Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. This is supposed to be the updated law as amended.

Mr. GOHMERT. If the gentleman would yield, yes, it does say any lawful contact, stop, detention or arrest.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Actually, I'm not just skeptical of the MMS. I'm telling you it's a disaster. It was a disaster with MMS, and it was a disaster that their performance was allowed to happen. We're going to find out there is somebody responsible--maybe one, maybe many--at British Petroleum, but we know for sure--and it came up in the hearing today as well--that the President had previously mentioned that he wanted to end the coziness between inspectors, or people with the government, who were supposed to manage the oil companies and make sure they were doing the right things, the Big Oil companies. So that inspired some double-checking. We had hearings before about the 2 years, 1998 and 1999, during which the Clinton administration had employees who pulled the price control adjustment language out of the offshore leases. Originally, I was thinking it cost millions. It cost hundreds of millions, and now there are billions of dollars that have gone to Big Oil that should have gone into the Federal Treasury. When we had a hearing a couple of years ago about that, I asked the Inspector General--and this was a Clinton----

Mr. GOHMERT. Appointee. Originally, he was the Inspector General. He is now in another capacity. I asked him, Did you not interview these two people who had the most knowledge about why that language was pulled out? He said, Well, they left the government. They're not with the government, so I can't do anything about it. He could call them. He could see if they wanted to talk. He didn't even bother to do that. So, after the President's comment about the coziness, I had to go back and check. Whatever happened to those two people the Inspector General couldn't talk to? Well, one of them, when she left the Clinton administration, went to work for a company called British Petroleum. Perhaps you've heard of them. She had three major officer/director positions with British Petroleum, but as of June of last year, Secretary Salazar and this administration hired her to come to work for the Minerals Management folks, so she is now----

Mr. GOHMERT. It's very cozy.

Mr. GOHMERT. Who had been working for 9 years for British Petroleum-- that's correct--in high capacities. So it's interesting to hear about that cozy relationship.

Mr. GOHMERT. Her name is Sylvia Baca, B-A-C-A. It was interesting, though, to learn--and I didn't really realize this--but nobody with the Minerals Management Service goes through a confirmation process in the Senate. This is completely an extension of the White House. Whatever the administration is, the Minerals Management Service is part of the administration. The Congress has no authority to confirm, to say ``yes'' or ``no'' to somebody who is appointed. This is an extension of the President's own hand, his running the Minerals Management Service; and we have absolutely got to clean house. The trouble is it's not our house. It's the President's house and that of the Minerals Management Service.

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you for yielding. Actually, I was going to bring a bit of John Adams' wisdom because, to follow up on my colleague's wonderful quotes and references to history, John Adams, toward the end of his life, said: The longer I've lived, the more I've come to understand that one worthless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three is a Congress. I yield back.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I appreciate my friend for yielding, but I want to follow up on that very point. We're told that there is going to be a financial ``reform'' bill that sounds more like a financial ``deform'' bill. All these reforms end up being deformities. But this in particular, financial reform? To get us out of the mess that had been building through the nineties and through this past decade, for the last 20 years? And nonetheless, as I understand, in this bill we're going to take up, it still has the Systemic Risk Council that is going to pick the winners and losers in America. That is so grossly un-American; it has no place in our law coming out of this body. That's the kind of thing that the Revolution was started over, that some King was going to get to tell them who would be the business that would stand and who would fall, because the Americans here wanted to be able to let the market decide that. Now, one thing we've seen, and it has been accentuated, is you do need a government that will ensure that people play fairly and play right. We saw that down on the coast as President Obama expressed that we have gotten a relationship too cozy between his administration and the Big Oil companies. Now we've heard people say on television that Republicans took contributions, Democrats take contributions; but it was the Department of the Interior in 1998 and 1999, some of the Clinton administration people, that pulled the language from the offshore leases that would allow the oil companies, ultimately, to make millions and millions and millions at the expense of the government and the taxpayer getting full value for the leases for those offshore oil and gas developments. When we had the Inspector General in front of us in the Natural Resources hearing a couple years ago, I asked why he had not talked to the couple of people that the Inspector General said were apparently responsible for that language being pulled out of the leases that hurt the revenue of the government and helped the massive oil companies at the time. He said, Well, they've left government service; we can't talk to them. Well, certainly you can at least try to talk to them, but the Inspector General indicated that they left government service. Well, after I'd heard the President announce that we had to end this cozy relationship between people in his administration and the big oil company, I wondered: Whatever happened to those two people? Well, it turns out one of the people with whom, apparently, the inspector general did not talk but felt probably had the best information on why that language was left out--when she was not working for the government, she went and worked for a company called British Petroleum. Perhaps my friend has heard of British Petroleum. In fact, after the inspector general said he couldn't talk to her about why that language was pulled--the language that helped the oil companies so much during 1998 and 1999--and why she would pull language that hurt our government, it turns out she has now returned to government service. In fact, she did last summer. This administration hired her to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary of MMS, the Minerals Management Service, which is the agency of this administration that is supposed to ensure that blowout preventers work properly. Well, we've got people here in the House who had asked for the results of the tests that were done by MMS within 2 weeks of the blowout preventer's failing. Apparently, the information has come back from this administration's MMS: We are not providing that information to you, maybe to a Democratic chairman of the committee but not to you guys. You would think that this would be public information, that MMS would want to be as transparent as they're demanding the CIA be, but apparently, they're not willing to be as transparent as they want the CIA to be. They're more in the nature of obscurity like the Federal Reserve continues to try to be and is. So they won't release the information of how badly bungled the tests were. You have to figure they didn't go well or they would have released that information to show that they were exonerated, that they did proper tests. In fact, as a trial judge back in my days in the courtroom, oftentimes, one side would produce evidence to show that the fact that there is no evidence indicates a fact. I think here the fact that they won't produce those test results indicates that the MMS of this administration is too cozy with British Petroleum because of the interactive business that has gone on here. It must not have gone well.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, if we go back to the day that the Wall Street bailout passed, that first week in October of 2008, I made the statement that when the Federal Government buys private assets and holds them in order to try to make money, or the Federal Government decides it's going to start trying to make money for the taxpayer, it's called socialism. And I was belittled by colleagues that serve here in this body for saying that it was socialist. One person even said, well, I only know three Socialists in America, and they're all against the Wall Street bailout. Well, I was pretty depressed and devastated when the Wall Street bailout passed. The next morning, Saturday morning, I was watching Neil Cavuto, and he had the Presidential nominee of the Socialist Party, and the Socialist candidate for President being interviewed by Neil Cavuto was asked, basically, what's the deal? I thought you guys were against the TARP bailout, the Wall Street bailout? And now this morning you're saying it was a good thing. And in essence, the Presidential nominee of the Socialist Party said, well, yes, they were against the TARP, Wall Street bailout. In essence, they didn't feel like the government should pay anything to take over the assets they were taking over. But once it passed and was signed into law, they realized this is probably the greatest day for socialists in American history because the Federal Government has begun the takeover, in a substantial way, of private assets. And of course he went on to say now that they've made this wonderful great step of taking over, socializing, nationalizing private assets from the financial sector, the government just needs to go ahead and finish taking over the rest of the financial sector because, he said, because we know then the government takeover of all of that area would not be done out of greed, and so they would do a much better job of spreading the wealth around the country, and that under the present system, greed rules the day, and that just that great, wonderful step of the TARP bailout, socializing America, as he saw it, just needed to be followed by the final step of completing the takeover of the financial sector. So the gentleman from Iowa is exactly right: according to the Presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in 2008, this is a socialist move to nationalize more and more of the assets, just as the Presidential nominee of the Socialists had hoped would happen. I yield back.

Mr. GOHMERT. Certainly, I'll yield to my friend.

Mr. GOHMERT. They won't release the records.

Mr. GOHMERT. If they had even done the testing, actually, yes.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, yes, it would certainly appear that that's exactly right. If the MMS of this administration will not produce the records to show exactly what testing was done and exactly what the results were, which should be public record for heaven's sake--they're public waters controlled by our government--then you've got to pretty well figure it would not make this administration look very good. I yield.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, that also brings us back to this problem with the Federal Reserve and with the Secretary of the Treasury. Yes, we had some people saying we've got to confirm Timothy Geithner as the Secretary of the Treasury because he worked with Paulson in the early days of TARP. He knows the plan. Well, that tells me he should never have been confirmed if he'd worked with Paulson on the original plan, because it was a disaster, and it should never have been allowed to have happened as it did; but now we've got these guys--the head of the Federal Reserve and the head of the Treasury--who are going to pick the winners and losers in the country. I yield.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, that's an interesting issue. You know, obviously, Secretary Geithner had great problems complying with his certification 4 years in a row. He swore that he would pay the tax that was shown on the form, and he certified, if they would just pay him that money, he would pay it. Then he didn't pay it. In answer to the question, I guess an analogy comes to mind, which is the FBI. For example, there was a movie about a gentleman who was so good at forging and acting as someone else, and he could create a forged document out of anything. Well, the FBI ended up hiring him because he was so good at forging checks and making fraudulent checks. The FBI hired him because he knew more about ways to cheat other people and to cheat the government. They felt like he could be an immense help, and apparently he was. As I understand, he has helped prepare more secure documents and more secure institutions because he was so good at cheating those very institutions and the government.

Mr. GOHMERT. So perhaps that was the thinking, that this is somebody who would be an expert in not paying taxes. Maybe that's who we want in charge of the tax entity, the IRS. It's an interesting point. It still cuts to my core to think that the land of the free and the home of the brave is being converted into a land of the unfree where liberties are taken away because people have decided that the Secretary of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Chairman get to pick and choose what entities or what banks get to stand when the smoke clears. I mean, what happened to competition? Why not let people play and play fairly and just enforce fair rules? That's what is needed here. We don't need the Federal Government saying what companies they're going to support and will never let fail, because as soon as the Federal Government says they're not going to ever let this bank or this company fail, then that's going to be the last one standing, because it knows it can operate in the red and that its competition cannot do that. At the end of the day, that government- supported entity or bank will end up being the one left. That is outrageous. It is un-American. Anybody who would stand for that proposition that we're not going to let these companies compete fairly, that we're going to come in and pick the winners and losers, needs to start wearing a name tag that reads, ``King George III wannabe.'' I want to pick the winners and losers. I want to tell you who prevails and who doesn't. I will tell you who ends up getting to be the dominant force in America instead of letting people live in freedom and in liberty and letting them pursue happiness and pursue opportunity. The Constitution never guaranteed equality of outcome. It guaranteed equality of opportunity, and that's what ought to be done. Anybody who says they support a systemic risk council that gets to pick the winners and losers--these are too big to fail, and we can't let them fail--are enemies of this country as it was founded.

Mr. GOHMERT. I was just asking if the gentleman would yield for a question, if he would.

Mr. GOHMERT. With regard to the financial deform package that apparently is going to be coming to the House, is the gentleman aware of whether or not these two entities, Fannie and Freddie, that kicked us into the spiral downward in the fall of '08, whether they are included in this reform package? Is there any reform of these two entities that nearly brought our economic house of cards down?

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, we were told that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was something we would take up once we had a study done because that's the only thing that would be fair to our men and women in the service. Now we're told the study will be finished at the end of the year; we're going to take up the bill now. We were told by the Supreme Court it was okay to have a cross in the Mojave Desert, but thieves went out there, took it out after they lost, and now the Park Service is working with the thieves, perhaps unwittingly, to keep it from happening. The Auto Task Force met behind closed doors, turned bankruptcy law upside down, made secured creditors unsecured, owned the place, took property without due process, turned the Constitution upside down. The Congress and the courts did nothing. No wonder employment is going down and unemployment is going up; businesses can't trust this government. It is time to get back to a body that deals honestly, with integrity and with a consistency the country and businesses and jobs can count on.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend from Florida, his discussion about energy. It's certainly a timely topic. I think we're all pretty upset with what BP has done. We heard the President point out that we're not going to have any finger-pointing. But that was yesterday. That was yesterday's news. Then I understand today the White House announces that it's going to have a commission that's going to do the finger-pointing. So one day no finger-pointing, the next day we're going to have a commission to do the finger- pointing. So I guess we know that nobody that comes in here would ever do anything but tell the truth, but whoever is sending out those messages sure is being inconsistent. I heard the President say last week that he was tired of all the cozy relationships between Big Oil and government. Well, as long as Big Oil is being properly supervised, then we are okay. But the trouble is in the last year-and-a-half apparently things have not been going so well in the area of supervision. There is an article that the AP put out: Federal inspections on the rigs not as claimed. This was actually from Sunday, May 16. This article indicates the Federal agency responsible for ensuring the Deepwater Horizon was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that the rig be inspected at least once per month. The agency's inspection frequency on Deepwater Horizon fell dramatically over the past 5 years, and apparently in the last year-and-a-half that has dropped significantly. According to the article, let's see, this indicates officials said 83 inspections had been performed since the rig arrived in the gulf 104 months ago, which was September of 2001. And then being questioned about the once per month claim, officials subsequently revised that total up to 88 inspections. And the number of more recent inspections changed from 26 to 48 since January of 2005. No explanation was given for the upward revisions. But what's amazing to some of us is the fact that you could have a level 5 hurricane as existed in the gulf with Hurricane Katrina before it hit the coast of Louisiana--once it hit the coast it was a level 3, but out there at the rigs it was still a 5--and some of those platforms were completely destroyed, completely destroyed, but the blowout preventers worked. There was no oil leaked. So you wonder, What's the deal? And relying on the old adage here in Washington that no matter how cynical you get it's never enough to catch up, begin thinking about the President deploring this cozy relationship between Big Oil and the government. Because if he is blowing smoke, then maybe there's fire there. So we got to looking, as, after all, it is MMS, the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior that's supposed to be monitoring British Petroleum and making sure that our environment's kept safe because we need the energy. My friend from Florida was talking about all the alternative energies. Well, that's going to cost a ton of money to develop. So on the one hand you can shut down this economy and prevent everybody from driving cars, prevent the trains from carrying all the freight that they do, prevent ships from traveling using the fuel they do, stop all these things, stop commerce completely and somehow come up with money to develop alternative energies, or you can develop what we have and make sure that the government is doing a good enough job as a watchdog to make sure that there are not these kind of violations. That's what could be done. And some of us have proposed repeatedly that all you have to do is use the resources we have got, take the government's royalty and use that to develop alternative energy sources so that as we deplete our energy resources, more than any nation in the world when you consider all the different resources we have, use the government's share of the royalty to fund alternative energy research so that we keep moving smoothly, transitioning into the day when we don't need any type of carbon-based fuel. But it's not in the next few years. We saw efforts in the last 2\1/2\ years since Republicans properly lost the majority because they were spending too much. Little did we know those that convinced the public to elect them to stop the deficit spending would do 10 times the spending, or create 10 times the deficit in 1 year that we dealt with in 1 year right after I got here. But be that as it may, we have the resources to drive this economy like none in the world. We have the resources that will allow us to take those royalties and to develop resources so we don't need the carbon-based fuel that we are using today. We could be moving toward nuclear energy, making sure it's a cookie- cutter-type facility and that parts can be utilized in different facilities. You train somebody to work in one, they can work in others. Those things can be done, but we are not moving in that direction. We are still moving, under this majority, toward greater and greater reliance on foreign oil and foreign energy. So wanting to see, though, what could the President be talking about regarding this cozy relationship? Being on the Natural Resources Committee, I have some institutional recollection of things that have gone on since I have been here the last 5\1/2\ years, and one of the things that we have taken up was the fact that during the last 2 or 3 years of the Clinton administration the Department of the Interior had at least a couple of people who intentionally left language regarding price controls out of the Federal leases with major oil for offshore drilling. And it has cost this Nation millions and millions of dollars because it was knowingly done. We had hearings, brought the Inspector General in. And I was one who inquired, Why hasn't there been a more thorough investigation about why these individuals intentionally, knowingly left the price control language out of the leases? It was always put there under former President Bush, under George W. Bush. His Department of the Interior always put it in. But for some reason, the last 2 or 3 years of the Clinton administration it was left out. And the Inspector General indicated that, well, he couldn't talk to those two particular individuals in question because they left government service. Found it a little bit hard myself to understand why you can't investigate gross negligence, and if not gross negligence maybe even intentional misconduct. But we won't know until the proper investigation is done, why wouldn't he, as the Inspector General who was charged with doing the inspection while the Bush administration was in the White House, why he wouldn't do this. Now, this is a man who had worked in the Clinton administration, and now he is Inspector General. Of course, his idea was to blame Bush, a theme that's followed up today even, even though it wasn't President Bush that negotiated the leases. It was the Clinton administration Department of the Interior. But one of the two individuals that he said, Well, we just can't question her because she is no longer a part of the government. She has gone back in the private sector. There is nothing we can do about it. And so I certainly wondered myself why you wouldn't pursue that, perhaps turn it over to the FBI, to the Justice Department, let them do some investigation, because nobody is beyond their investigation of potential Federal wrongdoing, certainly mismanagement in costing the country millions and millions of dollars. But it's not just that it cost the country millions and millions of dollars. It made that money for the big oil companies with which the Clinton administration cut these deals. But anyway, that individual who had worked with the Department of the Interior and had assisted in seeing that the leases did not contain the price control language cost the government taxpayers millions and made those millions, transferred to the big oil companies, whatever happened to her? Well, a little checking because we know the President said there's a cozy relationship he was concerned about. It turns out that this administration has put her back in the Interior Department as the deputy assistant secretary for Minerals Management Service. The people, MMS, the very people who were supposed to inspect these offshore rigs, the very people who are supposed to make sure that the blowout preventers worked properly so that if there's a catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, the blowout preventers work and no oil is leaked from those wells. Well, it didn't work out here, as the AP article talks about. The inspections weren't done with the regularity that they were supposed to. Now, I agree with the President that we need to be working on issues and not finger-pointing, except that if we--the problem is there are other rigs under operation right now under the supervision of these same folks that let this happen. We can't afford more disasters like this in the gulf or anywhere else. I've been a strong advocate for offshore drilling, but I anticipated that we would have a government that would not spend days and weeks deciding what to do, that they would get out there and do something. Not do a flyover and a wave-by, but an actual on-the-job, on-the- ground, you're-going-to-get-this-done. Now, we've heard that maybe the boot was on the neck of these folks. It feels like maybe it's more on the toe or something because we don't seem to be moving in the right direction. You hear stories--you know, having so many friends that know something about oil and gas. You hear different versions about potential ways to close this well up. God help BP if it turns out they could have closed this with some explosives very quickly but have not acted quickly enough in order to hopefully some day rework the same well, letting this disaster hit the coast in this manner. So what is the administration doing? I anticipated that with offshore drilling we would make sure that these blowout preventers were regularly tested--which wasn't happening here under this administration--and that if there were an accident, we would see what happened with Katrina; they would shut themselves down. And we can't see that there's really any strong movement toward inspecting the rest of the rigs that this Minerals Management Service may have neglected just like this BP rig. They ought to be out there on every rig checking and making sure that they're not allowing this to happen somewhere else. I'm not for shutting down the energy resources. But when you see a major company having more than one problem and other major oil companies not having the same problems, it does make you wonder if they are, number one, not being properly inspected. And if they're not being properly inspected, do they have a cozy relationship? Well, let's see. This new deputy assistant secretary for Minerals Management Service, what job did she come from? Well, here it is. She was the general manager for social investment programs in strategic partnerships at British Petroleum America in Houston. Previously, other work experience, she had been director of Global Health, Safety, Environment and Emergency Response. That would be people regarding safety and environment and emergencies. They probably dealt with the company she was with on blowout preventers, things that would prevent emergencies, since she was the director of safety and environmental emergency responses. Oh, yes, that was for British Petroleum of London. Well, what other experience did she have? Well, previously she had also been a vice president for Health, Safety and Environment. Environment like preventing oil spills? What company would she have gotten her training? Oh, yes. That was British Petroleum of North America in Los Angeles. But 1995 to 2001 when the Bush administration came in and let her go, she served as the assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Department of the Interior, where she was the principal policy adviser to the Secretary of the Interior for environmentally responsible stewardship. Isn't that special? So, once you hear the chief executive of the land talking about chief executives of big oil companies being too cozy with his administration, well, it bears looking into. And you don't have to go very far to see there is a very serious problem here. And the person that worked for British Petroleum that may have worked with MMS officials from the British Petroleum side is now the deputy secretary or assistant secretary with MMS, working with these same people, of which she used to be one. Interesting. Now, we know that the jobs have not come as was promised. We were told a year and a half ago that if we would move in a socialist direction, give $787 billion more on top of the ridiculous Wall Street bailout from months before, that if we add another $787 billion in a so-called stimulus package, that that would prevent the unemployment rate from ever going above 8. We were told if we didn't pass that $787 billion of a stimulus package, the President said unemployment might reach as high as 8\1/2\ percent. Well, doesn't that sound good now? Wouldn't it have been nice not to have passed that $787 billion porkulus bill and have unemployment not go beyond 8.5 percent? Because what happens is the government is sucking all the air out of the capital in the country. I keep hearing my friends across the aisle talk about banks not making loans. Well, there are a couple of problems. Number one, the Federal Government is using up all the capital to build new buildings, hire new people, 60,000. The biggest sector of hiring in the last month was from Census workers. Well, that's not long-term help for the economy. It is a job that needs to be done. I am glad it is not ACORN. Of course, these may be ACORN employees that are now working for the Census Bureau. But that's not good news. How in the world can anybody go out, as the Speaker and the President have, saying: Great news, the unemployment rate went from 9.7 to 9.9. Isn't that great news? If you talk to the people that are out of work, it is not good news, which is one of the reasons we have set up a couple of job fairs again to try to marry up people who have jobs open with people that are looking for jobs. We plan on doing one on June 2 in Marshall and then another down in Lufkin July 8. That will be in Nacogdoches, Stephen F. Austin University; and the one in Marshall will be the East Texas Baptist University, and we are going to be trying to marry up people that have some job openings with people that are looking for jobs. The two we have done in the past ended up with hundreds of people having employment that didn't before; but, sadly, not nearly enough people found the employment they needed. So what is going on? I mean, obviously this government is spending tons of money. We know that Goldman Sachs had the best year they have ever had last year. But then, when you get to scratching, we know the Federal Reserve is refusing to open its books, refusing to be audited. The same people that are demanding that the Intelligence Agency, the FBI, all these other folks, the Department of Defense need to have complete transparency, not demanding the same thing of the Federal Reserve. We have got to keep that secret for some reason, when the truth is we need to know how much trouble the Federal Reserve continues to get us into. But we were able to pull one contract between the Federal Reserve and New York with someone called Goldman Sachs SF Management, and they got a sweetheart deal here. But it does allow them to basically act on behalf of the Federal Reserve, just do whatever the Federal Reserve could do on their behalf, including hiring people to manage their assets. But in order to be hired to manage assets of the Federal Reserve, the manager, Goldman Sachs, acting on behalf of the Federal Reserve, is restricted to only hiring those outside entities that are listed in Exhibit C of their contract. So you know that at least restricted them. They couldn't line their own pockets. Except that Goldman Sachs Asset Management LP is the manager acting on behalf of the Federal Reserve; and, lo and behold, Goldman Sachs & Company is an authorized counterparty with whom Goldman Sachs Asset Management can cut a deal as Goldman Sachs Asset Management LP sees fit on behalf of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Well, isn't that special. Isn't that convenient. Those are the kinds of things we are talking about, I guess, when someone here on the floor or the President talks about these cozy relationships between his administration and others that are not good for America, because that sure doesn't sound good for America. But you know, there was a time in America when people had a conscience. There was something in this country called morality. And when morality was such an important thing in this country, if someone was greedy and they through greed, avarice, neglect, ran their car off in a ditch, and even though it was their own fault, their own greed, that got them in trouble. If their neighbors came out and helped them get their car out of a ditch, well, there was this conscience, this still small voice that spoke within the greedy person to say, Gee, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I will never be able to thank you enough for helping me get my car out of the ditch. I owe you. What can I do for you? Now we are in a day when greed of an entity like Goldman Sachs, I think they gave 4-1 to help the President get elected over McCain, they ran their car into a ditch during the end of the Bush administration. And since the former chairman was the Secretary of the Treasury and he could see his friends were in big trouble, he decided to scare America, tell them the financial sky was falling, to convince the President that the financial sky was falling, and that the only remedy was to give him, Hank Paulson, $700 billion to play with so that maybe he could keep things from getting too bad. Well, he kept things from getting bad for Goldman Sachs. That's why it was necessary to bail out AIG. Most of AIG's departments were doing great. It was the credit default swaps that got them in trouble. But, unfortunately, credit default swaps were deals that were done with Goldman Sachs, an awful lot of them. So they had to bail AIG so that of the billions that were paid to AIG to bail them out, most of that would go to Goldman Sachs. So the American taxpayers were on the hook to pull Goldman Sachs' car that their greed drove into the ditch; and once they had it out of the ditch, they run over the rest of America, their neighbors. There used to be morality. There used to be a conscience. And morality ensured that we could have economic stability. And when you lose morality, you lose economic stability. There are so many brilliant theologians and philosophers that have talked about this. Chuck Colson was talking about it in a Bible study a little over a year ago, and what he said was true: if you have got morality, you can have economic stability. When you lose economic stability, then throughout history people have always been willing to give up liberty to get economic stability. But to preserve liberty, wouldn't it have been better just to refine this Nation's morals, our moral foundation? Then we don't lose liberty to get economic stability. You get it by having a moral Nation. You know, the Miss USA pageant got some notoriety before the pageant this week because the contestants were required to take pictures scantily clad. What was that about? It is about greed. Greed. Figuring, if people saw how thinly clad the contestants were, more people would tune in, which means more money for the pageant. It is about greed. It is about greed. It keeps coming back to that. So if you get back to morality, you can get economic stability. One of the things that George Washington warned about, he tried to warn us in his farewell address. Washington said: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. So, to be moral, Washington said we need to be a religious people. The Nation once was. In fact, when Washington resigned from the leadership as commanding general of the Revolutionary military, he at the end of his resignation had these words, and this is not the whole thing but I'm shortening it here: I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in His holy protection; and, that He would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks 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. Of course, he was talking about the divine author of our blessed religion is how he referred to Jesus. But to be moral under Judeo-Christian beliefs, we would need to be tolerant and allow the expression of opinions, even those opinions that we happen to disagree with, even when those opinions disagree with our lifestyle. And, Mr. Speaker, when people become so intolerant that they do not allow people to speak their mind even when it is to say, I believe your lifestyle is immoral, then we've lost the liberty that so many have fought for and so many have died for and that the Founders pledged their lives, their liberty, their sacred honor. You see, there was a time during the revolution and for about 150 years after that where people were taught in school--I was taught in school in my early days that this quote from Voltaire--some say Voltaire, some say Cicero, hundreds of years earlier, but that ``I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'' Now it's become, I'm so angry at you because you have said that you disagree with my lifestyle; therefore, I'm going to get you fired. Not only am I not going to fight to the death for your right to say it, I'm going to get you fired. I'm going to see that you lose all your assets. I'm going to see that property is taken, hopefully, and the government comes after you and hopefully puts you in jail and that you die alone and miserable. What happened to the principles that people fought and died for, ``I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it''? There are friends from across the other side of the aisle who I disagree with profoundly on many issues that are extremely important to me, but I know them and I know their heart, and I know they really, honestly believe that what they're saying is right. And I would fight to the death. I was in the Army 4 years, active duty, took an oath, willing to fight and die for their right to say what they say even though I disagree. Now we've come full circle. Those same things that the Pilgrims depicted in the scene in the big mural down in the Rotunda, having a big prayer meeting, praying to God for his protection and guidance, and lo and behold, they ended up in Massachusetts, not where they had intended. But they came to this land to get away from discrimination because of their Christian beliefs, and now we've come full circle to where Christian beliefs are the only ones that it's okay to discriminate against. It's a sad time in America. You know, we had a recent survey that indicated 70 percent of American adults believe their children will not have it as good as they have had it, will not have the opportunities, the liberties that we have had. And the fact is, if we got back to a national morality--and I'm sure not pointing the finger across the aisle because there's plenty of finger-pointing to go around, but we need to do it. It's wrong no matter which side of the aisle, and we need to not be afraid to stand up and say it and say the immorality needs to be addressed, and we need to protect this country, its liberties, its prosperity, its opportunities, and that can only be done if we do as George Washington suggested. Now, there is another country around the world, halfway around the world, called Israel that is under threat. Iran has made clear through its leader, Ahmadinejad, that it needs to be wiped off the map. That leader has also made clear that the great Satan--America, in his mind-- also needs to be completely destroyed. How do we ignore that? You ignore those kinds of threats by people who are pursuing the means to carry them out at your own peril, and they seem to be getting ignored. I was at an APAC dinner recently where I heard a great orator, Senator Schumer from New York, and he was pointing out all the things that I agreed with about how Iran was running amok, trying to develop nuclear weapons, and it could not be allowed. It must not be allowed. It must be stopped. I was thrilled that he was taking that strong position. And he got to the end, and he basically said, So we need sanctions. Sanctions? We've been trying to have sanctions for years. And while sanction talk continues to go around this administration and Russia and China and others in the U.N. who despise Israel and would also like to see it wiped off the map, the centrifuges in Iran continue to spin. They continue to enrich uranium. Oh, and now we hear that they may be cutting a deal with Turkey to trade some enriched uranium. I mean, there's plenty of bad news to go around, but that has to be stopped. When you have an enemy who has sworn to wipe you off the map, as Iran's leaders have us and Israel together, and he is working as fast as he can to develop the weaponry to do that, then you sit idly by twiddling your thumbs, talking about sanctions at your own peril. Now, it is true that before the end of last year we began working on a resolution that basically would run through just a small fraction of some of the comments that Ahmadinejad has made. Apparently he has indicated that he believes the Mahdi is coming, will rule over the world, but that he can speed his return if he simply utilizes nuclear weapons. Then the end and the Mahdi's rule comes that much quicker. And yet we've had so-called journalists who have interviewed him, and the man has talked about wiping out this country, including the journalist asking him questions, and yet they don't have the nerve or the sense to ask him, What about your comments about wiping us off the map? What about your comments about bringing about the end of the world as we know it? What about those things? The journalists have become lapdogs. How sad is that? Not all of them. There's some excellent journalists, and apparently they're the ones that this administration is pursuing vendettas against, the way it sounds. But somebody needs to do the work because we're at risk, as is our dear friend Israel on the other side of the world. And not just Israel, not just the United States, but our Muslim friends who are moderate Muslims that don't believe that jihad means to destroy all your enemies, that they believe that the jihad is within. Well, those are the very people that will also, with us, be wiped out if Ahmadinejad has his way, gets his nuclear weaponry, because he has no use for moderate Muslims. He'll kill them with the rest of us that he considers infidels. How can we allow those centrifuges to continue to spin? I have been reluctant to come to the floor and talk about this because I wanted to make it a very bipartisan thing--it's gone on for over 6 months--hoping that we would quietly be able to have Democrats take the lead, because I didn't care who took the lead. Take the lead, whoever wants to. But it is time to step up and stop Iran from developing and acquiring nuclear weapons that pose a threat to Israel, to moderate Muslims, and to the existence of this country. It's time to step up, and sanctions are not doing it. We know from the Iraq sanctions when Saddam Hussein was in charge that we had dear friends--France, Germany, Russia--cheating on the sanctions. France's friend Joseph Wilson--not Congressman Wilson, but Joseph Wilson started throwing around allegations about the Bush administration. As his wife said, he has dear friends in France. Well, France was about to come under fire for cheating on the Oil- for-Food Programme, but Mr. Wilson was able to turn the discussion and focus away from France and their cheating on those sanctions to the Bush administration successfully, and the willing allies in the mainstream media went right with him. But it didn't change the fact that cheating went on and that there will be people who are willing to cheat with Iran as long as they're willing to pay money to get what they want. I think it is actually to China and Russia's credit that they haven't said, Okay, sure, we will agree to sanctions, knowing that they are going to cheat and sell things to Iran and not have competition because sanctions are in place. I think it is to their credit that they have been honest enough to say we don't think sanctions are a good idea. And all of the while the centrifuges continue to spin, and uranium continues to be enriched, and they move toward a bigger and bigger and bigger bomb that poses such a threat to Israel, to our way of life, to our liberties, because even though our liberties have allowed what the jihadists, the radical Islamists see as nothing but corruption, that our liberties have allowed us to move into complete immorality from their way of seeing it, and therefore need to be destroyed. The fact is our liberties allow us to move forward and progress and become what has shown the world the greatest Nation in the history of mankind right here in the United States of America. The greatest ever in the history of the world. We continue to move forward and advance because of the liberties and encouragement of entrepreneurism. But what are we doing now? Now we are moving more and more of the entrepreneurship into the Federal Government and say the Federal Government is going to take over and take care of things. But the truth is if we allow someone like a modern day Hitler named Ahmadinejad to develop a nuclear weapon--and apparently he may have enough fuel now to make a small bomb, if we allow him to get a bomb, Israel is at risk, we are at risk, and it would take a miracle of God to protect us because we have pulled down our own defenses. I never seek to push my religious belief on others, but it is my belief, and since people have fought and died so I can express my opinion, it is my belief that God does allow us to have freedom of choice. And when we turn from God in our freedom of choice, and we walk away from his direction, teachings, and become the immoral Nation we have moved into where greed and avarice take over, eventually God turns his back, and you go to the dust heap of history. It has happened over and over. And now we seem to be moving ever so quickly in that direction. Well, the great news is that this incredible experiment in human liberty and democracy does not have to go away, but it is going to have to take a recommitment to the morals, and of course George Washington, as I read, he said you cannot have morality that will sustain this Nation in exclusion of religious principle. We know that Benjamin Franklin, I have said it so many times, but because there are still people out there saying Ben Franklin was a deist who believed that a deity created the universe and never involves himself in the things of man, it is important for people to know his own words, because he himself said, in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, I have lived, sir, a long time. And the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: That God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it possible an empire could rise without his aid? Franklin said, We are assured in the sacred writing, sir, that except the Lord build a house, they labor in vain that build it. He went on and said, I also firmly believe that without His, the Lord's concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be confounded by our local partial interests, and we ourselves will become a byword down to future ages. And that is what scares me now in America. We, as Franklin said, have forgotten our powerful friend. That is the question that he asked the Constitutional Convention: Have we now forgotten our powerful friend? If he were here in this body today asking that question, we would have to answer him ``yes.'' There is a judge in Wisconsin who said you couldn't call upon your powerful friend as a Nation on a National Day of Prayer. We have had a Supreme Court say previously that despite the fact that the Constitution came about after Franklin moved that we begin to have daily prayer in Congress, we had a Supreme Court that was so miseducated that they felt like it was improper to have prayer in public places. How did we get so far off base? Well, we have had people that were miseducated. There was a lady in Mount Pleasant where I grew up, Ms. Milum, she got into her 90s and she could still cook. And she would call my mother and say, Tell Louie I have some rolls. Her daughter was my mother's best friend, Emma Lou. And one day Emma Lou was talking about a man there in Mount Pleasant. And Ms. Milum said, He's a fool. Emma Lou said, Mother, he has his Ph.D. And she said, I don't care, he is still a P-H-U-L. Well, I think we have a lot of Ph.D.s and other degrees who are still P-H-U-Ls. They are fools still because they have been educated beyond their means. Or they have become, as scripture refers to them, wise in their own eyes. As a result, we have people in this country who think that while a madman is spinning centrifuges, developing uranium, and saying that he is going to use it to destroy Israel and America, and of course that will also include destroying moderate Muslims, we are just talking over here about sanctions and can't even agree on them. We took an oath in this body to support and defend the Constitution. We are supposed to provide for the common defense against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and we have a self-announced enemy to this country that wants to wipe us off the map and he stands there taunting us, developing nuclear weapons, and we are not living up to our oath to provide for the common defense. I was in West Africa with Mercy Ships, a wonderful charitable institution that helps the lame to walk, the blind to see, provides surgeries for those who do not have health care in Africa. In the country of Togo with around 6 million people, two hospitals, this Mercy Ship is truly a ship of mercy. But West Africans on the ship wanted to meet with me the last night I was there. I don't know how well educated those folks were. They had hearts of gold, and they were people of prayer. They were Christian brothers and sisters. The oldest gentleman there, Ebenezer said, in essence, it is so important that you understand what America means to the rest of the world. And to Christians around the world, and those who want to be free, who have freedom, those who want to be free, if you let your country fall, there is no one else in this world, other than God, to help us. You must keep your country strong in order for the rest of us to have hope of protection. There were so many words of wisdom from that group, one from a young man who said, yes, but we must not only pray for their leaders--in fact, they said, we're excited that you have a Black President. We're concerned about some of his policies. We're concerned some of them will weaken America. And if you become weak, we have no protection from the forces of evil. Our protection of this country means so much to so many. As this young man said, we need to also pray for the people around their leaders in America because they all have people whispering and giving them advice and giving them information. We need to pray for them too. I was struck by the wisdom of that young man because he understands. And in this country, whether it's at the White House, here in the Halls of Congress, we all have people whom we rely on for information and to help us work through and summarize and get information in a nutshell so it can be absorbed and utilized. And if the wrong information is provided, then our leaders have no hope of doing the right thing. That's what happened with the TARP bailout. We had a good leader in President George W. Bush. He's smarter than people give him credit for. He's witty, one of the wittiest guys to talk with, just a delight to visit with. But the man who was his Secretary of the Treasury was acting in the best interest of Goldman Sachs and his friends on Wall Street, and not for the people across America. And I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say, okay, through his Wall Street lens he thought, if my friends get rich again and they don't go bankrupt, then everybody in America will do well. Well, we saw that's not the case. But that's what we've got going on now. Apparently our President, our great President, is getting some very bad advice, just like President Bush did on the TARP bailout. He's got a Secretary of the Treasury that we were told worked with Paulsen in the plan so he'll keep the same things going. I thought that was a good reason not to confirm him, but he was confirmed, and there he is giving the President advice. And the jobs still are not being created. And as we move toward the end of the year, we see the tax rates are going to go up in every way, capital gains are going to go up, estate tax is coming back with a vengeance. Some people are beginning to make their moves financially. And as Art Laffer said, it's going to make this, the rest of the year, look like we may be moving into a recovery, but it's a false recovery. It's people preparing for the end of the year when the taxes skyrocket in every area. And that's when the bottom will fall out. So it's not surprising that there are some economic indicators that are going up. It makes sense. But we've got people giving the President bad advice. We have people in this Congress, the leaders here who are getting bad advice, and we're hurting the country. And those wonderful West Africans that I met with, who warned me, don't let your country fall; don't let your country get hurt. You're the hope we have in this world because of the way God's used America in the past. We owe it to so many. Who will come rushing in to the Haitis, to the international disasters once we're too broke? You know, the Democrats took the majority in November of 2006 I think largely on the promise that we're going to correct, as Democrats, what the Republicans have done in running up the deficit. And unfortunately, Republicans had done that. When Republicans got the White House, had both Houses of Congress, they got giddy and they could run up a couple of hundred billion in deficit. My first 2 years we were still in the majority, and I couldn't believe some of the things that we were doing. That was not Republican. That's not what we were supposed to do. But the new majority, over the last--well, since January of '07, have run up deficits. This administration has run up deficits like never before in history. And I was embarrassed when Bush was talking about $160 billion deficit in one year. And we're talking about a $1.6 trillion deficit in one year, 10 times what the Bush administration was pushing. And yet no outrage from the same people that were so upset about 160 billion. What happened to that? Our country is in trouble morally, and because morally, then economically, and because we're economically in trouble, people are allowing their liberties to be taken. And now we find out that 53 percent of Americans are going to carry all of the income tax burden for the whole country? Now, there are some in this country who want to work, and they're not able to work. There are others in this country who are able to work and they're not. There are those who could do more, but we're moving up to 47 percent that are not going to pay any income tax. And we know historically that when one more than 50 percent of the voters in a country get more benefits from the Federal Government, than they put in, you are very close to the end of your Nation's history. You are very close to the end of your Nation as you knew it. And we are moving far too quickly in that direction. It's got to stop. We need morality in the Department of the Interior, in the MMS, so they don't just wink and nod on the blow-out preventers, that they will step up and do what is morally correct to protect the environment. We need people who will step up and say, we are not going to destroy this economy. We're going to use the energy we've got, but we will make sure that it's being used environmentally responsibly. Apparently my time has expired, so I must yield back with a prayer for America that we will regain our morality, our economic stability and keep our liberties.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, it has been an interesting week. It's been an interesting time. And there are things that we agree on between our parties. I heard my friends across the aisle talking about we need to have an audit of the Federal Reserve, and that is certainly something that I agree with and everybody on my side I know agrees with. We ought to have an audit of the Federal Reserve. As Newt Gingrich has said repeatedly, if transparency is good enough for the CIA, it ought to be good enough for the Federal Reserve. We need to know what they are committing us to. We need to know what they're doing, how much trouble are they getting us in. Those are things that need to be known. So I am delighted to hear my friends across the aisle join us in our cry for an audit of the Federal Reserve. The difference between friends on this side and friends across the aisle is that my friends across the aisle have the numbers, they have the power to get an audit done of the Federal Reserve. There are a number of things that can be done when you control the House and the Senate and the White House. And even if the White House doesn't agree, which they very well may not because of all the shenanigans that have been going on in the financial realm, the Congress still controls the purse strings. And there are things that can be done in this House and down the hall in the Senate that would bring this to a head and would have the Federal Reserve crying uncle, uncle, all right, we will go ahead and allow the audit. It ought to be done. Enough of the shenanigans, blaming one side or the other. Well, the majority party has such a massive majority, it's a real easy thing to get done, and I would be delighted if we had colleagues across the aisle that would come together with us on this side and require that audit of the Federal Reserve so we would know what has actually been going on so we could set some goals and go about fixing this economy, fixing this broken financial system so we could get it back on a road that makes some sense. Now, I have heard my friends across the aisle talking down here today and as well yesterday evening about the financial bailout, and I was rather disappointed. I know some, like my friend Marcy Kaptur, have been adamant about the problems going on in the financial system going back to the fall of 2008. And she and I, there are many things we don't agree on, but we are both for complete transparency--she has been there all along--and demanding full responsibility and accountability in the financial sector. And I have been so pleased with things she said in the last couple of years on this issue since the TARP bailout in September, October of 2008. But then hearing other colleagues across the aisle talk about Republicans are trying to stop financial reform because Republicans are so closely aligned with Wall Street? I mean, that theme has been played long and loud for years. And the Heritage Foundation finally had enough and said let's see what the truth is. So they did some research. And the fact is anybody in America can go on Huffington Post or look at some of these Web sites where you find out who contributed to what, and you find out the real truth. And the real truth is that Wall Street donates to the Democratic Party and to now President Obama about four to one over the Republicans. Now, you can go to Goldman Sachs and find an officer who has made a maximum donation to Senator Obama and a maximum donation to Senator McCain; but you do a little more research and you check that address and you find out, well, gee, the wife and all the children, though, made maximum donations to Senator Obama and to the Democratic Party. And you find out, gee, there is a financial link here that there have been completely misleading statements about for years. And the truth is now in black and white. Let's forget the misleading statements about who is in bed with whom and just follow the money, and that's all you have to do. And you find out in some cases some of the Wall Street firms, it may be three to one, some it may be five to one, but average about four to one donations from Wall Street firms to the Democratic candidates, including Senator Obama, now President Obama. So once you know that is the relationship that exists financially and has for years, then it causes you to look at all this talk about financial reform and making these people accountable. We're going to bring them to bear. We're going to make them account for all of these things, and we're going to make it so that they can't do this and they can't do that. But once you know that the people that are doing this so-called financial reform, what amounts to another bailout bill, once you know that relationship, then you have to look at the bill being proposed more carefully. Now, I know we have friends that come here to the floor and, just like they did on the ``crap and trade'' bill, made statements on the floor that this bill will not cause one single person to lose their jobs, that this is going to be a job creation bill. And they got their talking points and they dutifully came to the floor, and they talked about how the crap and trade bill was going to be so wonderful and it was going to create jobs. And I was able to come to this very spot on the floor and pull out that bill. Of course, we didn't get that last 300 pages until--it seems like it was around 3 in the morning or so. And then actually we did not have a complete bill when that bill passed. Up there at the Clerk's desk, I kept asking for a copy of the full bill assimilated, and we found out there wasn't one. It was in the process of being assimilated; so nobody on this floor could see a complete bill assimilated and know what all it meant together. And yet that got rammed through. But just on the original about a 1,000-page crap and trade bill, if you went back to 900-and-something in the pages, I was able to point out there was a fund there created in the bill that obviously my colleagues were not aware of because I know they wouldn't come down here and intentionally mislead people, but whether it was the liberal left wing groups that wrote that bill--we know that we had a chairman or two that said they didn't know what was in the bill even though it was coming through their committee. Somebody knew. So since it wasn't the committee Chair, the Members of Congress that were on the committee, since it wasn't Members on the floor because they weren't sure--they were making statements about the bill like nobody losing their job that obviously wasn't true because there was a fund created that would pay people who lost their jobs as a result of that bill. So whatever liberal left wing group or whatever special interest groups wrote that bill for the Members of Congress that was rushed in here, so much of it, at 3 in the morning when people couldn't read the assimilated bill, whoever wrote that bill knew people would be losing their jobs as a result of that bill, pure and simple. They were losing their jobs. There was even a fund in there that would provide some remuneration for people who lost their jobs as a result of the bill and had to move to follow the job. But, unfortunately, in that bill, the crap and trade bill, there was no provision to pay for travel to India or China or Argentina or the other places that those jobs were going to likely be going; so they weren't going to be able to follow the bills. The one good thing for those who voted for that disastrous bill here in the House is that I still feel strongly that once people find out what all was in that bill that they voted for, then they will lose their jobs. Many of them will lose their jobs in here as a Member of the House as a result of that bill. So it looks like the good news for those that vote for the bill and lose their job as a result of it is that there's a built-in provision that may provide them with some compensation and travel expense when they lose their job as a result of voters finding out what all is in that bill. But that is the kind of thing we have dealt with here, people meaning well, getting their talking points, thinking they were telling the truth, coming in here and passionately proclaiming what was put before them, but not reading the bill. That is so important. So when we apply this cynicism, once you know that the people that are pushing this bill are the ones that have benefited four to one in contributions from these very firms that will be so-called ``reformed,'' then you take a more skeptical look at what's in the bill and we get to find out a little bit more about what is in it, because obviously some of my friends have not looked at it thoroughly enough to know what is in it and to know that it's really not the financial reform bill that they thought it was. It's more of a financial ``deform'' bill, more of another bailout bill, or I would say perhaps we could rename it the Goldman Sachs monopoly bill. A friend across the aisle had a blowup of some of the monopoly pieces. It applies. That's a perfect, perfect display for this financial bailout bill because it's going to allow certain firms to have monopolies. This bill is going to create some monopolies. One of the truths about this bill is that there are backdoor bailouts. Despite the rhetoric, there are backdoor bailouts in this financial deform bill, or the Goldman Sachs monopoly bill. The Dodd bill from the Senate, it codifies these backdoor bailouts that were used by the Federal Reserve to pump money into Bear Stearns. It also was used by the Federal Reserve to pump money into AIG, into Fannie Mae, into Freddie Mac. And then this thing that troubles me so deeply, systemic risk council. It's in the bill, a systemic risk council. I was hoping 2 years ago, as we got into the TARP business, and some of us actually read that disastrous bill and could see that this was just not something that should be done in America, some of us hoped, well, since we have seen that Secretary Paulson is completely sold out to Goldman Sachs, it's an effort to bail out the buddies at Goldman Sachs, yes, we are bailing out AIG apparently, he wanted to do that, and lo and behold billions of dollars turn around and go straight from AIG to Goldman Sachs. So it did help his friends. But some of us had hoped that Mr. Bernanke might be the level head in all of this. But having been in meetings with Mr. Bernanke, and having watched him closely on television and read so many of his comments, it appears that he has been caught up as well in this power grab, in this lofty ivory tower he has been placed in with this incredible amount of power without accountability. It was Stalin who said, ``With power, dizziness.'' And we have seen some of that dizziness in the way these financial markets have been handled by people at the top. But it appears from the things Mr. Bernanke has been saying that he has bought in hook, line, and sinker into this systemic risk business because he could get to say, you know what, this is who I'm naming a systemic risk. And when the Federal Government says this firm or this bank, this company is too big to fail, that means the Federal Government will not let them fail. That means they can go in the red and run their competition out of business, knowing the Federal Government will not let them fail, but their competitors don't have that assurance. That's why you might as well call it a monopoly bill, because it's going to allow firms to become monopolies. And we saw after the TARP firm, boy, Goldman Sachs got to be a bank in addition to being everything else to all people. One of the things that concerned me as I read through the TARP bill, when I got toward the end where it said that it was raising the debt ceiling by $1.3 trillion, and we knew that it was a $700 billion bill, well, why would you need to raise the debt ceiling $1.3 trillion if it is a $700 billion bill? And of course we know there was $100 billion added to the bill in order to buy enough votes to get it to pass. So it's an $800 billion bill and yet it raised the debt ceiling $1.3 trillion. Well, there's a half a trillion dollars there for some reason that was built into that. So I went back through and I reread the bill, and I kept pleading and begging with other colleagues, Please, just read the bill. You'll see we don't do this in America. We don't give one man $700 billion and say, go play with it and fix this and make us better. We never have done that in America since we've had a Constitution. With that qualification. There was a man in American history that had that type of power that was given by the Continental Congress by a bill that was passed December 27, 1776. His name was George Washington. This was a humble man. This was a man who made the statement, ``People unused to restraint must be led. They will not be drove.'' And so like in the Battle of Trenton or in that 1755 disastrous ambush that the British walked into and didn't listen to Washington, who was in his early twenties, we have seen pictures over and over painted by those there that Washington didn't do as I was taught in the Army, that commanders are normally supposed to stay at the back and command from the back and coordinate things. Washington in some of the worst battles knew he needed to be out front so people would see him and do the right thing. There was one soldier after the Battle of Trenton that wrote home talking about how afraid he was with so many people dying. He said, ``But when I saw bullets flying around that priceless head of our great general, encouraging us as he went, sir, I thought not of myself.'' Now that was a leader. Not Hank Paulson we're talking about. That's not a leader. We're talking George Washington. And when the Continental Congress was afraid that the people who had signed up for 6 months' enlistment around July 4th, around the time of the Declaration of Independence, when their enlistment was coming up, they got word these guys may not reenlist. So they passed a bill basically giving Washington the power to make whatever contract, pay whatever he needed to pay. We didn't have a Constitution yet. But they knew this man and said, ``You fix it.'' And they sent a cover letter that in essence was saying that we know you well enough to know our liberty is not at risk. And when you have no further need of this power, you'll give it back. And he did, like no man has ever done before or since in history. But in 1787 we got a Constitution. Since that Constitution we have never allowed one man to do what Hank Paulson and now Tim Geithner are being allowed to do, and with Bernanke's assistance. It's a disaster. Systemic risk council. We are going to decide who wins and who loses in America? And you want us on this side of the aisle to vote for this bill? And you call it a financial reform bill? It isn't. This is not reforming things. This is taking us away from the free market principles from which we have been running for far too long. That TARP bill took us away from it. And some of us prayed that we would have a chance to get back on track, and we have run farther and farther. And it gives no comfort when people on the other side of the aisle say, well, your President started this with a TARP bailout. Yes, and it was wrong then and it's become even worse of a nightmare. Stop already. Return liberty and freedom back to people. I'm not talking about unregulated financial markets. We have the regulations. Just like we have regulations that would have allowed the President, the executive branch, the administration to monitor more carefully what was going on in the Gulf of Mexico, to monitor more carefully what Madoff was doing, what Goldman Sachs was doing, how the credit default swaps were allowed to be insurance without putting money in reserve to insure against that insurable event out there they were supposed to be taking premiums for. This is not a financial reform bill. And to stand here on the floor and say Republicans are standing in the way of this, you betcha. I don't want a Goldman Sachs monopoly bill being passed into law and signed into law simply because they gave four to one more money to the Democratic Party than they did to the Republicans. I don't care if they gave four to one to Republicans, it is wrong to give them the kind of monopoly that they have been given through TARP and in the year-and-a- half since. It's got to stop. And this bill is not the bill that will do that. So don't come to the floor and talk about how this is going to reform things and create accountability because it gives unrestricted leeway to give any nonbank financial company ``too big to fail'' status. What a disaster for this society, for this incredible gift of a country we have been given. Now we are not blessed in this body and in this country because of what we ourselves who stand as elected officials today have done. We are not blessed because of what we have done. We have been blessed because of the sacrifices of the Founders and those over the years that worked so hard to make this country into the greatest Nation that has ever existed in the history of mankind. And now we have people that are peeling back the very principles that made this such an incredible place to get to live in. Well, let's look some more at this financial bailout bill, financial deform bill, whatever you want to call it. There is a 100 percent bailout for creditors in this bill. So a failed firm's creditors and counterparties could recoup far more of their investment, potentially 100 percent, than they would if they went through a normal bankruptcy proceeding. We have seen enough of the corruption of the bankruptcy system. The provision for the bankruptcy system was put into the Constitution by those people with such incredible foresight. Unfortunately, it was into the early 1800s before they actually passed laws creating the bankruptcy courts that allowed people to avoid debtors' prisons like the financial backer of the Revolution, Mr. Morris. But this bill that's being touted as such a great financial reform bill will also allow the FDIC to guarantee debt obligations of failing Wall Street firms without limitation and without congressional approval. You want us to vote for a bill that allows debt guarantees for failing Wall Street firms without this body approving of them and you call that a financial reform bill? Also under this so-called financial reform bill, what's really more of a financial deform bill, the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized to purchase debt without any limit. You know, Washington gave back the power as soon as the Revolution was won. Four years later we got the Constitution, and we have never allowed this kind of insanity since then. And yes, Secretary Paulson under a Republican President created this monstrosity and bailed out his buddies effectively, but it's got to stop. It's got to stop. And this bill is just more and more and more of the same. On May 5, 2010--for people keeping track that is yesterday--Freddie Mac requested an additional $10.6 billion in bailout funds. Between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayers have already lost $126.9 billion bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And now it appears that is just bottomless. It's got to stop. Don't ask us to come in here and pass another further power extension to those who are already dizzy with too much power and no accountability. It's got to stop. This financial so-called reform bill, this Wall Street future bailout bill is a disastrous mistake. And, heaven help us, we should not pass this bill. We have lost enough rights and power to Wall Street already. So I hope and pray this Day of National Prayer that those who have been getting the four to one contributions over Republicans from Wall Street firms will say, sorry, guys on Wall Street, we started playing this game and saying Republicans are in bed with you. Oh, yeah, yesterday one of our friends across the aisle said that, gee, these Wall Street firms are having closed-door meetings with Republicans. They may have been. And you can imagine what's being said. They've cut their deals with the people that they've been giving four to one to over Republicans. They've cut their deal. They know they are going to be sitting so pretty, they're going to have monopolistic ability like never before in history. So they want to meet privately with Republicans and say, Look, you don't have to worry. We're really getting serious oversight from these Democrats, the ones we give four-to-one over Republicans to. We're really getting serious oversight here in this bill. We just need you to come on board. No telling what kind of things they're telling Republican Senators behind the scenes to try to get them on board with this terrible financial deform bill. But let me point out something that I did find as I went back through and tried to figure out, well, where could that other $500 billion, between the $800 billion designated in the TARP bill and the amount that the debt limit was raised, what loopholes may be in this bill? As I went back through it, one of the things I found was this provision. The all caps title of this little section, title 1, section 101(c)(1), Public Law 110-343. It says: The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this act, including, without limitation, the following: One, the Secretary shall have direct hiring authority with respect to the appointment of employees to administer this act; Number two, entering into contracts, including contracts for services authorized by section 3109 of title 5, United States Code; Number three, designating financial institutions as financial agents of the Federal Government. Such institutions shall perform all reasonable duties related to this act as financial agents of the Federal Government; Four, in order to provide the Secretary with the flexibility to manage troubled assets in a manner designed to minimize cost to taxpayers, establishing vehicles that are authorized subject to supervision by the Secretary to purchase, hold, and sell troubled assets, issue obligations; Five, issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authority or the purposes of this act. Holy cow. What a blank check the Secretary of the Treasury received. When President Obama nominated Timothy Geithner to be Secretary of the Treasury, even though he signed and certified he would pay the taxes that were designated 4 years in a row and he couldn't bring himself to actually pay those, he is in charge. We were told at the time, Yes, but he worked so closely with Paulson on the bailout that he knows what needs to be done and he will be able to continue the same thing. Some of us said, That's a reason not to confirm the guy. Good grief. But he has all this power. Well, is it any wonder that the firm that donated four-to-one to President Obama and his party had the biggest profit year in their history last year? That's right. Goldman Sachs, while the rest of America has been hurting and struggling, trying to get back on its feet, Goldman Sachs is on its feet and made a bigger profit than ever, which brings me back to this. So I have been trying to look for things to see, well, they had the biggest profit year in history. Could that be because the Federal Government is paying them all this taxpayer money to do the things that the Federal Government told America we will do, but actually they farmed it out and paying no telling how much money to Goldman Sachs to do this stuff? Well, I did find one contract here--this amended and restated investment management agreement between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The first whereas is: Whereas, the Open Market Committee has approved the purchase by the System Open Market Account of Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), and Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae). So they approved this deal, and in the first paragraph it points out that this is between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, LP, designated as manager. Then you go through and find out they're appointed to manage, supervise, direct the investment portion and appointed as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's agent in fact. It's just amazing what all power they're given on behalf of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It does point out that they're going to get some nice fees here. It says that this agent here, this manager, can hire firms to help them carry out their duties. But you have to look at attachment C to see who on exhibit C is authorized to act on behalf of this manager, Goldman Sachs Management, LP. So you flip over and you find exhibit C to this agreement. Well, my goodness, there's Goldman Sachs & Company is authorized counterparty to act on behalf of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, LP. Isn't that wonderful. Because they probably know each other. Well, doesn't that work out well? Those were good investments they made in this last election, and yet people still continue to come to this floor and talk about how Republicans are in the pocket of Wall Street, even though the Democrats received four-to-one over the amount that the Republicans got. Well, I know there are people in this body--it doesn't matter what kind of contributions they got--they're going to vote what is appropriate under their conscience. Unfortunately, we've got groups on Wall Street that are awfully powerful in their persuasiveness and convincing people that giving Goldman Sachs their biggest profit year in the Nation's history, in their history, is the thing that needs to be done. That's the kind of stuff we're talking about. And Republicans are getting blamed for this, for trying to stand in the way of more monopolies on Wall Street. And if you look at the bailout of the automotive industry with TARP funds--and the truth is, I signed on to all those letters where we said we never intended for TARP to be used to bailout the automotive industry. I signed on to those because I agreed that was not the intent. The trouble is I read the bill, and so I knew that it could be used for whatever the Secretary of the Treasury wanted to use it for, basically. Incredible power given under that bill. And now we're going to follow that up with this new financial deform bill, this new bailout bill. That's why you've seen Wall Street firms sign on to this business of taking out the $50 billion bailout fund. That's been done in the last few days. Why would the Wall Street firms sign on to that? Well, if you look at the bill, you find out why. They've still got the potential to be named as systemic risk by the Systemic Risk Council, Mr. Bernanke leading, and get too-big-to-fail status. And I heard my friends. I couldn't have agreed more when they said we have got to stop this business of creating too big to fail. AIG should have been allowed to file bankruptcy. That's what the bankruptcy laws were for. They should have been allowed an opportunity to reorganize. Goldman Sachs should have been given a chance to reorganize under the bankruptcy laws, not the way they were perverted and destroyed and turned upside down with regard to the automotive industry, but followed the way they're supposed to be. It didn't happen with the automotive industry, and it didn't happen on Wall Street, as it should have. The firms should have been allowed to go through and try to reorganize. The pain would have been so much more quickly over than when we exacerbate it. But for folks to come in and say, I want to stop this too-big-to-fail business, that's why we've got to pass this bill. They've got to read the bill. It's in there. It's still going to allow that to be going on. It's got to stop. It's in the bill. So you wonder why you have Republicans standing in the way of the financial deform bill. Well, take out the Systemic Risk Council, take out the too-big-to-fail designation, take out the bailout for firms without going through regular bankruptcy proceedings. Take that out. The automotive industry should have showed us that this is not what you do. You don't turn the law and the Constitution upside down. People might wonder, Well, how could that have happened? You've got Congress, the executive branch, and you've got the judiciary. These are supposed to be checks and balances. But it didn't happen. The checks and balances didn't work. So you had an auto task force that was appointed by the President. And then the auto task force met in secret and refused to come up here and tell Congress exactly what was going on in those meetings. They said later, Well, we didn't really pick which dealerships would go out of business. We just told them, basically, how many had to go out of business. Why? Why was it their job? When a firm, a company, an industry goes through bankruptcy, an effort at reorganization, you have to have a plan. And the debtor can propose the plan and you can have creditors come in and propose plans. You have secured creditors that come in and they get first choice. That's the law. That's the law as allowed under the Constitution. We had an auto task force that put together this plan, and they said, No, we're turning the law upside down. We don't care what the law says. So we're going to take the secured creditors and we're going to give them pennies on the dollar for their secured claims, despite the law saying they get first shot, and unsecured creditors may get little or nothing. They took the unions and said, You know what? You're unsecured under the law. You may get little or nothing. And we made them like secured creditors, the auto task force did, so they own a big hunk of the company, just like the Federal Government does. You say, Well, how could that be? Well, bankruptcy judges don't sit for life terms. They depend on the good graces of others to appoint them so they can continue to be bankruptcy judges. And many of them aspire to be district judges, where they have lifetime appointments. Who makes lifetime appointments of Federal judges? The President does. So if you're a bankruptcy and you want to one day be a Federal district judge with a lifetime appointment and somebody from the White House says, Here, sign this. It will save you months of hearings, even though the law requires them, and it does kind of turn the Constitution upside down, but just sign here. Things will be good for you in the future. Well, that remains to be seen. But it sure wasn't good for the country. Despite the head of GM going on TV and saying, We paid back our loans, with interest, ahead of time, I know everybody else in America who has loans would love to have taxpayers loan you money and then take taxpayer money to repay the loans. But to some of us, that doesn't really feel like a clean payback of this little area because we still own a big interest. You hadn't paid back the Federal Government for all that was put in there to save this so-called company. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, bless her soul, she put a 24-hour hold on one deal and it gave some of us hope that, okay, Congress completely failed in its duty as a check and balance on the abuse of power from the executive branch, but maybe the judiciary, that third check and balance, they're coming through. Thank goodness Justice Ginsburg did that. But then, apparently, the Justices were persuaded that if you extend this stay more than 24 hours the deal will be gone and this will all go away and everybody will lose their job. You can't extend the stay. And I'm betting there are Justices who are now saying we should never have allowed them to talk us into just allowing them to turn the law and the Constitution upside down just because maybe this deal with Fiat might not go through. Fiat had no business owning the American company unless they could do it properly, without turning our laws upside down. So the third check and balance went away, and nothing protected the Constitution, nothing protected the laws as they were passed. It's got to stop. It's got to stop. And yet we see a bill brought before the House and Senate and, lo and behold, the Federal Government is going to take over all student loans. We're taking over the student loan business. Well, I am so grateful that my youngest daughter is graduating within the next 2 weeks. We had to do student loans to do it. My wife and I cashed out all our assets except our home in order to run for Congress, so we had to use student loans to get our girls through college. And to think that anybody in this country might have to be beholden to whoever is in the executive branch, whichever political party is controlling the executive branch is who we have to hope and pray will be kind enough to extend a student loan to us in the future? Do Democrats really want to have to depend on Republicans for their student loans based on who is in the White House? Should Republicans have to rely on who is running the executive branch in hopes that their kids will get student loans? It's the wrong way to go. And now with the Federal Government having taken over Freddie and Fannie, we've taken over such a big part of the housing, the home mortgages, does either party or independents or tea party or progressive liberal party, do you want to be beholden to another political party in power in order for you to get a home loan or a student loan? This is where we've come. It's got to stop. I know that in the minority we're a voice crying in the wilderness, but it's got to stop. There are people on the other side of the aisle that know that, who say this. And to my friends, Mr. Speaker, I would hope that they would all go back and read these bills, particularly the ``financial deform bill,'' and find out that it is not as the talking points have represented. It does create the too-big-to-fail problem, and it's got to stop. I hope we will have some Democratic friends who will help us. It's tragic. I was in a Bible study with a hero of mine, Chuck Colson, a little over 1 year ago. He pointed out that this society is resting on three legs: one is morality, one is economic stability, and one is liberty. And throughout history, as long as you had morality, you could have economic stability. But when you lose morality, it always leads to economic chaos. You have too many Madoffs out there that think it's okay to just live high and wild lives off other people's money that they've stolen. Then you have people get elected that think some people have made too much money, so I want to steal their money. But since I'm in power, I can pass laws that allow me to take their money and spend it the way I want and it won't be called stealing because we'll legalize the stealing because we have the power. And, yes, the power resides in this Congress to legalize stealing of people's money. The power rests here, but the moral authority does not. And when I hear friends say, well, Christians ought to be helping those who can't help themselves, helping the widows and orphans, Jesus did talk about those things, Even as you have done to the least of these, my children, you have done to me. And we should be doing those individually. But He never said use and abuse your taxing authority to legalize theft of other people's money so you can give to your favorite charity. He was saying, you do it yourself with what you have. You do it. You help individually. Don't go corrupt a governmental system that was put in power, as Romans 13 talks about, If you do evil, be afraid, because God doesn't give the government the sword in vain. The government is not supposed to become a part of doing immoral acts; it's supposed to protect those entrusted to its care, and we've gotten too far away from that. During the revolution, so many were heard to quote Voltaire--some say he said it, some said he didn't, but he was quoted as saying, I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'' So many of us heard that, learned that in school. What a noble, moral concept: I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, even though it offends me. And look how far we've come. To some of us who look at the Ten Commandments and say, you know what? Conduct outside of those, all of us are going to break the commandments because no one--but I believe one--is perfect, but that offends. But people here have the right to, in some cases, lie, in some cases commit adultery, in some cases some of these things are illegal, but that has been changing. And we've changed this society from one in which the Founders said, I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, and we've turned it into one where what you say offends me, and not only am I not going to defend to the death your right to say it, I'm going to force you out of your job, I'm going to do everything I can to cause you to lose all of your assets, I am going to do all I can to make your life nothing but misery from now on. How did we get so far from the founding that we would want to destroy people's lives because what they have said offends? When the Pilgrims came over, when so many of the groups that came over to what they called the New World, they were fleeing from the kind of persecution that has now started. This was a National Day of Prayer, and yet we had Franklin Graham--what a great, great man--he was uninvited from speaking to our military. We had Tony Perkins not long ago uninvited from speaking to the military at Andrews Air Force base even though he served this country's uniformed military services for 6 years because there were some who said in the administration we disagree with what you say and we're going to ruin you and try to do all we can to keep you from speaking. The military is fighting for people's right to say what they want, and yet we're denying people the right to come speak to the military while they're fighting and dying for the right to speak freely under the First Amendment? How did that ever happen? From 1800 to 1860, and again intermittently until 1880, there were church services held right down the hall, nondenominational Christian church services. I was asked earlier by a CNN reporter, how do you reconcile the separation of church and state with a group reading through the entire Bible in 5 days over here at the west side of the Capitol? Well, I reconcile it because I know where the phrase ``separation of church and state'' came from. It came from Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists. There was nothing about preventing people from having church or having religion or praying in Jesus' name, or doing any of those things, or speaking to the military. To the exact contrary. Thomas Jefferson used to ride down Pennsylvania, according to CRS, most of the time--the Congressional Research Service, they've authenticated this-- most of the time when he came to the church service every Sunday here in the Capitol he liked to ride his horse down here, down Pennsylvania. He's the one that codified the phrase ``separation of church and state'' because it's not in the Constitution. It's so unfortunate that so many of our judges over the years have been so poorly educated about our history. And then you've got James Madison as President who came to church most every Sunday he was in Washington here in the Capitol, in the House of Representatives, but according to CRS, he was different from Jefferson. Jefferson liked to ride a horse and usually Madison liked to ride in a coach drawn by four horses to come to church in the Capitol. Jefferson--who coined the phrase ``separation of church and state''-- sometimes brought the Marine band to play hymns for the nondenominational Christian worship service here in the Capitol. The Constitution's First Amendment was never about discriminating against Christianity as this administration has done by uninviting people to speak to the military who are fighting and dying for the very beliefs that the people were denied the right to come talk to them about. And yet we have people who are so politically correct they're afraid to say that a guy who makes very clear about what he screams before he shoots these other servicemembers, that this is an act of a crazed jihadist, Islamic jihadist. Thank God that the vast majority of Muslims are not jihadists of that type, but you need to recognize the ones that are and that they're out there and they want to destroy our way of life. And you can speak to moderate Muslims--many of them are afraid to speak out openly because they've become targets--but you speak to moderate Muslims, they know. They're some of the first to be killed when the crazed jihadists take over. They don't like moderate Muslims. But the Nation was founded on principles such that the church, the Christian church, was at the heart the Declaration of Independence. Over one-third of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were not just Christians, they were ordained Christian ministers, had churches. And the church was behind the effort to abolish slavery because they, just like John Quincy Adams, knew it was so wrong. And as Adams, for about a year and a half, took a young, tall, slender, not very handsome man under his wing down the hall, as Christians, they became so close in that short time, John Quincy Adams affected him so he knew as a Christian that slavery had to end because we could not continue to be blessed by God if we were treating brothers and sisters by putting them in chains and bondage. And he preached that sermon over and over and over just down the hall. And the churches were preaching--some weren't, but many were-- that was the heart of that movement. And what was Martin Luther King, Jr.? Dr. King was an ordained Christian minister. The church has been behind the great movements here in America, and now we're discriminating against it? We're saying what you believe in a Christian church so offends us, not only are we not going to fight to the death for your right to believe what you believe and say what you want to say, we're going to destroy you and keep you from doing anything publicly that you want to do in observing your religion. How did we go so wrong? How did we go so wrong? Abraham Lincoln struggled with this terrible war that was going on because he believed in a just God, and yet this thing was going on and so many brothers and sisters were dying and it was a terrible thing. And that is why he said in his second inaugural, How do you reconcile this? He said, Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. But he goes on and he says, If we shall suppose that American slavery, and you might substitute in there abortion, American abortion, abortion is one of those offenses of which, in the providence of God must needs come but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove and that He gives to the North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came. Shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, said the President, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all of the wealth piled up by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and every drop of blood drawn by the lash, or by the abortion doctor's hand, as was said 3,000 years ago, so must still be said today, Lincoln said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether, as he quoted scripture. We are told it may not be appropriate for the military to hear from somebody who believes the things that Jesus taught. So you have Tony Perkins cancelled. You have Franklin Graham cancelled because they believe the things Jesus taught. You have others who we have been hearing about the last couple of days who have been uninvited to speak to military. And yet I was given by my aunt a Bible that was given to an uncle in World War II. It has this metal front, May the Lord be with you. And inside on the first page, it says at the top: The White House, Washington. As Commander in Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible. That is signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. We all need to pray that God will continue to bless America.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, thank you. One of the other things that comes to mind is we talk about our freedoms--about the ability to assemble and about the freedom of speech, which is the ability to say what is in your heart. We come to what happened last week in England, where a man who was not intentionally out being a nuisance, but he was asked by an officer, according to the article I read, who looks for violations of this type of law, ethics type of law--and this person apparently was homosexual in practice, and he asked the individual about the Bible, about sin. He mentioned drunkenness and a number of things that would be sins as addressed in the Bible and was asked about homosexuality, and he said, yes, under the Bible it's a sin. It's hard to look at Romans 1 and think otherwise. But anyway, this man was arrested. He was put in jail and now is out awaiting trial on his charges. And it was one of the things that concerned us greatly about the Hate Crimes Act because we knew that bill was based on two lies. And there were publications like Texas Monthly that didn't bother to look into the facts, many publications around the country that just ran off and jumped on the train of those who refused to read it, laws to read the facts, to look at facts that were being cited as basis and find that they were lies. But the two things on which that bill were based were both lies. Number one, that there was an epidemic of hate crimes in America. Number two, that it would somehow have changed for the better the outcome in the James Byrd case in Texas, the Matthew Shepard case. And the fact is that those are lies. The James Byrd case had two of the three--the two most culpable defendants got the death penalty. The only effect the hate crimes bill would have had if it had been in place back then would be that those guys that got the death penalty would have gotten life in prison instead of death. I felt like from the evidence that I read and heard about that they deserved the death penalty. And in the Matthew Shepard case, they got multiple life sentences; so it wouldn't have affected those cases. The FBI statistics show there has been no surge, uptick in hate crimes, alleged hate crimes, and those include yelling of things inappropriate. I don't think my friend from Iowa or any of our friends, and those that I met at TEA parties would condone nasty name calling. None of the people I met. But we get into a very dangerous area. There were Founders that fought and died for this country and for that thing that would later become the First Amendment. It didn't exist during the Revolution, but they believed the concept of freedom of speech. And they often cited Voltaire as the source. Some disagree, but Voltaire is usually given as the source for the saying ``I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'' That helped form a basis for this country. Yet now we have evolved in this country to where the thought police have a slogan that is more apt to be, I disagree with what you say, and I'm going to destroy your life because of it. I'm going to see you're fired. I'm going to see that you lose as much of your assets, hopefully all of them, as I can. I am going to destroy your life. So we have come a long way from those days when the Founders were willing to fight and die so people could say things they thought reprehensible but at least they had the liberty to say them. One of the things that gets very dangerous is when you start putting a lid on people's freedom of speech, as the PC police around here, as the thought police have begun to do. When you prevent people from being able to say what's in their heart and vent a bit, then you build up steam. If you don't allow people to vent, they build up steam, and then you have an explosion. So I know there are those that say, well, talk radio is hateful and whatnot. And actually talk radio, most of it, is not hateful at all. But you go back to the President's own statement that we're not a Christian Nation. Well, I am not going to debate that. I know that we were founded by people who professed to be, although history is often rewritten nowadays, including in the early 1800s an early biography of Washington that was a complete fraud. But if my gentleman friend from Iowa would allow me, this has just been on my heart because I go up from time to time to the Lincoln Memorial, and I stand there and read those profound words from that selfless man. And on the north inside wall is his second inaugural speech. And it brings me to tears every time I read it because this is a man who is wrestling with how a just God could allow the pain and suffering to go on that he did. And it is a beautiful theological discussion. If it would be all right with the gentleman from Iowa, these are Abraham Lincoln's words in his second inaugural. It's there carved into the marble, and he was talking about the North and the South, trying to make sense of how you could have friends and family fighting on two sides of an issue. He said: ``Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.'' Then he quotes Scripture, and he says: ``Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. ``If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? ``Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said `the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' ``With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the Nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.'' Powerful, powerful words. And having lost my brother a couple of weeks ago, sometimes it is a struggle when you believe in God to know the kind of hurt and suffering that goes on. But as Lincoln said, and so it must still be said, ``The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'' And I do believe, and I don't try to push my religious beliefs on anyone else, that God normally allows us to suffer the consequences of terrible decisions. If you follow the rules, you do what we are told allows your nation to be blessed, and your nation gets blessed. If you follow the things that cause your nation to be cursed, it just seems throughout history, that is usually what happens. This is such an important time in our history. We have got people who would gladly destroy everything we believe in, all the liberties we have, and yet we have people who are at the same time striking at our freedoms of speech, striking at our liberties to assemble as we wish. Those things need to stop. We need to stop those who by terror and by warfare would try to take away those things that the Founders and all those who have fought and died since have put at our feet and given to us as a gift, and we need to fight those from within who attempt to take them away through misrepresentations of what are truly the facts in order to pass bills that actually are based on lies and hurt the country. I appreciate my friend so much yielding to me.

Mr. GOHMERT. I thank my friend for yielding. Steve Forbes was up here on the Hill a couple of weeks ago. One of his comments was that we could do a complete repeal, and at the same time we could put some fixes in there that Republicans had been proposing, that we have had out there as alternatives at the same time, just one fell swoop, so that people would realize that we have not been the Party of No, we have some fantastic ideas that would have revolutionized health care and gotten it back to where it had transparency, where it was affordable, and gotten insurance companies out of the health care management business and into the health care insurance business, where you insure against an unforeseeable illness or catastrophe down the road and put patients back in charge of their health care. I certainly had a proposal along that line that we never could get CBO to score nearly a year later, I guess about 9 months to be fair, that they have sat on that to try to help kill--help work for the Democrats to help make sure that any of the good alternative plans could not get scored so that we couldn't come in and say here is the plan that saves money, gives more freedom, and does all these things. Anyway, it's been a bit of a tough year. But the problems didn't just start with this President. My friend from Iowa knows as well. We have been heading in the wrong path for some time. Of course Republicans lost the majority, rightfully, in November 2006 because Republicans had gotten giddy after 2001 and had started spending too much money. And voters held them accountable. And we hope they will continue that trend this November. But I recall my favorite President, from Texas that is, George W. Bush, I think the world of him, he is smarter than most people give him credit for, but he got sold a bill of goods by a bad Secretary of the Treasury, and he was told a good way to stimulate the economy in January 2008 was to have a stimulus bill and have $160 billion, $40 billion of which would just be given to people as a rebate who didn't pay income tax. They would get an income tax rebate even though they didn't pay income tax. And my friend from Iowa may remember as President Bush came down the aisle here he shook hands with everybody, and made his speech, and then on the way back up I didn't realize there was a mic open that picked me up asking him, ``Mr. President, I wanted to ask you how do you give a rebate to people that didn't put any bate in?'' And that's still a problem. And then you come up, and bless his heart, Hank Paulson saved his firm Goldman Sachs, saved the people that he had worked with and chaired over and had great personal interest in. He was able to save them at great cost to the American way of life, to the free market system. Just created a real disaster. You can't set aside free market principles to save the free market. But it all led up to desensitizing people to just how much $700 or $787 billion is. It is an enormous amount of money. And so here we came into January of 2009, and right off the bat have a $787 billion stimulus, most of which has not been spent. Even though we were told that people didn't have time to read it, you got to just pass it, $787 billion dollars will be thrown out there and we will get the economy going. Had to be passed so fast, before people could read it. And then yet the President took several days, kind of like he has getting fired up to do anything about the gulf coast. So he takes his time, waits for a photo op to sign the stimulus bill into effect. But the problem is you can't raise taxes the way this health care bill did and think you are going to help the economy in the long run. It's not going to happen. And then we find out we have moved from the overly high 39 percent of Americans not paying Federal income tax to now the projection that 53 percent of American adults will be paying all of the income tax. I think historians all pretty well acknowledge that in a democracy, including this republican form of government where people can vote for candidates based upon what they promise to give them in the way of benefits, once you get past one more than 50 percent of those who are voting receive benefits and not pay income tax, or not pay the Federal taxes, you've lost it. You head to the dustbin of history. You're done. There is no recovery from that, absent a miracle from God. And of course some of the people that are creating the problem don't believe in God, so they are really in trouble because they can't even expect a miracle from God like some of us could. But 53 percent of Americans to pay all of the income tax. And then I have heard great disparagement, as my friend from Iowa has, as we have been to the tea parties and been asked to speak at various tea parties, including the one down Pennsylvania Avenue a few weeks ago, the one at the Washington Monument, and you see all these wonderful, peaceful, law-abiding people, and you talk to them and you find out these are people paying income tax. And we also have seen the latest survey that indicated that 28 percent of Americans, up from 20 percent, 28 percent of Americans identify with the tea party. Well, what that means is since those 28 percent pay income tax, it means that over half of the 53 percent projected to pay all the income tax this year, those that are really carrying the load for the country, pulling the wagon for everybody else, over half of them are tea party members, identify with the tea party. Quite interesting. It's not the marginal group that some would have Americans believe. We are talking about rank-and-file Americans who are pulling the weight with income tax. Now, one of the things that would help a lot is if all of the President's promises about jobs were to come true. Then we would have more people able to pay income taxes. I know an awful lot of folks who would welcome the chance to get back to paying income taxes, but they can't find jobs. This health care bill is a real jobs killer. I have had, as I'm sure my friend from Iowa has had as well, people who've come up and who've said, I lost my job. My sister lost her job. These folks lost their jobs. After the health care bill passed, they had to be let go. Others are saying, We've had our salaries cut. We've been told it's coming. These are economy killers, and these things in the health care bill are robbing America of people who would be able to help with that income tax burden. So it has been tragic, and it just breaks my heart to hear from these people who have lost their jobs because they had to ram through this health care deform bill instead of doing what was really right for America. We didn't have to have people lose their jobs just to pass a health care bill, but they didn't care about what America thought. I want to mention one other thing about the Tea Party folks before I yield back to my friend from Iowa. We've heard that people were rowdy at the Tea Party on that weekend that health care got rammed down America's throat. Some of us went out and walked and saw the folks. We walked down the street. People were lining the sidewalks pretty thick. They were yelling and cheering when some of us came out because they were so vocally opposed to health care. On that weekend, as I was going back to my office from a vote over here and as people had crowded onto the sidewalks and as most of my friends in Congress were walking through the streets, I decided to get up on the sidewalk and walk through the middle of the crowd and thank them. This was not a group for which the SEIU, ACORN, or the Federal Government paid their way. These were people who had come on their own money--nobody else's. They'd had to come up with their own money. Some of them had taken time off from work and from family. They'd made sacrifices to get here in order to let their voices be heard. So I wanted to personally make sure I went through the crowd. I shook as many hands as I could, and I thanked as many people as I could. As I was going down the sidewalk, people were patting me on the back and were speaking encouragement to me. I was just saying, Thank you for coming. Thank you for letting your voice be heard. About 10 people into the sidewalk, I started to reach for this lady's hand. She probably was 40 to 50 years old. She was pleasant-looking enough. She said, I'm for health care. I thought I misunderstood, so I said, Well, I am, too--just not for this disaster. But she said, No. I support this bill. She wouldn't shake my hand, and I thought, well, that's kind of strange. That's kind of a party killer person right here in the middle of the crowd; but, oh, well. That's fine. That's America. So I moved on. I was shaking hands and was thanking people. They were so wonderful and encouraging. They were saying ``thank you'' for my thanking them. It was really very moving at times. Those were some of the expressions we got. About 15 feet down the sidewalk, I met a guy who said, I'm not shaking your hand. I realized this was another one like the lady. Every 10 to 15 people, as I shook hands with people on both sides, I ran into people who wouldn't shake my hand because they were for the health care bill. When I got to Independence, I had a guy yell, Are you Louie Gohmert? I said, Yes. He wanted to know why I hated homosexuals, and I explained I don't. You know, as a Christian, I am supposed to love everyone, and I try very much to do that, but it doesn't mean I have to embrace lifestyles that the Bible says are inappropriate. Anyway, he used the ``S'' word and some things that I won't use. I mean I know it's appropriate for Senators like Senator Levin, but I'm not going to use those words down here. I don't think they're appropriate here, but I had them used on me out there on the sidewalk. He was, obviously, also not a supporter of the Tea Party, of me, or of those who were walking through. After I got back to my office, I realized, you know, those people were placed about every 10 or 15 feet in the middle of the crowd. I don't know what they did after they refused to shake my hand, but there were certainly people placed regularly throughout the crowd who were just that--they were placements. They were people who were put in there. They were observers. Hopefully, they weren't the people who yelled epithets or things to try to make their conservative folks around them look bad; but I can verify and I can testify that those people were out there and that they were amidst the Tea Party folks. Most assuredly, they were not Tea Party people.