John Carter

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. I will yield now to my friend from Iowa (Mr. King.)

Mr. CARTER. To finish up this particular subject, let me just point out that I think most people know that the Fed has, as one of its things it does, it uses interest rates to micromanage our economy. It prints money. And the more money that it puts out there, the less value our dollar has. It has an affect on every part of our lives. Now if you have never contracted with the Federal Government, back in the 1970s, I did a lot of work for people who built section 8 housing projects. And let me tell you, because you're dealing with large numbers, this is what you would hear, you had to be looked at and relooked at and relooked at, which is the right thing, to make sure nobody is doing something wrong. When you're dealing with $8 million or $10 million, the government wants to look closely at how that money is being spent, are the subcontractors being paid, and so forth. Now, why do they do that? Because they know the nature of certain people is such that there can be wrongdoing. We are talking about trillions of dollars. And we ought to at least know a little bit that an audit would tell us about what's going on at the Fed. So that's Ron Paul's bill. I'm going to go to another bill. It's not really a bill, but just a comment. We've been talking about the Rangel rule. I've got a new one today. We are going to talk about Mr. Geithner again because he is back in the news because he says he has got this bank, UBS, over in Switzerland, to open their secret vaults and let him know what's over there. And he is being very magnanimous to the people he thinks have been hiding funds overseas. He is telling them that, I know you. I've made a successful raid. I know who you are. Now if you step up and pay your taxes, we're only going to give a maximum of a 20 percent penalty for your failing to pay taxes. Wait a minute. What about the Geithner gesture here? When he talks to these people, he owed $17,230, no penalty. He owed another $25,960, no penalty. He used bad child credits. He filed additional taxes with interested infrastructure, he had a faulty retirement plan, an improper small business deduction, and he was expensing utility costs that went for personal use. All these things he was doing to no penalty. We call this the fox watching the hen house; he says they've cheated the government. And maybe they have. Where I come from, if they cheated the government and there's penalties to be assessed, fine. Everybody ought to get the penalty. When I've been late on paying my taxes, and I have, I filed not on April 15 before, I filed on August 15 before, I filed on October 15 before. I paid my penalties, and I paid my interest because that's what you're supposed to do. I think it is curious that this is the subject of Mr. Geithner's conversation when he has not. He, the boss of the IRS, has not been assessed any penalties. So I throw that out for quick discussion. I think it's interesting. The Geithner rule ought to be zero penalties on taxes paid back on unreported income until Mr. Geithner pays his.

Mr. CARTER. Thank you, everybody, for participating. It's most important you remember the subject of this conversation, and that is the rule of law that holds this society together. Never forget. We're all talking about rules and laws and how they seem to be stretched and violated. We've got to get back to the rule of law governing this Nation. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, thank you. We feel real good when we can call a colleague out of the dark. We're glad you're here. We are just about to wrap up our time. Before we stop, I'm doing something different today. We've been talking about an awful lot. This is probably the most we've talked about in a single hour. As soon as this is over with, as soon as I walk across the street to my office, if you go to www.house.gov/carter, we're going to have a live Webcast for the next hour-and-a-half where you can ask questions and make comments about what we've talked about here, or anything else that's bothering you or that you're concerned about, I want to have it, so that you can tell Congress what you think. I've already started doing this. I enjoy it. I've already got 300 questions waiting right now. I'm going to advertise a little bit and welcome people to come to this Webcast. Mr. Speaker, how much time have I got left?

Mr. CARTER. We're just about to run out of time. We had a surprise guest come from the back of the room. Would you like to tell us about the czars? Did we stimulate you?

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, the previous discussion that took a little over an hour before we came to the floor commending Senator Kennedy and his legacy, it seems to me that when we're talking about civility, which is one of the things they talk about, if we can get back to civility, I think the 72-hour rule would have something to do with that. Very quickly, I want to go to one more thing and then I want to come back and talk about ACORN. We're the czar champions of the world. We have got more czars than the Romanovs had in the entire history of their dynasty, and our friend Steve Scalise, who was going to be here tonight but he got tied up and couldn't come, he's got a bill to sunset these czars. A czar is someone who heads a task force, a council, is appointed by the President without the consent of the Senate, is excepted from the competitive service and does not have an existing removal date. Appropriated funds can't be used to pay for salaries and expenses of task forces or councils established by the President and headed by a czar. This is what he's trying to do. He's trying to put a sunset on the czar policy, because it seems to an awful lot of people in this country, the term ``czar'' means absolute power, and they've created these positions of absolute power without any oversight. I will start with my friend from Georgia.

Mr. CARTER. I yield to my friend from Iowa.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, it's kind of interesting that, back to our other subject, talking about holding the Federal Reserve accountable, one of the suggestions was that the Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner be able to review the books of the Fed. Probably the smartest thing the Fed said was, No, I don't think that's a good idea, and maybe there's something to that. That may be the smartest thing the Fed has done in a long time. We have got another issue that's been an issue for many of us, and Greg Walden and John Culberson and Brian Baird have introduced a bill, House Res. 554, and they're asking that each bill have 72 hours before you take action. And this is not hard for us. We know what they're talking about because we have seen in this Congress bill after bill after bill spending billions and billions and billions of dollars that we get in the middle of the night to vote on the next day. And all they're saying is, let's do what, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the rules of this body, still follows. He said they need 3 days before voting. That's in Thomas Jefferson's rules, which he wrote for this House, and they're basically the same rules we follow now, with some changes that have been made. All they're asking to do is let's do what Jefferson said we ought to do in this House, and what they did in this House for a century, well, let's do it. I yield to Mr. Westmoreland.

Mr. CARTER. Do you wish to be heard on this, Mr. King?

Mr. CARTER. We're working on it.

Mr. CARTER. I do.

Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, to my hall mate, Mr. Kennedy, that was a moving tribute and well deserved. I am glad we could yield the time. The subject of this hour that we have been talking about now for, I believe, about 14 or 15 weeks is we are talking about the rule of law and how the rule of law must prevail. It is the glue that holds our society together. And when we start to ignore rules or ignore others' laws, then we are ignoring what our Founding Fathers intended to rule us. When we established this Nation, the people who established it came from a monarchy. Yet they felt that a much greater society would be a society which would pledge itself to the rules, not to the authority. So they didn't want a king. They didn't want some powerful dictator. They wanted the rules to prevail in the Nation. And that's one of the secret parts of the society that was created that nobody can see, that over time has developed the most important and most powerful Nation on the face of the Earth that has ever existed. We cannot ignore that rule of law today. We cannot let personalities or concepts or attitudes change the fact that there are rules that you follow, and you must follow those rules. And there are laws, both civil and criminal laws, that have to be upheld. We as a society have created those laws. They have governed us in some instances since the beginning of the Republic. And to waive or to ignore those laws, we do it at our peril. So tonight we're going to talk about some legislation that addresses the issue of ignoring or not following certain laws or bending laws. We are going to start off with my good friend Roscoe Bartlett. I'm going to yield to him, and he's going to talk to us about a bill that he has, H.R. 2743, the Car Dealer Equity Act, in which he talks about the fact that he feels some laws, some contract laws, were either bent or ignored. I yield to my colleague.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, I thank you, Roscoe. You have hit on something that when that all happened to me, I just wondered what happened to the law of contract. Where did it go? When did our executive branch think it had the authority to just negate contracts in order for people to, through some threats that were made to settle a bankruptcy, to lose dealerships that--I talked to people in my district. It was not only did you lose your dealership, but your work product got handed to the people you'd been competing with. Just kind of free gratis. You get the win, and I get nothing. And of course, hopefully this will be resolved in the courts or something. I don't know what's going to happen. But Roscoe is on the right road. We can do something about it here because if you can't contract, you don't have freedom, and especially freedom of commerce. If you can't make an honest contract with somebody and depend upon that and have it be enforceable in the courts of our country--because the rule of contract is sacred. If you don't have that, which we'd had for the history of our Nation, then the rules of commerce come tumbling down. And we keep hearing people say, Do we want to be a Banana Republic? And nothing against our poor Banana Republic neighbors, but that's what happens when you don't have the rule of law. You can't make a deal that can be enforced and people become--go more and more to the dark side in their trading habits. And this is one of the issues that when we've got the world economy we've got to deal with. We've got multiple subject matters, and we are going to start with one that's all over the front page. Roscoe is going to fix the auto dealers, and I am on that bill and proud to be there. We've got a bill by Leader Boehner and Darrell Issa, Defunding ACORN Act, and my friend, Lynn Westmoreland from Georgia, is here to join me, and my friend Mr. King from Iowa is here to join me. And we've got a bunch of things to talk about here today. Let's talk about ACORN. I think those videos that the American public have now seen were a shocking wake-up when they had already heard about all of the ACORN violations. We'd already heard about this, and it didn't seem to be bothering anybody that there were all kinds of election law frauds, convictions, and so forth across the country. But then we saw advice being given to two people pretending to be into criminal activity, and you saw people that seemed to be encouraging child prostitution calling it a business, how to do your taxes, just like they weren't talking about criminal activity. And I think that shocked America into realizing that all of this was real, and that cheating on elections and cheating on voter registration and so forth was just as criminal and just led to further, more criminal activities. And now, all of a sudden, the folks at ACORN are all over the front page. So I will yield to my friend, Mr. Westmoreland from Georgia, to let him make a few comments on this. And you've got a sign there. What have you got, Lynn?

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Yes. If you get enough votes to pass the bill that says I want this bill voted on, any Member can file a discharge petition asking that that bill be voted on. If he gets enough people to sign his discharge petition that it would pass, by the signatures on the discharge petition, then it will be called up against the ruling of the majority party.

Mr. CARTER. I thank my fellow judge and friend from Texas, first off, for being here to start this, because I was across town, and was fighting the traffic to get back. I apologize for not being here on time, but sometimes things don't cooperate around here like they should. We're starting off by talking about--and I think you've probably told people we're again addressing what we've been addressing every week now for probably 12 or 14 weeks. It's very simple that the rule of law must prevail in this country. That means that we have to have rules both of this House, of this Nation and of our States. We have to abide by those rules. The failure to abide by those rules has to have consequences. So we've been talking a lot about internal things that go on with the Ethics Committee and so forth here in the Congress. Now, tonight, we're talking about some things that are in the news that, once again, are under the subject of the rule of law. It puts a bright light on an issue that we really need to be concerned about, and that is the issue with ACORN. I think, probably, an awful lot of people have seen this video, what we have right here. I know, if they watch Fox News, they've seen the video, but I think now it's being shown on other stations. It's of these actors who pretended to be a pimp and a prostitute, who went to ACORN and asked for their advice on housing and taxes. They were basically given a hand on how to do things--on how to do fraudulent activities, on how not to get caught, on how to beat the system, on how to be able to run a child prostitution ring, and on how not to claim those people as dependents because you don't want people to know about them--all kinds of things like that, things from an agency which is supposed to be there to help people, an agency which is supposed to be law-abiding, which has received $50 million worth of American taxpayer money to help fund that organization, and which is standing in line right now, based upon bills that have already been passed through this House, to pick up another $8 billion--with a ``b''--as a potential that could go into ACORN's hands as community organizers. This shocking event happened not just at one place but in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York, San Bernardino, and San Diego. They all have videos showing this.

Mr. CARTER. Of course I will yield.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, the only thing is that the $8 billion right now was in the stimulus bill and in some of the other bills, and it's available to be played with right now; whereas, H.R. 3200 has yet to pass this House. We anticipate it might. If there's a party line vote, it might pass this House. You're right. There is additional funding in that bill. As we talk about this scandal, which is a scandal that has broken on national news, let me point out that the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of this House found that ACORN had committed the following offenses: voter fraud, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, aiding and abetting, embezzlement, investment fraud, use of taxpayer funding for partisan political activity, and Department of Labor violations. Now, these are all things that have been raised by the Oversight Committee, the named ``Oversight Committee'' of this Congress. So, as we've talked about these various issues that involve the rule of law, what we want to do and what, I think, is necessary for this Nation to do is to--you know, a lot goes on in the dark, but when you put sunshine--sunlight--on an issue, you get to see a clear picture, and that's what we're about here. We're about putting sunshine on the issue so you can see a clear picture. This clear picture is awful. This country and anyone who stands up for this group of people should really be having second thoughts. So here are some other issues that are listed, and we'll go into these, but I see my friend Virginia Foxx is here. Would the lady like to claim a little bit of our time?

Mr. CARTER. Well, I thank the gentlelady for giving a good explanation. Leader Boehner, Leader John Boehner, the minority leader of the House has asked Nancy Pelosi for a stand-alone bill that will clearly define no funds go to ACORN from any source. That's going to be difficult.

Mr. CARTER. That's correct. There is a stand-alone bill, and he is calling on the Speaker to call it up. If the Speaker doesn't call it up, he is going to ask for a discharge petition so that we can force it to be called up for a vote. If we maintain the vote we got before, then we will have evidence that now this Congress overwhelmingly says ACORN is through. Although I think you have given a very adequate description of the politics that may be involved in this issue, let's go back to right and wrong, and, unfortunately, you can vote to make things sound like they look right when, in reality, the results come out wrong. I think that's a perfect point.

Mr. CARTER. That is true.

Mr. CARTER. That's absolutely correct. That is a good point.

Mr. CARTER. Just look at this chart right here. Colorado, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions. Florida, vote fraud, case pending. Michigan, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions. Minnesota, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions. Missouri, vote, mail fraud, identity theft, multiple counts with convictions. Nevada, vote fraud, multiple counts pending. Ohio, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions. Pennsylvania, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions. Washington, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions. So not only are there allegations of fraud, identity theft and other things, there are people who have been convicted by a court of those offenses. Realize that American taxpayer dollars go to fund every one of those organizations. There are, by the stimulus package and other things we have created, there are multiple grant applications out there in this spider web that Congressman Gohmert has so adequately described where there are all these offshoots, all these 501(c)(3)s out there that are nonprofits, with nonprofit status, and yet they can push up the money to the mother ship, if you will. It's a real issue. It's an issue that, quite frankly, a team of very capable people at the Justice Department should be looking into, busting up as much of it as they can. But our job, from what we are trying to do here tonight, is let people see what's there. It's bad. It's awful.

Mr. CARTER. Let me point out one thing. You made a very good point, Congressman Gohmert, when you said this internal audit thing isn't going to get it done. That's right. Let's just look at what Government Reform has discovered with the discovery they have done. First, ACORN has evaded taxes, obstructed justice, engaged in self- dealing and aided and abetted the coverup of embezzlement by Dan Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. Second, ACORN has committed investment fraud to deprive the public of its right to honest services and engaged in racketeering enterprises affecting interstate commerce. Third, ACORN has committed conspiracy to defraud the United States by using taxpayer funds for partisan political activities. Fourth, ACORN has submitted false filings to the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, and the Department of Labor in addition to violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, FLSA. Fifth, ACORN falsified and concealed facts concerning an illegal transaction between related parties in violation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, ERISA. Now, all those things, in addition to what we have discussed, and an internal audit has already been done once with no information released. Basically they look at their own books and say, We are just fine. We should have a full external audit of the books at ACORN and, quite frankly, I believe the Justice Department or this House should be involved in subpoenaing all the records of all the entities that are involved in this, and we should lay this picture out on the table, which brings us to another issue that I want to talk about. ACORN, we can talk all day and all night, but there is a new thing out there that our colleague from Texas, Ron Paul, Congressman Ron Paul has brought out, and that is holding the Federal Reserve accountable; H.R. 1207, Congressman Ron Paul's bill that's pending before the Congress and trying to get the Federal Reserve audited. Congress has given 700 billion in the Bush TARP, 787 billion in the Obama stimulus funds to the Fed. Congress and the taxpayers have no way to independently verify how those funds have been used. The American public wants to know what is happening with that money. The American public doesn't want any more double standards. Quite frankly, this is a bipartisan bill, because, quite frankly, Ron Paul points out that 1207 is sponsored by Congressman Paul but has 290 cosponsors already. Obviously there are Democrats and Republicans on this bill. There is going to be a full hearing on this on Friday. And I think people back home want to know, in fact, I got asked that the whole time I was home in August, and which I, if you recall, had said that on the floor of this House more than once, Where's our money? Where is it? What's happening to it? The stimulus isn't being spent at a rate we were told it would stimulate the economy. Special projects are being funded. Where's our money? And, then, what we forget is the Treasury and the Fed can independently pour more money into the economy. And I don't even know the number, but it could approach trillions of dollars.

Mr. CARTER. I yield back.

Mr. CARTER. Well, what our chart here shows, since 1913 the U.S. dollar has lost 95 percent of its purchasing power. The Federal Reserve has many privileges of government agencies, but many benefits of private organizations. H.R. 1207 would open the Fed operations to enhanced scrutiny. The Federal Reserve Transparency Act would achieve much-needed transparency of the Federal Reserve. Under H.R. 1207, we would audit the Federal Reserve system and the Federal Reserve banks by the end of 2010. The Comptroller General would submit a report to Congress within 90 days. The report would include recommendations for legislative or administrative action. On July 30, Ron Paul asked, Why are Wall Street and the Fed so hysterically opposed to H.R. 1207? Just what information are they so anxious to keep secret? Only an audit of the Federal Reserve will answer this question. When you really get down to it, when it's our money and they have the ability to dump money into our economy by printing it, then with--with the help of the Treasury--then what's so unreasonable for asking for an audit? I think that's a perfect point. I'll yield back to Judge Gohmert.