Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, that's so unexpected and unnecessary, and it actually means a great deal. Thank you. Somebody that's been here slugging it out longer than I would ever be able to handle, Mr. Barton from Texas came as a young man, and he's been able to endure the slings and arrows through many, many years of being in the minority. And we're back to dealing with a White House who wants, he says, to negotiate, to work with Congress, and does so by demanding to come talk to Congress, and comes. Did we have a warm, friendly meeting here as the President stood here on the second level? Well, actually we got lectured. We were lectured that we needed to pass the President's jobs bill right away, right away, 16, 17 times. We've just got to do it now. During the speech, I don't recall the President ever saying, I really don't have a bill. I don't have a bill. And, in fact, if you want to sit down and work with me, you won't be able to because in the morning I'm getting on Air Force One, funded by the taxpayers, and basically hit the campaign trail. And I'm going to be beating up on you guys in the House of Representatives for not being willing to negotiate with me, even though I'm not around. And, by the way, I'm not going to negotiate even if we sat down because you've got to take my bill completely, pass the whole thing. I'm not going to compromise on anything. That was the message for a number of weeks. Take it; pass it as it is. Never mind the fact that he didn't have a bill when he hit the road and was condemning Congress for not passing his bill. That's just strange. You would think if somebody really wants to work with Congress, really wants to do something for the people of America that are hurting--I've had four job fairs in east Texas, and I've gone to each one, and it breaks your heart. There are people in their fifties and sixties, there's a lot of young people, a bigger percentage of young people, but there were older people, tremendous experience, tremendous education and training, been laid off because of the bad economy. And it's heartbreaking even more so because this Congress and this President have to take responsibility for continuing to put more and more laws, regulations, burdens on business that keep them from being able to retain jobs, keep them from being able to expand and create more jobs. And when you hear from people who've lost their job, and they're not only brokenhearted, but they're upset because then they find out that this administration has done things like throw $600 million at Solyndra, has spent millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, to create jobs. One giveaway program, seems like I read we spent $8 million per job that was created. Different amounts resulting in a different number of jobs. One of the things I've seen in talking to people in Texas who are involved in the education system is that when the President's so-called stimulus bill in January of 2009 was passed and it was done, rammed through like the ObamaCare bill was, it didn't have, it didn't seem, the full support of America. But it had a majority in the House, it had a majority in the Senate, and so it passed. I like to think I'm objective enough that I certainly acknowledge it didn't start in January of '09 with President Obama. A good man, a smart man--he's not given credit for that--made a major mistake when President Bush trusted Hank Paulson. Paulson says, we're about to have a catastrophe, give me $700 billion and I'll keep things on track, get things back on track. We don't give $700 billion to one man and say go fix things. You don't do that in America. That's not what the country was founded for. But it was done. And as I understand it, about $250 billion of the $700 billion is around the amount that Hank Paulson squandered of the so-called stimulus or the bail-out, TARP, whatever you want to call it. Ironically, if one wishes to look at things from a political standpoint, it was pretty amazing because a Republican administration provided $700 billion to mainly bail out people on Wall Street who had donated to Democrats 4-1 over Republicans. That's what's so amazing is to hear people constantly talk about these rotten Republicans on Wall Street, when the fact is they give to Democrats 4-1 over Republicans. So, not only was it absolutely, in my mind, an immoral thing to do, to take people's hard-earned money and add it to money we borrowed from China and others to bail people out on Wall Street. That's not the America that was founded, that so much blood and treasure has been spent to establish. Wall Street executives, I've got no problem, as long as they're playing by the rules, they're not cheating people, if they make $100 million a year. I have no problem as long as they're playing fairly; but when they get greedy and end up being broke, I do think it's appropriate for them to do what Americans are supposed to do and what is set out in the Constitution to do, called bankruptcy. And AIG, it sounds like they were making money in every department except the credit default swaps. Well, gee, that's what happens when you sell what is, in effect, insurance against a catastrophic event, which would be the failure of the mortgage-backed securities to have the value that was paid for them. You ensure against that. You take what amounts to premiums. You put no money in reserve to ensure against the event you took money to ensure against; and then are shocked some day when people want to make a claim under that insurance, and you've done nothing but take profit. What a great business that was, selling insurance to ensure against mortgage-backed securities not having the value paid for them, and not having to set aside a dime of that in a reserve account so that if somebody ever makes a claim you've got to pay it back. Now, there had to be a fun business. But, again, it was immoral, it was irresponsible, and they should have been under the rules of insurance. If you're going to sell insurance, you've got to ensure against the event you took money to pay off for if it ever happens. It didn't happen, so AIG should have been allowed to go through bankruptcy. If they had enough assets, and thought they might, they were certainly making a lot of money, if they had enough assets, they could reorganize, get creditors to agree and come up with a plan for reorganization. The law is very clear. At least it used to be before the auto bailout. But that's what should have happened. Goldman Sachs, even though those were the dear, close friends of Hank Paulson, the worst Secretary of the Treasury this country has ever had until we got Tim Geithner. Now it's a close call. I'm not sure who is worse. But he bailed out his buddies at Goldman Sachs. They should have been allowed to go through reorganization if they could, and, if not, then liquidation and bankruptcy. That is what the Constitution provides for. And it should have been allowed to happen. And I realize that if that had happened, then those massive donations that the Democratic Party and President Obama got from Wall Street wouldn't have come through for him. I realize that. But this is more than about political parties and more than about political donations. It's about the life and the existence of this country. Nobody should be too big to fail. If you can get big enough that the failure of your company or your bank hurts a lot of people, then it's going to hurt a lot of people. But that is the problem when the government becomes a player. We start becoming the lending institution, we start becoming the player in insurance where we're going to be selling the insurance like we do flood insurance, and we're going to be guaranteeing all the home loans. Well, people have to be in the good graces of the Federal Government if they're going to be able to get what they want because the Federal Government becomes the player, selling the insurance, like flood insurance, or backing home mortgages, and then you have a catastrophe like we've witnessed for the last 3 years. It didn't have to happen, but it is what happens when a country moves toward being more socialistic, where the government runs everything, the GRE, government running everything. That is what ObamaCare was about, the GRE. That's what the President's stimulus bill in January of 2009 was about. We were told it was $800 billion. It turned out to be maybe more like $1 trillion. It was about the GRE, the government running everything. We heard with the President's stimulus bill in 2009, January, that if we did not pass the President's stimulus bill--the President told us, he made very clear, if you don't pass this bill, I'm warning you, unemployment could go as high as 8\1/2\ percent. Well, 2\1/2\ years later, that 8\1/2\ percent looks pretty doggone good. That would have been nice. But it got up to 10, and we're back at 9.1 for months now. The numbers are bad, but what is worse is all those people that cannot find jobs, and the biggest reason is because we have a government that thinks it is the answer when it's the problem. It's not the answer. When the government becomes the player and tries to be the player and referee, it doesn't work. When the government is so busy being a player as well as referee, it can't do its referee job very well, and so you have people like Bernie Madoff who get away for years with bilking people out of billions of dollars--life savings. That should never have happened. If the Federal Government were more interested in being the referee and making sure people played fair, Madoff couldn't have gotten away with it for that long. When the government wants to run health care as we do with Medicare and Medicaid, it becomes the problem, not the solution. And now we have seniors who are scared to death because they see what's happening. The President gets his bill, ObamaCare health bill, passed, and it has a provision for $500 billion to be cut from Medicare. And then AARP, after supporting that bill that cut $500 billion from Medicare, has the unmitigated gall to encourage people that are sending AARP money to notify their Congressman that we don't want any cuts to Medicare. Well, I've gotten those petitions. And my response is that if you're part of AARP and you don't want cuts to Medicare, then I'm so glad you're now off the AARP team and you now support what I do. Because AARP sold the seniors down the road. Why would they do that? Well, let's look. Gee, they made, I believe it was in 2008, one big health insurance company made around $92 million clear profit and another $112 million or so profit, and then you have AARP that made over $400 million in clear profit from the sale of their supplemental insurance. I had a proposal that would have given seniors a choice: you can stay on Medicare, or you can choose to have us buy you private insurance that covers everything. You won't need any supplemental insurance; it will cover everything, but it will have a high deductible. Thirty-five hundred dollars was the proposal, but I'm not married to that. If there were another figure that would end up being better from an accounting standpoint in the long run, you can do that. But the proposal was $3,500. And then for that, we will put the $3,500 cash in the seniors' health care account for each of those 30 million or so homes that have people on Medicare, Medicaid. So then you have a debit card coded to only pay for health care, and the senior for the first time since the sixties will finally be in control of their own health care, making their own decisions, and we get the government out of the way of making decisions--oh, no, you can't have that medication; oh, no, you can't see that doctor; oh, no, you can't have that treatment. And what we're seeing are the early stages of what ultimately happens when the government controls health care. It's lists, and lists mean rationing. I've heard from people that live in Canada and England. The father of one man from Canada needed a heart bypass operation. They put him on the bypass list, and 2 years later he had not gotten his bypass, and so he died. If he had been in the United States, he would probably still be alive today. One secretary in my district told me about her mother getting breast cancer. But she had to get on a list in order to get the mammogram, had to get on a list to get the treatment, get on a list to have therapy, and get on a list for surgery, all those things that came with it. And as a result of all those lists, she said, ``my mother died because she was in England. I was found to have cancer, I had immediate treatment.'' She's a secretary. She got treatment. She got the surgery and treatment. And she says, ``I'm alive because I was in the United States. My mother died because she was in England.'' Well, unfortunately, there are people who love people but think that by the government running health care--which will inevitably lead to rationing of health care--that somehow that's a better thing. Our health care system needs work. It needs to be fixed. But the thing we should be doing is not having the government become the ultimate, the biggest player and referee in health care. We need to get the government out of being the player and get them back into the business of being the referee. At the same time, we need to get the health insurance companies out of the business of being health managers and back in the business of selling insurance. And you do that, if we can move forward, with health savings accounts. The young people of today in their twenties and thirties start putting away money in their own health savings account, let that build--there shouldn't be any limits on how much you can put in, but it ought to be a requirement you can never take it out. You can give it to your kids, give it to charities for a health savings account for those who can't provide it themselves, but once it becomes health savings account cash, that's where it stays until it's spent on health care. Leave it to your children when you die. Leave it to other charities that have people who need health care, and it could go in their health savings accounts. Once we do that, for the kids in their twenties and thirties, indications are, by the time they're 65, 70 years old, not only will they not want Medicare, they won't need it because they'll have enough money in their accounts that they can do whatever they want to and have whatever health care they need. But it's not the end-all solution. We don't have free market forces at work in health care. It's why costs keep going up. That's one of the reasons. Another reason is the tremendous advances that have been made in medicine that are now slowing down without the great people who have been attracted to health care--brilliant doctors and nurses. People in the health care industry are so smart, but we're already seeing the quality of people applying not at the level it once was. Why should it when this government intervenes and prevents people from being compensated properly? But until we get free market forces at work in health care, we're not going to fix health care, and you cannot have competition in health care as long as we have our existing system in which nobody knows what anything costs: You ask, What does an MRI cost? Well, it all depends, you're told. What does a room with a single bed in your hospital cost? Well, it all depends. We can't really say. You have Blue Cross. You have this and that. You have Medicaid. You have Medicare. Are you paying cash? It all depends. You can't fix health care when there's no competition. Growing up in Mount Pleasant, Texas, it was no secret that we went between two and, actually, eventually three different doctors' offices. We loved the doctors. They were great doctors. My mother passed away at 91, and my dad is still alive. I recall, growing up, we'd go to one doctor when I thought we were going to this other doctor: Well, they raised their prices, and they're both great doctors. Well, yeah, they are. I love them both. So we would go. When one would raise his price, we'd go back to the other doctor. You can't do that now. You don't know what a doctor charges. I've talked to doctors who would love to tell people what they charge, but it all depends whether it's Medicare, Medicaid, what insurance. Then the most unfair cut of all is, if you come in and if you're too poor to have insurance and if you're not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, then they're going to sit down with you and work out a payment plan for an amount that is normally many times more than the insurance companies would ever have agreed to pay. Well, that's not right. If somebody comes in with cash, they ought to be able to get it cheaper than Blue Cross or cheaper than other methods of payment. They're coming in with cash. In a good scenario, that's the way it would be. If everyone had a health savings account that covered the high amount of the deductible, of their catastrophic insurance, that's the way it would be because you would call up the doctor or the hospital and say, I need to come in. How much do you charge? Under a bill I've proposed, they'd have to tell you. You could find it online. It would have to be posted. ``This is how much we charge.'' They'd have to know before they'd come. Then you could get competition. You've got your debit card coded to only cover health care, and so you then care about how much things cost. You can't find a whole lot of people who care how much health care costs anymore because they're not paying it. What does it matter if the cost goes up 10 times? Then you've got seniors, many of whom are AARP members. They're paying their dues, and they've got their supplemental insurance. How tragic that AARP didn't mind the $500 billion cut to Medicare. Gee, let's think about that. If there's a massive cut to Medicare and if AARP sells supplemental insurance to cover what Medicare doesn't, I wonder if maybe they might think they would sell more insurance. Maybe that's why they would support a bill that cut Medicare by $500 billion. The games that have been played around this town really need to stop. We've gotten this country in trouble, but they're not going to stop with the President spending every day traveling around the country, demonizing Congress for not passing his bill, his law, when he doesn't even know what's in his bill. I do. I read the whole thing. I'm told there may not be anybody else in the House or Senate who has read every page of the President's bill like I did. Well, if the President would read it--he's obviously a smart enough man--he would see that a lot of his claims do not have the merit he thinks they do--or whoever is putting those words in his teleprompter thinks they do. On education, we have the stimulus bill. We were told it was going to create so many jobs, that it was going to build bridges and fix bridges. It didn't do those things. So now, 2\1/2\ years later, the President makes the same speeches. That's got to be good for the speechwriters because they could go back and take the same speeches that the President gave in January of 2009: You need to pass this bill. You've got to pass this bill right now, right away. Then it will build bridges; it will fix these bridges; it will hire people, get school teachers back and law enforcement. Those were all said in January of '09. I'm wondering if we shouldn't go back and compare those speeches and see if they haven't just cut some of those speeches and pasted them. Hey, it worked. They got Congress in January of '09 to pass the massive stimulus bill. As I've talked to educators around Texas, I found something that was deeply saddening and a bit maddening. There was some very limited amount of the trillion dollars in the President's so-called ``stimulus bill'' in January of '09 that went to hire teachers. I've met young people who were hired as teachers, and I'm thrilled when young people are able to get jobs. It's a good thing. Then I've talked to different educators who have said, It's so tragic. The stimulus money ran out, so we had to let teachers go. If you don't keep paying the stimulus money, then we don't get to keep those same teachers. That ought to tell us something. The stimulus money was not stimulus. If it had been stimulus, it would have stimulated things to the point that those teachers who were hired 2\1/2\ years ago would have stimulated enough in the economy that they would have been able to keep those jobs; but the stimulus bill in January of '09 was not nor was the stimulus bill in January of '08 under President Bush. They did not work. They don't work. That's not the way to stimulate. So then what really breaks my heart is when I find out people my age, who are in their fifties, and people in their forties who have been teaching for 20, 25, 30 years--and because they do and because of the payment structure in education, they make a little more and a little more as they go along. Lo and behold, the Federal Government comes in and says, Here's a bunch of stimulus money, not that much in the scheme of a trillion, but we'll give you a little bit to hire some new teachers. They hire new, young teachers. They're working for cheaper than the older, experienced, well-trained teachers. So what happens when the stimulus money that didn't stimulate anything runs out? It's rather tragic. People who have families, who have committed their lives to education, have lost their jobs. I've heard from those people. Good teachers, good educators. But when they look at it, jeesh, if this stimulus has allowed us to hire these young, new teachers, these experienced teachers that have a heart for the students, well trained, well educated, they're costing a little more, let's let them go. How tragic that this body would pass a bill under Speaker Pelosi intending to help education; and as a result of the misguided attempt to help education, we have driven out many of our best, most experienced, most caring teachers. I have talked to young people who have gotten a job. They don't intend to stay teachers all that long. They're hoping they can find something else. So you have people who committed their lives to education losing their jobs because of a stimulus bill that wasn't for young teachers who don't plan to stay teachers. They don't like teaching; they want to do something else. This body needs to get back to the original purpose of the Constitution. The purpose of the Constitution was to have a limited government, and that government would be a referee. It would make sure people and businesses in America played fair. It would not guarantee equal results, but it would guarantee opportunity to be fair and equal. It was a long way from doing that until the wonderful works that were accomplished by the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. So we were on track, more equality of opportunity; but now it's as if some people think, no, Dr. King wanted equal results. No, he didn't. He wanted people judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We made great, tremendous strides, but when a government wants to guarantee equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity, it becomes a tyrannical government. It becomes the player and not the referee. The other thing we're supposed to do is provide for the common defense, and that means not checking in our brain before we come to work every day. That means in every executive agency charged with providing for defense, you don't suddenly declare that the only people who can advise us about that tiny percent of radical Islamists, tiny percentage of the overall Muslim population, the only ones that can advise us about those radicals are people that really understand that mentality. We want people from the Muslim Brotherhood who want to take over the county, take over the world, have a united caliphate under sharia law to be the ones to advise us on how we deal with radical Islam, although this administration has now made it extremely clear, Attorney General Holder has made it clear, Secretary Napolitano has made clear, we really don't want to offend those who want to kill us and destroy our way of life by referring to them as radical Islamists. Let's call them violent extremists. But when you look at what they've said, and you look at what they've done and want to do, it's because of their sick beliefs in what being a Muslim means. An even further tragedy is the fact that we have allowed people with organizations who have supported terrorism to be advisers to this administration, to this Justice Department, to this intelligence community, to this Department of State. We've got foxes in the hen house. We don't need to pass the President's so-called jobs bill. This will do more to drive up the cost of oil and gas because this President doesn't understand that the four pages of deductions that he repeals in here will put independent oil and gas producers out of business. He doesn't understand that 94 percent of the oil and gas wells that are drilled on the land in the continental U.S. are drilled by independent oil and gas producers. He doesn't understand that when you eliminate their ability to raise capital, those wells will no longer be drilled. The major oil companies that the President demonizes and says he's going after will not only not drill all of those wells and produce all of the oil and gas; they can produce the exact same amount and make massive amounts more in profit. So the one thing the President says he wants to do that's page 151 through 154 of his bill has the exact opposite effect. It will increase revenues, profits, for major oil companies because it will drive out the independent oil and gas producers, not to mention the millions of jobs that we'll lose by doing that. Now, when I came to Congress 6\1/2\ years ago, I was concerned that there was not enough natural gas to continue to produce electricity with it, even though it is the most clean-burning thing that we've got. It would be wonderful, I thought, if you could do that. We just don't have enough because you've also got to have natural gas. It's a feedstock that you have to have in order to produce so many of the plastics, so many of the goods that are now so important to all Americans and to health care and to transportation. So if you're using natural gas to produce electricity, provide energy, then it's going to drive up those costs. Well, then science and necessity being the mother of invention, we hone our ability to horizontally drill. Hydraulic fracking allows us to get gas that we couldn't get otherwise. And now, depending on who you believe, we've got 100, 300 years of natural gas. Some of us have been told that possibly the largest deposit of natural gas just may be off the west coast of Florida, and nobody's allowed to drill there. We find out that the Marcellus shale up in the Northeast is producing jobs for people, unless our friends across the aisle are successful in killing those efforts to drill for that gas, Haynesville shale down in Louisiana, east Texas where I am; Barnett shale, north, northwest Texas. These other gas finds are so extraordinary I now fully support my Democrat friend, Dan Boren's, efforts to encourage people to convert cars to natural gas, to encourage manufacturers to produce cars that will run on natural gas. It will be cheaper than gasoline. Some people identify greatly with the tea parties. I think they've been demonized, the people I see at those tea parties, all races, all ages, but they seem to have one thing in common: They're all paying income tax. And we're down to about 50 percent of the country that's doing that. People that come out at the tea parties, that's the one commonality: They pay taxes, they pay income tax and, as a result of that, they'd like to see less government. So some have been surprised that I would support something that's not free market totally because I'm a free market kind of guy. But the overriding concern for this body, the oath that we take should be to make sure that we provide for the common defense. We have been sending trillions of dollars overseas when so much of that money finds its way into the hands of those who hate us, want to destroy our way of life. They don't think that people should have freedom to choose because if you give freedom to choose they think, their religious beliefs are, you'll slip into degradation, and then you'll be part of a Nation that needs to be destroyed. Well, it happens. When you give people freedom of choice, just as I believe God did to start with, some are going to choose to do wrong. It's going to happen. We're all going to make mistakes, and some will do so intentionally. That's when you need a government to enforce rules of fair play to make sure that we provide for the common defense so that people can freely practice peaceful religious beliefs. But we've been sending all that money year after year, growing more and more dependent on overseas oil. When President Carter created this new monstrosity, a couple of them, one called the Department of Education and another called the Department of Energy, and every year the Department of Energy has existed, its goal has been to reduce the dependency on foreign oil. And every year they fail at their job more than they did the year before. Every year. No matter how many billions, hundreds of billions of dollars they throw at alternative energy rather than letting the free market play, it's not working. But the reason I would support encouraging people to convert cars to natural gas, I'd like to buy a car from a factory in the United States that runs off natural gas. We do need infrastructure where you can pull up to a gas station and get natural gas instead of gasoline. But I support it because if we do that, I now see we could be 100 percent energy independent. It would save the lives of our most treasured possessions in this country, the American people, the men and women who give their lives for their country, when we have funded terrorism, not intentionally, but by paying people who hate our own country for their oil when we could get off of it. And if we get on natural gas for 100 years, there's going to be time to develop--and I know some people think it's not possible, I really do think we could eventually come up, somebody will, with a way to hold electricity. Some laugh at that. The late Ted Kennedy laughed about having a strategic defense shield of rockets, that's Star Wars. And lo and behold, it's happening. Well, until President Obama reneged on our agreement with Poland that cost so many their political lives in Poland, supported the missile defense that would stand between us and Iranian missiles, and we turned our backs on them, stabbed them in the back. Well, we're at risk, and it's time to quit sending money to countries that hate us. As I have often said, you don't have to pay people to hate you; they'll do it for free. You don't have to pay them. And yet we keep sending money to people who hate our guts, and it doesn't cause them to like us. It causes them to not only hate us but to have total contempt because of how stupid we are--that we know that they hate us and we still keep giving them money. Bullies on a playground who demand lunch money from another student don't develop admiration, love, and respect for students who give them their lunch money. They still hate them. They still don't think anything of them. That's not the way to deal with bullies. The way to deal with bullies is to make sure that if you have to band together as a government, as an educational administration, and just decide we're not going to let bullies prevail, then you do that. You can do that in schools. You can do it in the world by having a government that is strong enough militarily that what it says, it can back up. You don't do that when you make contractual agreements, as we did with Mubarak. And I'm not a President Mubarak fan. I was not a Qadhafi fan. But this administration had agreements with both of those people. They turned their backs on them, and now it appears we have radical Islamists that are taking over in those countries, and they will hate us more than Qadhafi did because at least Qadhafi was afraid of us. And then, we had a hearing yesterday in the Judiciary Committee. Secretary Napolitano came here. It has not made the mainstream media. They'll probably never touch it, but it ought to rock people's lives when they see what's going on with this administration. You can't use the word radical Islam--that might offend the people that want to kill us--when the fact is if we address radical Islam, we will protect the moderate, the vast majority of Muslims who are moderate who want to live in peace. If the radicals take over, they could be the first ones they go after. As well as liberal reporters, they'll take them out. Gays, they'll take them out. You would think people for gay rights would be on the side of those of us who want to go after radical Islam. But instead, it seems to be strange bedfellows in combining against those who want to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. So we do some digging, a couple of sleepless nights doing research, and we find out the Homeland Security Department has people in its midst who are advising it. We find out, there's an article about it, it can be found on the Internet, we find out that there was a seminar by two of the leading experts on radical Islam that was going to be given to law enforcement. And CAIR--a named coconspirator supporting terrorism, named as a coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial that should have been prosecuted, but this administration says they're friends, we're not going after them--CAIR complains to the White House, to this administration, and they cancel the briefing. And the word we're reading is that, gee, apparently they're rewriting the rules so that people in our intelligence of this administration, people in Homeland Security, people in the Justice Department, people in the White House, can only be briefed. They are rewriting the rules, and what we are told they'll end up saying is, you can't do the briefing if you're part of the government. So if you're in the government and you're not Muslim and don't have sympathies for radical Islam, then you'll be prevented from briefing others despite the fact that you may have spent your whole adult life studying this terrorism since 1979, when we saw it first come after us in Iran after President Carter proclaimed this ``man of peace,'' Ayatollah Khomeini, was coming in, and he has done more to create hatred, to create violence, than any leader I'm aware of in the last 50 years. President Carter thought he'd be a man of peace. Wrong. He wasn't. Nor is the present Khamenei. Nor is Ahmadinejad. And then you find out the president of ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, who has ready access to the White House, within the inner sanctum of the State Department. When the President gave his speech to try to upstage Netanyahu the day before Netanyahu was coming from Israel to the United States and ultimately to address this body, the president of ISNA, a named coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, 105 counts of conviction in which the named coconspirators should have been pursued after those initial convictions, he's advising the President on his speech about Israel. He's giving remarks on how the President is doing. He's got the President's ear. He's got the State Department's ear. He's got National Security's ear. In fact, we see from the Deputy National Security Advisor's own transcript of his own remarks that were on the White House Web site, the Deputy National Security Advisor commends the president of this named coconspirator to fund terrorism for leading prayers for the Iftar celebration last year at the White House. We haven't seen anybody in this mainstream media that wants to talk about the fact that al-Awlaki, who this administration killed with a drone just not that long ago, was leading prayers for Muslim staffers on Capitol Hill. Foxes are in the hen house. And they're given more and more authority. We found out yesterday that it was Homeland Security that gave a secret security clearance to Mohamed Elibiary, from all accounts, a very nice gentleman. But if you read his writings, he thinks the world of the Muslim philosopher on whom Osama bin Laden relied so heavily for being barbaric, for killing innocents. The man that is part of the inner circle and now has been elevated to the National Homeland Security Advisory Council of the Secretary of Homeland Security thinks that he was a man of peace. He was executed in the sixties, but his writings fully supported what Osama bin Laden was doing. They support what radical Islam is doing. And that's why they constantly point to his writings from the fifties and sixties. We also find--and I have got a flyer in my materials here--that Mohamed Elibiary was one of the featured speakers for the tribute to a man of vision, the Ayatollah Khomeini, just recent years ago. He's been given a secret security clearance. I find out 2 days ago he's also working with the ACLU to attack from the outside, to demand materials that will tell them about the sources and methods of how we try to get some intelligence on the people that want to destroy and kill us and ruin our way of life and create a one-world caliphate for some dictator like the Ayatollah Khomeini or Khamenei over there now in Iran. And we're giving people like that access. And then I find out this week--and it's written; it's now on the Internet and you can read the story--that the same man used his security clearance and is allowed to access security databases from his home computer; and he accesses a security database called the State and Local Intelligence Community database, called SLIC for short, and he pulled off some material that said on it ``For Official Use Only,'' and then was shopping that to mainstream media in this country to try to condemn people in Texas for being concerned, under Governor Perry, as being Islamaphobes. Then we find that the OIC that has been so powerful--57 states--that actually in 2007 they said that the most fearful terrorism that exists--and these are their words--is Islamaphobia. They created the term ``Islamaphobia.'' They're donating hundreds of thousands and millions to some of our best educational institutions to go after people who are concerned not about Islam, not about the 95, 99 percent, whatever it is of Muslims who are peace-loving, but if you want to go after the 1 percent that wants to kill us and make this country into a caliphate under sharia law, you're an Islamaphobe. And they're paying millions and millions to develop that terminology. So the mainstream media will buy into it and come after anybody that says, Look, there is a common thread that runs through those people who want to destroy our way of life, that want to take our young men and women in this country, radicalize them and have them help them destroy the greatest, most free country in the history of mankind. And this administration is bringing some of those foxes into the hen house. So not only does this administration give a man who admires the inspiration for Osama bin Laden, who is a featured speaker for the tribute to Ayatollah Khomeini, he's given secret security clearance and now is using that as a political weapon not just to go after people concerned about radical Islam, but also to go after an opponent of this President politically. It's time to wake up. It's time to be a referee, not a player. It's time to let the free market system drive the economy, create jobs, while we do what we're supposed to do--provide for the common defense. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. GOHMERT. I certainly will yield to my friend from Texas.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, for going on a couple months now, we've been hearing the President say we need to pass his jobs bill--pass his jobs bill right away, right now, pass his jobs bill. And it was so ironic to have a President of the United States, who says he wants to work with the Members of Congress, but Members of Congress won't work with him, and in his purported ``effort'' to work with Members of Congress, he doesn't ask to sit down with Congress in a private meeting and talk about these issues. Oh, no, that would really show an intent to work with Congress, to sit down in a room where we can visit about the issues. That would be really working with Congress. Instead, what we have from the President of the United States is a demand. Now, I'm not sure historically, Mr. Speaker, how many times a President of the United States has decided to just throw a little hissy fit and, I'm going to come talk to Congress. Well, we know that he was an instructor. He wasn't a professor, but an instructor. You can be an instructor in a law school if you practice law on the side or a community organizer on the side, or whatever; and they'll let you come teach a course or two. So anybody who has been involved in a law school, you would think, even as a low instructor, would know that the Constitution makes very clear that the President of the United States has no right, no moral authority to demand to come speak in the House. Now, the President would never give credit to the willingness of this Congress to vote unanimously to allow the President, after his little hissy fit, to come speak in the House, but we did. He demanded to come speak to the House. He has to have an invitation to do that. In social circles, if somebody demanded to come to someone's house--I demand an invitation to come lecture you in your house--most people would say forget it. But this House, controlled by Republican Members--the majority here, Republican, Democrat majority down in the Senate--we voted unanimously. There were no objections to inviting the President to come lecture us rather than sit down and try to work with us.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend, the gentleman from Illinois. He knows something about struggling for civil rights, and he's done a great deal for civil rights, and I respect that very much. As a Christian, it's okay to talk about our religious beliefs as long as we don't ram it down somebody else's throat trying to force them to believe as we do, but the First Amendment allows our right to discuss that. I'm very grateful for Abraham Lincoln, and as I was just talking with some constituents down in Statuary Hall about John Quincy Adams believing he was called to try to end slavery in the United States after he was defeated in 1828 for a second term, so he did the unthinkable after being President: he ran for the House of Representatives. And some thought it was extremely strange, and as I told my constituents, my friends, it was reputed that when someone asked him about that, he said he was prouder of being elected to the House of Representatives after being President than he was after being elected President, which seems strange to some of us until you realize that it means after he was President his neighbors still liked him. That's a big deal because most Presidents don't end up going back to their earliest hometown; they go somewhere else. John Quincy Adams got elected nine times, preached sermons over and over down the hall about the evils of slavery. We really couldn't expect God to keep blessing America while we were treating our brothers and sisters by putting them in chains and bondage. Seventeen years he fought that fight, believing he was called to bring an end to slavery. His last year there, there was a young, tall man from Illinois who had been elected to Congress one time, most people don't know that he was ever elected anything but President, but Abraham Lincoln was elected. John Quincy Adams liked him and took him under his wing. It was reported that after Lincoln was defeated after just 2 short years, went back to practicing law, made some money working doing some legal work for the railroads and other things, after the compromise of 1850, he knew he couldn't allow slavery, as even more States were coming in with slavery, and he got back involved and fought the battle. He didn't get elected to the Senate. In 1860, he got elected President. It was reported that someone asked him if there was anything memorable that happened in his 2 brief years in the House of Representatives, and he replied not other than those powerful sermons John Quincy Adams used to preach on the evils of slavery. He knew it was wrong, but it just etched it on his soul. He had to do something. John Quincy Adams died in 1848 not achieving what he was originally called to do--end slavery. But a man who believed in God, who read the Bible constantly, whose Second Inaugural Address is etched in marble on the north inside wall of the Lincoln Memorial, one of the greatest theological dissertations on how, if there's a just God, there could be something as horrible as a Civil War, brothers killing brothers. As he said, they all read from the same Bible, pray to the same God. The prayers of both can now be answered; the prayers of neither were fully answered. But as Lincoln came to realize, if it is that God chooses to have every drop of blood that was drawn by the master's lash be equal with blood from the sword, then as he said, we still must conclude what was concluded 3,000 years ago from the Old Testament: ``The judgments of the Lord are just and righteous altogether.'' Powerful theology of a very difficult subject, but those beliefs drove him to give his life for others. Downstairs, I just saw the statue of Father Damien, a Catholic priest in the Hawaiian Islands who knew that going to the island where the lepers were, where they had no basic life, that eventually he would get leprosy and he would die from it, but he knew that he had a calling, that God called him to minister to those lepers so they could have a life, they could have a society, a place to worship, a priest to come to for ministering and consolation and direction. So it is entirely appropriate that despite the existence of the ACLU wanting to tear down so much of what the Founders did and the great things that are emblazoned in the soul of this country, the statue, the plaque starts with John 15:13: ``Greater love hath no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'' Basically, Abraham Lincoln did that. But there was not full equality in this country. That was clear. Bobby Rush can talk about that authoritatively; I really can't. He can talk about it authoritatively. And along came an ordained Christian minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. He believed it was his calling, God's calling on his life to bring about real equality in America. As he said, he had a dream that one day people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. He had a dream. I'm so grateful for that heritage that God moved in the hearts and minds of great men like that. Some would say Martin Luther King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his life to help African Americans, black men and women in America to have equality, but it goes much deeper than that. For those of us who are Christians, he created an environment where white Christians could finally really be Christian and treat brothers and sisters as brothers and sisters. That's a big deal, because before that there were too many white Christians who didn't. He freed them up. Now you can treat your brothers and sisters as true brothers and sisters where the color of skin doesn't matter. Powerful. But the country we have come to know and love is under attack. We, many of us, I was in the Army at Fort Benning in 1979. We look back and we think the war started, radical Islam started at war against us in 1979. More recently, some who know more about the history of radical Islam say it actually started quite a bit before that. But in 1979, it became clear, President Carter, well intending, meaning well, hailed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of peace, just like this country did with President Mubarak. We would not assist and, in fact, encouraged rebels and the leader of a country with whom we had agreements. We reneged on our end, not that the Shah was a fine, great, upstanding man. From reports--I never met him--apparently he wasn't. Not that Mubarak was a fine, loving, cuddly fellow--apparently, from reports, he wasn't. And there wasn't equality as there should have been, but he kept radicals at bay from destroying the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. We had agreements with him, and apparently this administration looked the other way and wouldn't honor those agreements. I sure never thought much of Qadhafi, but I could not celebrate a man being captured, tortured, and then shot; and then all the adoration and excitement by the same people who get so upset if a terrorist who is trying to kill Americans has water poured on his face, knowing that the water won't hurt him, that there's a doctor right there, and that when he reveals information, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did, it will save lives and lead to the saving of many more lives. But he won't be harmed because the doctor would be there if there was any problem. Yet those same people that went ballistic over pouring water on a guy's face, not pleasant, how excited they could be about a man being captured, tortured, and shot in the head routinely. How excited people could be about having a drone take out an American citizen. Well, he had declared war on the United States. You declare war on the United States, the United States has every right to declare war on you back. You are an enemy combatant and the rules of war apply, such as they are. But we have come so far in the last 10 years from being careful and concerned that it seems that we've gotten careless, gotten ridiculous. Our obligation, even those of us who are Christians, is not to turn the other cheek as part of the government, not to reward evil with good as individual Christians are supposed to. Our obligation is to provide for the common defense. The same thing is set out in Romans 13: ``You do evil, be afraid, because the government is not given the sword in vain.'' You are supposed to encourage good conduct and punish evil, provide for the defense so that individuals, whether they're Muslims, Christians, Hindu, Scientologists, whatever, they can worship as they wish. But when we fail to protect this Nation and provide for the common defense, we're not doing our job. We've had a very interesting time today with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. There's some things that have come out that have been very deeply troubling to me, and I would hope that they would be very troubling to many. I have got numerous articles, things that I have taken out to talk about here today. One is a news segment here about Secretary Napolitano appointing a deradicalization expert, Mohamed Elibiary, to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Originally, he was made by Homeland Security a member of the Countering Violent Extremism. It's a little strange, violent extremism. Then you realize that's because this administration does not want to use the terms ``radical Islam'' about the people who are radical Islamists. And when you get to digging a little deeper, you find out that the OIC Islamic group years ago figured out, We need to go on the attack and start calling anybody who mentions radical Islam an Islamophobe. Even if it's a lie, it doesn't matter. Call them Islamophobes. They found if you give universities--even great universities; proud heritage in this country--massive amounts of money, you can also get them to teach seminars on Islamophobia. You can get them to teach courses on Islamophobia. And you can paint the picture that anybody, no matter how open-minded, no matter how well read, how well studied they are, you call them Islamophobes enough, then maybe it will catch on, and people will be afraid to call radical Islamists what they are. Now, I don't know of anybody who was in Judiciary today that believes that Muslims are terrorists. They're not. The only disagreement among those I know concerned about radical Islam is whether the radical Islamists are 1 percent, 5 percent, maybe a little more. Some might say as much as 10 percent. But at least 90 percent, maybe 99 percent of Muslims are peace-loving people. If you have got a Muslim friend, they are your true friend. And people have experienced that. They have seen that. But those who study radical Islam also come to know that it's very difficult for a moderate, peace-loving Muslim to speak up against radicals because under some of the contorted thinking by people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who helped plan 9/11, that basically makes him an apostate. They're not really Muslim. They're Muslim in name only. They think that means they're okay to be killed because they don't really believe in true Islam. So when you get down to it, it appears from a studied look at the issue, when you don't worry about what the OIC or Muslim Brotherhood may try to paint you as, or the mainstream media, for whatever reason-- though many in the mainstream media would be one of the first ones killed if radical Islam takes over this country. They nonetheless do some of their bidding for them without realizing just how ignorant they're being. But if they were to take over, any area where they take over, as they did in Afghanistan, the moderate, peace-loving Muslims are often the first ones brutalized and killed because they don't see them as true Muslims because they're not radical like that small percentage. But documents have been discovered going back to the 1993 meeting in Philadelphia of those who would be part of the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups trying to plot a strategy for the years ahead, they believed a number of things that we're now seeing carried out. You intimidate people, you make them think they're much more intellectually elite. They say, Well, gee, we're not going to even say the name of radical Islam. In fact, as Speaker Pelosi led in the last Congress, the 2006 military tribunal bill was changed, the law was changed so we didn't call them ``enemy combatants'' anymore. We changed the name--big deal--changed the name from ``enemy combatants'' to ``unprivileged alien enemy belligerents.'' I guess we just hope that the word ``enemy'' wouldn't offend them, even though they have shown, as they did with Pearl, they will take a jagged knife and cut your head off. They don't do it in the name of Scientology. They don't do it in the name of the Southern Baptist Convention. And if they did, I would be calling them out for doing so. They do it in the name of a perverted form that they believe is Islam. But it's radicalized jihadist Islam. So here's an article, October 21, 2010. Secretary Napolitano appoints Islamist to Homeland Security panel. It turns out Mohamed Elibiary had been appointed to her Countering Violent Extremism Working Group and apparently impressed somebody to the point that a year ago, October 21, 2010, Secretary Napolitano swore him in as being part of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. As we found out today from Secretary Napolitano, he was also given a secret security clearance. We've also seen from other articles we've talked about here before that the White House--and as we found out today, Homeland Security--has implicit trust in the president of the Islamic Society of North America, ISNA, even though ISNA was found to be a named coconspirator in funding terrorism in the Holy Land Foundation trial. CAIR, same way, named coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. The original prosecutor's thoughts were that the Bush administration, those I have talked to, intended to do everything they could to get convictions because they saw--they had the documentation--that these groups were doing some charity work, and actually doing some, but then sending money--really, the basis of their group--sending money to Hamas to fund terrorism. And that's what they were convicted of. It was 105 counts, as I recall. There was a move by CAIR, ISNA, some named coconspirators, to have their names struck from the pleadings so the people would not see that they were named coconspirators. But both the judge at the trial court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found there was sufficient evidence to show that they were coconspirators in funding terrorism and therefore they did not, as the Fifth Circuit ruled, they weren't going to have their names removed. The evidence was there. In fact, I have got some of it here. There were boxes and boxes and boxes of documents that have these kind of checks and ledgers and deposit slips and things like that that make a clear case that these groups ended up providing funding that funded terrorism. But this Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Holder, decided not to pursue all of these other named coconspirators. They let the cases drop. And not only did they not pursue them, they ended up--actually, we have the president of ISNA, who we find in the comments that have been on the White House Web site, actually led the Iftar prayers a year ago at the White House and actually has a very nice relationship, from what the Deputy National Security Adviser said, with the National Security Administration, the National Security Advisor, and the President. We found out from one article that, with two individuals who were going to participate in training law enforcement at one of our intelligence services, all it took was CAIR calling the White House, reporting to the White House that people were going to say bad things about radical Islam, and that people that wanted to kill us were radical Islamists, and explain how you could look for people who were radicalized, look for telltale signs. The White House, according to one article, intervened, and we know for sure the conference was canceled immediately before the conference was to start. And we have an article indicating that actually now they are rewriting the rules so that if you are a government employee, you will not be able to do briefings on the threat of radical Islam. And, also, they will not pay for outside contractors who've spent their adult life studying the issue, so that it will be left to volunteers, like those from the Muslim Brotherhood, who will come brief our intelligence, our State Department, our Justice Department and the White House on issues to do with violent extremism. And then we find out more about this person. I'm told he's a very nice gentleman, Mohamed Elibiary, that he's done a lot of nice things. But you don't have to look very far and you find out he was one of the featured speakers for the tribute--in fact, there's a flier--a tribute to the great Islamic visionary, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who has done more to bring hate and war and death and torture into the modern age than most anybody in the last 40 years. And he is a named presenter in the tribute to the great Islamic visionary. Then we find out not only did he speak at that, but also he's written articles. He got after the administration for the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, thought the trial was unfair and unjust and uncalled for. He also speaks glowingly of Qutb, who is the Muslim who was executed in Egypt in the 1960s after being convicted or found to have conspired to kill the leader of Egypt. But he has many writings. And, well, he's held in high esteem not only as a basis for Osama bin Laden, feeling that he should be a barbaric killer and destroyer, but also for Mr. Elibiary. And so we have an article he wrote about the verdict misrepresenting the situation with the Holy Land Foundation. Then we have an article from the Dallas Morning News where they go through and cite so many of these things that seem to indicate we should be very careful about giving Elibiary access to secrets; but he has been given, by this Homeland Security group, secret clearance. Then there's an interesting article from May of 2007. The OIC, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, reported in 2007--their words-- that Islamaphobia is the worst form of terrorism. In fact, that means it's worse than flying commercial airliners into high-rise office buildings, worse than beheading three teen Christian girls on their way to school, worse than launching attacks from civilian areas in order to use retaliatory actions to score propaganda points. Yeah, worse than that is to be an Islamaphobe. Then we find out that the ACLU and the Islamists are joining hands. I found out yesterday that actually Mr. Elibiary is working with the ACLU, but he's got a secret security clearance so he can work from the inside and from the outside working with the ACLU to try to get documentation that will ultimately, if he gets it--and this administration may just do this--it will reveal sources and methods of how we are dealing with radical Islam or violent extremism, and he's working with these guys. But the ACLU and Islamists are going after the FBI and trying to destroy their ability to actually fight those who want to destroy our country. There's an interesting article by Bill Gertz October 5 of this year, and he points out that the anti-terror trainers were blocked. And according to people close to the conference I mentioned awhile ago, the event was ordered postponed after Muslim advocacy groups contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the White House, including scheduled speakers Stephen Caughlin and Steve Emerson, both specialists on the Islamic terror threat. Mr. Caughlin, a former Pentagon joint staff analyst, is one of the most knowledgeable counterterrorism experts specializing in the relationship between Islamic law and terrorism. Mr. Emerson, head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, is a leading expert on Islamic violent extremism, financing and operations. But, anyway, it looks like they're rewriting those rules so people like that--since they're not Muslim Brotherhood--will not be able to instruct law enforcement on the threat that radical Islam creates for the country. And then we find an article here, ``Holder Firmly Committed to Eliminating Any Muslim Training.'' But just so people understand--and I'll close with this--I understand that the vast majority of Muslims are dear, wonderful people, peace-loving people. But the radical Islamists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four at Guantanamo Bay who said they wanted to plead guilty in December of 2008--the judge was going to accept it until this Justice Department rushed in and said no, no, no, we'll give you a show trial in New York City, and threw a bunch of gum in the works. So now there has still been no trial; there has still been no justice. And in his own writing he says, in quotes from the Koran, ``We fight you with almighty God. So if our act of jihad and our fighting with you cause fear and terror, then many thanks to God because it is him that has thrown fear into your hearts which resulted in your infidelity, paganism, and your statement that God had a son and your trinity beliefs.'' Then he quotes from the Koran: ``Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, for that they joined companies with Allah, for which he has sent no authority; their place will be the fire; and evil is the home of the wrongdoers.'' People like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are radical Islamists, and we need to recognize it so that we can perpetuate the freedom that we've had for 200 more years. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There's so much going on today, this week. We've been, for one thing, trying to take up trade agreements that should end up creating new jobs in America. I know there have been concerns by some--gee, don't we give away sovereignty each time we enter a free trade agreement. Well, I read these free trade agreements. I wasn't here when NAFTA passed. I'm not sure that I would have voted for it because it seems like we did give away too much of the autonomous nature of this country. But with regard to the Colombia free trade agreement, the free trade agreements with South Korea, and Panama, it doesn't appear from my reading that we are giving away any autonomy, we are giving away any of our powers to govern ourselves. In fact, the U.N. is far more of a threat with the concessions, particularly this administration is giving to the U.N., as far as us controlling our own destiny. Since the U.N. has become so incredibly anti-Israel, I think it's time to look seriously about getting out. We should not be accessories to the kind of anti-Semitism and the anti- Israeli feelings, the hostility from those members of the U.N. that have so much more control, it appears, than we do, who encourage, basically, the wiping out of Israel and of the Jewish population. In the meantime, on the homefront, we have people still claiming that the President's tried and failed methods of helping the economy should be tried yet again. There's the old story about a guy beating his head with a hammer, and somebody came up and asked, ``Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?'' He said, ``Because it feels so good when I stop.'' For heaven's sake, it is time to stop hitting ourselves and hurting our own country, hurting our own economy with the crony capitalism that has come to bear here in this country. And it does not serve as a defense that Paulson started it under George W. Bush. That's not a defense. It was wrong for Paulson, and it's wrong now, and especially, the longer this country struggles to get back on its economic feet. And any time you engage in crony capitalism where those closest to an administration reap the biggest benefits, you hurt the economy. So when you have a company like General Electric that is so close to this administration, the head of GE certainly has the President's ear as the trusted adviser, and that adviser has caused thousands and thousands of jobs to be sent overseas, then you can anticipate that with him advising the President, we're going to have more and more jobs sent overseas. And then we keep being told yes, the true answer is in green jobs. Green jobs are our future. How long is it going to take for us to stop hurting this country in the name of green jobs? We have sent thousands and thousands of great union jobs overseas in the name of greenery. And yet it shouldn't take anybody past an elementary education to realize when you send manufacturing jobs from this country to China, South America, Latin America, where they pollute so many more times doing the same job than what the output was here, that the world would be better off with those jobs here. Pure and simple. And then, of course, we've been treated to the fiasco which is Solyndra. And as a former judge who saw cases where people acted against the interests that they were hired and sworn to protect, we call that fraud. And so it sure sounds like we're having the beginning of a fraud case emerge, potentially against people in our own government, because we know that the law said that these loans could be given to these so-called green companies, but there could not be another lender that had priority over the Federal Government in lending that money. Well, that means that if someone within this administration, which appears to be what's coming out, actually advocated and actually made sure it happened that the United States taxpayers, the United States Government, that they were hired to protect, subverted the position as first lender to Solyndra to the detriment of hundreds of millions of dollars, somebody ought to be going to prison. I mean, I had people come before my court having committed felonies, pull a gun, rob somebody, maybe they didn't get $100, and they went to prison. How about somebody that causes the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars? Well, we sure have to look at it. And just when people thought it couldn't get any worse, then we get word this week about a new entity called SunPower, another one of these wonderful green companies that were going to set the world ablaze with power and light with their clean green energy. This article from biggovernment.com by Mike Flynn, says, The Department of Energy bragged about giving a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to SunPower, a politically connected solar energy company to create ``10-15 permanent jobs,'' raising critical questions as to whether California SunPower is the next Solyndra in the ongoing Cronygate scandal. Unlike Solyndra, which went bankrupt receiving the loan from the government, leaving taxpayers on the hook, SunPower's deal is more complicated. Many questions are being raised about how the company was able to obtain the loan and what they did after they got the money. Questions include: How could the Department of Energy give a loan to a company that was under a shareholder suit alleging securities fraud and misrepresentations? This says that the son of Representative George Miller from California was paid $178,000 to lobby on behalf of the company representing SunPower as a lobbyist. Why did Representative George Miller tour the SunPower facility, which is outside his congressional district? And what other official action did Representative Miller take on behalf of the company that is represented by his lobbyist son? Did the company's hefty political contributions to the Obama campaign and the DCCC play a role in the deal? Did U.S. taxpayers help pay for the company to open a facility in Mexico after the announcement of the loan? Was the U.S. Government aware that company executives were in the process of selling a portion of the company to a French company, an action that was undertaken 2 weeks after the loan was awarded? Did the loan allow insiders to cash out, leaving other investors holding onto the stock that has dropped by more than 60 percent since the loan was awarded? In 2009, a year before the DOE awarded the loan, investors in SunPower filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging SunPower and certain of the company's executive officers were in violation of Federal securities laws. The lawsuit alleged the company knew or recklessly disregarded and failed to disclose or indicate the following: One, that the company made unsubstantiated accounting entries during the class period; Two, that, as a result, the company's financial results were overstated during the class period; Three, that the company's financial results were not prepared in accordance with the generally accepted accounting principles; Four, that the company lacked adequate internal and financial controls; Five, as a result of the above, the company's financial statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. Despite the questions about potential violations of Federal securities law, the Department of Energy approved the loan guarantee in 2010, all to create 10 to 15 permanent jobs. That's not only some silly estimate, it's what the Department itself thought would result from the billion-dollar loan. Our Department of Energy intentionally invested over $1 billion in order to create 10 to 15 jobs. At best, that's around $80 million from our government to create one job. Now, there are a lot of folks in government that have never been in business, but I'm betting just about anybody in this body could do a better job of creating good-paying jobs if they were given $80 million to create each job. I bet if we auctioned that off, we might even get as low as $50 million to create one job. For those in Washington I've found that don't understand sarcasm, I am prone to sarcasm. Very tragic. At a time when this country can ill afford to be squandering vast amounts of money, that's what we're doing. It's also no comfort that in the President's so-called jobs bill there are numerous references to wanting to get more money to these green companies to help out our country. And when you see that the President's so-called jobs bill is not about jobs at all--there's only a tiny fraction that goes for infrastructure, so forget about all your bridges being fixed. It's not about that at all. It's about more government control. In fact, as we have seen since this President took office, especially the first 2 years under the control of Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid, it seemed like most everything we took up was all about the GRE. The GRE, the Government Running Everything. And you look at the President's so- called jobs bill and you find in there the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. So, again, when are we going to stop beating ourselves death with the same tried-and-failed policies. So, Fannie and Freddie wasn't bad enough. Now we're getting into investing and guaranteeing billions of dollars for each financed operation instead of a hundred thousand dollars or so for homes. Yes, we've done such a great job with Fannie and Freddie nearly bringing us to the brink of ruin financially, wouldn't you next suspect that we should get into financing all the infrastructure needs of the country as a Federal Government? But those who are suspicious and think, gee, maybe this is more about the government running everything than it actually is financing infrastructure, there would be evidence to support that idea, because the board of the American Infrastructure Financing Authority is appointed by the President. And since the current President has an affinity for people who have never been in business, never made a payroll--he actually put people on the auto task force that didn't own cars. Most of them never had anything to do with the auto industry. So we can anticipate that if he stays true to form, we'll have people on the American Infrastructure Financing Authority that will be spending billions and billions of dollars, just like they have on Solyndra, on SunPower, and who knows how many other companies like that, they'll be doing it for infrastructure. Crony capitalism to the max. And I have struggled as we've seen these groups like Occupy Wall Street. There's a little group down the road here on Pennsylvania. Most of them are very young. I'm guessing perhaps many of them still rely on their parents for a living, making expenses. I know some of them have indicated that. It reminded me of the female comedian on television that said, Gee, there's a study out that says our generation may be the first generation that doesn't live as well as our parents. She said, That makes no sense, it can't be, because we're all still living with our parents. So that doesn't make sense. Well, apparently it's given some people time on their hands, since they're not working, to go create public nuisances in New York City, here, and other places. And it really is intriguing to find out they don't really have a centralized, firm position on anything. They're just out there to protest. But as a history major trying to think through history, certainly I can never recall a time in this country's history when a President of the United States ever told people to take off their bedroom slippers, put on their marching shoes, let's get out there and then encourage them. Yes, it's wonderful. They're getting out there. They're standing up. These are great rank- and-file grassroots folks. Encouraging protesters. I can't find another time in this country's history--so the President can be proud of this--when the President of the United States encouraged protesting the country he was leading. Most Presidents would never have had the nerve to do that because they knew they were in charge. And to encourage people to go out and protest meant you're encouraging protesting the country that you're in charge of and you're leading. So if things aren't good, it must mean you're doing a rotten job of leading. So why in the world would you encourage people to go out and protest? For those who say the President had a great jobs bill, and Congress ought to do something, you find out when you look at the real facts that this President and Leader Reid never had any intention of passing the President's jobs bill. Never. The President never anticipated this Congress would pass his jobs bill. He didn't anticipate it. He didn't help it happen. He has still not helped it happen. It's why it went for so many days before anybody bothered to file that bill. And when Harry Reid filed it in the Senate, he knew the rules. He knew that under the Constitution, any revenue-raising bill--as the President's bill raises taxes--any revenue-raising bill must originate in the House. It's part of the Constitution. He knows that because in order to get ObamaCare through, when it didn't originate in the House, he took a House bill, designed and passed here in the House to give veterans a tax credit when they bought their first home, stripped out every word and put in ObamaCare. He knew the constitutional requirement, and yet he didn't do that. I was shocked when I told my staff, after I heard he had filed, I said, go find out what House bill he stripped out because he's playing that game again like they did on ObamaCare. And yes, I know Republicans have done it. It doesn't make it right. It doesn't matter who does it. It isn't right. That was never what was intended, but it's the game that's been played. And Leader Reid, even when he filed his amended President's jobs bill that he himself amended, he didn't bother to strip out a House bill and go through the facade, the game that has to be played for a bill like that that raises revenue to become law. He didn't even bother. He just filed it as it was. I told my staff, no, he has to--he knows. He's done this before. He has to strip out a House bill, delete every word beginning at line one, page 1, deleting every word thereafter, substituting, therefore, the whole bill. He has to have done that. If he really wants it to pass, then that's what he's got to do. Well, since he didn't do that, we know that the President and Leader Reid never intended for the President's so-called jobs bill to pass. Well, then, for what reason would the President have gone on the road after condemning us in here for not passing a bill that didn't exist, going on the road and demanding we pass a bill that didn't exist, and then when it did exist, not even bother to pick up the phone for days and ask somebody to actually file the bill? That's why I filed the American Jobs Act. You can go online at the Clerk's office, Mr. Speaker, and find out the American Jobs Act. It's mine. And it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs if mine were passed. And as I've said here on the floor, I'm open to negotiation. I'm not married to zero as the corporate tax rate. I think it would be best. I think it would create more jobs. And then of course there are those left-wingers that enjoy seeing billions of dollars go to companies like Solyndra and SunPower, enjoy seeing their friends being enriched and engorged with taxpayer dollars and Chinese dollars we'll have to pay back with interest. They enjoy that. They've also said, well, gee, I must be in the pocket of corporations. No, I'm in the pocket of the American people, and I want to see jobs. And I have seen the devastation from people from all walks of life, from the manual labors to the airline pilots to the engineers who have said, This is killing me. I never dreamed of losing my job and not being able to find one. And all this administration is doing, it puts forward a disingenuous bill. It isn't going to create more jobs. And when you see the Public Safety Broadband Corporation, what job does that create? The board is going to be appointed mainly by the President, and then the board that he appoints will appoint some others. That's not a job creator, but it is about the government running everything, the GRE. The Public Safety Broadband Corporation will be able to protect every American citizen from what they may want to look up or see through broadband because we'll then have the President's own Public Safety Broadband Corporation that this President is pushing in his bill. That's not a jobs bill. And he says on the one hand he wants to go after excessive profits of major oil, and then you look at page 151 through 154 of his bill and you find out this doesn't hurt major oil. The things in there will devastate and drive out of business the independent oil and gas producers. Those are the people that don't have their own company sections that go in and do everything necessary to drill a well. They go out and hire people to help with the mud that goes in the well, to help with the wireline stuff, the people that will do all the--even feeding the people that work there. They hire independent contractors all over the place. Many of those people stay in hotels. They eat at restaurants. They drive the economy. And yet this President, as we've heard from people from the Gulf of Mexico area, this President's moratorium did more to cause people to lose jobs than the horrific Deepwater Horizon explosion. That was so tragic. It was so needless. Why in the world would this administration have allowed British Petroleum to continue to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, putting this Nation at risk, when we find out after the fact, though, Exxon was found to have, I believe it was, one willful, egregious safety violation; Sunoco had two violations, willful and egregious. The President's friends at British Petroleum had 760 willful, egregious safety violations, when others had one and two, and the administration looked the other way. We've had hearings on that, and I've brought it up to the Director of MMS before our Natural Resources Committee: What safeguards did you have to make sure that investigators were doing the proper job, the inspectors, the offshore rig inspectors? Because, see, to me, if you're an offshore rig inspector, you're a bit like the military. You stand between us here in the continental U.S. and devastation. So I was surprised to find out that they didn't have any problem with having unionized offshore rig inspectors. Well, if you're comfortable having offshore rig inspectors being unionized, then next you'd be comfortable with the military unionizing. Why not? They're standing between this Nation and disaster. If the offshore rig inspectors can be unionized and negotiate their hours, or whatever is all in their union contract, then why wouldn't the military be next? The trouble is there are some professions that are so important to national security you can't have contracts that limit hours. A soldier can't have an agreement that he won't work more than 8 or 12 hours and get time and a half. It doesn't work that way. They stand between us and disaster. And they, God bless them, they serve as they're required to serve to protect this country. I was quite concerned about our United States military in the 4 years I was in the Army after Vietnam. There were times I would see what some of our troops were doing--couldn't read, couldn't write effectively, smoking lots of dope--and I would think, if the Russkies ever attack, we're in big trouble. But I get around the fine men and women of our armed services now, they're the best that's ever existed in the history of the world. But we can't allow them to unionize. Well, the Interior Department has no problem. And the Director of MMS replied, Well, we do have a means of making sure that our offshore rig inspectors are doing their job. We send them out in pairs, so they watch each other. And if one of the rig inspectors didn't properly do their job, we know the other would report them. Because there have been stories, rumors, things alleged about some rig operators providing benefits of all kinds and services of all kinds to rig inspectors to have them look the other way. So I was curious, What do you do to safeguard that that doesn't happen? And the one answer, the only answer the Director had was, We send them out in pairs, and that ensures they're doing their job. She apparently was not aware that I knew that the last pair of inspectors that were sent out to the Deepwater Horizon rig to inspect it were a father and son unionized team. Some have wondered, why in the world wouldn't the administration immediately move to force BP to close that thing up? And we find out later that, actually, leaders of British Petroleum were meeting with key leaders of Congress at the Senate, figuring out when they would come out and have the great day over which the President and the Democratic leaders in the Senate would rejoice in which they announced that they're a major oil company and they were supporting President's cap-and-trade bill. Well, of course, after it was realized just how serious Deepwater Horizon was, eventually, the White House and the Senate Democratic leaders had to finally accept the fact it wouldn't be very good for PR to have BP be the one major oil company that came in and embraced the cap-and-trade bill that was attempted to be shoved down America's throats, like ObamaCare. And then we heard the President say there are more people protecting our southern border than ever before. This story, from Yahoo news, brand new story--well, it's Wednesday, October 12: Drug smugglers are endlessly creative when it comes to inventing ways to move marijuana, cocaine, and other contraband from Mexico into the United States. In the latest innovation uncovered by law enforcement, smugglers in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, were bringing drugs into the United States for the cost of a quarter. The parking meters on International Street, which hugs the border fence in Nogales, cost 25 cents. Smugglers in Mexico tunneled under the fence and under the metered parking spaces and then carefully cut neat rectangles out of the pavement. Their confederates on the U.S. side would park false bottom vehicles in the spaces above the holes, feed the meters, and then wait while the underground smugglers stuffed their cars full of drugs from below. When the exchange was finished the smugglers would use jacks to put the pavement plugs back into place. The car would drive away, and only those observers who were looking closely would notice the seams in the street. In all, U.S. Border Patrol Agents found 16 tunnels leading to the 18 metered parking spaces on International Street. The pavement is now riddled with neat symmetrical patches. It's unbelievable, Nogales Mayor Arturo Garino told Tucson, Arizona, ABC affiliate KGUN. Those are the strides these people take to get the drugs across the border. Past methods of smuggling have included catapults that launched bales of drugs across the border fence. The smugglers have tried everything, said Garino, and this is one of the most ingenious methods of them all. The city, advised by Homeland Security, has agreed to remove the parking meters. Nogales stands to lose $8,500 annually in parking revenue, plus the cost of citations. Well, the President, I know he wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it was true. But it isn't the most people we've ever had on our southern border, not at all. In fact, you can find this at Wikipedia, regarding General Pershing, and there are other far more detailed accounts. In January 1914, Pershing was assigned to command the Army 8th Brigade, United States, at Fort Bliss, Texas, responsible for security along the U.S.-Mexico border. In March, 1916, under the command of General Frederick Funston, Pershing led the 8th brigade on a failed 1916-17 punitive expedition into Mexico in search of the revolutionary leader, Pancho Villa. He had met him in 1913 when he invited him to Fort Bliss. And that's about all it says, but if you do more digging you find out, actually, after Pancho Villa and his cutthroats had come into the United States proper and killed some Americans, Woodrow Wilson ordered American troops, led by Pershing, to go into Mexico to pursue these murderers and end their killing spree, and make it clear that there would be dire consequences for coming into the United States illegally. One report I read said there may have been as many as 100,000 or more National Guard troops put on the U.S. southern border. Pershing went in, depending on the account you believe, 10,000, 14,000 troops into Mexico pursuing Pancho Villa, killed many of his lieutenants. Never got Pancho Villa. But it ended, for a long time, anybody coming in illegally to the United States to commit a crime on U.S. soil. Woodrow Wilson was not really considered a warmonger, as a university president. But he understood, when the Nation is under attack, whether it's from Pancho Villa or drug smugglers today, we took an oath we must follow, and supporting and defending the Constitution means providing for the common defense. And if people are bent on the destruction of this country, we must take such steps as are necessary to defend ourselves. Mexico is in deep trouble. We can help Mexico, we can help ourselves, simply by defending ourselves and re-establishing the rule of law along our southern border. It's critical. In the time I have left today--this is the last day of this week, at least for about 10 more days when we come back into session, I want to take up an issue. My late mother thought I should have been either a doctor or a college professor. I do enjoy history. I love teaching. I enjoy math. So, despite my parents' disappointment, I did go to law school. And anyway, as I told my dad, who said, you know, there are just so many lawyers that are hurting the country, it really caused me to do some soul searching. And I explained, Dad, I've thought about it, prayed about it, wrestled with it. The fact is the law is a tool, like a hammer. You can use it to build up or you can use it to tear down. It's all in whose hands the hammer is hitting. The law is a powerful tool, but as so many of our Founders laid out, unless we serve and govern a moral nation, this form of government is entirely inadequate to protect us. And I know our fine President has said we're not a Christian nation, and I will not debate that issue. There's plenty of evidence on both sides of that issue currently. I don't think we are anymore. But for those that continue to persist and say we were never a Christian nation, who refuse to note that a third of the signers of the Declaration, over a third, weren't just Christians, they were ordained Christian ministers. People like Peter Muhlenberg--ended up with a statue down the hall. He was a minister who Washington made a colonel, unbeknownst to his flock and his church. His statue depicts him taking off his ministerial robe to reveal a uniform underneath, even with a saber on. He was preaching from Ecclesiastes: There's a time for every purpose under heaven. When he got to verse 8, that there's a time for war and a time for peace, he took off his robe and said, now is the time for war. He recruited men from the church to join him. They recruited men from the town to support them. And he became a general by the end of the war, all of that while a Christian minister. But I think it's helpful to go back and look at some of those who were intimately familiar with our founding and, of course, I've read so often from Washington here on the floor, from John Adams, I thought I would read from John Quincy Adams to start off with. John Quincy Adams, our youngest diplomat. Washington appointed him to serve briefly as a diplomat at 11 years of age. Smart guy. At the age of 77, in 1844, John Quincy Adams was not only a U.S. Congressman, but he was also the chairman of the American Bible Society. These are John Quincy Adams' words: ``I deem myself fortunate in having the opportunity, at this stage of a long life drawing rapidly to its close, to bear at this place, the Capital of our national union, in the Hall of Representatives of the North American people, in the chair of the presiding officer of the assembly representing the whole people, the personification of the great and mighty Nation, to bear my solemn testimonial of reverence and gratitude to that book of books, the Holy Bible. The Bible carries with it the history of the creation, the fall and redemption of man, and discloses to him, in the infant born at Bethlehem, the legislator and Savior of the world.'' On the occasion of his 80th birthday, John Quincy Adams' words were these: ``I enter upon my 80th year with Thanksgiving to God for all the blessings and mercies which His Providence has bestowed upon me throughout a life extended now to the longest term alotted to the life of man, with supplication for the continuance of those blessings and mercies to me and mine as long as it shall suit the dispensations of His wise Providence, and for resignation to His will when my appointed time shall come.'' John Quincy Adams. One of the most powerful closing arguments of any case was given by John Quincy Adams in the Amistad case just downstairs in the old Supreme Court Chamber. And toward the end of his argument he was so concerned that he might be losing, and that if he lost the argument, he lost the case in which he was representing the Africans who had been captured and had chains put on them. They were able to get loose and take over the ship and ultimately ended up in the U.S. So the lawsuit was over. Were they free people who could go where they wanted? Or were they to remain slaves? He ended up in his closing arguments by asking about where were all the Justices? He now called every one of the Justices that had ever been on the Supreme Court by name and asked where they were. Where are they? Where was the Solicitor General that argued against me last when I was here? That was back in the early 1820s. And during the course of the arguments, about 3 days in the Amistad case, one of the judges died one night. That kind of throws a crimp in your closing argument. But when they resumed the case, he was asking, ``Where are the judges?'' Even the judge that started the case with him wasn't in there. In essence, he concluded by asking, ``Where have they gone? They've gone to meet their Judge.'' And the big question about their life, he quoted from Scripture when he said, ``Did they hear these words, 'Well done, good and faithful servant?''' The message was clear. You are all going to die, and when you die, do you want to go meet your Maker after having a decision that allows these free Africans to be drug out of here in chains and bondage? He won the case. The Africans, as they should have been, were free. And they should have been. And it is an embarrassment that slavery was ever allowed in this country. But if you look at the founding, they were led by Christian Founders. If you look at the greatest developments in civil rights, Abraham Lincoln felt called by God to run for office and bring an end to slavery. John Quincy Adams was a mentor to him during the 2 brief years he was in the House of Representatives. Adams had a massive stroke during that term, but young Abraham Lincoln, despite their difference in ages, was one of the honorary pallbearers. Adams thought a lot of Lincoln. After Lincoln was President, he said that the most memorable thing that occurred during his time in the House of Representatives, just down the Hall here, was John Quincy Adams' powerful sermons on the evils of slavery. John Quincy Adams, as a Christian, believed he was being called. After losing the election for a second term, he believed he was being called to come into Congress, as William Wilberforce had done. Adams had corresponded with Wilberforce in England and had come into Congress as Wilberforce had come into Parliament, to fight to end slavery. And each time he was recognized on one of his bills, he preached a hellfire and brimstone sermon about, in essence, how can we expect God to keep blessing America when we treat our brothers and sisters by putting them in chains and bondage? He thought God had called him to end slavery. He served in the United States House. He was the only person to have ever done this: After being President, he lowered himself to run for Congress and serve in the House. Of course, he told some folks he was more proud of being elected representative after being President than he was being elected President. And that seems like such a strange thing until you realize what it meant was that after he was President, his neighbors still liked him. And that is not often the case. We know that some of the greatest debates that occurred in the House of Representatives and in the Senate were participated in by Henry Clay. He and Daniel Webster had some powerful debates. Henry Clay said this in 1829. He said, ``1,800 years have rolled away since the Son of God, our Blessed Redeemer, offered Himself on Mount Calvary for the salvation of our species, and more than half of mankind still continue to deny His divine mission and the truth of His sacred Word. When we shall, as soon as we must, be translated from this into another form of existence, is the hope presumptuous that we shall behold the common Father of the whites and blacks, the great Ruler of the Universe, cast His all-seeing eye upon civilized and regenerated Africa, its cultivated fields, its coasts studded with numerous cities, adorned with towering temples dedicated to the pure religion of His redeeming Son?'' I want to make clear that the reason that we have more religious freedom in this country than any other country in the world is because we were founded on Christian principles that Jesus taught. Any nation that is based on sharia law and follows true sharia law will not have freedom of religion. So this is the freest country that any Muslim can ever worship in. You don't have to believe exactly as the radicals do about the Koran's teaching, because you have that freedom here in this country. And we just read this week that after we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and lost over 1,700 precious American lives to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and, unfortunately, try to create a central government that won't work, we now find this week that there is no longer in Afghanistan a Christian church. Not one. We also find out this week there is a report that there is only one Jew left in Afghanistan. After 10 years of battle, hundreds of billions of dollars and precious American lives, we see what we've done come to this. There is not one Christian church, war declared upon Christians, Christians killed and imprisoned, and a jihad against Christians there in a country that we saved. We're losing some of our freedoms here because some say we should have more law that follows sharia law. The only way sharia law will be completely and freely followed and worshiped, not by some radical Islamist view of it, but by all Muslims who freely can have different interpretations, unless they're in a radical Islamic society, they can only have that here, where we were founded on Christian principles. And thank God we were. I was a history major. I didn't read this until after I was out of school. Christopher Columbus wrote this in his own words: ``It was the Lord who put into my mind, I could feel His hand upon me, the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous illuminations from the Holy Scriptures, a strong and clear testimony from the 44 books of the Old Testament, from the four Gospels, and from the 23 epistles of the blessed Apostles, encouraging me continually to press forward. And without ceasing for a moment, they now encourage me to make haste.'' Columbus said: ``Our Lord Jesus desired to perform a very obvious miracle in the voyage to the Indies, to comfort me and the whole people of God.'' That's evidence that God can use somebody to create a miracle, and the person being used doesn't even know what he did. Of course, there are those who say Columbus is the perfect example that you can be a huge success for all of time even if you don't know where you're going, don't know where you are when you get there, and don't know how you got there so long as you can get the government to pay for it. Unfortunately, there are too many in government today who believe that's the key to all success--to get the government to pay for it. Francis Scott Key, he was there on the ship in the Chesapeake Bay on September 14, 1814, in part of the War of 1812, which was when the British unmercifully bombed that small Fort McHenry. In the morning light, he saw our flag. The fourth verse of what is now our national anthem is: ``Oh! thus be it ever when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war's desolation! ``Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven rescued land praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a Nation. ``Then conquer we must when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.' ``And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!'' I want to conclude with one other historic reference from the Supreme Court, itself, back when the Supreme Court did not believe that the Constitution was a living, breathing document that would be subject to the whims of people appointed who brought their own biases to the Supreme Court and twisted it and turned it into whatever document pleased them. I am also thankful to God that we have had some incredible Justices on the Supreme Court who believe the document called the ``Constitution'' was exactly as the Founders intended. It is not a living, breathing document that can be molded like silly-putty around somebody's fingers and whims. In 1892, the Supreme Court said this in the Church of the Holy Trinity vs. The United States: ``No purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, State or national, because this is a religious people.'' This is historically true. ``From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation. The commission to Christopher Columbus recited that it ``is hoped that by God's assistance some of the continents and islands in the ocean will be discovered.'' It goes on to read: ``The First Charter of Virginia, granted by King James, I in 1606, commenced the grant in these words: 'In propagating of Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness, language of similar import may be found in the subsequent charters of that colony in 1609 and 1611'; and the same is true of the various charters granted to the other colonies. ``In language more or less empathetic to the establishment of the Christian religion, declared to be one of the purposes of the grant, the celebrated compact made by the pilgrims on the Mayflower, in 1620, recites: 'Having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia the fundamental orders of Connecticut under which a provisional government was instituted in 1638 and 1639 commenced with this declaration: 'And well knowing where a people are gathered together the Word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union there should be an orderly and decent government established according to God to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of Our Lord Jesus, which now profess of the said gospel which is now practiced amongst us.''' The Supreme Court went on and concluded that these, and many other matters that might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian Nation. It may not be now, but it started that way. Mr. Speaker, just as Martin Luther King felt a calling as a Christian minister and just as Lincoln did in ending slavery, we owe so much to the religion of Christianity that everyone can worship or not as they wish. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the few minutes I have left, with so many wanting to destroy our way of life, with so many out of work, such a troubled time here, I want to finish my time on the floor tonight by reading the words of a man named Abraham Lincoln. In 1851 he wrote to his stepbrother encouraging him about the last illness of their father. Lincoln said: ``I sincerely hope father may recover his health; but at all events tell him to remember to call upon and confide in our great and good and merciful Maker, who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow and numbers the hairs of our head, and He will not forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him.'' In 1858, Abraham Lincoln said: ``Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.'' And then finally this from his speech in 1861, as he left Springfield, Illinois, to head for Washington, and I close with this, Mr. Speaker: ``I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.'' It is with that faith in that same Divine Being that I have hope for the future, and with that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do appreciate the opinions of our friends across the aisle and those who have spoken here tonight, and I know we both have similar goals--get people back to work. But when I hear my colleague across the aisle say Republicans keep proposing plans that have proved failures, the truth is the failures that the Republicans have supported were the things that our Democratic friends were in favor of. I sure like President George W. Bush, but in January of 2008, he took a page right out of the Democrats' playbook--proposed a $160 billion stimulus, $40 billion of which went as rebates to people that didn't pay any income tax. So you had people getting rebates that didn't put any ``bate'' in. That money really didn't do any good. And then we come around and end up in late September or early October of 2008, having unfortunately the Treasury Secretary appointed by a Republican, pull a page out of the Democratic playbook and help the folks on Wall Street that contribute and vote 4-1 for Democrats over Republicans. Bailed them out. Some of us made clear you don't abandon free market principles to try to save the free market. If you have to abandon free market principles to save the free market, it's not worth saving. The trouble is we've gotten away from free market principles and that's why we were in trouble. We had friends across the aisle that were demanding that loans be made to people that couldn't afford the loans. We had friends across the aisle that were verifying here in this room and in other hearing rooms that, by golly, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, they were healthy, there were no problems, when it turned out they were rotting from the inside. So, apparently, as smart as my dear friends are across the aisle, they have not been taught history very well. The things that have failed are the very things that are being proposed again. The $700 billion wasn't enough. Actually, President Bush's Treasury Secretary, the second worst Treasury Secretary in the history of our country, exceeded only now recently by Secretary Geithner in just how poor a job has been done, but they spent maybe $300 billion, $250 billion of the $700 billion. So the Obama administration got about $400 billion, $450 billion of that $700 billion. President Bush unfortunately listened to ``Chicken Little'' Paulson as he ran around saying that the financial sky was falling. That ended up all going to President Obama and Secretary Geithner for them to squander, which they have, and basically used it as a slush fund, in fact. Then we're told we have got to build bridges. We have got to do infrastructure. How could anybody disagree with infrastructure? Well, most of us didn't disagree with doing infrastructure as long as it was governmental functions. The trouble is the President had $400 billion, $450 billion from TARP still left over, and asked for $800 billion on top of that. And then it turned out that $800 billion may have been close to a trillion by the time they got around to having what was available under the bill. Of course, forty-two cents out of every dollar of that was borrowed, much of it from our friends and neighbors across the world in China. But here again these governmental giveaways, the governmental rebates to people that didn't put any ``bate'' in, the giving more and more money to entities that were not creating jobs, the fiascos like Solyndra. And I understand even after Solyndra, Leader Reid down the hall was able to procure another $700 million for a similar company in Nevada. This is insane. My friends, were just saying in the last hour that Republicans keep proposing plans that have proved failures. The failures of Republicans are when we adopt the Democratic strategies on these things. It's time to get back to the principles on which our government was founded. It's very basic, very simple. You give equal opportunities to people to excel, you stop paying people to fail, and we can get this country going again. We also had a bill today that was finally going to allow people to exercise their First Amendment rights. There's not supposed to be, under the Constitution, under the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, the government's forcing people to practice religion that is entirely opposite from the religion they believe. So we passed a bill here in the House that would allow health care providers who believe with all their heart, soul, and mind--most of them, it's a religious conviction--that to conduct an abortion and to take and kill a baby in utero, remove it and kill the baby in utero, out of utero, that it is wrong. Having had my wife's and my first child come 8 to 10 weeks prematurely and sitting by her isolette for 8 hours--it was supposed to be only 2, but I couldn't leave, and they didn't make me until I had been there for 8 hours--with that little child, her hand clutching to the end of my finger. She was hanging on to life. The doctor pointed out, Look at the monitors. They've stabilized since she's been holding on to you. She's drawing strength. She's drawing life from you. That tiny preemie, my daughter, trying to cling to life, and my friends across the aisle condemning people like me or health care providers who think it's wrong to take that life when they just want to cling to life. Give them a chance. I was a bit surprised but embarrassed for Minority Leader Pelosi when she said here on Capitol Hill about that bill that would allow people to practice their religious beliefs and not kill babies, the quote from our former Speaker Pelosi, was: ``Under this bill, when Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene.'' Well, there's good news for former Speaker Pelosi. We didn't vote to allow women to die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene. That did not happen. Yet the bill passed. Good news. Apparently, the Speaker did not read the bill. She didn't know that what this allows is a health care provider not to have to kill a baby if it's against their religious beliefs. And also, no women will be allowed to die on the floor. If they do, there will be severe and dire consequences for any health care provider that allows that to happen. There is nobody, despite the former Speaker's contentions here on Capitol Hill, there is nobody that voted for that bill today that would in their wildest nightmares want a woman to die on the floor without a health care provider intervening. And the bill doesn't do that. So whatever nightmarish bill the Speaker was referring to when she thought she was talking about the bill we passed today, good news for her. She didn't know what she was talking about. It does not allow women to die on the floor. It just allows people who believe with all their heart, mind, and soul, and their religious beliefs, that killing a baby is wrong, that when that baby wants to cling to life, as my little girl was clinging to my finger and her heart rate stabilized and her breathing stabilized, they can live. They don't have to be killed. They don't have to be killed in utero. It's good news. It's a great thing. I hope that the Senate will pass it and not be dissuaded by those who misread the bill. Maybe they were reading some disaster book or something, because obviously they were not reading the bill that we passed. There is also a real easy fix to establish cuts in the Federal budget. And it would be so great if our colleagues down the aisle in the Senate, our colleagues across the aisle, the Democrats, would take the fact that this House agreed to cut our own budgets in this legislative session by 5 percent and say, Hey, rest of the Federal Government, look what we have done. We've not talked about it. We did it, but we haven't really talked about it. And the truth is, by Congress, by the House at least cutting our legislative budgets by 5 percent this year, and as I understand it we're going to cut 6 percent next year, it gives us the moral authority to say to every Federal department in this government, Congress has cut--or at least the House has cut--our own budgets by 5 percent this year, and you're going to, every one of you, cut your budgets by 5 percent next year. We have the moral authority to do it because we've done it. Now, maybe the Senate doesn't want to do that, but it's the morally responsible thing to do. And then, if it comes through and we do cut our legislative budget here 6 percent in the House, we have the moral authority to say, hey, Federal Government, every department, every agency, we cut our own budgets 5 percent last year, 6 percent next year, so you're going to cut 5 percent next year and 6 percent the year after that. That's an 11 percent cut. Now we're on the right track. And if you don't want to cut some invaluable program, there's good news: cut it off some program that's a waste. My friend, Daniel Webster from Florida, has been looking into the different transportation agencies that provide rides to people to get to their place of appointments, whether it's with the VA, whether it's with a doctor, whether it's with the Federal Government, different agencies. Eighty-five different groups provide rides. How could that be? Well, the rules, the way they were set up in 1974 by a Democratic Congress--that also set up the screwy CBO rules that do not allow a good score for things that really do help the country--that same time they were also busy sticking different agencies that do the same thing in different committees so that we have massive duplications of those type things. Well, all we've got to do is start cutting those things out. And I hope and pray that before I leave Congress, this body and the one down the hall will have the courage to step up and say, you know what, I know I've been on my committee for a number of years and I've got seniority, and I know this committee is critical and this committee is critical, but it's time to reform the committee process. And the only way that we'll ever be able to completely eliminate or come close to eliminating all the massive duplication, replication of the same programs--spending massive amounts of money to do the same thing and yet we could combine those and save trillions of dollars over the next 10 years--we need to have a welfare committee. We take the food stamps out of the ag budget. People hear how big the agriculture budget is and they just can't believe it--there aren't that many farmers. They don't know that between 70 and 80 percent of the ag budget goes for food stamps. Let's put that in a welfare committee. Robert Rector over at the Heritage Foundation has done fantastic work. He was telling me it takes him 2 years to find all the hidden welfare provided from all the different subcommittees, all the different agency budgets, it takes 2 full years to do that. It's time to change things here. And I realize that with a Democratic-controlled Senate it's not going to happen this session. But I hope and pray that the next session of the Senate that begins in January of 2013 will have people in the House and the Senate, regardless of their party, that will finally reform the government here in Washington, and to use the President's words, fundamentally change the way we do business so that we don't set ourselves up to provide massive amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse. Now, it helps to reform government if the people here in Washington who vote on the bills and down Pennsylvania Avenue who sign bills or veto bills actually read them. Wow, what a concept. It would help if the President himself, before he had gone out on the road condemning Congress for not passing his American Jobs Act, had actually had an American Jobs Act written. But after he spoke here on this floor, Mr. Speaker, he went around the country spending millions and millions of dollars--some say it was campaigning. Whatever he was doing, he was condemning Congress for not passing a bill that didn't exist. He did so that weekend, did so on Monday. Monday evening they finally had a bill, and I got it printed out. But it turns out nobody was filing it. And yet that didn't stop the President from running around saying we were refusing to pass a bill, pass his bill, right away, right now. Nobody bothered to file it. In fact, if he had taken 10 minutes out of his schedule running around the country, spending millions of dollars condemning us for not passing his bill, to have picked up the phone and called one of his Democratic friends here in the House and said, hey, I'm running around the country condemning Republicans for not passing my bill, I'm embarrassed that nobody filed the bill. I forgot to ask anybody over there to file the bill so that you could pass it. So how about filing my bill? Didn't bother to do that. Just kept running around the country condemning us for not passing his bill. By Wednesday, that's when I realized if the President of the United States, who obviously had not read his bill, which I did, the entire bill--clearly, from the things he said about the bill, he hadn't read it at all--I decided, you know what? If he's going to condemn us for not passing the American Jobs Act, there ought to be one, so I filed one. And I was flexible. I said here on the floor I'd be willing to negotiate. And it would create jobs because it deals with an insidious tariff of 35 percent that we put on every American-made company's goods here, which keeps them from being able to compete globally because nobody else in the world slaps that kind of tariff on their own goods produced in their country. We're doing it to ourselves. And then the insidious part is that the American public has been convinced by people here in Washington, hey, hey, it's a corporate tax, so you don't have to pay it. Of course they pay it. The corporations are nothing but a collection agent. And the way that crony capitalism has been working around this town, the only way you get out of paying corporate taxes or the massive tariffs so you can compete globally is if you've got a friend down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, or in the Senate, perhaps. Because friends of those here in the House are not fairing so well--they're having to pay taxes. But if you are an entity like General Electric and you're close friends with the President, you really enjoy each other's company, top executives and the President, good news: You're probably going to get out of paying any taxes no matter how many billions you make. So why not level the playing field, which would bring back manufacturing jobs--and I'm surprised the unions are not all for this-- it would bring union manufacturing jobs in massive numbers back to this country. And I know there's a lot of environmentalists in the United States who really don't want the manufacturing jobs back. Even though they provide good union jobs, folks that would probably vote Democrat, they don't want them back because they think somehow--and it's really unbelievable that they think this, but they think somehow by driving those manufacturing jobs out of the United States and into countries that pollute 4 to 10 times more, producing the same products, as there was added to the atmosphere here, that somehow they've helped the environment, not realizing that that pollution goes up in the air, and the way the world turns we get an awful lot of that Chinese pollution right here in our own country, even though we don't have the jobs, we don't have the tax revenue from those, and we suffer the consequences of having run those companies out. So we get all of the disadvantages of running them out and none of the advantages. We hurt our economy and we hurt our ability to prepare for any type of defense that may be necessary to those who want to destroy us, because anybody that knows history knows a country that is looked to as the securer and protector of freedom must be able to provide all of the things that it would need in a battle within its own country. And if it can't do that, it's not going to last very long as the protector of freedom, which means freedom won't last very much longer. Now, the President talked about his bill so much, and it would be easy to be very cynical since the President went on the road and went for 6 days before there was ever an American Jobs Act filed, which was my bill. It might be easy to become cynical and say, ``It doesn't sound like the President had any intention of ever getting a bill voted on; all he wanted to do was run around the country and condemn Republicans,'' when this was some kind of political game. He had no intention of that bill being pushed, even being filed. There is a dramatically important piece of evidence that would seem to establish irrefutably that Leader Harry Reid and the President were not serious at all about his bill passing. What would that piece of evidence be? Well, it would start with article I, section 7 of the United States Constitution, which says all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives. But the Senate may propose or concur with amendments, as on other bills. The critical part was all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives. Well, it's not hard to find, from the President's bill, that he's raising revenue, he's raising taxes. So, clearly, under the Constitution, no question about it, the President's bill has to originate in the House. No question about it. It raises revenue. Everybody knows that. Leader Reid knows that. So, when I heard that finally the President's bill was passed in the Senate, or not passed but filed in the Senate, then I knew, because I know something about the Constitution, well, that has to be a House bill. The President is popping people with extra tax. It raises revenue. So, obviously, it has to originate in the House. Now, normally, unless there were games played in this town, that would mean the bill starts here, and we would take up the President's bill, and if it passed, then the Senate would take it up. But over the years, both parties, apparently, have played a political game where, if the Senate wants to start a bill that raises revenue, they will take a House bill that has already passed, strip out of it every word, and substitute for all that language of the House bill the Senate bill. And then, under the gamesmanship up here in Congress, that's been considered to satisfy the requirements of the Constitution because, technically, the bill started in the House. It has a House bill number on it, and so it did start in the House. They just took out every word and then put in the Senate bill. From a practical standpoint, it originated in the Senate, but from a technical standpoint, since it has a House number on it, then obviously they slide by, under the gamesmanship here, by saying it's a House bill. In fact, that's exactly what happened with ObamaCare. The House had not passed a bill that the Senate would take up on health care back 2 years ago. So what the Senate did was take a House bill, H.R. 3590, and this is the actual name of the ObamaCare health bill. I've got the first volume of the two volumes that make up the 2,400 or 2,500 pages of the President's health care so-called bill, H.R. 3590, entitled, ``An act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes.'' ObamaCare is H.R. 3590, and it was a bill the House of Representatives passed mainly to help our veterans, to help our armed services, our members who have pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor to serve in our military--that is mainly who it was for--and give them a tax credit for the first-time purchase of a home. It just seems so coldhearted to have taken a bill that started out to help veterans and our armed services members and, beginning with line 1, page 1, strip out every single word of the bill to help our veterans and substitute therein ObamaCare, 2,400, 2,500 pages. But that's what they did because that was the game. Because they knew in the Senate, if they were going to pass a bill that raised revenue, under Article I, section 7 of the Constitution, they had to take a House bill so they could play the game of saying, Well, it did originate in the House, has a House number on it, House title on it. We just stripped all that language out and put our bill in. That's the only way that the President's so-called jobs bill could originate in the Senate, practically, is to take a House bill, strip out every word, keep the House bill number, keep the House bill title, and put the President's so-called jobs bill in there. That's the only way that bill could ever have a chance of becoming law. And Leader Reid knows that. He's a smart man. And from what I understand, the President at one time was a local instructor in a law school, and surely he had to have read the Constitution and understand that. So he would know, as would Leader Reid, that for the President's jobs bill to meet the constitutional requirement of Article I, section 7, then Leader Reid would have to strip out a House bill. So when I heard that Leader Reid had filed the President's so-called jobs bill, I directed my staff to find out what House bill number and what House bill title that Leader Reid had stripped every word out of and substituted therein the President's so-called jobs bill. And I found the answer. He didn't do that. Leader Reid filed the President's bill with no cosponsors. A little trivia. The American Jobs Act, my bill, I think it's got five cosponsors. The President's so-called jobs bill, zero cosponsors. Mr. Reid filed it. Mr. Speaker, it is S. 1549. That's a Senate number, S. 1549. That's a Senate bill. Leader Reid did not bother to do what would be required, even under the gamesmanship of Capitol Hill, to strip out a House bill. And there's only one reason he wouldn't do that. There's only one reason the President wouldn't request that he do that, and that is because they had no intention of that bill--this bill--ever passing. Now I've only got the first few pages because the President's bill is actually 155 pages. But that came before. I got a copy of that before it was ever filed by anybody. So then I heard that Leader Reid actually filed an amendment to the President's so-called jobs bill, and I thought, ah, now he's no longer going to play this ridiculous charade of acting like he wants a bill to pass that he knows could never become law because it originated in the Senate and doesn't have a House bill number. So, okay, he's filed an amendment, the new bill, it has surely got to be some House bill that was stripped of every word, but it turns out that was Senate bill 1660. It's still a Senate number, it is still originating in the Senate, there's not even a charade, facade being shown here, which makes very, very clear Senator Reid and President Obama never ever intended for the so-called jobs bill of the President to pass. Never intended for it to pass. They never did. A smokescreen is all this has been for weeks now, millions and millions and millions of dollars running around the country demanding we pass a bill that neither Leader Reid nor the President had any intention of ever having passed because they knew the way the procedure works here when a bill like this that raises revenue originates in the Senate and the Senate were to actually pass it, then the Senate Clerk would send it to the House, it would go to our Clerk, and they would review it, and they would find that it raises revenue, as the President and Leader Reid know and acknowledge, and they would do what's called blue slipping it. They put a blue slip on it in essence saying that the House cannot take up the Senate bill because it raises revenue. And that means under article I, section 7, it must originate in the House, and, therefore, it's being sent back to the Senate without any action whatsoever because obviously people at the other end of the hall were playing some kind of game, knowing that a bill to raise revenue that originated in the Senate and did not have a House number, did not have a House title, would never become law. It was all a game. All a game. Apparently, the goal of this political game played by the President, and Leader Reid has as a goal the President winning the game, the political game, and getting reelected and the American people losing because there was no bill that was ever seriously intended to pass by the President or Leader Reid. That is tragic, simply tragic. The American people suffer, people are losing their jobs, and the only reason that the unemployment rate did not rise one more time again, that it stayed at 9.1 percent, that disastrous rate, was because so many employees who had been out on strike came back on to work. If they had not done that, then the unemployment rate would have reflected the truth. This country is still in big trouble, all while the President travels around making speeches about passing a bill that neither he nor Leader Reid ever had any intention of passing and becoming law as the American people suffer. Now, I heard my friends across the aisle here tonight say they wish, in essence, that the Republicans would bring their jobs bill. Well, there's great news. Apparently, while my friends hadn't noticed, we have passed about a dozen bills out of this body and sent them down to Leader Reid that will create jobs across the country, will bring down the price of gasoline, will bring down the price of energy, all kinds of bills we've sent down there, and they're sitting in the Senate. So for all of those people who have said the President is flat wrong when he says that we have a do-nothing Congress and as he is traveling around this week saying there's a do-nothing Congress, I'm going to defend the President here. For those that say the President is completely wrong when he says it's a do-nothing Congress, well, I'm going to defend the President. And I stand up for him because the President, when he says there's a do-nothing Congress, is one-half right, and he ought to be acknowledged for being one-half right when he says there's a do-nothing Congress because there is a do-nothing Senate. They're sitting on bills that would create jobs, bring down energy prices and would bring jobs back to America easing the burdens that have sent companies fleeing from this country to South America, to China, to India and to other countries. We bear them no ill will, but we want our jobs back here in America. And how wonderful to have the President's big job czar as a guy who has sent thousands and thousands of jobs from his own company overseas. Well, he apparently knows what he's doing because since he's been our jobs czar for President Obama, we've had thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands more jobs continue to flee and go across to other countries. He knows what he's doing. He did it with his own company, and now we're continuing to have that happen with other companies. Well, obviously, since the President, based on the things he said about his so-called jobs bill, has not read the bill, clearly, that's how we know he's not misrepresenting things, he just doesn't know what his bill says. And, in fairness, he could not possibly know what his bill says because he was on the road for 4 or 5 days, the whole time the bill was being written, demanding we pass a bill that hadn't even been written. I'll just flip through some of the provisions here. We're told, once again, just like we were in January of 2009, that we must pass the President's bill, just like in 2009, because it's going to provide bridges and infrastructure. I'm surprised that in 2\1/2\ short years the President was thinking people would have already forgotten that he used that sales pitch to sell a nearly trillion-dollar bill that didn't do anything he said it would. And then I found out today--my friend, Mick Mulvaney, pointed out this morning that when adjusted for inflation to the current level today, every interstate highway in this country had $425 billion spent in total to construct all the interstate highways we have in the country. Yet the President, in January of 2009, talked about creating all these new roads, infrastructure and bridges, and yet there was only a tiny fraction of all that money that was used at all on such infrastructure, and if he had taken half of that money and used it on infrastructure, we could have had an entirely new interstate highway system to mirror the one that we already have. It is amazing the kind of money that was squandered with nothing to show for it. That's the embarrassing part. If we had more people employed today than ever before, then even though it was an abandonment of free market principles, I would have to be grateful that there were new jobs and people were employed. You want to help people? Let them get a job that was not a giveaway from some government agency. Let them earn their own keep. For those of us who believe the Bible--I won't try to shove my religious beliefs on anybody else, but for those of us who do believe the Bible, you can look. Before there was a fall from grace, before such a thing as some people call ``sin'' was ever introduced into the world by improper choices, God gave Adam and Eve--not Adam and Steve, but Adam and Eve--a job. He said, ``Tend the garden.'' They were in a perfect paradise where there were no thorns, no sweat--a perfect paradise. People had a job. ``Tend the garden.'' A job is a good thing. It builds self-esteem, and it allows people to give of themselves to help others, not to come to Washington and use and abuse the taxing authority to take people's money to give to our favorite charity. It's for individuals to be blessed because they earned money at their own jobs and then helped people. I believe the Creator knew how much good that did our hearts, minds and souls to earn something and then help ourselves and others who need it. That's not what you find in the President's so-called ``jobs bill.'' Just when we thought, surely, Washington had learned a big, big lesson about the disaster when the Federal Government starts getting into the business of financing things, we have the President proposing what he calls the American Infrastructure Financing Authority, page 40. It's another massive bureaucracy. Who would control it? Oh. Well, it's a financing authority, so maybe it's not run by the government. Fannie and Freddie had government fingerprints all over them, all over some of the worst problems. Maybe the President learned a lesson from the damage done to this country by Fannie and Freddie being improperly managed. Then you can turn the page to page 41 and see, oh, the board of directors of the American Infrastructure Financing Authority consists of seven voting members appointed by the President. How about that. How about that. I guess the President didn't learn his lesson. He thinks the government is still the way to go about, not only funding housing for 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 or so, but now we'll fund billions of dollars in infrastructure financing. He'll stand good for that. Ironically, just as in the President's so-called ``stimulus bill'' in January of 2009, where the President promised all this great infrastructure and it turned out it was just a tiny bit of infrastructure compared to the overall amount, we find he has done the same thing in this new so-called ``jobs bill.'' There's a little bit of money for infrastructure, but compared to $450 billion, it is a tiny drop in the bucket. There's a little revenue generated here by auctioning off some broadband spectrum. Oh, I see there are provisions here where the public will relinquish some of its licenses and where other people will relinquish different things. I always hate to see that word when the government makes people relinquish things, but the language is there. Then what we get by selling off a little bit of broadband spectrum is found at page 75 of the President's bill, called the Public Safety Broadband Network. If individuals in this country were disappointed that the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, did not totally control the airwaves the way they wanted them to--maybe they wish there'd been a Fairness Doctrine reinstated or maybe they wanted the Federal Government to just exercise with an iron fist its authority, which I think would be unconstitutional, but to limit speech--well then, people would have to be encouraged by this new entity, the Public Safety Broadband Network, because it will take over the broadband for us. But not to worry. We'll call it a ``corporation,'' so it won't be government, right? Wrong. If you look at page 76, even though it says it will be established as a private, nonprofit corporation, it turns out the members of the board will be the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General of the United States, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and they will go about appointing 11 more individuals to serve as non-Federal members of the board. Well, happy days, happy days. More and more government. It's interesting. There's a little money for a reemployment program. How many reemployment programs are we going to throw money away on to train people for jobs that don't exist? How about allowing the public sector to have that money?--which is not available to borrow when the Federal Government is sucking that money out of use by the private sector. It's not there to be borrowed and used to build up companies, to build up jobs, to create jobs. Oh, no. The Federal Government is taking it to build more government--more training programs for jobs that don't exist. Then there's a new program here at page 106 that most people have never heard about, and I really doubt that the President knows it's here. It's a new program, entitled Short-Term Compensation Program. It does say that it's initially voluntary, but it also says if an employer reduces the number of hours worked by employees in lieu of layoffs--and I've had people tell me they were doing this, where, for example, they didn't want to lose their valuable employees, but business was terrible, so they all agreed among themselves they would take a reduction in hours/a reduction in pay so that they could save the company, weather the storm, maybe get to January 2013 when the economy would rebound because we'd have new free market principles put in place and things would take off. Then everybody could go back to making an even a better living. Under this provision, if you're part of the President's new program and if you reduce by at least 10 percent the hours of your employees, then according to subsection 3, those employees would be eligible for unemployment compensation. That means the unemployment tax rate for that employer would go up. I've heard from employers who've said, If you raise my unemployment tax rate, I'm going to have to lay off a whole lot of employees instead of being able to save the company, save their jobs and weather this storm. It does say on down the page, under subsection 7, that if an employer provides health benefits and retirement benefits under a defined benefit plan, then the State agency is required to certify that such benefits will continue to be provided, which means, for the employers I talked to who are struggling and just trying to hold on, they're not going to be able to hold on. They're going to have to keep providing benefits at the same level. They're trying to weather the storm, which is what companies normally do just to survive. That's what individual mom and pop operations do--they cut their budgets. Not here in Washington. One of the best things I've heard all year is when Chairman Ryan said the vision he has for our budget includes finally adopting a zero baseline budget. I am so grateful to Chairman Ryan. He sees the same thing I do. We need to have a zero baseline--in other words, no automatic increases. It started in 1974. It's time it quit because a mom and pop operation--a mom operation, a pop operation, any operation, any business. When times are tough, they have to cut. Not here in Washington. Under the rules set up in 1974, there is a formula so that we have automatic increases every year. It's time to stop it. If an agency is going to get additional money, they need to prove that they should get it. But as I started off this hour, Mr. Speaker, saying this House has adopted a budget that cut our legislative budgets by 5 percent across the board, it's time we exercise our moral authority and say everybody else in the Federal Government is going to have to have the same kind of 5 percent cut across the board. And when we do that 6 percent to our budget next year, it's time to demand, after we do it in the House, everybody else in the Federal Government has to do it too. There's so many other provisions that have nothing to do with creating jobs, and you can look at page 134 and see that the President, who's talked about all these millionaires and billionaires need to pay their fair share, even though we're now approaching 50 percent of the country that will not pay income tax. If the President believes what he says, Mr. Speaker, it is time to call the bluff and say, all right, then let's have a flat tax, everybody pays the same amount, it doesn't matter if you're an ultra zillionaire, billionaire, if you're one of the poorer workers, everybody is going to have an investment, as the President likes to say in this government, and that way they'll have more interest in what happens. They'll have more interest in seeing we don't waste so much money up here, and we can do that. This is why I'm sure, also, the President never read the bill that he demands we pass, that I explained earlier, why we know now neither the President nor Leader Reid had any intention of this bill passing, so they didn't bother to meet the constitutional requirements. At page 135, the President's bill defines what he's been calling a billionaire and a millionaire as a taxpayer whose adjusted gross income is above, C, $125,000 in the case of married filing separately; 250,000 in the case of a joint return. But if you're a gay couple living together, then you can be grateful to the President because you can claim $200,000 or $225,000 as your exemption amount. But even at that rate, I'm from East Texas, and the public schools I went to were awfully good, but they taught me that when a number has six figures in it, it isn't a million and it isn't a billion. So when the President's bill says $125,000 if you're married, that's the exemption you've got before they start slapping you with extra tax, and I haven't heard anybody else but me talk about this, but down in subsection C on page 135, not only does the President not do away with the alternative minimum tax, as the title says there's an additional AMT amount in the President's bill. Now there's a jobs bill. People you're calling millionaires and billionaires and define it as somebody that makes $125,000, you slap them with extra alternative minimum tax, you take away deductions. I'm telling you, Mr. Speaker, it is time that we had a flat tax across the board. Everybody would pay their fair share. And the more money you make on a flat tax, the more money you're going to pay in. I agree with Art Laffer, who was telling me, there is a strong justification for two deductions only, the mortgage interest deduction and charitable contribution deduction. All the others go away. Now that would be a fair tax. Everybody would pay their fair share. And since the President's not aware of how oil companies work, and since they've spent more and more and more money than ever in the Interior Department budget to consider permits to drill for oil or gas, we've gone from 140-something permits that cost a whole lot less to process to now processing double-digit permits, we're losing jobs. I hear from people in the Gulf affected by the Deepwater Horizon explosion by the President's good friends at British Petroleum, who were all set to endorse the President's cap-and-trade bill before the blowout, and then they had to postpone that. But when you eliminate deductions that only keep independent oil companies alive, then it affects the majors in only one way, and that is you drive out all the independent producers, the majors will be able to charge more than ever, they'll make more profit than ever. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to speak here today, and I certainly appreciate my friends enlightening the Chamber and those that may be prone to listening. I want to add a little bit to the enlightenment, as we've seen that the President is out there. And here is an article from the AP, dated October 4, saying that President Barack Obama is criticizing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for saying the President's $447 billion jobs bill will not get a vote in its entirety in the Republican-led House. The President singled out Mr. Cantor. According to the article, it says, `` `I'd like Mr. Cantor to come down here to Dallas and explain what in this jobs bill he doesn't believe in,' Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday at a Texas community college.'' And as we know, the President would have been reading those remarks, because he wouldn't want to stray far from the teleprompter with remarks. We've seen what happens on those occasions, and it isn't pretty. The article goes on: ``Three weeks after Obama sent the legislation to Congress, the proposal has run into resistance from Republicans and even some Democrats.'' See, the article's not quite accurate on that, because we know that the President came in here, in this very body after he demanded to come speak, which requires an invitation. You can't just come speak on the House floor unless you're recognized by the Speaker, you're a Member of the House, or if the House votes to allow someone to come in who's not a Member. Some people are surprised when they come in, Mr. Speaker, that the President's not up there where you are, but the rules make it very clear. This is the people's House. The President can only come, just like any other leader that's invited, for instance, Prime Minister Netanyahu. They speak from the second podium because they're invited guests. Well, now, it's a little bit rude to demand to come speak in someone's house, and then you come in there and lecture them and you state things like repeatedly saying, You've got to pass this bill right away, right now; pass this bill, this bill, and it turns out you didn't even have a bill. You had the gall to come in here and demand we pass a bill and you haven't even got a bill? And then on Friday, the President hit the campaign trail. Well, maybe not the campaign trail, but whatever you want to call it. He was out there spending millions and millions and millions of dollars to go to different places around the country and demand we pass this bill. Tell Congress, pass my bill, and he didn't have a bill. Saturday, Sunday, he's out there saying, Pass my bill right now, pass it right away. People, go to work immediately. Never mind that he had to take a vacation before he could get around to producing a bill that was that important. Never mind that he's going around telling everybody, We should make Congress pass a bill that doesn't exist. On Monday, I was a little bothered we were being condemned for not passing a bill that didn't exist. So we were pushing to try to get a copy of this phantom bill. Late that afternoon, we finally got a copy emailed. I printed it out that Monday night at around 11 p.m., and I started going through the President's bill. Now, by Wednesday, when no bill was filed and when the President was still running around spending millions of taxpayer dollars, condemning Congress for not passing his bill when he was so busy out there telling people to make Congress ``pass my bill,'' he forgot to have anybody file the bill. For 6 days, we were condemned here in this Chamber for not passing the President's bill. He was so busy condemning Congress for not passing his bill that he forgot to ask somebody to file it for him. By Wednesday, I got tired of being condemned for not passing the American Jobs Act, so I filed an American Jobs Act. Mine's two pages. It's H.R. 2911. It would create more jobs in America than anything that the President has ever even talked about because, though you have businessmen who are very successful, like Donald Trump, saying we ought to slap a 25 percent tariff on everything we buy from China, that starts a trade war. I'm sure we don't win. I don't think China wins. I don't think anybody wins. It would be messy. China owns so much of our debt, unfortunately, that it's probably not a smart move right now until we get out from under this debt. The Bible talks very clearly about what happens when you allow somebody to own your debt. Basically, you become a slave to them. So I'm looking forward to the day we don't owe China and we don't owe foreign countries, the day we get out of debt because we balance our budget; and it looks like it will take a balanced budget amendment to do that. In the meantime, there is no treaty that would be violated, no trade agreement, no court order anywhere in the world that would prevent us from eliminating the 35 percent tariff that we put on all American-made goods before they're able to sell them abroad. It's called a 35 percent corporate tax, the largest corporate tax in the world. It's the number one reason that I've heard from CEOs as to why they moved their businesses to other countries. So my two-page bill, the American Jobs Act--and I do appreciate the President promoting the American Jobs Act; that's my bill--reduces the 35 percent corporate tax to zero. Now, there are some people who never really got economics, and they don't understand the way the real world works. They think the real world works like CBO's archaic rules that say you can't take actual historic precedent to figure out what effect a bill will have. Never mind even if the same result always occurs after a certain thing is done, you can't consider that because the 1974 liberal Congress that ran us out of Vietnam and left all our allies there to be killed by our enemies put in the rules for CBO to score bills. So you don't get a fair look at what really happens with CBO rules, and there are some people who think those rules are the way you have to look at things. The fact is, if you reduced the corporate tax, especially to zero, jobs would come flooding back into America. Now, I would think unions would love this bill. If you really want union jobs back in America; if you're really willing to say, you know what, forget this business about America being nothing but a service economy, we really want manufacturing jobs back, then eliminate the 35 percent insidious tariff we put on American-made goods before they can be sold abroad. As I've said here on the floor, I'm willing to negotiate, to be bipartisan. If the President can't bring himself to get to zero, then let's negotiate somewhere in between. We could do that. Herman Cain is talking about 9 percent. But then we have the President out there demanding that we pass his bill. Then he's saying things about it that simply are not factual, not factual at all. I know, because I read the bill. I'm very irritated with people who think the President's lying about his bill, because I believe I can prove he's not lying about his bill. He doesn't know what's in his bill. You can't lie about something you don't know, and I believe I can prove the President is not a liar. Absolutely not. He gave that speech in here on Thursday night. The next day, he's on the road condemning Congress for not passing his bill. There was no bill yet. Saturday, he's on the road condemning Congress for not passing his bill. There's no bill. He was still keeping that up all day Monday. Well, it wasn't until Monday that his bill got finished. There's no way he could keep giving those speeches every single day all over the country and have had the 6 or 7 hours I did between 11 p.m. to 5 or 6 a.m.--I've said five, but I was still going awhile--but at least the 6 hours that I took the night the bill came out to go through his bill. He hadn't had that time. There's no way the President could work that 6-hour schedule, or time in his schedule, to go through the bill like I did. There's no way to condemn the President for not knowing what's in his bill when he hasn't had time, when he's been too busy condemning Congress for not passing it. How could he know what was in it? Then today, of course, we see the President's knocking the GOP leadership, and he's telling people on the campaign trail--let's see. This is an article from Yahoo! News, by Chris Moody: President Obama is in Dallas today, urging Americans who support the American Jobs Act to demand that Congress pass it already. Though it's been nearly a month since he laid out this plan, House Republicans haven't acted to pass it, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is out there actually bragging that they won't even put the jobs package up for a vote-- ever. It's not clear which part of the bill they now object to-- building roads, hiring teachers, getting veterans back to work. They're willing to block the American Jobs Act, and they think you won't do anything about it. Apparently, those are the President's words, according to the article, the best I understand this. Oh, this was the President's reelection campaign that sent out an email blasting House Republicans for not voting on the proposal. It's just been in the last hour, while the President is condemning Republicans for not passing his bill, that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, tried to force a vote on the President's plan in the upper Chamber on Tuesday afternoon; but Reid used a procedural tactic to block the bill from coming to the floor. He called the Republicans' insistence on a vote a ``publicity stunt.'' So the President hasn't had time to read the bill. He hasn't had time to find out who was really blocking his bill. Well, it turns out it's really Harry Reid in the Senate. Based on the things the President has said, I know he hasn't read this, because I know the President would not be dishonest. When he's out there and has repeatedly said that we're going to make millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share, I know he wouldn't go out there and say that if he knew the truth about what was in his bill, because in his bill at pages 134 and 135, it gives the definition of who's rich and who's going to get it socked to him. The President has been saying repeatedly ``millionaire and billionaire''; but bless his heart, if he had time to read the bill-- and I hope somebody will carve out some time for him to do that. I know his speech schedule out there of condemning Congress has kept him tied up--but if they could work in some time for him to read his own bill and just stop condemning Congress for just a little bit and if he has enough time to get to page 135, he'll find out that the people he's going after that he says are millionaires and billionaires in his bill--and it's not a jobs bill. Since I have used the name that the President was originally plugging, I think his bill would be better called ``the saving Obama's job bill.'' But that may not be fair either because if people really find out what's in this bill, I don't think they would be very happy. I'm not sure it saves his job. But he defines millionaire and billionaire--right here on page 135-- as any taxpayer whose adjusted gross income is above $125,000 in the case of a married filing separately return, and that's $250,000 in the case of a joint return, married filing jointly. And here again this may be something nice he's throwing out for gay folks that are living together, so he can tell them actually you're better off not getting married, because there's some marriage penalty here. If you're the head of a single household, you've got an exemption of $225,000; all other cases, $200,000. So it really penalizes married individuals and, apparently, according to this bill, a millionaire or a billionaire is somebody who makes $125,000. But if you think this is good news, if you want to get divorced, it is good news for you because if you're married and you're filing a joint return, you get a $250,000 exemption. Or if you're married and filing singly, you get a $125,000 exemption. The good news is, if you're thinking about divorce, you can actually get divorced and have a $75,000 to $100,000 higher exemption if you'll just get divorced, and you can even live together. This is the President's proposal: live together and you get a whole lot more of an exemption than if you're married. Now, of course, the Founders, they all understood marriage to be between a man and a woman, and that's the way the history of the country has been. Study after study has shown that the odds are children will be better adjusted if they have the two-parent home, the traditional two-parent home. Obviously, there's some homes that aren't good and children are not well served there. But this President, by virtue of the power as the old saying, the power to tax, the power to destroy, takes a shot at traditional, conventional marriage. Then there is an additional AMT amount. That's subsection c, because if you are a millionaire or a billionaire, which means you make more than $125,000 and you're married, there is an extra penalty for you that the President's got waiting for you in his so-called jobs bill. I don't know if he's aware--I just don't see how he could be because he's been so busy out making speeches everywhere. But if you were to look, Mr. Speaker, at the stuff in here, well, he says it's about jobs; so I bet the President does not know that here at page 75, we've got a new Federal entity, although it's defined on page 76 as a private, nonprofit corporation, called the Public Safety Broadband Corporation, because this President believes there is danger in people having broadband in their home. Can you really trust the American people? It has to be the theme of this part of the President's so-called jobs bill. Apparently, he thinks there's a public safety threat in broadband that people have coming into their home and business. So he's created this private, nonprofit corporation. You might say, well, good, thank goodness it's not government; it's a private nonprofit corporation that will control everybody's broadband. Good news, is it? Because when you look down at section 285, halfway down page 76, you see who's on the board of directors. And even though it's a private, nonprofit corporation, the board of directors is comprised of--the Federal members are the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General of the United States, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. I believe those are all appointed by the President. How about that? But it's a private, nonprofit corporation; so surely the Federal Government wouldn't try to control it. But the Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney General, shall appoint 11 other individuals who serve as non-Federal members of the board. Well, isn't that happy news? They're not really Federal even though the President's appointees are the ones that will be on the board with these folks. They'll owe their appointment to them. But it's just interesting. I bet the President has no idea. And, of course, I know the President's aware of what a fiasco to our Federal budget Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been and the danger that it posed to our Federal economic system. Well, he's probably not aware that in here his bill creates--I'm sure there's no way he could know what's in this bill. He's too busy running around condemning us for not passing it. There's no way he could have spent 6 hours reading this, 6 to 7 hours, like I did. Anyway, if you'll double-check, you'll find, Mr. Speaker, that page 40, whoever wrote this bill thinks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were a wonderful, wonderful thing. The Federal Government, insuring all these home loans and, then, of course, we pass laws. I do remember our friend from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) assuring everybody that they're in good shape, not a problem. It turned out they weren't in good shape. He didn't know. Mr. Frank wouldn't come down here and misrepresent something like that, I know. He wouldn't. He just didn't know, just like the President has no clue what all is in this bill. But if he'll check at the bottom of page 40, he'll find the American Infrastructure Financing Authority says it's established as a wholly owned government corporation. So if you like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you think they've done a great job, you're going to love this bill. It's like both of them combined, exponentially increased and put on steroids. Because we know houses, compared to infrastructure, don't cost all that much. But, boy, you compare them to infrastructure, man. This has to be the thinking of whoever put this bill together, and I know it wasn't the President because he couldn't have put this together and gone around telling people things that are in it, not knowing this kind of stuff that is in it. But the American Infrastructure Financing Authority--and we could do that like we did the flood insurance. You know, the Federal Government says, well, we need a Federal player in the insurance business; so we provided a Federal option. Well, guess what, the Federal Government runs in the red on the flood insurance. Private companies can't keep up with that, and so insurance companies quit providing flood insurance in those parts and the Federal Government became the insurer. It's the same way with student loans. Banks, other lending institutions could lend money for student loans, and they were backed by the government. But under Speaker Pelosi and this President, Harry Reid, the Federal Government decided we're going to take over all the student loans. Well, that creates a concern for some because if you're as outspoken as some of us are, I'm just grateful my daughter has just finished her college degree so I won't have to come begging to the President for a student loan so my children can go to college. Is that what we want? Is that where we want the infrastructure financing to go? Every school district, town, county, State has to come begging to the Federal Government because we run everybody else out of business, like we did student loans and flood insurance? Surely the President doesn't know this is in here. This is not a jobs bill; it's a government takeover. Same with the public safety broad band authority or corporation. I bet a lot of folks don't know about the short time compensation program. It's a new program, never created before, but it's in the President's bill. The participation, it says, is involuntary. But if an employer under this program reduces hours worked by employees instead of laying them off, and that's anybody who has been reduced by at least 10 percent, then it says they're eligible for unemployment compensation. It gives out the terms for that. I bet the President doesn't know that's in there. Now I have to agree with him, it is a jobs bill for plaintiff's lawyers because we have seen over and over a lot of states doing tort reform. It's more and more difficult to sue people. So we have got a new program here that will help with lawyers that are out of work because here in the bill, we've created a new class of protected individuals. So if you're unemployed and you get laid off, you ought to see a lawyer if you feel like you weren't hired because you're unemployed, because you can sue. You can file a claim, at least, against the employer that didn't hire you. Now, a practical look at that provision, allowing employers to be sued if they fail to hire someone who is unemployed, would make employers--I've already heard from them--if that ends up in the law, I'm not going to be hiring anybody. I can't take a chance on being sued or having claims filed against me. If five people unemployed come in, four of them don't get the job and they all four file claims against me, I can't afford that. So I think once the President ever gets to look at his bill, then he'll understand this is not what he's thinking it is. And, of course, he's promised America we're going after major oil companies. There is no way this President could know that page 151-154, the part that goes after oil companies, will not affect his friends at British Petroleum, Exxon, Shell. They won't be affected because the most important deductions that are repealed here are only for smaller producers, the independent producers who drill 94 percent of all the oil and gas wells on the land of the continental U.S. There's no way he could know that, even if he read this, unless he really understood the oil and gas industry. So what he'll do, he drives up the capital for companies trying to drill wells, and this will be a disaster unless you're a major oil company, in which case you'll make more profit than you've ever made because you kill off all of the independent competition. That's what his bill does, and I'm sure he doesn't know that. Now, they have also been out there blaming Republicans for increasing the debt. This was in an article. We've got it up on the House Web site so people can really see what has happened. It's a great article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. This is one of the diagrams. It shows who really increased the debt. We know from the Constitution that it is the Congress that holds the purse strings. So really the one responsible, most responsible, is the Congress. And who's most responsible, the biggest, most powerful body is controlled by the Speaker; you, Mr. Speaker--that is while you're pro tempore. This shows the increase in debt as a percentage of GDP. And we see what happened under Speaker O'Neill. We see what happened under Speaker Jim Wright. Didn't really increase much in debt as a percentage of GDP. Under Speaker Foley, it increased a great deal. And actually under Speaker Gingrich and Speaker Hastert, debt as a percentage of GDP, it went way down. And then we got the last 4 years with Speaker Pelosi, and it went through the roof like has never happened in this country's history. Well, I hope I have provided an adequate defense to those who would say that the President is misrepresented because I think I've got proof. The President didn't lie about any of this stuff. He hasn't had time to read it. He doesn't know what's in it. I hope and pray that he'll take the time to do that so he can accurately represent the saving Obama's job bill, and I appreciate the President's support for the American Jobs Act, which bill is mine. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I know my friend from the Virgin Islands and I have differences on political issues, but she was very gracious to me personally and I will always be grateful, very grateful. Thank you. We do differ on some of the issues. And hearing my friend across the aisle from Michigan (Mr. Clarke), he wants what's best for his constituents. He wants them to have jobs. He wants them to have less taxes. He wants them to be able to revitalize their city. And that is what people want on both sides of the aisle. We just have a difference of opinion on the best way to go about it. My friend from California said that the Tea Party really didn't want anything that will raise revenues. And I know she believes that, but the contrary is actually true. And what we have seen historically is, when you create jobs, even if the tax rate is lowered, if you do something that creates jobs, then the tax rate increases. Some people have tried to vilify me because I'm advocating getting rid of a rather insidious--I sometimes think it is the most insidious tax we have because it has convinced rank-and-file folks across America that they don't have to pay this tax, some greedy, nasty corporation will pay the corporate tax, when the truth is the corporations are nothing but collection agents. If they don't collect the tax by adding on price to the cost of their product, to the price of their services, they don't stay in business. They're a collection agent. So the fact is, if you were to drop that tariff that we lay on our own products-- it's a 35 percent tax. It's really a tariff. You eliminate that and jobs come rushing back into America. The number one reason you get when you travel around the world-- whether it's Africa, China. Others tell me from South America, Hey, we had to move because America has the highest corporate tax of any country in the world, 35 percent. China is 17 percent. So you lower that tariff that corporations have to collect on their goods, jobs would come flooding back, and we could see Detroit become the car capital that it once was and that it should be. We would see those jobs come back. In first questioning CEOs overseas, the number one answer I would get on why they moved was too much regulation. Well, that was a problem. Difficulty in dealing with unions or too high wages compared to what people get around the world, that was a problem. It wasn't the number one problem. The number one problem was the 35 percent corporate tax, a tariff we put on all American-made goods. I've had people who, apparently, with degrees, are educated beyond their abilities, say, but if you lowered or got rid of the corporate tax, where would all that tax money come from? Because they don't understand how jobs are created. They think that money, it's a zero sum balance. It just would go away, and there would be no more tax. We'd lose that much tax. And, in fact, the liberal Congress that existed in 1974 when they set up CBO and set up their rules for scoring bills does not allow the Congressional Budget Office to score based on reality. They are forced to score under archaic, unrealistic rules that are not allowed to take into consideration past history in calculating future performance. Huge mistake. But the Democrats in charge in 1974 knew what they were doing. So you drop that tax. And, like I've said, the American Jobs Act is my bill. After the President beat up on us for 6 days, and it became very obvious he was more concerned about making speeches about American Jobs Act than he was actually getting one filed and getting one pushed through, then I felt like, if he's going to criticize me and our friends here for not passing the American Jobs Act, by golly, there ought to be one. So I did file one, and that's what it does. I'm negotiable. If the President would like to come up zero in corporate tax, I'm flexible. But the fact is, jobs would come rushing back into this country if the manufacturers, if the companies knew no corporate tariff is put on those products. They could compete around the world; we would retake the world. I know there are people in this country, good folks, smart folks, that think we are better off as a service-oriented society in America, rather than a manufacturing society. The trouble with that is, and as I heard from people in West Africa last year, we're their hope for freedom. If we don't remain strong, as one elderly gentleman told me, they have no chance of enjoying freedom in this life. Well, you can't be an international power and protect freedom, not here, not anywhere, unless you can produce the things that are needed in the event of war. That's why I'm an advocate for natural gas being used to power cars. We need to make sure it's safe, but it's cleaner burning. Some people say, no, we've got to get cars that run on electricity. They don't apparently realize that electricity has to be generated somewhere, and it's obvious that Solyndra's not going to be producing it for us. Maybe if we give them several trillion dollars instead of just 600 billion, maybe eventually they could come up with a product that would compete, but that hasn't happened. So mistakes have been made. Mistakes get made on both sides of the aisle. Republicans made a mistake in '05 and '06, my freshman term here, and I have to say that our friends across the aisle rightfully beat up on us back in 2006 for spending $160 billion more than we took in. We shouldn't have done that. And they promised they would get spending down under control and would not run a deficit like that if they were simply given the majority. They were for 4 years, and the spending went through the roof. Republicans made a mistake by spending more than was coming in by $160 billion. And then our friends across the aisle made a mistake over the last 4 years as they got that spending up over $1 trillion, $1.5 trillion more than we were bringing in. Major mistake. But I want to spend the remainder of my time tonight in talking about another problem that we've had here in the United States and with the Federal Government. There's been a lot of talk the last few days about the death of Anwar al-Awlaki. And it is important to note the things that we were told in past years about Mr. Awlaki. Pajamas Medium, that's a funny name, but Patrick Poole has done a good job doing some research on some of the old articles. For example, back in November of 2001 The Washington Post--let's see, I think they're going after our Governor from Texas right now. Well, that same Washington Post had a wonderful blog back in November of 2001 and featured none other than Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. And he was allowed to use The Washington Post to try to convince people of what a man of peace he was. And you get the impression, certainly, The Washington Post said he was a good guy. You can look back, again, November 19, 2001. And I printed this off of the Internet from The Washington Post. Understanding Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. And they featured Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. Now, obviously, The Washington Post doesn't care much for the Governor of Texas, but they certainly had a great appreciation for the man that was killed recently, featuring him in their publication to explain things for us. And they featured him explaining that, about Ramadan. Isn't that wonderful that The Washington Post would reach out to someone who it turns out wanted to destroy America, our way of life, thought it was a good idea to kill Americans, believed that actually it would be a good thing to bring down America. It was good The Washington Post would give him that much time because they're so open-minded, honorable people. So are they all, all honorable people, as Shakespeare had Mark Anthony saying. All those folks at The Washington Post, they're honorable people. I mean, why else would they give their paper, their moniker, to a man that they judged to be a man of peace? New York Times had a good article, October 19 of 2001, and they mentioned Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia, one of the Nation's largest, which draws about 3,000 worshippers for communal prayers each Friday. ``In the past we were oblivious. We didn't really care much because we never expected things to happen. Now I think things are different. What we might have tolerated in the past we won't tolerate anymore. There were some statements that were inflammatory and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent, radical way,'' said Mr. Awlaki, who, at 30, is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West, born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University. So they featured what they believed to be a man of peace. And, certainly, The New York Times is full of honorable people. So are they all at The New York Times, all honorable people that had such nice things to say about the man who would destroy America. Of course, Fox News published an article on May 20, 2011, that said: With the recent death and, again, this was May of this year, of Osama bin Laden, the life of another al-Qaeda-linked radical Muslim cleric-- well, that seems pretty hurtful of them, Fox News, to say about someone that The New York Times and The Washington Post thought so highly of. I'm sorry that Fox News was so mean to somebody that The Times and The Washington Post liked so much. The article goes on: Documents obtained exclusively by Fox News and its special unit shed new light on his stint as a guest speaker at the Pentagon just months after the September 11 terror attacks. American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, which seems a little mean of the CIA. I mean, The Washington Post and The New York Times thought he was okay back in 2001. Again, the article says: American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, is still considered a grave threat to U.S. national security. He now is hiding out in Yemen, where earlier this month a U.S. missile attack tried to kill him and his followers. The scene was much different on February 5, 2002, when the radical imam was invited to and attended the Pentagon event. Fox News obtained new documents through a Free of Information Act request as part of a year-long investigation called ``Fox News Reporting: Secrets of 9/11.'' An internal Department of Defense email that announced the event with Awlaki also laid out other details, like a proposed menu including pork, which is prohibited for Muslims. The email states ``the chef will create something special for vegetarians.'' The documents show that more than 70 people were copied on the invitation, which originated in the Defense Department's Office of the General Counsel. It is home to the Pentagon's top lawyer. ``I have reserved one of the executive dining rooms for February 5, which is the date he, Awlaki, preferred,'' a Defense Department lawyer wrote in the email announcing the event. ``He will be leaving for an extensive period of time on February 11.'' The email states that New Mexico born al-Awlaki was the featured guest speaker on ``Islam and Middle Eastern Politics and Culture.'' The Defense Department lawyer who vetted the imam wrote that she ``had the privilege of hearing one of Mr. Awlaki's presentations in November and was impressed by both the extent of his knowledge and by how he communicated that information and handled a hostile element in the audience.'' The article goes on and points out that al-Awlaki, a dual U.S. and Yemeni national, was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the first 8 days after September 11 because he had ties to the three hijackers involved. They were three of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon. Apparently none of the FBI's information about Awlaki, his ties to the hijackers or his history of soliciting prostitutes, was shared with the Pentagon. Another article published in Andrew Breitbart Presents Big Peace, November 9, 2010, points out that al-Awlaki was involved in the training of the Defense Department's Muslim chaplains and lay leaders as an instructor at the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, IIASA, in the Washington, D.C., area. It goes on to say: Controlled by the Saudi Embassy and operating under the kingdom's Ministry of Higher Education, the IIASA served as the branch campus of the al Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh. The institute was certified to train the Pentagon's Muslim chaplains until 2003. Many of the faculty members, who held diplomatic passports, had their visas revoked in January 2004, and the institute itself was raided by the FBI, Customs, and the IRS the following July. It goes on to say: Awlaki's role in the program was reported by Glenn Simpson at The Wall Street Journal back in December 2003 but hasn't been mentioned since. Writing about the IIASA's controversial role in the military chaplain program, Simpson noted: ``Anwar al-Awlaki, the former imam at a mosque in San Diego, also has lectured at the institute. A congressional report on September 11 released this July said Mr. Awlaki counseled two of the hijackers while they stayed in San Diego and then transferred to a mosque that both hijackers attended in northern Virginia shortly before the attacks. Mr. Awlaki, who is now believed to be in Yemen, has denied knowing of the hijackers' plans.'' The article goes on: More is now known about Awlaki's relationship with the 9/11 terror plot. Time magazine reported that the cleric held closed-door meetings with two of the hijackers in San Diego, and the pair followed Awlaki to the D.C. area when he moved there in early 2001. Hani Hanjour, who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, joined them there. The three hijackers attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, where Awlaki served as imam. Well, isn't that interesting? Also, a report, this is a Rewind: Anwar al-Awlaki leads prayers inside U.S. Capitol for congressional Muslim staffers. This is from Pajamas Media: Anwar al-Awlaki's appearance leading Friday afternoon prayers inside the U.S. Capitol following the 9/11 attacks. As Fox News later reported, Anwar al-Awlaki was not the only terror-tied al Qaeda cleric leading prayers for the Congressional Muslim Staff Association. Then it goes on and points out that there is footage of Awlaki leading prayers for congressional Muslim staffers (which also included then-CAIR official and now convicted terror operative Randall ``Ismail'' Royer) shot for a PBS documentary called ``Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet.'' Interesting stuff. Of course, National Public Radio, that receives so much of our taxpayer money, reported November 1, 2001, that Awlaki was contrasted to Osama bin Laden as one of the, quote, moderates who want to solve the problems without violence, unquote, and someone who could, quote, build bridges between Islam and the West, unquote. Interesting stuff. It just doesn't seem that we seem to learn our lessons very well. We also know that this Attorney General not only had a Justice Department-involved, which obviously included ATF involvement in selling guns to criminals, Mexican drug cartels who we know killed at least one, and there may be others, but this Justice Department dropped the charges against the individuals and the groups that were named coconspirators in the Holy Hand Foundation trial that was tried in Dallas, Texas, first to a hung jury. As I understand, there was an 11-1 verdict. One person held up the verdict, so they tried it again, and the Bush administration's Justice Department intended if they got a conviction of the five people charged with aiding terrorism that they would then move forward. In fact, the Assistant U.S. Attorney involved filed pleadings with the court, the District Court in Dallas, Texas, the Federal Court, and also with the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans in response to some of those groups that were named coconspirators to supporting terrorist activity with money and basically said there's a prima facie case here. There's enough evidence to keep them in as named coconspirators. The conviction occurred, I believe it was November of 2008, five defendants, 105 counts, as I recall. Then, rather than going forward as they should have based on the evidence, the stacks and stacks, the boxes and boxes of evidence, this Justice Department decided to drop the matter. It's understandable given some of the relationships that are involved. Of course, CAIR, mentioned in one of the articles, was one of the named coconspirators to financing terrorism in the Holy Land Foundation trial. We know that ISNA was one of the named coconspirators, the Islamic Society of North America, and the head of ISNA, Imam Magid. Actually, Imam Magid was the leader of a named codefendant in sponsoring terrorism in the Holy Land Foundation trial, which this administration refused to pursue further. Then we find out that Imam Magid, a year ago, was at the White House, leading the White House in the Iftar celebration at the conclusion of Ramadan. Then, of course, we know that the second-highest person in the National Security Agency, Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough, was invited and spoke, and thanked Imam Magid there for the wonderful prayers at the White House and also for the wonderful introduction. They have a wonderful relationship. Well, isn't that special. In the wake of Mr. Anwar al-Awlaki being killed in Yemen for his role in having declared war on the United States, I can't help but reflect back on something that sets our country apart. In a new democracy visited earlier this year, I had a leader there say, We're constantly worried about the military trying to take over because we never had a George Washington who did what no one has ever done before or since: led the Revolution--a military revolution--won the Revolution, resigned, and gone home. Nobody has done it before or since. What a man. In his resignation that was sent to the 13 Governors, Washington, at the end--and there's a painting of him tendering his resignation-- included a prayer. He says in the prayer--and we have his own words, but I won't read the whole thing--``I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you and the State over which you preside in His holy protection.'' He goes on and says, ``And finally, that He would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy and to demean ourselves with charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy Nation. ``I have the honor to be, with great respect and esteem, Your excellency's most obedient and very humble servant, George Washington.'' Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, I can't help but wonder if Mr. Al-Awlaki ever knew the divine author of our blessed religion, who George Washington says, ``without an humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy Nation.'' With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, we're going into recess for a week. We passed a bill to keep the government running. Some of us were concerned that we were compromising with ourselves, but supposedly it was a bill that, though we compromised with ourselves, that the Senate could pass. Now we find out they've tabled the bill, and now they're talking shutdown. It's extremely disconcerting when it seems that one group believes that the best way to win politically is to have a shutdown and blame Republicans. It's also disconcerting to have a President come into this body here, speak to the House and Senate, stand here at the historic podium and lecture this body on the President's jobs bill that didn't exist while he was lecturing us. It was entirely consistent, though, with exactly 2 years before that when the President's polling data showed that people didn't think that the President's ideas for health care were good, and since he is such an incredibly gifted reader of speeches, apparently he felt if he came back to the House floor and were able to use the teleprompters and read to the body that he would be able to convince everyone to go along with the government takeover of health care completely. And that day, he kept representing things about ``his bill,'' ``this bill,'' ``my bill,'' ``my plan,'' ``this plan,'' and there was no plan. There was no bill at that time either. So it was not terribly surprising that the President would come in here again 2 years later when polls are not looking good and tell us that we had to pass a bill that didn't exist and that he had a plan but the plan didn't really exist. Eventually, we got a copy of his bill, even though for 6 days nobody filed an American Jobs Act. So I went to the trouble of filing one. I felt if the President wanted to fuss at us for not passing the American Jobs Act, there ought to be one. So mine was two pages. His is 155. But it's amazing, and especially with all the stuff going on with Solyndra in California and the scandal that that has become, that this administration twisted and pushed and potentially distorted things in order to get half a billion dollars to a company which wasn't doing well, and then turn around and turn the agreement upside down. Secured creditors, those that provide the money, are supposed to be paid first in the event that there's not enough to go around for everyone. And yet somebody in this administration--maybe a number of somebodies it appears right now--changed the deal so that the secured creditors, the American taxpayer, the government, would not get paid back first. My days as a district judge in Texas and chief justice would seem to indicate that that kind of thing is fraud upon the American people. The investigation is going on, so we'll find out more about that as it does. It's interesting that in the President's so-called jobs bill that really will destroy more jobs than it creates, he's got these constant references to priority to the use of green practices, and it's got lots of provisions, apparently, that will ensure that any other Solyndras out there, any other companies that are trying to get government money for a business that can't make it on its own but they're close enough to the administration, they feel like they could get loans, they could get grants for things that cannot be commercially feasible, that this is the way to go. And we see that throughout the bill. Apparently, half a billion dollars squandered for crony capitalism was not enough. There's more provisions for that in the President's so- called jobs bill. Of course, we've got the payback to unions and language in here for prevailing rates and that kind of thing. Some folks that I talk to would be glad to have a job at whatever rate they could get. There are those folks. Yet, when the administration pushes a jobs bill that's going to make the prevailing wage the price to be paid for wages so high that a business cannot afford to hire those extra people, have we really done the American people any favors? We can't even create entry-level jobs because of what this administration keeps pushing and trying to heap upon the American people. And there is a little bit of money for infrastructures. I say ``a little bit.'' Compared to the overall price tag of $450 billion, you would think that we could do a little better than what the President is proposing if he wants a $450 billion infrastructure bill. But the truth is it isn't an infrastructure bill. We heard this same language about the so-called stimulus back in January of 2009, that we needed bridges. He talked about bridges back then, the bridge in Minnesota, this bridge, that bridge, they all need to be fixed, and we can do it, but we need this stimulus bill to do all this infrastructure repair. Well, it was kind of the bait-and-switch thing. I certainly didn't support that stimulus bill. I believe Republicans were unanimous on that. It was not a stimulus bill. You could see that. There was such a small percentage going to stimulus that we would consider true stimulus. Infrastructure, we do have failing infrastructure, roads, bridges, things that need to be repaired, sewage plants and different things, but that bill had just a tiny trickle coming out. And again, this is percentagewise, it really was not an infrastructure stimulus. The people were told one thing and yet got another. Now, one of the ways the Federal Government gets its control of people, State governments and local governments, is by throwing money out there and saying, Here, we're going to help you. And once that money is received, they start getting all these strings that go with it. Now, if you're going to keep getting Federal money, then you're going to have to start doing this, that, and the other. In fact, there is one provision in the President's so-called jobs bill that ought to send shivers through people in the State governments all over the country, because there's a provision that says if the States receive any money at all from the Federal Government, basically for any program, then they waive their sovereign immunity, opening up themselves for lawsuits in yet another area where States have never been able to be sued before. So I'm not sure what jobs that creates. I know it helps the plaintiffs' lawyers, and perhaps that's the whole goal of the President, to help plaintiffs' lawyers. But what a disaster. Nonetheless, we know that Fannie and Freddie, which may end up costing the country trillions of dollars, brought us to the brink of absolute financial disaster. And so what does the President propose? Well, houses, maybe they get a loan, $50,000, $100,000 or so, different amounts. Well, what costs more than housing? That would be infrastructure. When we talk about houses, we're talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe. With infrastructure, we're talking about hundreds of millions, billions. So what does the President propose for that? The American Infrastructure Financing Authority. And the good news is that that will be--and I'm reading from page 40 of the President's so-called jobs bill. It says the American Infrastructure Financing Authority is established as a wholly-owned government corporation. Happy days. Wholly owned government corporation. But if somebody's concerned that people that would be running the President's American Infrastructure Financing Authority that would start trying to do the financing for these massive infrastructure projects, if you're concerned they might not have good business sense, if you're concerned they might not understand how an economy really is stimulated, how real jobs in the real private sector are created, you don't have to worry because the next page, page 41, says the board of directors--and this is just so exciting to read--is consisting of seven voting members appointed by the President. Now there's excitement. The President has shown that when he picks people--well, okay, it's true that they come from universities and places where they have letters after their names. But do they really know how to create jobs? Well, so far we've got a big old ``no.'' They don't know what they're doing. They have PhDs after their names, and they just don't know what they're doing in trying to get the economy going, stimulating the economy. It's scaring investors these days. But the President will appoint the seven board members of the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. When you look through the President's bill, Mr. Speaker, I think it's a good indication of the aspirations and goals of this administration if the people of America will give them 4 more years. Because if you look, the Federal Government will be in charge of infrastructure. Well, we've seen how that worked with student loans. Students, their parents, trying to go to college, get college paid for. We know that college costs have gone through the roof. I wanted my three children to have the chance that I did to go to a major university. I didn't want them to be burdened with debt simply because I gave up lucrative work and decided to try to help my State and country. So we took out student loans. You can take them from banks, from private lending institutions; and there were provisions for student loans. But under Speaker Pelosi and this President, Harry Reid in the Senate's leadership, the Federal Government took over the student loan business. Well, I thank God that I got loans for my kids to go through college before we took over, as a Federal Government, the student loan business. Because I would hate for not just me, but anyone, especially from the opposite party of the President, those in power, to have to go begging to the Obama administration: Please, would you loan me money so my child can get a college education? We put the Federal Government in charge of who can get loans? Who can get a college education? That's not what was intended for this country, to have the Federal Government make decisions on who can get educated and who doesn't. I know it scares people sometimes to have these examples brought up; but in 1973, that summer I was an exchange student to the Soviet Union--I had had a couple of years of Russian language, and I was an exchange student there. And one of the things that surprised me was, in the Soviet Union, the federal government there decides who gets to go to college. They tell you who gets to go to college. Now, never mind that here in America sometimes the most successful business people, some of the most successful scientists may have made some grades that weren't very good in college, but maybe came back in grad school and then really showed promise and did well, but it didn't matter. Maybe they didn't do all that great in high school, got to college and made good grades here in America. But in Russia, it didn't matter. It didn't matter what your inner drive was, that you had a yearning to help in health care, make some discovery in medicine. It didn't matter that you had a vision for how to create some new engineering work. It didn't matter because the government told every student whether you would be allowed to go to college or whether you would not, whether you would go work in the factory or whether you would go and teach. The government told people what they got to do with their lives and who got to have a college education. Now, I became friends with numerous Russian college students. I was impressed and I liked them very much. But I could not imagine such a system back then. And I was so grateful and thankful that I was from the United States. I made good grades in high school and college, good enough to go to law school, but I just was so grateful that I lived in a country that really was the land of the free and the home of the brave. It's fantastic. Because when I had a yearning in my heart to do something and fix something here, I didn't have to beg the government: Will you please allow me to follow my life's goal, my life's pursuit? This used to be the only country in the world where any parent could tell their child you can be whatever you want to be. Now, we're kind of proud of Jamie Foxx in east Texas. He grew up in Terrell. And I ran into him in Los Angeles last year and told him I was from Tyler, Texas. He said Tyler, Texas. He said, you know, my childhood memory about Tyler, our family came over to the Tyler State Park--it's a beautiful park on a lake, one of the most visited State parks in the State of Texas--and he said, you know, Tyler had the highest diving board I had ever seen. I had never seen one that high. And people told me, Jamie, if you can climb up there and go off that diving board, you can do anything you want with your life, anything. He said he was scared, but he climbed up there, that high diving board, and went off the board because he wanted to be whatever he wanted to be. And now he is so successful as a singer, actor, all these kinds of things. You could be what you really wanted to be in this country, but it's scary to see that changing. And when I see moves in this country that I had nightmares seeing them happen in the Soviet Union, it's a little scary here. The Federal Government's going to get to tell people whether they can have a student loan or not? That's not a good idea. And yet the Federal Government, under Speaker Pelosi's leadership and the President's leadership, President Obama, and Harry Reid, we put the private lenders out of business because the Federal Government--I guess they sold some people on the idea it would be politics free. Yeah, right--they would do a better job of picking out who should get a student loan to go to college. I couldn't believe those things came back. And seeing the socialized medicine in the Soviet Union back in those days, visiting med schools, clinics and things--I had a little need for health care back then--I was so thankful that in America we had so much better health care. And we didn't have to depend on the government to tell us what we could have treatment for or what we couldn't, what we had to get on a list to maybe get treatment for or what we couldn't. This was America, where doctors could strive to be the greatest they could be and to help humanity, and then make money at the same time. I had one Soviet friend, college friend that summer, who some lady ran off to tell on him. And I said, why would she do that? He said, well, in America you can get ahead by working hard and making money, and money can give you power in America. Here, in the Soviet Union, he said, the only way to elevate yourself is by stepping on others. You saw it repeatedly. They couldn't wait to run and tell government authorities on each other. Basically, you could tell who was spying on an American. It wasn't hard to see. You could tell who was spying on the other students. It wasn't hard to see. And I was grateful to be from the home of the brave, land of the free, land of the free and home of the brave. And I see things changing, and it breaks my heart. Now, another thing I observed in the Soviet Union back in 1973, we went to a daycare facility, and it was made very clear that children didn't really belong to parents in the Soviet Union. They were the property of the government. The parents would be allowed to keep their children so long as they trained them up in the way the government said. But if the government ever had one of these stool pigeons that ran in and reported that parents maybe were teaching children that they should strive to be the greatest they could be and do what they wanted to do, for example, that was totally opposite of the government's teaching, and it would be a basis for you're teaching them evil things. I had a student friend, Russian friend who was removed from the camp where I was because somebody told on him, that he was being too friendly to me. He never said anything negative about his country, but we had frank discussions about a free market system compared to a socialist system. And they were very honest, candid discussions. And yet, he did nothing wrong, but he was removed, and he was told if he had contact with me again, he would be kicked out of college and go to work in Siberia or some other place that would be very unpleasant. I saw when a government controls people's lives. And I was shocked at daycare. And I was so grateful to live in a country where children belong to their parents, and the parents cared about seeing that they were raised up in the way they should go. And they may disagree with the government and that's okay in America. But they could disagree with the government, and they were still not at risk of having their children removed. And now, more and more, with political correctness setting in in this country, people are told, you raise the children the way we say is proper; otherwise, we'll take them away. And it keeps coming back as hints from what I saw 38 years ago. It's hard to believe this stuff is happening. When I look at the American Infrastructure Financing Authority, I see things down the road that this creates. And you can't help but believe that it will end up as the student loan business was. We create a Federal entity run by the President's cronies that will make decisions on who gets lending for infrastructure. You could envision a day, just like with student loans, maybe the private lenders still keep lending and that goes for a while. But as we saw with flood insurance, the Federal Government got into the flood insurance market and said, you know what? These private lenders are not selling it as cheaply as we think they should, so we'll get involved to give them a choice. Well, what the private insurance companies found was they are not allowed to run at a loss for a long period of time. They go out of business, go bankrupt. Yet, the Federal Government has no problem with running in the red, so the Federal flood program has run in the red for years. It doesn't appear there's any hope that it will ever get to the black. And, naturally, the Federal Government drives all the private insurance companies out of the business because the Federal Government can do it cheaper and run in the red. I can envision that happening with the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. Mr. Speaker, you think about a day when a local government, a State government, has no lender that can lend on infrastructure because the Federal Government started small and got bigger, and now nobody lends but the Federal Government. And once again, we create a situation. It's the potential, and if you don't look at the potential consequences of what we do in this body and the unintended consequences that can occur, we do damage to America. If the President had his way, and I feel sure that if he has four more years, there's a good chance he will, we'll have an American Infrastructure Financing Authority, and eventually local governments, State governments, entities will have to come begging to the President or to the new czar of whatever it is and say, please, please, could we please have a loan to fix our roads or to build new infrastructure that our people are crying out for? Please? We promise we'll be good. We'll do what you tell us. God forbid we should get to a system that way. But we're on the way. We see it happening more and more. We dangle money out to States and local government through grants. You want to keep getting the grants? Do what we tell you. The Founders never intended that. Never intended that. Bad enough that we set up a system where we order unfunded mandates of State governments. Before the 17th amendment things weren't perfect. They did need fixing, so I'm not advocating complete repeal. But there has got to be a way to restore power back to the States that it lost when State legislatures could no longer select the U.S. Senators. And I'm aware, there were some abuses there, but we have got to get a veto power, some leverage back to the States again so the Federal Government doesn't keep doing the kind of thing that this President throws out in his bill. And, of course, more and more of the airwaves are being moved toward broadband. So at page 75, something that tells you a lot about where this President wants to go for the future, he has the establishment of the Public Safety Broadband Corporation. But not to worry, page 76 points out this establishes a private, nonprofit corporation to be known as the ``Public Safety Broadband Corporation.'' It says, and I'm quoting, ``which is neither an agency nor establishment of the U.S. Government or the District of Columbia.'' But they will control broadband. So anyone that might have broadband coming in, maybe get television, computer, Internet, radio through broadband, well, guess who comes into your home or place of business through your broadband? It's control of the new Public Safety Broadband Corporation. In 1984 there was that eye that looked out into every room from something hanging on the wall. It was Big Brother watching everything. How comforting to know this President wants Big Brother watching us through our computer, watching us through the means of broadband. But if you're worried, well, it says, this will not be, and I'm quoting, ``neither an agency nor establishment of the United States Government or the District of Columbia.'' That's great news. So who will be controlling this new Public Safety Broadband Corporation? We see that in the next section a little further down in page 76. ``The following individuals, or their respective designees, shall serve as Federal members.'' These are the people that will control the Public Safety Broadband Corporation that this administration wants to impose and inflict upon America, controlling all broadband. You have the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General of the United States, and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. That's comforting, very comforting. There will be non-Federal members so they don't have just a total monopoly on control. In fact, there will be--the next section says-- non-Federal members on the board. Well, who might they be? The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General, shall appoint 11 individuals to serve as non-Federal members of the board. Isn't that comforting. You've got Cabinet members appointed by the President--but don't worry. The President won't control all of it, although his appointees appoint the rest of them, and they're going to control the broadband. I think this is what America can expect when you have the President push forward a bill that, until I filed my American Jobs Act, there was no American Jobs Act down here in the House; and that's where it had to be filed because the Constitution requires all revenue-raising bills to begin here in the House. They have to originate here. So great news. I mean, boy, if the President has his way, more and more Federal control. Infrastructure. If you need infrastructure, well, isn't that rosy. You can go begging to the Federal Government someday. But it's at page 133, as I'm moving through this bill, that you find section 376: Federal and State Immunity. But it doesn't address Federal immunity at all. It doesn't even touch Federal immunity. It, in fact, says, ``A State shall not be immune under the 11th Amendment of the Constitution from a suit brought in a Federal court of competent jurisdiction for a violation of this act.'' We don't have the constitutional power to waive sovereign immunity for the State. This is an incredible overreach by the President taking away the sovereign immunity of a State not to be sued. He proposes a bill, and says, Not only am I proposing this bill, but I'm going to stick in a provision--it's here on page 133--that says, States, you can be sued if you don't follow my law--my bill--to the T. How could the Federal Government waive States' sovereign immunity? I can tell you. Under constitutional law, the Federal Government cannot waive States' sovereign immunity. Only a State can waive its sovereign immunity. The Federal Government cannot have anyone waive its sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity is only waived for the Federal Government if the Federal Government decides to waive it. So how can the President stick in a bill that allows States to be sued willy-nilly under this bill? It's in the next provision. ``A State's receipt or use of Federal financial assistance for any program or activity of a State shall constitute a waiver of sovereign immunity under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution, or otherwise, to a suit brought by an employee or applicant for employment.'' He recognizes constitutional law. The Federal Government cannot waive sovereign immunity for a State, but the President says, You know what? If you receive one dime from the Federal Government for any program, then that is an affirmative waiver of your right not to be sued under some bill that we make up here in my czar capital in Washington. We also heard about going after the millionaires and billionaires. Now, as people have been told over and over, the CBO--the Congressional Budget Office--that scores bills cannot score a speech unless, of course, the Director gets called to the White House and gets intimidated, and then perhaps they will. But in the meantime, generally, you cannot score a speech. There has got to be a bill. So it doesn't matter what a President says in a speech in this body or if he spends millions and millions and millions of dollars running around the country telling people to pass a bill that for so long did not exist here in the House. What matters is what's in a bill. So the President says he's going after millionaires and billionaires, but if you look at page 134 and page 135, you'll find out what the President really thinks constitutes a millionaire or a billionaire. At the bottom of page 134, it's subtitled, ``A 28 percent limitation on certain deductions and exclusions.'' So who loses deductions? Who is going to get punished for making too much money? How many millions do you have to have before this President wants you punished and taxed extra? What does this President consider to be a millionaire or a billionaire who's not paying their fair share and who should pay more? It's in black and white now. The President's bill says that it applies to the taxpayer whose adjusted gross income is above $125,000 if you're married, filing separately. So, under the President's definition of who's a millionaire and billionaire who's not paying their fair share and who needs to pay a lot more, it's defined here in black and white as a married person filing separately who makes more than $125,000. That's in the President's bill. If you're married filing jointly, then you get to be exempted unless you make over $250,000 jointly as a couple. Well, with $250,000 as a couple and $125,000 as an individual, it's still $125,000. So how about if you're single and you're not married? Well, good news there. You can have either a $200,000 exemption or a $225,000 exemption if you're single and head of the household. So it's potentially worth $100,000 to get divorced. The government is saying we'll give you an extra $75,000 to $100,000 exemption if you'll just get divorced and live together. Now, I'm not sure who came up with this. Obviously, the President's waving the bill around now, now that there's one printed, but he's advocating that you're better off financially--we'll reward you financially--if you'll just get divorced and live together. I'm not sure if that's his effort to placate people who want gay marriage to say, Look. You're financially better off not getting married, see? You've got an extra $75,000, $100,000 exemption if you'll just stay unmarried. So why would you want to get married? I don't know what his thinking was. I can't imagine why he would want to punish married people who are working hard and making this kind of money. But sure enough, that's in the President's bill. Happy days. He's had talks before about eliminating the alternative minimum tax, which was never meant to apply to the tens of thousands of people that it does. Well, guess what? On page 135, subsection (b) talks about additional amounts. Subsection (c) talks about the additional AMT amount. So we're going to add to the AMT. I know he said we were going to get rid of it, but actually, in his bill, where you really see what he's thinking, he adds to it. Now, the biggest help for independent oil producers is called the ``deductibility of intangible drilling costs.'' These are the expenses of an independent oil company in producing a well; it's the costs of doing business. Any other manufacturer that produces a product is allowed to deduct the costs of doing business, but this President wants to demonize those things and call them what they're not. He calls them a subsidy. They're not a subsidy. A ``subsidy'' under any dictionary's definition is, in essence, a gift or a grant of money. There's no gift or grant of money to the people taking these deductions. They get to deduct the cost of producing oil and gas. And when you find out that over 94 percent of the oil and gas wells drilled on the land in the continental United States are drilled by independent producers, not Exxon, not Shell, not the President's dear friends at British Petroleum who were so ready to endorse the cap-and- trade bill, negotiating when to come out in favor of cap-and-trade the very day the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, losing lives, devastating the gulf. But then at the same time giving the President a chance to punish States like Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi who had so many thousands of jobs lost when he declared a moratorium that it has cost this country dearly by rigs having to leave American waters and go to other countries. And does that hurt the big oil companies? No. It means there is less oil and gas being produced, which means they will charge more and make more profit. So taking out the most important deduction for independent oil companies will devastate them, and it doesn't even apply to the major companies he says he's going after. So, once again, he says he's going after major oil, taking away their subsidies. Well, they're not subsidies. They're deductions for business expense. And on the other, what he really does in black and white in the bill--nobody has to take my word for it--he repeals the deduction that only applies to oil companies that produce less than a thousand barrels of oil a day. It doesn't even apply to the majors. The majors don't get that. They're able to do such vast production that they can survive without it. The independent producers can't. And a lot of people don't know like we do in East Texas where, during World War II, it was the largest oil field ever discovered in the world, but those, mainly wells still being drilled there, a lot of it for natural gas now, being drilled by independent producers, produce less than a thousand barrels a day. You can't go to a bank and get a loan to drill an oil or gas well. You can't. The odds are not good enough that it's going to be commercially productive. So what most independents do, they'll say take 18, 25 percent, something like that of their own well that they're going to drill and then they will sell working interests in that well and get investors to put up their money, because if an independent oil producer supplies all the money for their own wells, they hit three or four dry holes, it's what puts some of them out of business. So they're smart enough, they spread out the risk, because it certainly is risk, and so they don't lose everything when it's a dry hole. What section 435 does is devastate the ability to raise capital through investors investing because it repeals the oil and gas working interest exception to passive activity rules. So the working interests don't get the deductions passed through to them that they are normally allowed to do for the expenses they invest. Any independent oil producer can tell folks--and I've heard it over and over--you take away people's ability to invest, to deduct for what they're paying in, they're not going to pay into that. The odds aren't too good, that oftentimes the money they get back--if it is a commercial well--just barely pays the amount of expenses. If you don't pass through the deductibility of what they paid in, then it's a huge loss to them. So you're not going to have people investing like they do now. And it is tough to raise capital. They'll tell you. The President devastates an independent oil company's ability or gas company's ability to raise capital. This bill will devastate America. It's a great example of the President and Senate leadership saying we're going to do this and they do something entirely opposite. Those who have ears need to hear. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Madam Speaker. It's always an honor and privilege to speak in this body. There has just been so much information about the American Jobs Act that the President has touted that he demanded that we pass here in this room, and at the time he had no American Jobs Act. The next day, Friday, he had spent millions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, running around the country demanding that people pass his bill. On Saturday, the same thing, all weekend, running around telling people to pass his American Jobs Act when there was no such bill. Monday afternoon, very late, there became a bill. It's hard to believe that this is what came out of the White House because it does not represent what the President said he wanted to do, said he believed in. I'm sure he doesn't have time to go through and actually read and see that the things he's saying in his speech are completely opposite of what he's doing in his so-called American Jobs Act, but that's why, after 6 days of being beat up verbally by the President for not passing his American Jobs Act and finding that there was no such American Jobs Act on file here in the House, I felt like I needed to help the President by creating an American Jobs Act that really will create jobs. So I filed a two-page American Jobs Act that will do more than anything the President has talked about or put in writing to create jobs in America. But just since the President is obviously not aware of what's actually in his bill based on what he's saying, in the limited time we have here, I wanted to touch on some of these things. For example, the President said over and over and over that he wants to go after these greedy, big oil companies like British Petroleum, Exxon, Shell, those big companies, and that his American Jobs Act, his bill, actually will do that. It will go after their profits. He probably has no clue that the fact is the three pages of deductions that are eliminated for oil companies, they're basically for oil companies that produce less than a thousand barrels of oil a day. They don't even apply to the people that the President says he's going after for these unseemly profits they're making. I'm sure he's also not aware, but the fact is that over 94 percent of all oil and gas wells drilled on the continental U.S. are done by independent oil producers who these three pages will devastate and put most out of business. And so the President, by these three pages, that I'm sure he doesn't really understand what they do, but the fact is they'll put the independent oil producers out of business. They will affect the major oil companies because once over 94 percent of all oil and gas wells in America and the continental U.S. are stopped, then the major oil companies that he's demonized will actually make more money than they've ever made in their history, and it will be the middle hardworking Americans that will pay the biggest price. They're the least able to afford dramatically higher gasoline prices, but that's what will happen. We are also told that we're going to go after the millionaires and billionaires that have all this money and not paying their fair share. Now, to me, if we're going to make sure everybody pays their fair share, and you've got somebody like Warren Buffett that pays a 15 percent capital gains tax, why don't we make everybody's tax 15 percent? Everybody in America ought to have some financial interest in seeing this government is accountable. That's what should happen. Instead, at pages 134 and 135 of his bill--and, again, it has to be filed in the House because it's a revenue-raising bill and under the Constitution he'll have to start here--it's not on file. There hasn't been one Democrat willing to file this disaster of a bill that the President is out there beating us up over. Actually, he's just saying pass the American Jobs Act, which is my two-page bill that really will create jobs. But people need to know, Madam Speaker, that the definition in here apparently of a millionaire and billionaire is anybody who's married and makes over $125,000 a year. For some of us, $125,000 a year is not a millionaire or billionaire or gazillionaire. This is somebody who is paying taxes. They're paying their fair share. They're paying over 30 percent of their income in taxes. Well, why shouldn't we just say, all right, ultra-rich like Warren Buffett, quit fighting not to pay the billions of dollars you already owe in taxes, just write the check. I think if people will go read the President's bill, they will find out we need to pass the American Jobs Act that's on file with the House. That's my bill.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. We're at the end of another week of session here. You know, the President's been traveling around the country. I know that costs millions and millions of dollars to put Air Force One in motion, hopping all over the country. I've also seen what it takes from a security standpoint to prepare for a President to come anywhere. Because of the sniper weapons available these days, they have to be so thorough. The Secret Service has to go along and check. Anything they can see, they have to check out. Well, that takes several days. So, to the average person, you think, Well, gee. The President just comes in. He's gone in 30 minutes. No big deal. But for those whose life's work it is in the government to make sure that things go properly, it is an extremely onerous task. We owe so much to those who protect those who are leaving the country, not so much the people in Congress. I know we had people in Congress who were advocating that we all ought to have our own security detail; but as one of my constituents said one morning at 2 a.m. in Wal-Mart, ``Wow, you really don't have any security,'' and I said, ``No. It's just you, me and the syrup here.'' I don't think we should have to have security. If it comes to that, this country is in such trouble that I'm not sure we'll have it back in any proper form anyway. In the meantime, I am an advocate of letting people in Washington, D.C., who aren't prior convicted felons and who meet the requirements, of being able to carry. Let folks carry. Not here in the Capitol, of course. You don't need one here. We've got the finest we could hope for, Mr. Speaker. I know you know the Capitol Police are fantastic. We've got some up in the gallery who make sure that things are orderly up there; and as we know from the last 20 years, there are times they've had to lay down their lives to protect the public here. So we are greatly blessed, but it all comes back to this, that we're talking about millions and millions of dollars for the President to go anywhere. Ever since 1 week ago, we were chastised by the President here on the House floor, as he spoke from the podium here, that we needed to pass his bill. Somebody else counted them. I didn't. We've got to pass this bill right now, right away, right now. Pass this bill now. It turns out the whole time the President was saying ``this bill,'' there was no such bill, which brought back memories of exactly 2 years before when at that time the President demanded to come address a joint session of Congress. Under the rules of Congress, the laws of the land, no one can demand to come speak to the Senate or House unless they're invited, but that was overlooked back in September of 2009. The President was not doing well in the polling with his health care ideas. He figured, if he came and spoke here on the floor, because he is such a gifted reader, that he might be able to persuade people to support a bill they otherwise didn't like. So he came and he spoke. He spoke of this bill, my bill, this plan, my plan. I couldn't find a bill. I couldn't find a plan anywhere. It was even 2 weeks later that I asked the Cabinet member charged with Health and Human Services--it's her area--since the President was so accusatory and said, If any of you misrepresent my bill, I am going to call you out, I wanted to make sure I didn't misrepresent anything. I asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services: Where do I get a copy of the President's bill? She said these words: I think he was talking about a set of principles. Ah, it couldn't have been. He said this bill, my bill, this plan, my plan. He didn't have a plan. He didn't have a bill. He was talking about a set of principles? How could he condemn us for misrepresenting a bill or a plan that he didn't have? Not then. It turns out he didn't. So, as I heard the President say repeatedly to pass this bill, pass this bill, to do it right now, right now, I wondered if, yet again, 2 years later, he was making the same error--demanding we pass a bill that didn't exist. It turns out my concerns were well-founded. He had no bill. He had no plan. He had a speech. But as we've learned from CBO, generally speaking, unless they're chastised sufficiently by the President or the White House, CBO cannot score a speech. If they're chastised sufficiently, then CBO will give them some sort of scoring because there are pressures that can be brought to bear from the White House that somehow, apparently, make them sensitive, which is another whole point. I really don't believe that we will be able to fix the problems of the massive overspending, the overtaxing, the dramatic problems with the overvexation, the overburdensome laws and regulations until we change a number of things. One of those is we eliminate the Congressional Budget Office and eliminate the rules under which bills are scored. Those rules were put in place in 1974 by the same Congress that forced the military to rush out of Vietnam, leaving, many report, around 2 million people who had helped us to be wiped out--murdered, killed--because the Congress didn't care. That same Congress put in rules that would require that a bill be scored as to the effect it would have on our economy, on spending, on revenue. It required it would be scored under rules that do not allow the scorer to take into consideration reality, history, facts. All they're allowed to do is to consider the formulas--the rules under which they're bound by that 1974 Congress. That's it. Now, we've gotten horrible scoring, and it can't be blamed on CBO or on the Joint Commission on Taxation. It's the rules that are the problem. But when a group comes back with a score of around $800 billion and then later they have to confirm in reality it's more like, say, $1.1 trillion, then you realize on an $800 billion bill that the score really should put boldly that you have to consider that with a 30 to 40 percent margin of error, plus or minus. So here is the score, plus or minus 30 or 40 percent, and that's about the best we can do. Since that is the best that CBO can apparently do, it's time to have some massive changes in this place. It's time to use reality. It's time to use history and not some 1974 liberal Congress' idea of how we get the government taking over everybody's lives. That's no way to run government unless you're in some country besides the United States of America. There's an old saying in this town, Mr. Speaker: No matter how cynical you get, it's never enough to catch up. In my 6\1/2\ years here in Congress, I've found that's certainly true because you want to trust everybody. You want to believe that when people say things in this town it's true, but then you find out, for example, that you can have a leader of the country tell everybody that we need to go after the Big Oil companies. They're having massive profits, and we're going after those companies. Then you find out that the bill that's produced to go after those companies has no adverse effect on those companies whatsoever, and in fact, it will make them even bigger profits than they might have ever imagined. Now, I know there have been some issues about the bill title, ``American Jobs Act of 2011,'' and yes, I am the one who filed the American Jobs Act of 2011. I think it will be a wonderful thing when we in this body can work together. We can have our disagreements. I found, in a deacon body, even though there was a lot of nasty, mean things said, that if we had prayer together and we came together, we had meals together, we could work together. One of the things that's so troubling on this floor is when people come so close to impugning the integrity of other people. I know some people that have diametrically opposed views of how this country should work, but I know in their heart they want the country to work well and succeed. I just believe from history they're wrong, but there are people in this body who you might think we were so far from each other politically that we wouldn't want to have anything to do with each other. Dennis Kucinich is one of those people that is quite far afield from me on so many political issues, but Dennis has never lied to me; he has always been up front. I find him to be a man of conviction, and I find him refreshing. Marcy Kaptur and I disagree on many issues, maybe most issues, but I know she is a person of integrity. She has never lied to me; she has never been anything but honest with me. There are numerous people. Bill Delahunt and I would spar in Judiciary Committee many, many times, other committees, subcommittees, here on floor; but I always found Bill Delahunt--what I would call a liberal from Massachusetts, a Democrat--to be an honorable man, a man of integrity, and I believe with all my heart that he had a heart for this country and he wanted to see it work. We ought to be able to work together when people realize that we have got common goals, the common goal being the good of the country. So let's at least find things we could agree on. When I was engaged in trials--and I have been involved in many trials as an attorney, and as a judge, and then oversaw them briefly as a chief justice, but engaged as a lawyer--there were many times when we started in the discovery process that I told opposing counsel, We can do this one of two ways. We can fight, scrape and fuss over every question, over every interrogatory, over every deposition, but we both know the rules require certain things will need to be produced, that certain things will need to be disclosed. So I would prefer to do it that way, amicably, and the people that win are the clients because they don't have to pay near as much money. Because it doesn't take near as much time if you can agree on the things that you know you are going to have to produce and quit having a motion to compel, a motion to protect, all this kind of stuff. Sometimes we had attorneys that could work together well, and sometimes they would hit me with a discovery demand out of the blue that was so grossly unfair, but not illegal, that you would find out, okay, this is the way you want to go. I didn't want to go this way, but I believe so strongly in the interests of the person I am representing and believe so strongly in the process, itself, that if you want a fight, you will have a fight. If somebody is going to travel around the country, condemning me and other people in this body for refusing to pass a bill, knowing that that bill does not exist, it is not in existence because legally it has not been filed, then we are going to do some battle over that. If I am going to be condemned for a week for refusing to pass an American Jobs Act of 2011, well, after 6 days or so, it's time to have an American Jobs Act that we can pass or at least that I could go along with. I would certainly like, Mr. Speaker, the President and others to know I am flexible, but the corporate tax is one of the most insidious taxes that we have in this country because it's not an honest tax. Governments had represented to voters for years and years that we have got this tax over here. We go after the mean, evil, greedy corporations--and some do have greed as a material factor in their business--but the thing is, that's not what a corporate tax is about. A corporation cannot stay in existence if they don't have their customers or clientele pay the corporate tax. So a corporate tax is not actually a tax on a corporation. A corporate tax is, instead, requiring the corporation to be the collection agent. Oh, make no mistake, that tax will come from the rank-and-file people across this great country. They're the ones that are going to pay that tax. The corporations are a collection agent. They collect the tax from their customers, and then they pass it on to the Federal Government. The trouble is, in this country now, we have the highest corporate tax in the world, any developing nation for sure, 35 percent; in China, 17 percent, and they do cut deals where they will reduce it to zero tax for 5 years, I have been told by some people there. You get a deal-- zero tax for 5 years and then gradually work up to 17. Not here in the United States. We are going to slap a 35 percent tax on anything a company in America produces. That sure makes it tough to compete in the global market. Now that we have got planes, ships that move so quickly, rail that goes across borders, it is important that we be able to compete in the global market. And if we are going to slap a 35 percent tariff on everything an American company produces in this country, they are going to have to move and go to a country where there is not such a high collection fee that corporations are required to collect in this country. They are going to go to a country like China that charges a lot less for a collection fee from the customers. But if people could get their mind around the fact that it isn't making the greedy corporations pay, in fact, the greediest corporations are the ones that don't pay anything. You know, we found out that the close cronies of the President at GE are able not to pay any tax, but the mom-and-pop-type small business corporations, they are having to pay the tax. Gibson is employing a lot of people. I got a Gibson guitar when I was 8 years old, a fantastic guitar. We are going to send in armed agents to harass those people. That's no way to draw business back into this country. You reduce the corporate tax. If you reduce it at all, the more you reduce it, the more jobs are going to come back because that means more and more corporations will be able to compete in the global market, and they'll be able to come back here, union members, not the government union members--and that seems to be where union leadership wants to go these days. Forget the manufacturing unions. We are driving those jobs out of America. But any historian will tell you, when a nation that is protecting other nations--and we are; we are protecting the free world--that requires that nation to have a military. Any nation that cannot provide its own military with the things it needs to protect itself--that means steel; it means all kinds of metal; it means gunpowder; it means, actually, uranium as we have nuclear subs and ships; it means wood products; it means tires. We are buying tires for Humvees from China these days. Excuse me? We have to be able to have no supply line to be able to provide the things that we in this country need to defend ourselves and provide them in this country. It's time to quit driving companies, including manufacturing jobs, out of the country. This bill drives more jobs out. You have got to have energy. Those that are familiar with the Battle of the Bulge can dispel the myth that some think, gee, the war was won before the Battle of the Bulge. Some say they buy into the Russians' explanation that we had whipped the Germans all by ourselves, we didn't need the allies otherwise, but if you really study the Battle of the Bulge, what won that for the Allies was the fact that the Germans were running out of gasoline. So what does the President do to help us? He said go against and take the profits of these massive, big oil companies. Instead, page 151 through 154, he rips the heart out of the independent oil and gas industry. In order to drill a well in America, you have to raise capital. If you're one of the majors like Exxon, like British Petroleum, the dear friends of the President, if you're one of those big companies, you've got enough money of your own. You're capitalized; you can do these things. But for over 94 percent of the wells drilled in the continental United States, they're raising money. They have to raise capital. Well, this knocks the fool out of their ability to raise capital. Not only that, it repeals the deductions that are not even available to any company that produces more than a thousand barrels of oil a day. That's the majors. So all this will do is eliminate over 94 percent of the wells drilled in the continental United States. The result will be a higher cost of oil. It will make even more profits for the President's friends at British Petroleum. British Petroleum is friends of the President, they love the cap-and-trade idea, and they're going to love this bill by the President. Also, we know, we've heard complaint after complaint from State after State, and they're saying, You are giving us so many unfunded mandates. We just can't take this any more. Stop already. We just can't stand this kind of help much longer. So if you look through this bill, you end up finding out there is a little provision--and, like I say, I was up until about 5 a.m. Tuesday going through this lovely thing, but there is a provision at the bottom of one of the pages, rather obscure, and my staff made copies. I've got the best staff in the world, but I don't believe they got my tag back on that page. The title of the little section is Federal and State Immunity, but then you read the section, it has nothing to do with Federal immunity. Under the law, the Federal Government and the State government are immune from being sued, but in that provision it actually says that, gee, if a State accepts any money at all from the Federal Government, any money at all, then they have effectively waived their sovereign immunity and are therefore subject to suit. I just found it. It's page 133: ``A State's receipt or use of Federal financial assistance for any program or activity of a State shall constitute a waiver of sovereign immunity, under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution or otherwise, to a suit brought by an employee or applicant for employment of that program or activity.'' It goes on. So at a time when States say we can't afford any more unfunded mandates, the President proposes a bill to let them get sued a bunch more by people who are unemployed. That's just got to be great news. And we're seeing the hearings go on about Solyndra. This administration, it appears from the evidence, we'll get the final verdict later, but they rushed in to give them $500 million of stimulus money so crony capitalism could occur and certain people could engorge themselves, and all at the taxpayers' expense, and it turns out that probably future generations will be paying for that. If you like the way that was handled, you've got to be reassured, because in this bill there are a number of references that green programs, like Solyndra, will have priority, and we'll rush a lot more money out there. There are a lot of things we could agree on in that bill that the President never had anybody willing to file. There was a provision for a payroll tax holiday. Well, you would figure I'd support that. I'm the guy who proposed it 3 years ago and personally explained it to the President and Larry Summers in January of 2009. But it sure would've been better if we did it before this administration squandered $4.5 trillion more than we brought in. We could've given everybody in the United States who pays income tax a tax holiday for 3 years, and it would've only run up $3.6 trillion. We would have saved $900 billion. If you don't think that people having all of their own income tax from 3 years would've stimulated this economy, then you need to embrace this President's bill because you'll love it. Nonetheless, there are things that we could agree on. Both Houses, both parties, I think, agree that we were willing to sell some more broadband spectrum. That's there in the bill, but then he uses that as a platform to create another bureaucracy, a Big Brother coming into your computer, because it's the Public Safety Broadband Corporation that's created and will just really make sure that Big Brother government intrudes in your life. When you boil it all down, we have a moral problem in America. The Founders continually pointed to God and said that's where we need to have our focus. As Ben Franklin said, without His concurring aid, we will succeed in our political building no better than the builders of Babel. We'll be confounded by our local partial interests, and we, ourselves, shall become a byword down through the ages. So whether anybody believes in God or not, as the Founders did, over a third of the Declaration of Independence signers were not just Christians, they were ordained ministers, to take one's eyes off of self and put them on something higher and greater avoids the kind of engorgement, the self-satisfaction, the self-emphasis that we've gotten into. That's the reason you run up trillions of dollars of debt without any regard for the children, the grandchildren, and the generations to come. I have to make this personal note reference. It breaks my heart to see that in college football. Nobody loves college football more than I do. I attended Texas A&M, and I know a lot of people are excited about Texas A&M perhaps going to the Southeastern Conference for money. All about money. The traditions of Texas A&M make it unique and I think the greatest public institution of higher education in the country. I'm very proud of it, but it's the traditions. And now we see that over a hundred years of tradition, going back to 1876, are ready to be thrown away for money. Just money. Greed money. Forget tradition that makes your institution great. Forget it all. Forget the State rivalries. Forget it all. We're talking about cash. Isn't that what got us in trouble in this country in the first place, when we put cash, greed for ourselves above the interests of the country or the institutions we represent? To close with this example, my senior year in the Corps Cadets, I was the second level below the Corps commander. I was one level right below the commander. There were four of us at that level, major unit commanders. There was a Corps commander. He didn't get along very well. He didn't play very well with others. And the first meeting we had, all of the senior leaders in the Corps Cadets, he had his staff put together tables end to end. He got up there with a corncob pipe like MacArthur, walked up and down and condescended and cajoled all his classmates like they were 2-year-olds. I approached him after the meeting and I said, Man, these guys have seen you naked. We're all classmates. We're all friends. You need to try to work together. Don't just condemn everybody. And I think if we could get to that level in here--not that we run around naked together--but just where we can work together as friends, disagreeing on issues. But unless one person has a 100 percent lock on God's truth 100 percent of the time, we should listen to each other, not condemn each other; and we can get these things worked out, put greed aside and help this country last 200 more years. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I know of the intentions of my colleagues across the aisle. You want to try to make America a better place. We had the prior speaker indicate that tremors were sent through the financial markets because some politicians, for their own purposes, put the financial integrity at risk. The Democratic speaker before that indicated that we should not go against the President's ability to protect the integrity of the United States. The Democratic speaker before that said that no one was apparently advising Republicans who had missed a truck payment. Things like that. Guess what. I know that was not intended to be misleading. I know the intent was not that, but the fact is some of us go home as we did in August. Some of us get out into the far reaches, the most rural areas of America, our districts. We talk to those people. They're struggling with gas prices. They are having all kinds of trouble making ends meet, and they cannot understand how the people that are sent to Washington as representatives don't get it, how we could come up here and we can't control our spending. So I wanted to help illuminate those friends who are mystified as to what our own purposes were in opposing a debt ceiling bill that jacked up the debt ceiling and then says, you know, we are going to cut 1, maybe 2, 2.5 trillion over 10 years when everyone in this body either knows or needs a good education to know that there is not a court, there is no way in the world you can bind a future Congress into making cuts that they have not agreed to. You can't do that. It's not enforceable. So the trick here in Washington is to back load all of the massive cuts, have a little trickle of cuts now. So our own purposes boil down to this: I didn't deserve to be born in America. None of us that were born here did. We weren't born here because in the womb we did something deserving of being born in America. We are the most blessed nation in the history of the world, and it's not because of what anybody living today has done. We were blessed. We were born here. So many have been able to immigrate here and be blessed because of what prior generations have done: the responsibility, putting their lives on the line in war, struggling through depression to be accountable, struggling through the earliest days when they pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor. Those people are the reason we have been blessed. So to make clear about what our own purposes were in opposing that debt ceiling, that didn't really do any kind of significant cuts in the next year, 2 years, back loaded them for 10 years, because that's irresponsible. And if future generations have any hope at all of being blessed as we have been, it's up to us. We can't repay the people that paid the ultimate price and that scraped and saved and were responsible in Congresses for 200--well, not 200, but 150 years or so that lived within their means. We can't repay them, but we can repay them by being responsible for the future. So to come in and to have a debt ceiling increase time after time after time is not a real debt ceiling. And it is not an adequate defense to say, well, Bush did it; well, Clinton did it; well, Bush did it before him or Reagan did it, and just go on down, Carter did it. At some point we have to be responsible for our own actions and quit playing the pointing game and say, look, our time is now. We are elected to be responsible now. Our own purposes are to be responsible for the debt that we are incurring now. The $4.5 trillion more than has been brought in is pretty irresponsible. That's no way to go.

Mr. GOHMERT. I just wanted to make sure the record was clear. My dear friend from Maryland said there were those on this side who wanted to welsh on our debt, and that's not the case. The thing that we want to do is stop incurring debt. We are all about being good for the debt we incur. We don't want to welsh on any agreements. I didn't ask my friend for time, so my time is very limited. I just wanted to correct the record. We're not out to welsh on anything. We're here to say, let's quit incurring debt. That's the whole point.

Mr. GOHMERT. But if you want the numbers, if we are only able to save a trillion dollars over 10 years, which is quite possible under the debt ceiling deal that passed, then it will take 150 years before the budget balances if we continue to cut 1 trillion every year, and it will only add about $120 trillion to the 14 trillion we have now. If we could save 2 trillion every 10 years, then we are looking at 80 years before we balance the budget and only adding 72 trillion to the debt that we have. That's irresponsible. This country won't be around in this form, this Congress, and therefore that is our special purpose for doing this. That is why we say it's time to stop the debt ceiling bill from where it was, get responsible, and propose real cuts so this Congress does what the people who are missing payments are trying to do--live within their means.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. If I might inquire of the Speaker, a parliamentary inquiry: If there are charts around on the floor, can anybody use those?

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it never ceases to be an honor for me to be able to speak on this floor. The freedoms we have, the blessings, we've received because of those who've gone before us. The country is in trouble. People around the world cannot believe that the greatest nation in the history of mankind just cannot make itself live within its means. So businesses, manufacturing have flocked away from America. I know there are some who believe that the greatest thing that can happen for America is for those manufacturing jobs to leave America because they believe, gee, they hurt the environment because they pollute, so just as well they go to some other Third World country or China or other place, when the truth is, apparently, when those same manufacturing companies leave the United States, they go to nations that, on average, pollute, depending on the nations, 4 to 10 times more than we do here in the United States. For those that understand the way the world turns, as pollution goes up in Asia, we usually breathe it here in the United States. So that hasn't worked out so well for the environment of the planet. We're hurting the planet as we drive manufacturing jobs out of America. This administration has used the EPA as a sword, as a tool to drive more and more manufacturing and production out of the United States, hurting the country more and more, not because, necessarily, they want to intentionally hurt the country. I'm not saying that. They just think we're better off. If they're not willing to have a draconian EPA being, as the President said in his speech, working side by side with them in private business, good riddance. Go somewhere else. Because, in the President's own words, that's what he said, and it was the scariest thing I heard that the President said last week, standing right here at the second level in this Hall, the line, and I'll read from his speech directly. He said, ``We need to look for ways to work side by side with America's businesses.'' America's businesses do not need a government that wants to be their partner. The government in this country, according to the Constitution, metaphorically speaking, is supposed to be a referee--keep the playing field fair, keep it level, make sure everybody has a chance to compete and compete fairly, and stay out of the way. Do not interfere. Don't try to be a partner with business. Stay out of the way and be a referee. It's when this United States Government has tried to be a partner that so often it gets in trouble, and it kills businesses and it kills jobs, and people flee and go to some other country where they're allowed to produce things without the government trying to be their partner. Anybody that wants the government to be their partner should go to Venezuela or Third World nations. They're more than happy to partner with those businesses. But some years back there was a group of us that went to China, and we met with a number of CEOs of international corporations that have taken their American jobs by the thousands, taken their businesses, their manufacturing production and gone to China. I had the feeling that when we talked to them and asked them the question, ``Why did you move all these jobs to China?'' that they would say, well, they just couldn't work with the labor unions. The price of labor was too high. Regulations were too much. But the number one answer was because of the corporate tax. The corporate tax in America, in the United States, is the highest corporate tax in the world. Now corporations, those that understand business law, corporations, directors, and officers, have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to try to make as much money as they can. Unless some, Mr. Speaker, do not know who the stockholders are, more and more they're union workers; they're American workers across their countries; they're small business owners and operators, franchise operators; they're the rank and file across the country--State employees, local employees, Federal employees. But more than that, businesses across America, they have retirement accounts that invest in these companies. Those companies' officers and directors have a fiduciary duty that they have to--or they could be sued--have the best interests of the company and the stockholders at stake in the decisions they make. If you go to law school--I hopefully have saved somebody a lot of money-- that's it in a nutshell. So, when a group of corporate leaders is trying to decide how can we avoid being sued by the stockholders by doing the best thing to help them create the most revenue for their stock--what can we do? What will enhance their dividends?--they have to look. When they see the United States of America is taxing corporations at 35 percent and they see that China taxes at 17 percent, you would think it was pretty much a no-brainer. That's basically what they said. I was gratified to hear that, whether it's union labor or nonunion labor, across the board, the experience that the corporate leaders that I talked to in China say really their best workers are right here in the United States--union workers, nonunion workers--and that, generally speaking, they have better quality control over products produced here in the United States of America. So, when they move plants from here in the United States to other places like China, they have wonderful workers, but the quality control is not as good as what they have here. But if you think about it and you realize, gee, they would pay half the corporate tax in China that they pay here by the billions, then they could afford to build state-of-the-art facilities, where facilities here in the United States, their manufacturing plants, may be falling apart and getting older. Well, you could go build a state- of-the-art facility in a place like China, and because of the tremendously reduced corporate tax, by the time you really get around to paying much tax, you've paid for the plant. I was advised privately that it was possible the Chinese Government would make deals with some companies if they were big enough, and it might be, for example, they would say, Look, you move your manufacturing plant, hire these thousands of employees here in China instead of in the United States, and we'll make a deal with you. No corporate tax for 5 years. Then, depending on the company and the negotiations, they might say, And then for the next 5 years, maybe 5, 7 percent, maybe 10 percent. Maybe then it goes to 17, or maybe by 15 years you get to the 17 percent rate. But in those kind of scenarios, they say, We paid for a state-of-the- art facility by the time we ever get around to paying corporate tax. Whereas, if we kept those jobs in America, facilities getting older, we just can't produce dividends and returns on money for stockholders. We're just treading water. Here, because the corporate rates are half as expensive, then we can produce, we can compete anywhere in the world. Our goods are that much cheaper. Now, it is true our labor is more expensive, but, in general, we have good laborers in this country, and there are Americans that are willing to work, willing to do the jobs. From talking to employers, though, we could use a lot more people willing to be employees who can pass a drug test. That's kind of important. Now, I have had so many constituents say, Look, you have to pass a drug test in order to get employment for most important jobs nowadays, whether it's with a grocery company back home or a small operator. I was talking to an independent oilman this afternoon that drills wells from Longview, Texas, and he was saying, We have to give people drug tests. He was telling me, because of the drilling that's currently going on in east Texas, he's having trouble finding enough workers right now, today. While people are unemployed around the country, he's having trouble right now, today, finding enough people who can pass a drug test and are willing to work hard on an oil well, and he would put them to work. In fact, he was telling me this afternoon, they'd start out at $50,000 a year. They'd have health care. It's hard, dirty, long hours, tough work, but it's a good living. But so many of the people that apply can't pass a drug test. And because it's such difficult work physically and it requires that you be alert because all of the other people on the rig have to count on each other, kind of like in a military operation, the equipment is so dangerous, if somebody has taken drugs and is not at peak performance, they can get somebody killed. It's happened far too many times. They have to have people pass a drug test. That's just this afternoon. Well, think about it. If we had manufacturers coming back into America because the corporate tax rate was less than 17 percent, then the manufacturing jobs show up like crazy. Now, I realize from hearing all of the news, apparently the big emphasis of the national union leaders, who sure don't seem to be speaking to all of the union folks I know, but their emphasis seems to be basically we're not doing very well getting union members from private corporations. So they've gone all after government employees: Let's try to unionize government employees because maybe we can pick them up. And what I think eventually rank-and-file union workers for private companies will begin to understand is it seems that they're being thrown under the bus. The concentration seems to be for more government workers, less private workers, which means they're driving for more jobs in the government sector, which kills off the private sector, which will kill off those jobs for the union members who have jobs in the private sector. So, as I sat back here listening to the President's speech last Thursday night and as I struggled with what the President was saying-- because some of it didn't seem to me that it was going to create the jobs he was promising, but I was willing to wait for the bill and not judge from a speech, because it's been said around here before that CBO cannot score a speech. Well, that was before, a couple years ago, when the administration got on to them, and basically they did score a speech, but that's because the White House is able to exert pressure on CBO that the Republicans have not been able to see fit to do. I know Mr. Elmendorf was not happy with my reference, but the fact is, after Mr. Elmendorf met with the President in the woodshed, or the Oval Office, he came back and was able to bring down the scoring of ObamaCare by about a quarter of a trillion dollars or so. Then after ObamaCare passed, they said, Whoops, looks like maybe we underestimated by about a quarter of a trillion dollars. That makes for a pretty big plus-or-minus margin of error when CBO can't do better than that, but CBO and the rules were created by the most liberal Congress in history until about 5 years ago. They created CBO. They created the rules for scoring. They yanked us out of Vietnam without a chance to make sure our allies there would not be killed, so most of them were. They also created an automatic baseline for government budgets that increases every year. They created a formula. It increases every year. Now, I was here in '05 and '06, and I am embarrassed that, as Republicans, our party did not have the nerve to eliminate the CBO, to eliminate the ridiculous rules by which bills are scored. The actual reality and history and recurrent numbers of what happens--when you do this, you get this effect--you can't consider that. They have to use rules that don't apply in the real world and without taking into consideration the effects that have been had when an action is taken every time. So we get terribly inaccurate scoring from a government entity, and we also have this automatic baseline that increases every year. There is not a business or home in America that can plan a budget by saying, We're automatically going to increase our budget every year from now on. No matter how much income or revenue we have each year, we're going to keep increasing our budget. That is what has been happening for 37 years, since 1974. The Budget chairman back in '05 and '06 was not willing to do it, but I am extremely gratified that our bright chairman of the Budget, this Budget chairman, is going to do it, in that this year he's going to take up a zero baseline budget. I filed one in my first Congress back in '05 and '06, in my second Congress in '07 and '08, in my third Congress in '09 and 2010, and in this Congress. I am delighted. I don't care whose name is on the bill; but when we finally eliminate the automatic increases in the Federal budgets every year, that's going to be huge, and it's going to be better than anything that the President has proposed by way of producing revenue and balancing the budget. I do appreciate the White House emailing their version of the American Jobs Act. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, because I saw my friends across the aisle using a chart that said the ``American Jobs Act.'' It makes a wonderful chart if it's still on the floor, because that's what we're talking about, an American Jobs Act. The President kept saying, Pass it right away. Act now. Pass this jobs bill. Pass it right away. Pass it again right away. Pass the bill right away. They'll get back on their feet right away if we pass the bill. Anyway, just on and on--pass the bill, pass the bill, pass the bill. So I heard the speech. I got a copy of the speech, and I like to highlight stuff where I can find it easier. So we've got all this ``pass it now,'' ``pass it right away'' stuff highlighted. Where is it? We were told to pass it now, to pass it right away. We heard the speech Thursday night. We didn't get a bill Friday. We didn't get a bill Saturday. Obviously, it can't be filed Saturday or Sunday if we're not in session. We didn't get it, though, through email. They send the stuff when it's needed, but nothing Saturday, nothing Sunday. On Monday, we were inquiring of the White House by email, by phone, Look, when are you going to let us see what this bill we've got to pass last week is? We finally got a copy, and I was up until 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning going through it--tagging it, highlighting it, being staggered by the stuff in here that will kill jobs instead of create them--oh, other than the jobs that are created for the government that will help kill the economy. I couldn't believe this was being called an American Jobs Act, but it was not a surprise to me even at noon today when we inquired and found that no one had been willing to file an American Jobs Act in the House of Representatives. It had been available. The President had been talking about it since last Thursday, but nobody had been willing to actually file that bill in the House. I have been through the President's American Jobs bill, and I am absolutely convinced--absolutely no question--that this will hurt our economy. It creates massive, bigger government intrusion. If you like Freddie and Fannie Mae, you will love the new American Infrastructure Financing Authority. What a wonderful government creation that is. We're going to provide billions and billions of dollars to create this new government entity. But not to worry--these are people who will be running it who really know what they're doing--right?--because the Secretary of Transportation is going to be in charge. I do know the Secretary of Transportation right now, and I like him very much. He's a good guy. Nonetheless, we're creating another government nightmare called the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. Unbelievable. You would have thought we would have learned a lesson--but not to worry. These are people who will be appointed by the President. Some other people here in Congress can throw in some recommendations, but they're appointed. The seven voting members are appointed by the President. So that will be wonderful. They'll run all our infrastructure requirements for us, and of course the President will appoint the chief executive officer. Having been a history major in college, I do believe that the best indication of future performance is past history, past performance. With the auto czars and the private committee composed of a bunch of auto czars, I read somewhere that not any of them had ever worked in the auto industry at all, and most of them didn't even own a car. Nonetheless, they had put them in charge of our auto industry. That kind of scares you when you think about it and when you think this is the same guy who's going to appoint all these people to run the brand-new American Infrastructure Financing Authority. That's AIFA, and it is just another nightmare. It's going to help bankrupt America quicker than this administration has already been doing. I know people like to throw blame around. There is plenty of blame to go around because I know, in 2006, I was on this side of the aisle, hearing people stand up at the Democratic microphones, saying what I knew to be true. They were right. We had no business spending $160 billion more than we took in. That was un-American. It was outrageous. This body had no business authorizing expenditures of $160 billion more than we took in. They were right. The Democrats were right when they said we should not spend in a year $160 billion more than we took in. Nowadays, people like to say, Well, it's Afghanistan and Iraq that have broken this country and have made us bankrupt. That's not the case. We were in Afghanistan; we were in the worst part of the expenditures in Iraq during those days, and we overspent what we had coming in by about $160 billion. If anybody back then had told me that within 4 years those same people who condemned this side of the aisle for overspending by $160 billion would be just fine with overspending by $1.6 trillion, I would never have believed it. There is no way, with the speeches that were given here in '05, '06, '07 about the Republicans' irresponsibility in '05 and '06, my freshman year, over $160 billion more being spent than we brought in, that they would have any nerve or ability to stand up and say I'm voting to spend $1.6 trillion more than we're going to take in. I just didn't think, I wouldn't have believed that anybody would be willing to do that. Well, they have, and we as a country have. But I went through the President's bill. Yesterday I went through much of it, but there is a little more that needs to be said, for example, to illuminate the President's comments about he wants to go after the profits of Big Oil; and he does that in his bill, we were told. He was going to fix it for Big Oil. Well, I was a little cynical, I was a little leery, because I have heard the President call the Wall Street executives fat cats. He has called them names, said we wouldn't be letting them do that, that we ought to go after them, that kind of stuff. Yet I knew that, while he was calling them names, at the same time his governing made sure that an entity like Goldman Sachs made more money than they've ever made in their history. They should have had to file for bankruptcy. Instead, now they're making more money than they've ever made in history, and this President is presiding in such a way it's bad for America, but Wall Street is doing great, and some would say that doesn't make sense because we know that Wall Street is mainly Republicans. But if you look into it, as the Heritage Foundation has--my friend Mike Franc there has done the research--you found out that, in essence, corporate executives on Wall Street, when you include their immediate family that donates with them, donate about 4-1 or donate about 4-1 for Obama over McCain. And Mike had said, when he first saw that, he thought, wow, that's intriguing. That may be different from prior years, But as he checked on it, it wasn't that different from prior years, donations from Wall Street. Then you get to realizing, wait a minute, Democratic Presidents, Members here in this body are constantly deriding these greedy, evil people on Wall Street; and yet they're generally giving 4-1 to Democrats over Republicans. There are 4-1 Democrats on Wall Street in executive positions than there are Republicans. Well, no wonder. It starts making more sense that they would do much better under Democratic administrations since it helps to know people in those kinds of positions. But we were told by the President he's going after Big Oil. The provisions in this President's bill--it's at page 151--repeal the deduction for intangible drilling and development costs in the case of oil and gas wells. Now, the bill has a dishonest word here. It says repealing oil ``subsidies.'' A subsidy, you can look it up, Webster, wherever you want to, but the definition will basically be the same wherever you look it up. A ``subsidy'' is a grant or a gift of money. There are no grants or gifts of money, and there wasn't anybody that wanted to go after British Petroleum more than I did around here when we found out 800 violations or so and when all the other majors were having maybe one or two in the gulf. Yet they were involved in crony capitalism. So the administration looked the other way over and over and over again until the Deepwater Horizon blew out. People were killed, you know, not only lives lost but fortunes lost. The Gulf of Mexico was devastated all because this administration and those inspectors that were sent looked the other way to all of this pitiful way that drilling was done because they were buddies, crony capitalism. So when you look here at what the President actually has in his bill, who it's going to help and who it's going to hurt, what you see are these deductions here that he's repealing--the repeal of deduction for tertiary injectants, the repeal of the percentage depletion allowance for oil and gas wells. Section 199, the deduction attributable to oil, natural gas or primary products thereof, the repeal of oil and gas working interest exception to passive activity rules. I read through these, checked with experts and find out, CPAs, people that do the tax returns for independent oil companies, and I was reminded, this stuff basically applies only as a deduction for an oil company that produces less than a thousand barrels of oil. All of the majors that this President says he wants to go after and go after their profits, they're majors. All of the deductions that he is trying to repeal, they're not going to affect, they're not really going to hurt the major oil companies. They're going to devastate the independent oil companies. That will be the result here. So he says he wants to go after the majors, but that's just not what he is doing in his bill, and I know that, being a community organizer, he's not that well up on what he's going to hurt and what he's going to help. But the fact is there are figures that indicate American production activities are dominated by independent producers, who drill 95 percent of the Nation's natural gas and oil wells, accounting for 67 percent of total U.S. natural gas and oil production. That's the independent oil companies of America. Ninety-five percent of the drilling, 67 percent of the production is not ExxonMobil. It's not Shell. It's not British Petroleum. It's the independent oil companies in America. And who are they? They're people that cannot go to the banks, for the most part, to get a loan. Any bank that would loan an oil company money to drill a particular well is probably going to get shut down because the chances are, in most cases--certainly in the investments I have had--you are more likely to have a dry hole than you are to hit anything that's really going to be of a sufficient, productive nature. So, of course, once you have established a field, the odds go up dramatically, but most of these wells, when it's not an established field and it's just helping produce more from a known field, you can't get loans. The only way independent oil companies have to be assured of being able to drill oil wells is not to go get a loan, and they also know that if they invest and pay all of the 100 percent of their own drilling and they hit a few dry holes in a row, they're going to be bankrupt, if there were so many of them. What most independent oil companies do, they do studies geologically. They have to hire geologists most of the time. I am told they were independent geologists. I know a great number of those. They do great work. They will study an area, and they will hire a landman to come in and study who owns what interests in the minerals, who owns what rights that they're going to have to acquire in order to do drilling, and then they hire people that are involved in drilling. They're not like the majors where they've got all they need to go do all the drilling. They hire independent mud companies, independent wire line companies. They will often have to have people come out and feed them, and if they don't, they're going to have people who need to go eat somewhere. It is hard, nasty, 24-hour-a-day work. You don't stop 8-5. You have to do shifts because you can't afford to get somebody too tired for staying on a rig too long. But they employ millions of people. They cause the employment of millions around America even though there aren't that many that actually work on the wells, themselves. They create jobs. They don't just save them like this President says he's been doing. And so what's the President doing? He, in his bill, is not touching, he's not going to hurt the Big Oil companies. They're going to apparently do as well as his good friends at General Electric. So what we have seen is, if you're really friends with this administration, or to be fair, the parties in power, then odds are you're going to get your tax bills through and you are going to be like General Electric, you're going to be like Warren Buffett, and you're going to be able to skate through without paying virtually any tax. I loved the way Art Laffer explained to it me in his living room after a Sunday lunch one day last year. We talked about these taxing concepts. I just love the guy. He is so brilliant. He's charming and funny. He sure got us out of a mess back in 1980-1981 because he was the adviser to Ronald Reagan. Art Laffer was his economic adviser. Many people have heard about the Laffer curve because for people in government who want to maximize the amount of revenue to the Federal Government so they can spend more, how do you do it? Well, if you don't have any kind of tax at all, the government has no tax at all, then the revenue of the Federal Government would be zero on this end. If the government taxed a 100 percent tax, very, very quickly nobody would work. Nobody's going to work to produce 100 percent revenue for the Federal Government unless the whole Nation is enslaved, and God forbid that that will happen. So on the two ends of the graph, you have zero revenue to the Federal Government, if it is zero percent tax altogether, and on the other end you have zero revenue to the Federal Government if there's 100 percent tax. So somewhere in between, you reach the maximum efficiency for bringing in revenue to the Federal Government. If you tax too high, then you start hurting the amount of revenue percentage-wise coming in, and so you actually get less revenue when you pass that maximum point. Before that point, you can continue to raise taxes and actually increase revenue. Beyond that, the revenue starts coming down. So as Art has described it, you need to cut taxes 30 percent, and you will get us out of this horrific doldrums of an economy. I was back at Fort Benning, Georgia, at the time, and things were not good. The military was not respected at all. I liked Ronald Reagan a lot. Of course, when you're in the military, you can't say anything negative about the Commander in Chief or you've committed an offense under the UCMJ. You can't criticize someone in your chain of command, including the Commander in Chief. So we just had to bite our tongues, but we could see Jimmy Carter was doing such damage to this country economically and in the foreign arena. It was just tragic. I liked Ronald Reagan. He said he was going to be able to help bring down double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment and double-digit interest rates. As much as I liked him, I recall telling my wife, Kathy, back at Fort Benning, I like him, but I don't care who the President is, there's no way a President can actually help do all that, really have that kind of effect. He proved me wrong. With Laffer's guidance, taxes were cut 30 percent, and the economy took off. Because the economy took off and there were more jobs, unemployment dropped dramatically. Interest rates were able to come down dramatically. We had a 12\1/4\ percent or something loan on our first home in Georgia just off post in Fort Benning. It may have been 12\3/4\ percent. Some folks told me that was crazy--it was too high--but it wasn't long before interest rates some places were 18 percent, so 12 wasn't so bad. Now, interest rates came down under Reagan, but it was Laffer who said bring down the taxes by 30 percent, and you'll do dramatic work on creating a better economy. I love the story Art Laffer tells about getting a call from President Reagan. He said, Art, great news. We got your tax cut. Art said, in essence, this is my paraphrase: That's great, Mr. President. Congratulations. Art, you don't seem excited. Why aren't you excited? This is great news. We got the tax cut with the Democratic House and Senate. They're going to cut it 30 percent. He said, Congratulations, Mr. President. That's great. President Reagan said, Why aren't you more excited? He said, Mr. President, I understand you're going to cut it like half a percent the first year, 10 percent the next year, and another 20 percent the third year. He said, Well, that's the deal we had to cut with Congress. We couldn't get all 30 percent at once. As I recall, he said something like, Mr. President, if you were going shopping and the place you were going to go shopping had a half of one percent sale this month and then 10 percent sale next month and then 20 percent sale the next one after that, when are you going to go shopping? He said Reagan was quiet for awhile and then finally said, Are we going to have a couple of bad years? He said, Yes. Now it's going to be 3 years before the economy heals. We could have had it this year. President Reagan got the best he could in 1981 and 1982, and those were not good years. In 1983, the economy surged, and more money was brought into the coffers. The problem, though, is that the Democratic Party got so excited controlling the House and Senate--Reagan and Laffer had set up such a situation here, and there was so much more money coming into the coffers, the Federal revenues--that they started spending like never before. They can blame Reagan, but the Constitution makes very clear, Congress spends the money. So really, this year, we are still working off of what Congress did or didn't do last year under Speaker Pelosi. Next year, beginning October 1, will be the first full year we are back at least as Republicans being in control of one House. So I think it is very, very important what we try to do to generate jobs and when you know that these provisions are going to devastate independent oil companies that do 95 percent of the drilling in continental America and won't hurt Exxon, British Petroleum, and, in fact, because 95 percent of the drilling will not get done in the continental United States. I guess that's why the President was trying to do this. They apparently don't like drilling. They don't like mining. They don't like any of this stuff occurring on our soil. They would rather it go somewhere else where they pollute a lot more. But we are talking about millions of jobs that will be lost because of the devastating effect of destroying independent oil and gas businesses--and all of that when we've gotten such great news over the last few years. We went from having basically no natural gas reserves to having 100--some say 200, some say 300--years of natural gas reserves. Some fleets of trucks are starting to convert to natural gas. If we converted cars and trucks--you can't order them from Detroit yet that come equipped with natural gas. You can get them done after they leave the factory. But if we started getting natural gas vehicles like some fleets have done, travel is a lot cheaper. You don't have the pollution you have with gasoline. It burns clean. You do have CO2. So look out. We're going to grow more plants, because plants have to have CO2 in order to have photosynthesis, in order to produce O2 as a byproduct from growing as a plant. So, gee, if we use more natural gas, we may end up with more healthy plants. So that may be a difficult thing if people don't like green plants. I couldn't help but notice on page 155--and I have read through here--the President has things like eliminating deductions. He says this bill is paid for. In his speech he says--and I want to read it correctly. He told us back 2 years ago during his health care speech, if you misrepresent my bill, I'm going to call you out. So let me read what he says. He says, ``And here is the other thing I want the American people to know. The American Jobs Act will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for.'' That's what he said. What he's counting on, what he references on page 4 of his speech-- and it's on page 155--yes, there is elimination of deductions. In reality, it's going to cost this government revenue. It's not going to create more Federal revenue. It's going to cost jobs. There will be fewer people paying as much income tax. That will hurt the Federal coffers more. We'll have more deficit spending. We can't get that under control. But we just passed a deficit bill I didn't support because it didn't have adequate cuts in there. There was no restraint on spending that was really adequate. If you only cut $1 trillion over a 10-year period, and we all know-- everybody in here knows--you can't bind future Congresses. So all the cuts that do not occur within the next year or year and a half, there's no reason to think that they will happen. You can't bind future Congresses. Anyway, even if we did cut $1 trillion--not much the next year, but it gets heavier toward the end of the 10 years. If we were to cut $1 trillion over 10 years and we were to do that every 10 years, within exactly 150 years we will finally balance the budget, and we will have only added $120 trillion to the $14.3 trillion or $14.6 trillion that we've run up in deficit spending now. If we were able to reach this wonderful goal of $2 trillion in cuts in the next 10 years and do that ever 10 years, then we can balance the budget in only 80 years. We'll only add around $72 trillion in additional deficit spending to our deficit. So the joint committee was charged: Find $1.5 trillion somewhere between now and basically Christmas, the end of the year. Actually, we found out today they're really going to need to find it by the 1st of November. This is how the President pays for his $450 billion spending spree, where we create the American Infrastructure Financing Authority--a new Fannie and Freddie on steroids. We create a new massive government bureaucracy. The FCC wanted to have a fairness doctrine and control what people said on the airwaves. They want to dictate everything that gets done in the media on the airwaves, but they were realizing more and more people are going to broadband and less and less to the airways. They're losing control of things. So the President addresses that. It's not a jobs bill in the private sector, but it creates a brand-new authority, government entity. Well, actually, he describes it in his bill as a private nonprofit group. He appoints the directors, of course, and it's called the Public Safety Broadband Corporation. Wow, it's going to kill the private sector. But more government jobs. Good news there. And here's the pay-for. If we had a drum roll, Mr. Speaker, we could ask for it. The Budget Control Act of 2011 is amended by striking $1.5 trillion that they have to find in cuts in the next month or so and inserting $1.95 trillion in cuts. That's it. Magically, he just found $450 billion in cuts, but it's because he told the supersubcommittee: Go find this extra money. What a great revenue-enhancing deficit spending cut that is. This bill is a disaster. It sets up a program that will allow people who have their hours reduced by 10 percent to start collecting unemployment compensation. It requires State agencies to start mandating that those employers involved certify that even if they cut an employee's hours, they're going to still have the same health care benefits, retirement benefits. I talked to some employers today about it. They said, We'll have to give up providing health care and retirement benefits because we need the flexibility. If we're all taking a cut, then let's take a cut. I want to challenge my own Republican leadership, Mr. Speaker. Most of America is not even aware that this year we put our mouth where our money is, and we actually voted to cut our own budgets by 5 percent. And next year we're cutting our own budget by 6 percent. Well, we haven't done enough with that. I would challenge our own leadership, and I hope that we'll seize the day--seize the moment--and be able, because we would have the right to do this since we're cutting our own budgets. America doesn't know that, but we are. Okay. All Federal Government, here's the deal. We're cutting our own budget in Congress by 5 percent this year, 6 percent next year, and we're doing it to every department In the country. We have the moral authority to do that since we're cutting our own. We should do that. Let's get spending under control. But the President uses, apparently, Rahm Emanuel's own philosophy about: Don't let a good crisis go to waste. So he's got this 155-page bill that he finally made available Monday night but that nobody has filed here in the House. We need American jobs. We need American jobs now. I am convinced that if we eliminated the corporate tax altogether, you would hear a gigantic sucking sound, I believe Mr. Perot used to say, of manufacturers leaving other countries and flocking back to America, making more income than they had in the past, because for the first time--Donald Trump is a sharp man. He has made a lot of money. He has advocated that we put a 25 percent tariff on everything we buy from China. If you studied the situation and understand the treaties--I don't like most of them, but if you look at what we've done, if we set a 25 percent tariff on everything America buys from China, we have violated a number of contracts and agreements. There's penalty phases to that. We start a trade war. I don't think China wins, but I know we don't either. I don't think anybody wins a trade war that that would start. So inspired by Donald Trump saying, Why don't we put a 25 percent tariff on everything we buy from China--and I've talked to Art Laffer. He likes the idea. He's got some other alternatives as well, but one of them is you eliminate the corporate tax altogether. I really think it's one of the most insidious taxes in America because people have had to be sold a bill of goods to believe that you won't have to pay it. We're going to make these evil, greedy corporations do it. And I will admit to you, sometimes unions are very helpful because greed does take over. But the thing is, if you eliminate the corporate tax, who's been paying that? The consumers and lower wage earners in those corporations. In some cases, there are studies that have indicated that. But it's the consumers that have to pay the corporate tax. If a corporation doesn't pass that tax on, they can't stay in business. If you eliminate the corporate tax, you'll have jobs flooding back into America, and you'll have more people paying income tax. The Laffer curve won't be zero taxes on this side with zero revenue. It will be zero corporate tax. But even at the same tax levels, you will have dramatic increases in the Federal revenue because so many more people will be employed, things will be going well, and the economy will have a jump-start like we've never seen before. So after nobody else would file an American Jobs Act, as the President proposed, and having examined it over and over in the last couple of days, having checked today at noon to see if anybody had the nerve to file this disastrous bill that will kill jobs, run up the price of gasoline and oil and make everybody's life more miserable, more government intrusion into broadcast, more government intrusion into financing things--not Fannie or Freddie because we've still got them around, but a new infrastructure financing authority--I realize this is a disaster for America. So I filed not a 115-page bill but actually a 2-page bill today at about 1:20, and it says: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the corporate income tax. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America and Congress assembled. This Act may be cited as the ``American Jobs Act of 2011.'' It repeals the corporate income tax, repeals the alternative minimum tax, and there will be so many more people paying income tax, people will not believe the kind of money that will flow into the Federal Government, not that that's a good thing, but we can at least pay down our debt if we're responsible. I'm so excited that the Tea Party is getting fired up. I see people from all races, all walks of life in the Tea Party. The one thing they seem to have in common is they're paying income tax, and they're tired of carrying half of the country on their backs. So this is a start, I believe--it is a jobs bill--and you will see jobs flood this country, and we'll get on track. In the few minutes I have left, let me just tell you about a man that probably had the most influence on my life behind my father. His name was Sam Parker. There have been wonderful men in my life, women in my life, teachers in my life that affected me. Sam Parker was hired by the Mount Pleasant School Board in 1952 to be a coach and to teach history. He was the head coach of the Mount Pleasant Tigers football team. In 2 years' time, in 1953, he had led them to being undefeated after the first nine games. He turned the program around. He was a devoted Christian, belonged to the Methodist church there, started teaching Sunday school. His wife, Norween, was the librarian at the junior high. After nine games, we went to play Sulphur Springs, and people were saying, This looks like the best team in 3A, in Texas; they very well could win the State. They went to Sulphur Springs. Some team members told me it was their fault; they didn't take it serious enough, and they lost by one touchdown. That was Friday night. Monday morning, the school board fired Sam Parker. Then he and his wife had a tough decision. They believed that God had called them to Mount Pleasant to plant their roots, invest their lives, and change America from that small place. Well, he did the unthinkable. He stayed and taught American history after being fired as head football coach. And 7 years later, I met him in a park recreation program he put on for young kids in the public park down there each summer. I worked with him one summer as a teenager with the kids. He taught more kids how to play baseball in Mount Pleasant during those years than anybody else in town. He was my scoutmaster. He had a troop there. He was my scoutmaster through my becoming an Eagle Scout there at Mount Pleasant, and he taught me American history. He continued to teach Sunday school. The man that coached 2 years at Mount Pleasant High School changed Mount Pleasant in an incredible way. He was still alive in 1991. Before he died, they renamed the football field Sam Parker Field. He taught me American history. He served in World War II. He loved this country. His son was my best friend--is still a dear friend. Those are the kinds of people that have changed America. Those are the kinds of people who are the reason we have been blessed like we've been blessed, And if we don't have more people willing to put pettiness aside, goofy ideas that enrich their cronies, goofy ideas that increase power for some people and get back to what made America great, we're going to lose this country. As Ben Franklin said in 1787, we will become a byword down through future generations because we had the greatest country ever given to mankind, and we became irresponsible and lost it. It's time for major changes. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this is a tough time in our American history. I was a history major at Texas A&M. I knew I owed the Army 4 years for the scholarship I had. I had been really inspired by American history in high school by Sam Parker, my teacher, my Scoutmaster. So I know a little bit about our history. I know a lot about world history as well. And it's important to take things in perspective, especially speeches here in Washington and take them from the perspective of how it all fits together. Now, we have been in this Chamber, and I was sitting right back there on the aisle, and we had the President of the United States standing right there. I was on a direct line of sight to eye-to-eye with the President, except his eyes cut right into the teleprompter each time he looked my way so I don't think we ever made eye contact. But he kept telling us over and over, 16, 17 times, I didn't count them, I've been told, but he said we've got to pass this bill right now, right now. This bill, right now. Well, unfortunately, last Thursday, when the President was saying we've got to pass this bill right now, there was no bill. There was no plan. He talked about his plan. He talked about his bill. They didn't have it quite ready yesterday until later. And we kept harassing the White House, saying we want to get a copy of the bill. We need a copy of the bill. You've said pass the bill now. Do we not get to even have a copy of the bill before we have to pass it, or would it be okay if we could, you know, see it before we pass it? You know, it might be a good idea to file it at some point if we're going to pass a bill. That's just my thinking. And so the White House was kind enough, late yesterday, to e-mail a copy of the bill. We got it up on our Web site at gohmert.house.gov. For others who are intrigued by the promises that have been made and what it actually does, let's see. It's called Saving Obama's Job. No, I'm sorry. American Jobs Act is the name of it. It's interesting to hear somebody talk about their bill and then get it and dig through. I think I finished about 5 this morning going through all 155 pages of the bill. And it's most interesting. Some of these things I'm going to have to talk to people who have more expertise in particular areas. Some things it's pretty obvious what they say. Page 6, he gets right into payroll tax relief. And again, as the person who came up with the idea for a tax holiday as a way to stimulate the economy back nearly 3 years ago, and as a person who, in January of 2009, told the President personally about my idea for a tax holiday. Moody's rated a tax holiday as increasing the GDP. It looks like more than other stimulus proposals. That was back in 2009, before this President squandered $4.5 trillion above and beyond the amount around $2.2 trillion or so a year that was coming in. It's shocking that we could go through that much money. Of course we had 2 years, the first 2 years with the same party in power in the House and Senate as is in the White House. And as I found in my first term in 2005 and 2006, sometimes when you have the same party in the White House and in the House and Senate, if the people in Congress are not adequately restrained and cannot adequately restrain themselves, there ends up being a big spending frenzy. In 2006, again, my second year in Congress, we spent over $160 billion more than we took in. Democrats across the aisle rightfully tore after Republicans. How could you spend $160 billion more than what we had coming into the Treasury? And they were right to do so. We should not have spent $160 billion more than we had coming in. Ironically, President Bush in 2008 had a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled House and Senate, a stimulus bill that opened the door a bit to these stimulus frenzies. And $40 billion of that $160 billion, as I recall, was going to be going to people who didn't pay any income taxes, as a rebate, which caused me to ask the President down here on the floor after the State of the Union, How do you give a rebate to people that didn't put any `bate' in? Then after that we had TARP. President George W. Bush is a good man. He is smarter than most of the people in this town wanted to give him credit for. One of the wittiest people you'll ever want to be around. But he made the mistake of listening to, until now, the worst Treasury Secretary in the history of the country, Hank Paulson. And Paulson said, Look, give me $750 billion; I can fix things. Well, that was a mistake. Anybody that read that bill would understand that was not a bill that should have ever passed; and if more people on the House floor had read the bill, I am confident, I know they couldn't have brought themselves to vote for it; but they didn't read it, many didn't. Well, that's why I spent most of last night going through the President's jobs bill. He does have some payroll tax relief. But compared to the payroll tax relief I was proposing, we were told it would be close to--if you just gave people all of their tax money in their check, it didn't need to come back from Washington. It would be in the check. If we passed it and the President had signed it on a Thursday, it would have been in their Friday check. All of the money, all of the taxes they paid. That would have stimulated the economy, and we wouldn't have needed the government to say, Hey, let's bail out GM and let's bail out Chrysler, because if people had had their own money, they could have gone down and bought a car from the car manufacturer and dealer that they wanted to buy from instead of just throwing money at the car industry. I appreciated the GM commercial saying, We paid our money back. Unfortunately, that was not true. It was a misrepresentation. Still money owed. Anyway, I guess he would do well in Washington with that kind of mentality. The payroll tax relief provided here is just a fraction of what I was suggesting in late 2008, 2009. The President, in fact, when I told him the idea in January of 2009, said, That's a great idea. Have you talked to Larry? Talking about Larry Summers, who was right behind him at the time. I said, I'd love to talk to Larry Summers about it. Summers reached around and gave me a card. The card said, Give me a call. He never took my calls. I waited a week, and then he didn't call me. I felt hurt, you know, like high school days when you're trying to ask somebody on a date, and they say, Let me get back to you. Well, I was snubbed. He didn't get back to me. Okay. Well, not the first time. So I relentlessly called, and I was given eventually to some young man who sounded like his voice was still changing, telling me to leave a message, and I didn't leave messages. And ``Larry,'' as the President referred to him, never got back to me. And I understand he's not over there now. But they called a tax holiday back in those days that got just a few bucks in people's pocket. Nothing like the stimulus would have been if people had been able to keep their own money, all of it, for a couple of months. Now, this wasn't my motive. My motive was to stimulate. But there was a secondary occurrence that would have happened had we had a real tax holiday, even for 2 or 3 months. It would have been that workers across America, including union workers, would notice, many of them for the first time it would really come home, how much money they're sending to Washington every month and how much better their lives would be if they didn't send that much money to Washington every month, if they had their own money to give to their own charitable causes, they had their own money to bail themselves out, their own money to stimulate their own household. Everybody would have been better off. But that's not the tack the President chose. He got what was originally touted to be an $800 billion stimulus, and he also had about $450 billion of the original TARP that he and Secretary Geithner were able to find ways to squander. We were told if we did not pass the President's stimulus package back in early 2009, he said the unemployment rate, Mr. Speaker, might go as high as 8\1/2\ percent. That 8\1/2\ percent sounds pretty good. People remember him saying, Well, gee, if you'll pass this, unemployment will be around 8 percent at the worst. Wrong. But if you don't pass it, it could go as high as 8\1/2\ percent. I'd take that 8\1/2\ percent right now and have everybody that got that money give it back because it was, for the most part, wasted. Now, people back then were told by the President, It's a stimulus bill. It's all about infrastructure. We're going to have this money go to infrastructure. Well, there was only a tiny pittance of what may have been more like a trillion dollars that went to infrastructure. That goes through page 16 with that part. We get into first responder stabilization, and there is $5 billion for one program, $4 billion for another program, $1 billion for the Attorney General first responder stabilization fund. Oh, I guess $4 billion's for the Attorney General to carry out the competitive grant program. It keeps being lost on people here that America's better off if you don't force people at the point of imprisonment, and IRS persecution, to give all of this money to Washington and then we'll dole it out as we see fit. The economy does better when you let people keep their own money and only bring just as much as necessary. Don't try to run everybody's lives. But at page 17, we're going to give all of this money to the Attorney General's Office and let them dole it out as they see fit. And we've seen that if you're a friend of the administration, you're going to do well. If you're not, they're going to sic on you all of the power of the bureaucratic, whether it's EPA, all of these administration's tools and you'll pay a price. We're finding that out in Texas. Now, you go to the next page, page 18. You've got elementary and secondary schools. They're supposed to get money. But, of course, it's going to come through Washington because we know best. And we're going to dole some money to the States. We're going to dole some to State and local applications as indicated on page 19. But you can't miss this. It's throughout the bill. Page 20, here we go again. We saw it with the Solyndra fiasco in California and this administration giving away $500 million that can't be accounted for now--just squandered. Well, we're going to do that some more. Maybe if we keep throwing money at a bad idea it will somehow, someday, in some way get a little better. So page 20 has got us prioritizing green practices kind of like a bankrupt Spain has done. Now, there is money in here, page 21. This is nice--money even for private schools, but only if they have a child poverty rate of at least 40 percent. Then we've got community college modernization and more green jobs within the colleges, Page 23, and you go on and on. I mean, I went through this. It does go on and on. Then we're told we're going to invest. This time we really, really mean it. We said we really meant it back in January of '09 that we're going to have infrastructure, and that's going to bring us up. We said it. We didn't spend it on infrastructure. We squandered it on ACORN and all these different groups, but this time we really, really, really mean it. Let's see. That looks like it's $2 billion for that program, and on and on. It's interesting. We've got all this money we're going to put toward highways and whatnot. Now, anyone, Mr. Speaker, who believed this was all going to go straight to infrastructure missed the point, because then we get over to page 40, and you get to the real jobs. This is where the jobs are really created. It starts on page 40. It's called the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. If you love Fannie and Freddie, you're going to love the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. On page 41, you'll find out there are seven voting members appointed by the President. Well, he's good at creating jobs--look at all the government jobs he has added--so that's who I want having appointed. I mean, he has appointed all these people from universities who have never created jobs in their lives, so they're perplexed as to why their programs aren't working. He does have the head of GE who's helping him with that jobs program. China is grateful. China is very grateful to the head of GE because he has created lots of jobs--they're just in China and not here. Maybe he'll get to be on this board as well. But it's another government program. Let's see. I want to make sure I get this right. The board of directors' first appointees will be deemed the incorporators of AIFA-- that's the American Infrastructure Financing Authority--but that will make for some good reading. I wouldn't read it right before going to bed because you might not be able to go to sleep. Then we get over to page 56. This talks about the funding of the American Infrastructure Financing Authority and the administrative fees, which is section 257. Then we get into that it has hereby appropriated AIFA to carry out this act for the cost of direct loans and loan guarantees except for the limitations under section 253 and for administrative costs of $10 billion that remain available until expended. Then you've got some other moneys there, but that's good news because you can spend that for administrative costs. Fortunately, in Washington, we don't run up much in the way of administrative costs. Now, one thing that some people have talked about to raise a little bit of revenue is to sell some of our broadband spectrum. Then we also know that there are those in Washington who are not happy that the FCC has not been able to have a Fairness Doctrine so they can dictate what goes on the air. Well, not to worry because people, it seems, are going more and more to broadband than to radio waves and television waves. We're getting more and more broadband stuff. So we have the answer to the lack of a Fairness Doctrine that the FCC has wanted under this administration, but we've been able to avoid it so far. There is nothing about a Fairness Doctrine in here, but fortunately, you get to page 75, and you find out we're going to establish--I love this name--a Public Safety Broadband Corporation. On the next page, 76, you find out it has established a private, nonprofit corporation, and you're going to have some members who know how to run a government operation and create government jobs. Of course it killed jobs in the private sector, but it's creating government jobs. That's down here. You've got the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General--we're talking real job creators here-- and others who will be on that board. So people can feel better about that. If you don't think we have enough government control of things, well, this bill, you're going to love it: more government control, more government corporations. The thing that many missed--and it jumped out at me as I sat back there and the President spoke--is when he said we want to work side by side with business. For people who have ears and can hear, that means this President wants to be your business partner. That scares some folks, and that's why I think you saw the market go down the next day. People who understand how real jobs in the real world are created know that the government being partners with people trying to generate jobs is a job killer. We don't need a government to be partners, side by side, working with business. The government, as designed by the Founders and as we're supposed to be carrying out, is supposed to be a referee to make sure people play fair. If the government had made sure people were playing fair instead of dictating every detail of their existence, then they would have noticed that Bernie Madoff was cheating people, but the government--our bureaucracy--was too concerned with dictating how people live, and they forgot about their job as referee. I highlighted so much stuff as I went through the night, but I won't bore you with all of this, Mr. Speaker. Let's see: Public Safety Roaming and Priority Access. The FCC is going to get the report on the efficient use of public safety spectrum. Oh, extended benefit provisions. There's good stuff there. I've been a fan of retraining people when there are jobs in one sector and people have lost jobs in another, and there are no jobs with the training they have. That's a good idea. It's better money than just throwing out unemployment reimbursement if you can train people to have real jobs. This bill spends billions of dollars. We've got the Reemployment NOW Program. That's a new Federal bureaucracy, a new Federal program. We've got the State Plan at page 98. We've got the Bridge to Work Program at page 99. We're going to retrain people for jobs. We don't have jobs that they can fill, but we're going to spend a lot of time training them for jobs that don't exist. Wouldn't we be better off encouraging the real job creators, the small business folks, to create jobs and then train them for that? But no. We're going to suck more capital out of the financial community and into the government so we can retrain people for jobs that don't exist. Then we have, on page 106, the Short-Time Compensation Program. The Short-Time Compensation Program means a program in which the participation of the employers is voluntary and the employer reduces the number of hours worked by employees in lieu of layoffs. Such employees whose workweeks have been reduced by at least 10 percent are then eligible for unemployment compensation. If you lose 10 percent of your work time, guess what? We're now opening up a new avenue for unemployment compensation. Ten percent reduced is all it takes. Employers--I've talked to so many--say, I don't want to fire anybody. I'm asking my employees to hang on. We're all reducing what we're taking in, and we're going to try to get through this without firing anybody, but everybody has had to take a cut. Well, this will make them eligible for unemployment compensation, which raises their unemployment insurance rates they have to pay, which means they are going to have to lay off somebody in order to pay the additional unemployment insurance rates. Of course, then you have got temporary financing of short-term compensation agreements at page 109. Oh, we've got grants. We've got subsidized employment for unemployed low-income adults. You know, instead of sucking all this capital out of the private sector, it seems like we would want to help create more jobs. Well, if you're not satisfied with all the jobs that are created by the new government programs, new government agencies, wonderful that we have got something better than Fannie and Freddie for infrastructure financing, that's great, but I understand that lawsuit filing is down significantly around the country. Our Constitution tells you, and we know in our hearts that it's wrong to discriminate against people based on race, creed, color, national origin, gender, those things make sense. We shouldn't discriminate, and those are protected classes. We've also added, no matter what your sexual preference, your sexual orientation, no matter what you're oriented toward sexually, because the Democratic majority would not allow us to define sexual orientation to exclude illegal activity. We know sexual orientation is a protected class now. We are adding in this bill a new protected class called unemployed. The title, on page 129, ``Prohibition of Discrimination in Employment on the Basis of an Individual's Status As Unemployed.'' It says right here in the findings that we ``find that denial of employment opportunities to individuals because of their status as unemployed is discriminatory and burdens commerce.'' It goes on and explains this in the preceding pages. So the good news is, if you're unemployed and you go to apply for a job, and you're not hired for that job, see a lawyer. You may be able to file a claim because you got discriminated against because you were unemployed. Now, some would point out, legitimately, that will discourage people from doing interviews of people unemployed, because if they do, they've got a claim or may have a claim to make against the employer for discrimination based on the fact that they were unemployed. I think that this will help trial lawyers who are not having enough work, because it can open the door. We heard from our friends across the aisle in the preceding hour, 14 million people out of work, that's 14 million potential new clients that could go hire a lawyer and file a claim because they didn't get hired even though they were unemployed. We've heard the President demonizing billionaires and millionaires. You know, why are the Republicans so strong on trying to bail out their rich friends? Well, what we've learned here in this town in recent years is that if the very wealthy don't mind being called names, they will be enriched and even engorged. For example, we know that Wall Street executives have been called fat cats by this administration and demonized. Yet the little secret behind the scene's joke is, don't mind being called names; this administration has brought more profit to Wall Street than Goldman Sachs has ever seen in their history. Wall Street executives and their families gave to President Obama 4-to-1 over John McCain, so, of course, they've got a good little deal going on there. And also, demonize the oil and gas industry even though, you know, you love British Petroleum because they were going to endorse the cap-and- trade bill, and you demonize them, and then you stick provisions in this bill that have no effect on the big major oil companies. They will only affect, these provisions at the back at pages 151, 152, 153, they will not affect the big majors like British Petroleum except that because they will destroy the ability of independent producers that produce much or maybe most of the oil and gas in the continental U.S., it will drive them out of business. It will dry up investment. This is repeal of the oil and gas working interest exception, the passive activity, so there are things in here that are going to dry up the independent oil company's ability to function. And the pay-for--we were told over and over this is all paid for--is on page 155. Here it is, get ready: The Budget Control Act of 2011 is amended by striking $1.5 trillion that the supercommittee is going to have to find in cuts and inserting $1.95 trillion. He's saying, It's all paid for. It's all paid for. And the way it's all paid for is the new supercommittee is now ordered under the President's bill to find another $450 billion to pay for his bill. So it's all paid for, hallelujah, amen. Now, there are so many more problems I haven't had a chance to get to, and there are probably some things that I probably missed even as I went through this, but there is such bad news for America in here. Union workers, watch out: This may be the end of your jobs. But it's okay because the unions are growing by getting more government employees, not the hard-working folks in the regular unions. These are the government unions. It should say, instead of American jobs bill, saving the President's job bill, but this is a disaster for every other thinking person in America. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.