.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, today is Halloween. The Democrats are doing a good job celebrating it. They are handing out entitlements like Halloween candy. The question is how are we going to pay for it. Well, they have approved $431 billion in new taxes this year, but for Halloween they have got something that is really scary: the mother of all tax increases, the biggest tax increase in the history of our country, $3.5 trillion. The question becomes on Halloween, with fuel prices going up, with the cost of health care going up, with the cost of housing going up, how can we face something as scary as the mother of all tax increases.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer this amendment to the Small Business Contracting Program Improvements Act. As many involved in the Federal contracting world know, the 8(a) program currently serves small businesses owned by citizens who are socially and economically disadvantaged. Since the 1960s, the 8(a) program has remained the primary vehicle through which minority-owned businesses enter the Federal marketplace. There is no doubt that since its inception the 8(a) has helped many minority-owned businesses grow their firms, enabling them to become real players in the Federal contracting world. In fact, over the course of the program, nearly 20,000 companies have received almost $100 billion in Federal contracts. During committee markup of this bill, I expressed my reservations to Chairwoman Velazquez regarding certain provisions in the bill that exclude the equity in a business. I'm concerned that this provision undermines the argument concerning the competitive capacity of the business owners. I will explain. Many owners reinvest their earnings into their businesses, thus increasing the value of the business. If the 8(a) program is a business development program targeted toward socially and economically disadvantaged firms, why should the business owner with a valuable asset be permitted in the program and benefit from its existence? I would argue that the scarce resources available to assist these business owners be devoted to those business owners that are truly economically disadvantaged. My amendment is a straightforward amendment that I hope will address some of these concerns. Essentially, the amendment would ask the administrator of the Small Business Administration to conduct a study to determine what changes would be required to provide greater Federal contracting assistance to participants in the 8(a) program that have less equity in their business concerns than other participants in the program. I appreciate Chairwoman Velazquez's willingness to work with me on this important issue, and I believe that adoption of my amendment is one step towards ensuring that minority-owned small businesses who truly need assistance can continue to benefit from the opportunities provided to them by the 8(a) program. I would urge my colleagues to assist and support this amendment. In closing, my point on this is the following: As a business is small and most in need of the 8(a) program, we want to make sure that they can get as many of these programs as possible, and that will build their business up. As the business then prospers and grows through the years, they will continue to get these different 8(a) kinds of contracts, which give them essentially a 10 percent advantage. But as the business becomes bigger and stronger, what I'm interested in doing is creating a sliding scale so that those valuable contracts will be guaranteed to go to the most needy businesses, and as a business gets stronger and stronger, the number or the percentage of those contracts will tend to diminish as they become stronger and more able to survive on their own. I think that's a concept that has been understood and to some degree approved within the committee. The question is how do we mechanically work that out, and the purpose of this amendment is to give ourselves a little time to actually figure out mathematically how do you make sure that those contracts go to the most needy, and as people become less needy, that they have less and less dependence on. I very much appreciate the chairwoman's willingness to work with us on this, and hopefully we can figure out mechanically some way to do that that everybody could agree to. Mr. Chairman, I yield back my time.

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Crider Health Center, located in St. Charles, Missouri. Recently, the Department of Health & Human Services announced that Crider Health Center's application to become a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) was approved. For the past 27 years, the Crider Health Center has provided mental health treatment and services for underinsured and uninsured adults, children and families affected by persistent mental illness and serious emotional disorders. Since its inception, the Center has notably expanded its service programs to meet the rapidly changing expectations in the area of mental health service delivery. Such dedication has enabled Crider to serve over 35,000 residents a year in a four-county area who are in desperate need of such services. Previously, the Crider Health Center faced consistent challenges in obtaining medical and oral health care services for their patients. In fact, the nearest federally qualified health centers for persons living in this four-county area were in St. Louis, Potosi and Columbia, Missouri. Such distances created a considerable challenge in terms of access for low-income residents in Crider's service area. Crider Health Center's new FQHC status will allow Crider to integrate its current mental health care services with primary and oral health care services. This integration not only allows Crider to better serve its consumers but aid in further addressing the health care disparities in the St. Louis region. I congratulate the Crider Health Center's recent FQHC designation. The Crider Health Center is an exemplary example of the leadership we have in Missouri and I am pleased to honor them in their continued endeavor to provide for the needs of the people in the St. Louis region.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, last week on ABC's news program, Charlie Gibson announced the news in Iraq. He said, ``The news is, there isn't any news.'' That's right. Across all of Iraq, there were no fatalities, shootings and bombs going off. As the media has started to recognize that we have turned the corner and are winning the war in Iraq, this pressing question, once again, comes before the House, and that is, what are the Democrats going to do with the bill that we have already passed and that the Senate has already passed to provide money for our veterans? Eighteen million dollars every day is being wasted for the last 130 days because we won't bring this veterans funding bill back for final approval. It has the votes. What are we waiting for, post-traumatic stress syndrome? Veterans hospitals? Veterans clinics? We have to ask the Democrat leadership why a 130-day wait. It's time for us to fund our veterans.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Now we are getting to the problem. The problem is that the government is getting in the way and the Democrats are getting in the way of us collecting intelligence to protect our constituents. Now, the lady from Tennessee, you talked about some common sense, and the common sense of the matter is some of us remember September 11, and these people are not nice people; right?