Jay Inslee

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, the House has voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a historic measure first passed in 1994. It marked when our country finally recognized that domestic violence is not a private family matter, but a national problem that requires a national response. Since VAWA passed, victims of domestic violence have more options to leave abusive relationships, local communities have developed critical programs to assist victims, and our criminal justice system has become better trained in prosecuting these unique crimes. However, it is always the incident that happens in your backyard that will highlight the scope of a problem, such as domestic violence. In 2003, the state of Washington State became the focus of a national tragedy. Many have read in the papers the heartbreaking story of how, on April 26, 2003, Crystal Brame was shot in a grocery store parking lot by her husband, David Brame, chief of police for the city of Tacoma. Crystal Brame died one week later, and David Brame committed suicide at the scene. In response to this tragedy, people in the state of Washington swiftly formed a statewide task force of domestic violence, law enforcement, and criminal justice system experts to determine the best practices for law enforcement agencies, focusing on prevention, training, enforcement, and response. Crystal's death and the state's response, illustrated that despite the progress since VAWA passed in 1994, tragedies of domestic violence live in our communities today, and that we must continue to work towards new solutions. I think we can do a better job helping people like Crystal, whose abuser happened to be in a profession that responds to crimes of domestic violence. I have hopes that my colleagues will help put a stop to such tragedies and work with Mr. Norm Dicks, Mr. Adam Smith, and Mr. Dave Reichert, and me to commission a study by the Department of Justice to learn more about such incidences and the best response to officer-involved domestic violence. Ending domestic violence is an ongoing effort, and I have seen great improvements to this end. I would like to see an even stronger commitment so that other communities can prevent tragedies--like that of Crystal Brame from happening in their backyard.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I would like to address my comments to the Members who do have serious concerns about the Endangered Species Act who have had frustrations from their citizens about its application, but still believe that we ought to have a workable Act, and I want to suggest that voting for this bipartisan substitute and ``no'' on the Pombo bill will really satisfy their needs for five reasons. Reason number one, the substitute bill will make a significant change to reduce the amount of frustration that landowners feel by moving the listing process of habitat from the time of listing to a time of the development of the recovery plan. And the reason this will alleviate much frustration by landowners is it will allow these services to make a more acute and scientifically sound judgment where this land needs to be listed for habitat and will relieve significant frustration of landowners. Second, the substitute will make sure that we try to use public land first when we try to protect habitat to take care of these species. Third, and importantly, it will have a conservation grant program to allow the use of federal funds to help private landowners who will agree to use their lands to help in the preservation of these species. These are three very significant changes to the Environmental Protection Act which will help property owners avoid some of the frustration that now exist while still moving forward with the purposes of this Act. But we then need to vote ``no'' on the underlying bill for these two reasons: First, the underlying bill is a massive entitlement program that could be subject to massive fraud because the language is so loose and so speculative, we would be expecting the American taxpayers to shell out literally millions of dollars on highly speculative developments. When a developer comes in there, buys up land that is used for a wheat field and says he wants to put in a strip club or a casino, American taxpayers, under the underlying bill, would now have to pay entitlement funds where there is no money in this bill appropriated to do it, or even especially authorized for these highly speculative enterprises. Why should the taxpayers have to pay for this flim-flam type of speculation? And, by the way, nowhere in American law is any taxpayer required in any jurisdiction in this country to do that right now. This is a radical change which exposes the taxpayers to millions of dollars of loss that is not required by the U.S. Constitution and makes no common sense. And second and lastly, very importantly, the underlying bill provides no enforceable protection for the habitat of these species. Sure, it says that the agencies have to draw these maps, but what is a map if they do not have to follow the map? Five reasons. Members can vote for this with honor, go home and tell their constituents this they have relieved their frustration and protected these species and protected the taxpayers. Respect for the taxpayers and respect for God's creatures at the same time.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Yes. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, we appreciate the gentleman from Alaska's (Mr. Young) comment. I would yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. LoBiondo) if he wanted to make a further comment, but the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) seems to have covered the map.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the Chair's assistance on this. We are offering this amendment in an attempt to address an inequity in the committee's clear desire, it is the committee's clear desire to have operation and maintenance costs available as outlined in the Maritime Transportation Security Act for coverage under this grant program. After talking with the Congressional Research Service and with the Department of Homeland Security, it is clear that, at a practical level, on the ground at our ports, these costs, including overtime compensation for State patrol officers, are not being covered, despite the committee's best efforts. The Department of Homeland Security, however, responds to legislation passed by the Committee on Appropriations and takes a narrow view that operations and maintenance costs are not eligible to be covered. I believe that the chairman is of a like mind and believes that operations and maintenance costs during times of increased alert, expenses like extra operators for screening equipment, overtime for security officers, and additional K-9 bomb units, should be eligible for reimbursement by the Federal Government. I am asking for the chairman's help in addressing these issues. These Federal security mandates place an undue burden on our ports, which are part of the lifeblood of our economy. We need to help them.

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

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

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Alaska.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, that is the thrust of the amendment.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, over the Labor Day weekend, I volunteered at the Houston Astrodome to assist in relieving the victims of Hurricane Katrina. On Tuesday, September 6, 2005, en route to Washington, DC, from Houston, a passenger on my aircraft attempted to commit suicide and the flight was temporarily rerouted to Nashville, TN. As a result, my flight was significantly delayed in landing at Dulles airport, causing me to miss votes for both H. Res. 360, commemorating the 60th anniversary of V-J Day and the end of World War II in the Pacific, and S.J. Res. 19, a joint resolution calling upon the President to issue a proclamation recognizing the 30th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act. Had I been present in the House of Representatives, I would have voted in support of both resolutions, H. Res. 360 and S.J. Res. 19.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, this Labor Day weekend I flew from Seattle to Houston to join thousands of Texans to volunteer in the Astrodome to help these evacuees, and there I met an incredible family with such courage and grace, trying to keep their family together on the floor of the Astrodome. A woman named Penny told me that her mother named Alice was trapped at a specific address on Bell Street in New Orleans, and I pitched in to try to help to get her rescued. For 3 days, the most powerful Nation in the world was incapable of going to a specific address on Bell Street and rescuing this 80-year-old lady named Alice. While that was going on, a lot of the lower level FEMA people were working hard to effectuate that, but they were handicapped by a lack of senior leadership, senior leadership who failed to anticipate the breaching of the levees; senior leadership who failed to call for help, who waited 5 hours to call for help after landfall of the hurricane; senior leadership that allowed FEMA's job to protect us from hurricanes to be totally overwhelmed by the responsibility regarding terrorism. This senior leadership led me to conclude, and millions of Americans to conclude, that we cannot have confidence in senior leadership at FEMA today. This is not a matter of finger-pointing or accountability. It is a matter of whether we have confidence in dealing with the next hurricane that is getting ready in the Atlantic Ocean right now. This is the middle. I heard one person say this is the third inning of a nine inning game of the hurricane season. We have to get this problem fixed now. After the debacle at Pearl Harbor, America did not wait until the end of World War II to fix the problem that led us to be caught with our pants down at Pearl Harbor with such fatality, and we have suffered probably more fatalities here than we did at Pearl Harbor. We need, on a bipartisan basis, to fix this problem now; and we need to help the President do that because of his attitude of saying, Brownie, you did a great job, it just will not wash with the American people. It is a shame that this rule will not allow Americans to get what they deserve, a working FEMA.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, last weekend I went to the floor of the Astrodome to work with some of the evacuees. I have never been so inspired by people of courage and grace and great dignity. On the way home on the flight from Houston to DC, there were 10 evacuees headed for Florida. In the middle of the flight, a young man took out a razor blade and slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt. The pilot made the appropriate judgment. There were two MTs on board. They saved his life. Actually, it probably was not life threatening. We diverted to Nashville. We made a flight change in response to a problem. Now this administration has to make a change in the flight plan about who and how FEMA is being run. It is a disaster in itself. We need a flight change, and this is not a matter of accountability. There are more hurricanes on the way. FEMA's job in this disaster is not done. We do not have confidence in the people and the organization in the FEMA cockpit. It could crash again. This President needs to change FEMA, and we should be doing it in this debate today.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, too often, violence claims innocent lives in our world. We have seen suffering on our own soil, and all over the world in places like Indonesia, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and recently, England. Amid this instability, for a Representative in the United States Congress to even hypothetically suggest that the United States would destroy Mecca, a holy site of one of the world's major religions, serves only to exacerbate the impression that U.S. actions in the Muslim world are part of a religious struggle--certainly a step backwards in national security. Sadly, such statements also perpetuate the unfortunate misunderstanding that an entire religion is responsible for the actions of a minority of religious extremists. These reckless comments do not reflect American values, and irresponsibly put American security at risk.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, there are better ways to solve this problem than to strip Americans of the right to trial by jury. Fundamentally, this bill takes the right of trial by jury of your peers away from Americans and gives that authority to politicians who have never heard any of the evidence. Take this case about a 4-year-old girl I know from Yakima, Washington, named Nichole. Several years ago, she went in with a urinary tract problem. The doctors put in a foley catheter. When you do that, there is a balloon they put in your bladder that is inflated to hold the catheter. This was traumatic to this 4-year-old girl. When they went to deflate the catheter, it would not deflate. So they tried to deflate it by sticking a steel wire up through her urethra to try to puncture the balloon so they could pull the catheter out. They tried it many times. This was traumatic to this young girl. It did not work. So they finally had to inject a solvent up her urethra to dissolve the rubber and it dissolved the rubber and it also dissolved part of her bladder and severely burned her bladder because of the malfunction of a negligently designed and manufactured foley catheter. Now, who is better to make a decision for that 4-year-old girl about what is justice? Teachers, truck drivers, insurance salesmen sitting in a jury who have heard the evidence and who have looked at Nichole and understand the future dysfunction she may have and the trauma she had, or 435 politicians who are clueless about that specific case? Where is the wisdom from the Creator that these politicians are vested in to tell us what Nichole went through? Nobody knows except maybe someone who was at that trial. This is moving authority from jurors, citizens, the people who are sitting up in the gallery right here and taking it away from you and putting it in the pockets, first of Members of Congress, through the lobbyists for the drug companies and the medical companies. And by the way you, know what happened because of Nichole's case? That company cleaned up its act, and it started a new quality-control mechanism so that we will not have future Nicholes, because we had a medical negligence system that protected the Nicholes of this world. There is a problem. This is not the best way to solve it. Respect America, democracy, and our jurors. announcement by the speaker pro tempore

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, it is truly sad that a Nation that produced the Apollo Moon Project today will produce something with the success of the Hindenberg. The only thing that can be guaranteed about this bill is that it will fail. It is guaranteed that it will fail to reduce our dependence on Saudi Arabian oil. According to the Department of Energy, our dependence will rise under this bill from 58 percent to 68 percent failure. It is guaranteed to fail to deal with global warming, and the reason is you took the money that should have gone to emerging high-tech industries that need the help, the Davids, and you gave 64 percent to the Goliaths of the oil and gas industry. Guaranteed failure. It is guaranteed to fail, to send our jobs to Japan because you took out of the bill the provision that would bring these new fuel-efficient cars to be manufactured in America where they should be. Guaranteed failure. The only success that this bill will have is an energetic fleecing of American taxpayers. And if you can find a reason that you can take money from your taxpayers and give to the most profitable business in America at $60 a barrel oil, good luck. I cannot explain it. I do not think you will be able to either. Vote against this bill.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, as the sordid tale is unfolding about the Bush administration's outing of one of our covert intelligence agents, as that unfolds, there is an aspect that I just learned about, I wanted to share with my colleagues, last week. Last week with some Senators, we had a hearing where we listened to former CIA agents about the impact of this event on our national security system, and these four agents spoke as one. And what they said was interesting to me, because what they said was the outing was bad enough where they destroyed the covert status of one of our spies, but what is almost as bad or worse is that the President has refused to take action to deal with whoever is responsible for that wrongful act. And to them that was a message that the President just did not honor the trust we have to keep the secrecy of our spies secret. That makes it more difficult to recruit. We are trying to recruit people for cells in London right now. How are we going to recruit them when we out, the administration outs, a spy and does not take action to deal with that? That is as disturbing as the outing originally. The President needs to act. We need to pass House Resolution 363 to get to the bottom of this.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor tonight in part of a continuing discussion of our national energy policy, and I come specifically this evening to address some new science. There have been two new developments that are important to America in regard to our energy policy. One is some very new emerging science indicating that we need to change our energy policy and have one that is much more optimistic and visionary; and, two, the results of the energy policy bill that has come out of the House that is now in the conference committee that unfortunately has fallen very short of what this country needs. And, third, I will finish with an optimistic note about a discussion of how this country can adopt a truly new technologically oriented, optimistic, can-do energy policy that can help our country break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil, stop global warming, and grow jobs in this country with these new energy sources that we need to develop. But first I would like to start the discussion by talking about some emerging science. There really are three reasons that we need a new technologically oriented clean energy policy for America. We clearly need to break our addiction on Saudi Arabian oil that is a security threat to the United States. That is number one. And we can do it with a high-tech future. Number two, we have to stop global warming, which is a real threat and the science that I will talk about is in that regard. And, three, we need to grow our economy by having the next generation of technological development to truly have a new breakthrough energy policy for this country. But I would like to start tonight's discussion by talking about some new science that has come in just in the last several weeks that has a bearing on our need for a clean energy future in this country. This science has been accumulating for the last decade or so; but it is very interesting just in the last several weeks, we have had some very fundamentally profoundly disturbing scientific revelations that lead to the conclusion that our Nation needs to lead the world to a new energy future. I would like to set the stage, if I can, to talking about some of the things that have been known, at least on a gross basis, that are happening in the world today. And basically what is happening in the world today is in a real sense, it is melting. I want to refer to a picture of the Upsala Glacier in Patagonia at the southern tip of South America, a picture here taken in 1928. This huge glacier at the tip of South America. You can see it here, pretty vast field of ice in 1928. Same picture taken in 2004, basically showing the disappearance of this enormous multisquare mile field of ice that in this photograph has disappeared and now is essentially a bay at the southern tip of South America, an incredibly rapid, rapid change since 1928. This picture unfortunately is very typical of what is happening in glaciers around the world due to the warming of the Earth. A picture to show that it is not limited to South America. This is a photograph of the good old United States of America, one of my favorite national parks, Glacier National Park. On the left it shows a picture of the Grinnell Glacier in 1938. You can see it extends down into this basin, comes off this cliff, has a rather large area of flat glacier down in this area. Same picture, same observation point in 1981. You see that this extent of the glacier has now totally disappeared. There is a lake where the glacier used to be. The Grinnell Glacier is rapidly receding. There were 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park a hundred years ago. There are about 30 significant ones now. And the scientists project that in one of our most treasured jewels of our crown, we will have no glaciers of any significance in Glacier National Park 50 years from now. So, in fact, what we see is that due to a national or a global phenomenon, some of the most pristine treasures of America are being destroyed by global warming, and so our grandchildren, in hopes of having some some day, our great grandchildren will have to say we will take you to the park formerly known as Glacier because it will not have glaciers anymore. The point I would like to make is that this is not just an isolated regional occurrence happening at the southern tip of South America or in our treasured Glacier National Park. In fact, it is something that is happening all over the globe. We now know some information that shows the thickness of long-term perennial ice in the north, and we now have very, very conclusive evidence that that ice is melting significantly. This is a graph showing the extent and thickness of the ice cover in the Arctic in various locations during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s compared to the thickness with observations taken in the last 15 years. The blue, for instance, at the North Pole, shows the meters, just under 4 meters of thickness of ice at the North Pole on average in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The brown bars show the thickness in the last 15 years. You see it has gone down to under 2\1/2\ meters of thickness, probably a 40 percent reduction in thickness at the North Pole. It is not isolated. In the Nansin Basin there was about 4 meters of thickness. It has gone down to about 2.25 meters. In the Eastern Arctic, it is even more pronounced, from about 3.4 meters down to about 1\1/2\ meters. It is the same story all across the Arctic. The Arctic is melting. It is becoming less thick by factors of almost half. Just under half of the ice in the Arctic is gone as a result of global warming, something that we have grown up with, something that 15 years ago we could not have imagined could disappear. It is not just the thickness and it is not just in the Arctic. If you look at Greenland, and Greenland for reasons I will talk about is one of the great question marks about what is going to happen to the world in the next century. Greenland is an enormous reservoir of ice, thousands of feet thick covering the continent. But what has happened in 2002, this is a map of Greenland, basically showing where the melt has been in 2002 in these red areas. And you see a rather pronounced area where you have had this very significant melting along the periphery of the Greenland ice sheet. What scientists have found is a very disturbing phenomenon that has occurred in Greenland and that is that there have been these fissures or crevasses open up that allow this melt water to melt down which lubricates the glacier which hastens the seaward spread of the glacier which can even accelerate the melting even further. This is of tremendous concern. This may get technical but let me notice it. This is a hidden time but when it comes to climate in Greenland. The reason is off of Greenland is the Atlantic current that operates because of the saltiness, what is called the Halcyon Cycle of cold salt water sinking that creates this current that warms northern Europe, warms the northern Atlantic States of America. If this ice melts in Greenland it can shut down the Gulf Current. In fact it has done that thousands of years ago. It happened at least once before, shut that current down and actually precipitated, and here is one of the great ironies, a little ice age in the northern hemisphere. That is why the Europeans are terrified of what is happening in Greenland today of this ice melting, making the water fresher, possibly shutting down this Atlantic current, causing this enormous change in our climate factor, a situation in the north Atlantic. I want to point out these are not hypotheticals, these are not theories. These are not suggestions. These are not abstractions. These are facts. The things I have talked about today are direct observations. No scientist in the world questions them. They are unequivocal and there is no use arguing about them. So what we have is a rather pronounced worldwide melting of ice and the question now is why is that? Well, there is a clear reason that has now been answered by the scientific community from the international panel of scientists, of over 1,500 scientists from around the world, from every bent, from every philosophical standpoint, geophysicists, geologists, physicists, climatologists, you name it, in the largest gathering of world scientists ever dealing with a climatic issue. They have said with great confidence that human factors are causing the climate to change, are a significant factor in that change. The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and I am proud of the United States of America, we are the world's greatest scientific authority in the world. Our National Academy of Sciences, the people to whom we trust the scientific intellectual treasure trove of America, a few months ago came out with a conclusion that human activities are a significant cause of the climate change that the world is now experiencing. These are not fruitcakes, crackpots or small granola eaters. These are the people that helped put us on the moon, develop nuclear energy, and basically are the reason the United States leads the world today. We need to listen to them when they tell us something very dangerous is going on in the world today. What is that? It is global warming caused by gasses that we, all of us, put into the atmosphere, and I would like to talk about that for a moment. There is a phenomenon that actually is a really good thing. The presence of carbon dioxide is really important for us to live. Right now, carbon dioxide, we need to reduce the amount we are putting in the air because carbon dioxide and methane and a few other gasses are causing this global warming. But do not forget it is actually vital to human life on the planet, because carbon dioxide warms the planet. If carbon dioxide and water vapor and other things were not in the air, we would live on a frozen planet. So having the right amount of carbon dioxide is very important. Too much is a problem and that is what we are experiencing now. The reason this works, carbon dioxide, it is like a greenhouse. You have heard of the greenhouse effect. It very much is like a greenhouse. Carbon dioxide allows energy in but does not allow energy out. It is like a pane of glass. Just like a pane of glass it has a certain attribute. And scientists taught me this and I will share with you this trick, how this works. CO2 is like glass in that it allows light energy to come in but not go out. It is like a one-way door. And the reason it is like that is that CO2 molecules block ultraviolet rays of light, light at a certain spectrum, excuse me, allows it in, allows ultraviolet rays from the sun in to the Earth, and that is the warming component coming in. But when light bounces back into space, it bounces back at a different frequency, at infrared frequencies. It holds the energy in and that is good to a certain degree, but the problem is now is that the carbon dioxide levels in the air have gone up dramatically and so we have a thicker blanket on the Earth trapping this energy to a significant degree. Let me talk about now how significant that is. The numbers I am now going to talk about are also fact. They are not abstractions or hypotheticals. This chart basically shows the CO2 concentrations in a red line. This is the most disturbing red line that I know of in the world today in the long term because what it shows is for the last thousand years what the carbon dioxide levels were on this red line, and that is expressed in parts per million, how many molecules of CO2 per million there are in the atmosphere. If you see a thousand years earlier it was about 280, 278 parts per million on the left side of the chart. We know this because it is pretty amazing. We have air from that period, because there are trapped air bubbles that were trapped by these glaciers a thousand years ago. Scientists drill a core into the ice and they get those little air bubbles and they put them on a devices that measures the concentration of CO2 and you know exactly how much CO2 there was. So this is a very precise measurement. So we know a thousand years ago CO2 levels were 278 or 280. You will see the next hundred years are about the same. The next hundred about the same. The next hundred there are some minor deviations 500 or 600 years ago. They are staying about the same. Then about a hundred years ago we started to see an uptick of CO2 levels starting to rise. Something happened about a hundred years ago or a little more than a hundred years ago causing carbon dioxide levels to rise. What happened is we started to burn coal and oil. When we burn coal it puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So those levels of carbon dioxide started to go up, and they kept going up and now they are going up at a rate unprecedented in global history. As far as we know this is the fastest rate of CO2 acquisition or increase in global history. And what we see now is we are now up to about 370, I believe it is about 378 parts per million. So we have gone from about 275 a thousand years ago and just in the last hundred years we have gone up about half of that again up to about 373, 378 parts per million. So we were a third or half, depending on how you categorize that number, higher than we were and what are called pre-industrial times. Now, why is that important? Well, it is pretty obvious. If CO2 captures heat and it traps heat and you increase the carbon dioxide, you are going to increase the energy that is trapped in the Earth and the temperature of the Earth if it is not used in some other fashion. And that is indeed what has happened. We see temperatures spikes shown in these blue areas. And the blue shows the variations and, of course, the temperature does vary to some degree from year to year and even decade to decade. But what we see is we have had a corresponding increase in temperatures on the Earth as well. The scientific community has come together to tie those two together, and frankly it makes sense to me that if you increase carbon dioxide by a third, as much as you had in pre-industrial times, it is likely you are going to trap energy in the Earth, and that is exactly what has happened. It is not just the last thousand years that this correlation has taken place. I want to show a chart which is also observational evidence. This is a chart that is very similar. It shows carbon dioxide levels again in the red line and temperatures in the blue only it goes back 400,000 years. It takes us back further in time. And what we see is that 400,000 years ago we were about 250 and the red line went down and went up and went down and it went down and it went up. And you will notice corresponding changes in the temperature at the same time. When carbon dioxide has gone down, the average temperatures have gone down. Notice we have had some deviation over the 400,000 years. Carbon dioxide levels have gone up and down. But also notice this, they have never in the last 400,000 years been as high as they are. This is the highest they have ever been, number one. And, number two, the rate of increase is now on this graph essentially a vertical line. The rate of increase of the amount we are putting of carbon dioxide is unprecedented in global history. So if we look the projection is that if things remain the same we will be up to 550 parts per million by 2050, my kids' lifetime. And by 2100 we will be up to 1,280 parts per million taking a worst case projection. So however you slice it, we are going to have somewhere between a doubling of carbon dioxide and a quadrupling of carbon dioxide in the next hundred years compared to pre-industrial times. This is bad news for the Earth because we have a system built on a climate regime consistent with somewhere around 300 part per million. And our crops, where our fish are, where we live, how much air conditioning we use, whether we are comfortable or hotter than heck will all change as these CO2 levels skyrocket. Now, these are observational issues, observational facts as well that I have given you. Obviously, this is a projection but one that is based on the best available scientific evidence that we have. Now it just in the atmosphere? No, it is not just in the atmosphere. One of the categorical things that our own oceanographic folks in the United States Government have been studying temperatures in the ocean as well because the ocean is a very efficient sink of energy. It is a storage battery for energy. What they have found is that ocean temperatures as well, and this graph is expressed in heat content rather than temperature, and that is watts per year per meters squared. The ocean essentially going back from 1993 has had observational changes that have gone up dramatically, as this graph would show, to 2003 as well. And this is actually a piece that had fallen into the scientific puzzle to answer this question when we have recently found huge amounts of energy essentially stored in the ocean. Now, this is a concern because the ocean expands as it gets warmer. And if you live on the coastline as I do, the State of Washington, or around Florida or anywhere else for that matter, you need to be concerned about rising ocean levels, not like a tsunami but on a creeping basis, that could inundate significant parts of our coastline in the next hundred years. That expanding phenomenon of water is also increased by the melting of Greenland. And we have projections of anywhere from several centimeters to several meters in the next 100 to 150 years potentially inundating our coastlines. So we have not just the air but the water associated with these problems. Now, I want to note how this, the things that have happened in the last 4 months that have nailed the nail in the coffin of debate about whether or not global warming has been caused by human, in part, by human-caused action. Basically, I think that one of the major newspapers I was seeing had a headline that said ``The Debate is Over: It's Fact.'' And I think that pretty much summarizes the state of this situation. Arguing about whether or not global warming exists right now is a little bit like arguing gravity. It is something you could do several hundred years ago, but not today. We have a lot of questions about the extent, the rapidity, the rate of change, how much coastline will be inundated, how fast the West Nile virus will move north, how fast the tundra will melt. There are a lot of questions about how much and how fast; but the fact it is occurring, clearly, number one, is true; and, second, it is great cause for concern. These are not abstractions. Our lives are changing today because of this. The ski industry in the Cascade Mountains in Washington essentially was shut down this year. My son is a ski patrolman. He worked for 3 days this year. There was no snow. And having no snow is consistent with what the models predict will become a significant problem for us in the future. And it is not just skiing; we get our irrigation water from there. We run our power in the Pacific Northwest from there. We are experiencing these problems today. I talked to a friend of mine who went fishing off the coast of Washington. Not many salmon, because the water is six to eight degrees warmer than it has ever been. In fact, we are getting species that have never been seen off the Washington coast. Tuna. Certain species of tuna never seen before off the Washington coast before are now moving north along the coastline because of these warming temperatures. If you go to Alaska, you will see houses that are falling down because the tundra is melting. And that is significant because the tundra, and this is what is called a multiplier, a feedback effect, when the tundra melts because of warming, it releases enormous amounts of methane. Methane gas is frozen and stored in the tundra, and when it is released, methane gas itself is a global-climated gas. It is four times worse than CO2. So when you melt the tundra, you accelerate the rate of change. Just like when you melt the ice, you accelerate the rate of warming. And that is why the North has warmed up so much, because the ice has melted and now the light is absorbed by the dark land rather than reflected back into space. It is called the feedback loop that accelerates the rate of warming that is going on. So we have the native populations in Alaska now having to move their villages because of the collapse of their coastline. And they are seeing the day when they may not be able to hunt for seals any more because the ice is not coming close to the shoreline to support the sea life. West Nile virus. You have seen these maps that show where West Nile virus has invaded the United States. It is not an accident that some of these diseases are moving north that are carried by mosquitoes, because those insects are moving north. It is not an accident that you are seeing these horrendous fires in the western United States, because the trees have no moisture in them and they are also dying because of beetle infestations. Why did these beetles all of a sudden show up? These trees have been there for eons. Why all of a sudden are these forests being killed by these insect infestations? Well, one thing we can say is that the milder winters allow these insects to live. So our forests are significantly affected by this situation. The point I am making is that when you grow a garden in Seattle, Washington, right now, you notice that flowers are coming up earlier. That might be a good thing, but it is not so good a thing if it means we are not someday going to be able to grow wheat in southern regions of the Midwest because it will not support that type of vegetation. So the point is there are real things happening today; and, sadly, we are not responding to them. Coming back to the pieces of the puzzle that have come into play very recently, there has been a lot of debate about global warming; and as many things in science do, we have advanced from questions to hypotheses to theories to observations to arguments to debates to consensus. There is a consensus in the worldwide scientific community that humans are now playing a role in climate change that is assuredly affecting the globe. And in the last several months, there have been several major studies by very well accredited organizations that have come up with pieces to that puzzle. For instance, in the last 2 weeks, the Royal Academy of Science in Britain completed a study of the acidity in our world's oceans. Now, the acidity of our world's oceans are affected by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is then dissolved in the ocean. Because carbon dioxide, through a chemical reaction, can make the world's oceans more acidic. They are a little bit alkaline-based now. Now, the Royal Academy of Sciences goes back to Isaac Newton, I think. Talk about a prestigious group. How are you going to argue with this group? They have concluded that there is a very significant increase in the acidity of the world's oceans because of the increased carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. That amount, if I understand this correctly, is almost a 30 percent increase in the acidity. It is still alkaline, but it is becoming more acidic, and it is going down in a PH level from, and my numbers may not be correct, if you want to check this, you can go on a Web site called realclimate, it is either dot-org or dot-com, which should give you the numbers. But it is a logarithmic scale. You can see it has gone from 8.5 to 8.2 or 8.1. Now, that does not sound like much, but it is a logarithmic scale, which means about a 30 percent change, which is significant. And that is significant because life in the ocean, our coral reefs or shellfish, or anything that makes calcium-based covering, like shells and corals, depends on that level of acidity to allow their life forms to exist. Our coral reefs now are in deep trouble because of temperature. We have had massive bleaching, which is basically the death of coral reefs. They have a life form that builds the reef, and those have died just because of the warmer water. But the changes in the acidity levels, the PH levels, is also a means of mortality for our reef system. Many scientists are very concerned that this could greatly upset the balance of life in our oceans associated with anything that essentially uses calcium that is affected by the PH levels in the water. So there is one thing that has changed. The National Academy of Sciences, secondly, America's most prestigious organization, and a pretty conservative group, not known for wild ideas, in the last several months came out and said that they had a consensus that human activity is a significant factor in global warming. A significant second thing. Third thing. A study done of the world's oceans by a third group concluded that the salinity of our oceans is changing significantly because of this fresh water melt coming off from Greenland. When Greenland melts and the Arctic melts, that fresh water goes somewhere. It goes in the ocean and changes the salinity levels because that ice is melting. Fourth. We have seen significant localized temperature differences of varying significant degrees, six to eight degrees off the coast of Washington, for instance. Those are just things in the last several months that are occurring. Now, what they add up to is a picture of a changing globe, one that we are partially responsible for and one that we do not know exactly where it is going. I talked to a scientist down in South America who is studying the rain forest; and he is finding that the vines, now this was in Panama, and he was one of the first guys that had a crane and they put these big cranes up and the crane goes around, they have a little basket and they can look at the top of the rain forests. I went up in one of those cranes. They cover about 2\1/2\ acres of ground. It is amazing being up there. This scientist told me that in studying the rain forest, what they have found is that the type of vegetation in the rain forest is changing dramatically because of the increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. What we see on this chart at first seems like an abstraction; but when you see these CO2 levels going up dramatically in the atmosphere, that is not just an intellectually interesting point. It means a change in our world. What it means in the rain forest, this scientist told me, I think his name was George, though I cannot remember his last name, is that certain plants metabolize carbon dioxide better than others and they grow faster than others. What they found is the parasitic plants, the plants that basically use other plants for a structure, like vines, and the vines are called lianas, and the lianas are increasing their rate of growth explosively and are sort of taking over the canopy of the rain forests. So when we went up there, you could see these places where the canopy of the rain forest was just covered with vines. He told me that 25 years ago that was simply not the case. So what we are seeing is major changes in vegetation patterns in certain places associated with carbon dioxide as well. So what do we conclude from this? Well, I think that we need to exercise common sense. What this scientist told me, and I thought his characterization of this problem was one of the most sort of commonsense ones I have heard, he said we are now engaged in the largest experiment in human history, and we are the guinea pigs. And he meant by that that this whole global warming experiment that we are conducting in the world, we are the ones likely to be affected by it in ways we cannot fully predict. In other words, we cannot fully predict the year we will not be able to grow wheat in the southern Midwest. We cannot predict that. We cannot predict the year we will not be able to power our electrical turbines in the Pacific Northwest because of the lack of snowpack, or the year that we will have a 20 percent reduction. We cannot predict when that will happen. We cannot predict the year that malaria will spread significantly north in various environments. We really cannot predict when that will be. We cannot predict when we will have to move the villages in the Arctic because of the receding shoreline. We cannot predict the dates those things will happen, but we are running this large craps game about what we are doing with our Earth by continuing in this course of putting carbon dioxide in the air in this steady curve. And now I am going to come to what this Congress has to do with this. What the United States House of Representatives, and there are 435 people who work here, 100 over in the Senate, and there is one President and one Vice President, what that group has decided pretty much, at least the majority at the moment, what they have decided is that this explosion of carbon dioxide, this enormous ramp-up of carbon dioxide that has never happened before in the Earth's history as far as we know, that is having these prolific changes on life forms across the world is just hunky-dory and that we can just take our chances. This U.S. Congress has decided to just roll the dice and let it happen, no matter what is going to happen. We do not have either the insight or the instinct or the willingness to do anything about this problem. And I stand here tonight to say that anybody that spends just a few minutes, just a few minutes acquainting themselves with the recent science on this issue will come away with the conclusion that inaction on this problem is massively irresponsible to our grandchildren and our great grandchildren, and in some parts of the world to ourselves. That is the situation that is happening in the U.S. Congress because we do not pay attention enough to the science that has shown the conclusion that we have a problem on our hands. This Congress has done nothing about this problem. The President is not willing to deal with this problem. Disappointing. He ran for office saying he was going to support a carbon dioxide cap so we could put at least some limitation on the carbon dioxide we put out. He ran for President telling the American people he would do that, and he has not done a single thing about global warming in the 5 years he has been in office. There is no excuse for that dereliction of duty. None. He owes us better. And we are capable of doing better because we are the smartest, most technologically oriented people in the world. We owe ourselves and our kids a solution to this problem. Now what has the President said he was going to do about this problem. Here is what he said he is going to do. He says he is going to have a voluntary program where he will ask major players to volunteer to solve this problem. Well, you can run a PTA bake sale on a voluntary basis, but you cannot reorient the energy policy of America on a volunteer bake sale. It is a joke. It is a sham. We would rather have the President just admit that he refuses to do anything about this problem. That would be straightforward. But this volunteerism is nothing but a scam. We need to act. We need to do some common-sense things to deal with this CO2. Why am I suggesting we have a cap on carbon dioxide. The reason is what we have found is when we cap these pollutants, it works. We have had what is called a cap-in-trade system now for over a decade for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. That has been very successful. It has limited those two pollutants without damaging our economy one hoot. And yet this pollutant, the one that is going off the charts, the President refuses to do anything about. We need a CO2 cap to lead us in ways that we can reduce our contributions of CO2. Now there are some other common-sense things we can do. Unfortunately, we have not done them. We can improve the mileage we get from our vehicles. The reason we know that is we have done this. We know that Congress can effectively increase the mileage of our vehicles. If you look at this graph that shows the mileage our vehicles have gotten, as we increase our mileage, we reduce our CO2 emissions. In 1975, our cars got 14 miles to a gallon. And then the Congress and the President acted in a bipartisan to increase mileage. In 1984 it got up to 24.5 miles a gallon. Trucks also went up. The average almost doubled. We almost doubled our mileage because we decided to do so. We took some common-sense measures to increase our mileage. Then in 1985 the Federal Government went to sleep and the Federal Government refused to take any further action to increase mileage, and mileage went down. The average mileage of our total fleet, cars and trucks, had gone down in 1985. Since 1985, we have mapped the human genome, we have invented the Internet and applied it to great usage, and yet the mileage manufacturers provide us has gone down since 1985. We can do better than this. I am 6 feet 2 inches, 200 pounds and driving a hybrid car that gets in excess of 40 miles a gallon. It is safe, it is comfortable. We can do better. If we inflated our tires to the manufacture recommended level, we would save more gas than we will ever get out of ANWR if we destroy that area through drilling. So there are things that we can do. I want to suggest a solution, and that is we can pass the New Apollo Energy Project, a bill that I have introduced with other Members of the House. The New Apollo Energy Project will have an aggressive technologically based way to solve this problem, and it will do that by using what America is great at, which is our creative genius. And the reason we call it the New Apollo Energy Project, it is to kindle the spirit that we had when John F. Kennedy stood right behind me on May 9, 1961, and he challenged America to go to the moon in 10 years and return a man safely. That was very daring. We had not even invented Tang yet, and our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. But he did it because President Kennedy understood one thing about the American character, he understood that Americans are genius when it comes to innovation, and that Americans love a challenge. We need now a bold vision and a challenge to America to invent our way out of this difficulty, to invent the new clean, renewable energy sources that can help solve this problem, to invent the new, more efficient cars, refrigerators, air conditioning units, building, houses, you name it, in a way to use energy more efficiently. We know if we do that, and the New Apollo Energy Project will do that, we will harness the talent of America to get that done. The reason that we are suggesting this is not just global warming, there are two things that the New Apollo Energy Project will do. Number one, it will break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. We know that the energy bill that passed the House, a sordid affair that gave 94 percent of $8 billion, 94 percent of the bill that this Chamber passed, I voted against, 94 percent of the $8 billion of taxpayer money went as a direct subsidy to the oil and gas industry, to the most profitable industry in America, to an industry that is getting over $60 a barrel for fuel. Hooking our wagon to the oil and gas industry to try to drill our way out of this problem is simply doomed for failure. The reason it is doomed for failure is that the oil is not here, it is elsewhere. We only have 3 percent of the world's oil supply, but we generate 25 percent of the world's CO2 production. The oil simply is not here. Dinosaurs went somewhere else to die, actually leafy vegetation material. They went mostly to the Mideast, to Venezuela and Indonesia and off the coast of Norway, but not here. So we are chasing a losing proposition here to try to drill our way out of this problem. Besides, even if it was here, we would be competing with China now with this huge new economy to compete for this new resource. No, this is a failure just waiting to happen. So this 94 percent solution is money that is not going to solve our energy problems. The New Apollo Energy Project, by contrast, will say we do not have to think about what the Saudi Royal House thinks about our public policy. When we make a decision on the Middle East, we will be free of that. We will not have to face the prospect of our sons and daughters dying in the Middle East again. We have lost enough. Now it is time to get serious about this, and an oil and gas driven policy is not a serious energy policy, it is a sham. But this New Apollo Energy Project will have a third and very important benefit. It will grow jobs in this country. You have to ask yourself why are we letting the jobs to build fuel efficient cars go to Japan. Those cars should be union jobs here in the United States. Why are we letting jobs go to Germany for solar cell production, they should be here in the United States. The New Apollo Energy Project is as American as apple pie because it means American jobs. Two causes for optimism in that regard, and a lot of people think when we talk about new energy that somehow it is just pie in the sky, but they really have not paid attention to look at the science that is going on in new energy. What we find, and these are graphs of the prices of renewable energy systems in the last 30 years or so. What we see is that all of these new technologies have come down in price dramatically. We look at wind here that in 1980 was 30 cents a kilowatt hour, is down to about 4, 5, 6, and is projected to continue to go down. In my neck of the woods, wind is a huge new growth industry. We are putting in North America's largest wind farm in southeast Washington, a utility very close to where I live. It is essentially market based in a lot of places. We see photovoltaics have gone by a factor of about 5 in the last 30 years, from 100 cents a kilowatt hour down to about 22 now and projected to go further. Biomass has gone from 12 down to 7 or 8; solar thermal has experienced the same thing. What we have found is while oil has been going up, renewables have been coming down, and renewables are somewhat more expensive today, most of them still, than fossil fuels. But that is not going to last long because China is coming on, and if you have seen what has happened to the price of oil, we are going to be in an international bidding war with the Chinese economy, and that price is going to continue to go up. We have something cheaper in these technologies which have become more cost based because they have become more efficient, and we use scales of economy. Every time we build one of these, the price goes down. Let me show you the house of Mr. and Mrs. Alden Hathaway in Virginia. It was built for about $365,000. A little more expensive than a normal house, although not much. By using solar panel roof, passive energy, an in-ground heat pump, decent design, net energy consumption used by fossil fuels is zero. Zero. It is a comfortable home. I have seen it. It would not stand out in any neighborhood, a place to be proud of, and has zero energy consumption. And the secret is they have net metering. When the sun is shining, and even through clouds it works, certain levels of clouds. It feeds electricity back into the grid and their meter runs backward. You sell your energy back to the utility, and they have to pay you for it when we pass my bill, the New Apollo Energy Project. The point I have is this is real. It is out there today. It is happening. I read in this morning's newspaper about a fellow developing a senior citizen housing complex with essentially the same technology in Thurston County, Washington. This is with us. All this Congress has to do is to listen to the science, be optimistic about American technological development, and have just a little bit of common sense to act in a positive way in the future. Unfortunately, it has not done that yet, but I stand tonight to say that with this emerging science, with the clarity that has emerged about the threat of global warming, with our positive view about the confidence we have in America's technological ability, we are going to solve this problem. It is doable, it is achievable. The New Apollo Energy Project will help to do that.

Mr. INSLEE

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

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts. An issue I would like to address tonight is perhaps one of the most important ones. Of course, we all share the gentleman's admiration for our troops. I heard of a young man from Ohio who will be going back in a month or so for his fourth tour of duty in Iraq, so not only our admiration for our personnel there, but their whole families who are contributing to this effort, and it has been very, very difficult for them as well. But I want to talk about how we can eventually be in a position to be able to bring our sons and daughters home, and that involves fulfilling an activity that might seem obvious to anyone who has thought about this, but, unfortunately, has not been fulfilled by the administration, and that is that we need to replace American troops with Iraqis. We need to get our sons and daughters home and their responsibility for the security of Iraq needs to be assumed by Iraqis who will stand up and toe the line for their countries. And until that happens, we are going to continue to see the enormous losses that are being suffered by the Iraqis and our sons and daughters now. And the reason I want to address this, and perhaps it seems obvious when I say that, but I wanted to share tonight the abject failure of the administration to do the very obvious things that need to be done to train the Iraqi security forces. It is obvious in this country that we need larger number of troops in the security forces now and in the future to allow the withdrawal of American troops. But we have found after doing an examination of what the civilian planners, and this is not a criticism of the military personnel because frankly it is the civilian personnel, from the Secretary of Defense up through the President, who have dropped the ball unfortunately, and what is required to train these Iraqi troops. Four months ago an assessment showed that we had less than 40 percent of the training personnel that was anticipated to be in Iraq 6 months after the collapse of the Iraqi Army, less than half of the training personnel were there several months ago. And the result has been a spectacular failure to train and equip and stand up an Iraqi Army. I remember the first time I ever heard the term stand up. It was from Secretary Rumsfeld. And he said we are going to stand up the Iraqi Army. This is before the war started. This army cannot get on its knees in Iraq right now. Now, we have been told by the administration that there are 170,000 troops in Iraq. Well, there are 170,000 names on paper, and maybe there are 170,000 boots, but at most, at most, being generous, there are three battalions that can actually go out there and provide security in Iraq, less than 20,000 people. This army is a paper machet force and we, the administration, has not provided the infrastructures needed to train it. Now why have they not done that? Why you would think immediately after the collapse of the Iraq Army, of course it did not help that the administration made what appears to be a major tactical blunder, which was to disband the Iraqi Army in the first place, without any security in Iraq to replace it, which led to this horrendous looting, if you will recall, looting that everyone predicted except the civilian leadership of the military here, knowing the history of Iraq, the violence in the ethnic groups. The fact that no security was supplied after the collapse of the Iraqi Army has put us behind the 8 ball. In any event. At that point you would think the administration would push the alarm button to say we are going to speed forward as far as we possibly can to train and equip the Iraqi Army. Boy, were we wrong. In fact, it is this bad. In this chamber, when the defense bill came to the floor here the week before last for the appropriations bill, the majority party had put in a limitation on what could be spent to train the Iraqi military force. Now, it seems to me that ought to be the place we should not be scrimping money. We should not be trying to artificially limit. That is the place we should put the pedal to the metal and train these forces to replace our sons and daughters as soon as humanly possible. Now fortunately we passed an amendment that lifted that cap. I brought an amendment. I appreciate the Chair accepted it, and we actually got rid of that limitation. But this has been one of a long train of failures that follows from a fundamental misapprehension of the situation. And all of these mistakes that we have talked about flow from one basic misunderstanding by this administration, and that was the assumption that they made, that they could put on rose colored glasses and Baghdad would look like Paris in 1944 and the Shiias and the Sunnis would break bread together and sing Kumbaya and democracy would flower without standing up an Iraqi Army, without having security, without having armored HUMVEES, without having flak jackets for our troops, without having a provision for the National Guard, which is now so extented that the governors now, you know, the governors had a meeting just this week saying how are we going to fight our fires this summer when the National Guard is not here. This has been a continuation of the rose colored glasses syndrome that has now resulted in a continued failure to stand up an Iraqi Army.

Mr. INSLEE. I just want to say that, you know, that is history. It is important to review. But the present and the future are disconcerting now too. For instance, we now know that we have this paper machet force in Iraq, and that is all it is, to provide security. And until it becomes real, it is going to be difficult to get our troops home. But even today, this administration, because they are so wedded to this go it alone policy, has rejected offers from adjoining nations in the region to train these Iraqi troops. Egypt, we are told, has made a specific proposal to train Iraqi troops to expedite that process so we can replace our people and get our people home and replace them with Iraqis. And this administration, because of their go it alone attitude has rejected that offer of other people in the region to train these forces.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I have come to the Chamber this evening to address what many of us consider a very serious breach of our national security. The outing of a covert agent serving the Central Intelligence Agency is something that should not have happened, and now this House needs to get to the bottom of why it happened and how it can be prevented in the future. We have many agents serving in a covert or undercover capacity who are serving with distinction in the United States, as we speak, around the world. These are men and women who have contributed and honored us with their service to try to provide for our safety, our personal safety. They sometimes live in tough circumstances. When they are covert, undercover agents, they frequently take great personal risks. They play one of the most potentially fatal games, which is to attempt to obtain information for the United States to protect us safely in our homes in this country. I think it is fair to say that on a bipartisan basis we honor their service and we respect their service, and we ought to protect them by not divulging their identity to anyone. Their identity is something that must be held closely for their personal safety, for their family's personal safety, for our ability to pursue our intelligence in an effective manner, and even for the safety of the people around the world with whom they deal. Because when one blows the cover of an undercover agent, they put not only potentially their own lives in danger, but they endanger everyone they have ever had lunch with in these foreign countries who now become suspected potentially CIA operatives of the United States as well. So I think it is fair to say that the illicit wrongful outing of a CIA covert agent is something very serious, something the U.S. Congress needs to be concerned about. And in this particular sad and sordid affair, we need to be concerned about. And that is why I would like to address this evening in my comments what happened in the outing of a particular covert agent by the executive branch of the United States. And as many people know now, we have experienced a case in the last 2 years where the executive branch of the United States Government, the people who work by, for and now very closely to President George Bush were apparently responsible for blowing the cover of an undercover agent who worked with distinction with the Central Intelligence Agency. This is a very serious matter not only for the safety potentially of this agent but for our ability to maintain the integrity of our security services of the United States. And on a bipartisan basis, we need to commit the U.S. Congress to see to it that those things do not happen again. And to start that process, we need to know how it happened in this case. Briefly, if I can summarize, and many people know these facts, but for purposes of a summary, I would like to summarize what happened in this situation. What happened is that, leading up to the Iraq war, the President of the United States went before the American people to try to build a case for the Iraq war. And one of his assertions that he wanted Americans to believe was that Iraq was on the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons, and he and his Secretary of State and others brought a specter of a mushroom cloud frequently. And one of the things he did in the State of the Union, he stood right behind me in the Chamber, addressing the Joint Session of Congress, and told the American people that, essentially Saddam Hussein, that murderous thug in Iraq, had obtained uranium yellow cake, the material from which one would build fissionable materials, the heart of a nuclear weapon. And he told the American people that our intelligence had learned that Iraq had obtained uranium yellow cake from Niger, a country in Africa. And he did not say this was questionable; he said it was a fact. And he issued 16 words that later turned out to be false. And some time thereafter, we found, through an article written in the New York Times by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that, in fact, Ambassador Joseph Wilson had been sent to Niger at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency. They requested Ambassador Joe Wilson, who had previously served in Africa and had knowledge of the African situation, to go to Niger to attempt to find out whether there was any truth to the fact whether or not Niger had sent uranium yellow cake to Iraq. And we subsequently learned and Ambassador Wilson had the courage, the foresight, the gumption to notify America that this was false, that, in fact, he had gone to Niger at the request of the CIA, fulfilled his patriotic duty; had the gumption to go into this difficult place, which is not exactly the Club Mediterranean, fulfilled his duty; and came back and reported to the CIA that this assertion that yellow cake came from Niger was, frankly, wrong, that it was highly unlikely that the documents were accurate that someone had relied upon to suggest this uranium yellow cake had come from Niger. And he reported that these were likely forgeries. He then reported to the American people that this was wrong. And it turns out that, actually, there were at least two other reports that had been circulated in the CIA suggesting that what the President said was wrong. So the American public learned that what the President said in the State of the Union Address was wrong; it was false. At that point, the response from the administration was that Ambassador Joe Wilson was correct. It was wrong, and that it was a mistake, that this should not have been in the State of the Union Address. It was an error. It was, in fact, false, and that Ambassador Joe Wilson was correct. And now Secretary of State Rice and others were very candid at that point, saying that what the President said never should have been said. And they essentially admitted that Ambassador Wilson was correct in his report to the CIA. But then, what did this administration do? It turns out that, instead of thanking Ambassador Wilson for his work, instead of calling him up and saying, Thanks, Joe, for your work in Africa, we are sorry we made a mistake, glad it got cleared up, what did they do? It turns out that someone in the executive branch of the United States with secret information about a secret agent of the United States Government blew the cover of Joe Wilson's wife, thereby potentially endangering an undercover agent, thereby destroying the integrity of our national security information, thereby jeopardizing others for whom Joe Wilson's wife had worked and possibly violating the criminal laws of the United States of America. Not exactly the kind of response Joe Wilson got from the first President Bush, because in our disclosure, for a moment, I would like to introduce Ambassador Joe Wilson to those who may be listening about who this gentleman is. He is a fellow who served with distinction in the Foreign Service of the United States in several countries, including Africa. He was our last Foreign Service agent in Baghdad before the first Persian Gulf War. And he was a pretty gutsy guy when he was in charge of the affairs of our embassy in Baghdad; gutsy enough that when Saddam Hussein threatened to hang or execute any American who tried to get Americans out of the country, Saddam was going to threaten to hold them hostage, to try to prevent the attack on the forthcoming attack in the first Persian Gulf War, threatened to kill anyone who tried to preserve and protect Americans there, Ambassador Wilson's response was to hold a press conference with a noose around his neck and basically said, Come and get me, Saddam, I will be the first to challenge you because I am taking my people home safely. And Ambassador Wilson did. We did not lose a Foreign Service person, extricating them from Iraq before the first Persian Gulf War happened. And one of the reasons that happened, one of the reasons, is that we had Ambassador Joe Wilson on the job to challenge Saddam Hussein, to stand up to that murderous thug, and deliver his people back to America without a single loss of life. He showed some courage then. In fact, the then President Bush, who effectively hired him, who gave a press conference, on October 22, 1990, telling the world that we had a very capable, effective person there, Joe Wilson, that Saddam can talk to. Later, on January 30, 1991, the first President Bush wrote a handwritten note to Ambassador Wilson, and it is in a book that the ambassador wrote; a handwritten note from the first President Bush said, ``Dear Joe, both Barbara and I appreciate your note of January 25. Even more, we appreciate your service to your country and your courageous leadership while you were in Baghdad. Good luck. Many thanks.'' Signed personally, ``George Bush.'' The reason I note this is that, very unfortunately, we have seen a circumstance now where the people who could have been thanking Ambassador Wilson for bringing the White House's error to their attention and to the public's attention instead are running around, and I do not know how else to categorize them other than attack dogs, trying to destroy the credibility of Ambassador Wilson. And it is very unfortunate because this is a gentleman who was honored by the first President Bush, served with distinction, and really did not deserve to have his wife attacked, his wife's career damaged, if not destroyed, really did not deserve to have the entire force of the administration of the United States come down on him and now have these multiple attacks on his reputation going on across this country; a person who has supported Republicans in the past, gave money to the first Bush campaign, was a bipartisan person before someone in this President's administration tried to destroy his wife's career, and did so. And now we have this very unfortunate attack on Ambassador Joe Wilson going across this country. Why is that? Well, the reason is that, fortunately, Ambassador Wilson had the temerity to tell the truth. He had the temerity to stand up to the administration and blow the whistle on something they did that was wrong. And what they did that was wrong was to tell Americans that Saddam had uranium yellow cake from Niger. They admitted that they were wrong but now are trying to attack the credibility of the person who told the truth. It is very unfortunate. And they are embarrassed by that; rightfully so. And how do we know that? Well, we know what the response has been for the last year and a half while questions have been asked as to whether or not the President's close confidants were responsible for this outrage of blowing the cover of a secret agent. How do we know that? Let us look at what the White House has done, whether they feel some potential embarrassment about this. Has the White House been forthcoming and straight with us about the involvement of people, including the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House? Let us find out. Let us look at some quotes by the President's spokesperson. His name is Scott McClellan. He is the official spokesperson for President George Bush. Mr. McClellan was asked on July 22, 2003, the question: ``Scott, has there ever been an attempt or effort on the part of anyone here at the White House to discredit the reputations or reporting of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife, or ABC Correspondent Jeffrey Kofman?'' McClellan: ``John, I think I answered that yesterday. That is not the way that this White House operates. That's not the way the President operates. No one would be authorized to do that within this White House. That is simply not the way we operate, and that's simply not the way the President operates.'' Really? Continuing, he was asked if Karl Rove did that, and Mr. McClellan responded, ``I haven't heard that. That's just totally ridiculous. But we've already addressed this issue. I just said, it's totally ridiculous.'' Was that a slip of the tongue by Mr. McClellan? No. In fact, Mr. Rove joined in that. On September 29, ABC News, Owen asked him, Mr. Rove: ``Did you have any knowledge or did you leak the name of the CIA agent to the press?'' Rove: ``No.'' At which point Mr. Rove shut his car door and bid adieu. Really? On September 29, 2003, a question was asked to Mr. McClellan: ``Has the President either asked Karl Rove to assure him that had he nothing to do with this or did Karl Rove go to the President to assure him that he . . . '' McClellan: ``I don't think he needs that. I think I've spoken clearly to this publicly . . . I've just said there's no truth to it.'' Question: ``Yes. But I'm just wondering if there was a conversation between Karl Rove and the President or if he just talked to you and you're here at his . . . '' McClellan: ``He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.'' Question: ``How does he know that?'' McClellan: ``The President knows.'' Well, the question is, as was famously put, what did the President know and when did he know it? Because for a year and a half now, this White House and this administration and this President have been telling us that neither the Deputy Chief of Staff nor anyone else he knows of was responsible for this outrage. Really? So we continue with this litany. Scott McClellan: ``I have made very clear from the beginning that it is totally ridiculous. I have known Karl for a long time, and I didn't even need to go ask, because I know what kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct.'' Continuing, September 30, 2003: When asked, ``What would George Bush do if he found out someone was responsible for this?'' And the President said, ``Listen, I know of nobody, I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it and will take the appropriate action.'' Well, we are waiting for the appropriate action, because we since have been told by the Deputy Chief of Staff's lawyer that, in fact, he told a press agent himself personally that Joe Wilson's wife was working for the Central Intelligence Agency shortly after Ambassador Wilson came forward and told the American people the truth, I think 3 days before Mr. Novak printed an article to that effect. We now know that, in fact, the Deputy Chief of Staff was involved in a disclosure that Joe Wilson's wife was, in fact, working for the CIA. But it was not just a few of those comments. We look at Mr. McClellan's comments later on. On October 10, Mr. McClellan was asked, Question: ``Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliott Abrams, nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wonder if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.'' McClellan: ``I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me that they were not involved in this. And that is where it stands.'' Question: ``So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?'' McClellan: ``They assured me that they were not involved in this.'' That was not the case. Mr. McClellan was either told inaccurately by at least the Deputy Chief of Staff, or Mr. McClellan has told us a story that is not true. We do not know what it is at this point, but we do know a couple of central facts that are pivotal here. We know that a war started. Mr. Speaker, 1,700 Americans-plus of our sons and daughters will never come home from the sands of Iraq. We know that the reason for that is the President of the United States told Americans that a mushroom cloud could be imminent because, in part, Iraq had uranium yellow cake. We know that that was false. We know that Ambassador Joe Wilson, sent by the CIA to report on that told the CIA that that was false. We know that when he told the American people the truth, that, in fact, a falsehood that had been told that is partly responsible for a war that has resulted in 1,700 Americans dead and 13,000 of our sons and daughters seriously injured. We know that he has now suffered the slings and arrows of an outraged administration that blew the cover for his wife who was a covert agent for the CIA. We know those central facts, because the Deputy Chief of Staff's attorney now has told us the truth after a year-and-a-half of falsehoods from this administration, of giving America false information about how this outrage occurred. Now, that was wrong. We had to have a bipartisan consensus, and I think there is in this Chamber, that both Republicans and Democrats believe it is wrong to blow the cover of an agent. The reason we believe this is very simple. We think there is a bipartisan consensus in this Chamber and in this country that secret agents ought to remain secret, and no President of either party or anyone working for the President with access to the secret information ought to blow that cover. That happened here. So we have to ask, Were there excuses for that? Are there excuses that we should accept that? Are there excuses that we should buy? Are there excuses that allow our secret agents and our national security to be jeopardized? Well, some people are saying this should be excused, it should be swept under the rug, Congress should not look into it, we have no business asking hard questions of the administration. The White House has suggested they are not going to talk about it. They were happy to talk about it when they said they were not involved, but, boy, as soon as they found out they were involved, they do not want to talk about this and they want Congress to just shrink away and go home quietly and not find out what happened here. We think we need to find out what happened here. So let us see what the excuses are that they have proposed. I have been listening carefully to the White House, people now working for the President. I have been listening carefully to their political allies around the country. What excuses do they proffer for this misconduct? I really see three. First, they argue that because the Deputy Chief of Staff did not spell out the names, the letters of the name of this secret agent, that he should be excused from destroying her covert status, because he did not use the name Valerie Plame or Valerie Wilson, he did not use those letters. All he said was, it was Joe Wilson's wife. Well, Mr. Speaker, when you think about it, unless Joe Wilson was a polygamist, we knew exactly who he was talking about. If somebody says your wife is an undercover agent, it is pretty clear to the neighbors in the neighborhood and where she works, you know who he is talking about. In fact, it is interesting that during my comments of the last few minutes, I have been referring to the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House. I never said the name Karl Rove. Never spelled out the K and the R, but we know who I am talking about. That is why anyone who wanted to know whether Valerie Wilson is a secret agent knows exactly who we were talking about and anyone she has ever talked to in her covert capacity around this world knows exactly who we are talking about, and everyone who she had lunch with in her work, working on weapons of mass destruction in the CIA, knows who he was talking about. That dog just will not hunt. It is, frankly, insulting to the American people that their administration and their political allies argue that it is okay to out a CIA agent, as long as you do not use their name or their Social Security number. You can tell them whose wife it is, you can tell them where they work, you can tell them where they live, you can show a picture of them, but as long as you do not spell out their name, it is hunky-dory with the American people. It is not. It is wrong. It is terrible. It is an abuse of democracy and the people who work for us as undercover agents, and it will not stand. The second excuse they use, they say, well, the Deputy Chief of Staff was just being innocent here; he was just trying to clear up some confusion about who ordered or asked Mr. Wilson to go to Africa. We know it was the CIA and, frankly, how the CIA made a decision, I am not sure is of any particular importance to anyone. I mean, what importance is it who ordered Mr. Wilson to go to Niger? If it was one person, does that change the fact that we have 1,700 dead in Iraq? Does it justify the President in using false information to precipitate a war? Does that make it okay? I frankly do not understand what difference it made, except for an effort to damage Ambassador Wilson's credibility, which apparently was going on here, sadly. But be that as it may, let us just ask ourselves, if the Deputy Chief of Staff wanted to clear it up and said it was not the Vice President who precipitated this expedition to Niger, he did not have to mention Joe Wilson's name, his wife's name or identify her. He simply could have said it was not the Vice President, it was someone else at the CIA. Now, ask yourself, why did the Deputy Chief of Staff not simply tell the reporter it was somebody else at the CIA instead of what he did say, which was, it was Joe Wilson's wife? Why did he not do that? I would like to know the answer to that question, and Congress deserves an answer to that question. That is why the Deputy Chief of Staff ought to come to Congress under oath and answer these questions about what happened in these circumstances. That is why we have filed today, with the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) leading this effort, a resolution of inquiry that would simply compel the White House to turn over, and the Secretary of State and the CIA and the Defense Department, documents pertaining to this whole affair. Because, frankly, there may be a whole bunch of other people besides the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House responsible for this outrage. Mr. Novak said there were at least two people within the administration who identified Valerie Plame as an operative. An operative means undercover agent. In Mr. Novak's own lexicon, you can check it out and do a Nexus search and find out when he says operative, he means undercover agent. But we know that is what happened. But there may be others involved in this, and this Congress needs to get to the bottom of who those people are and how that happened, to make sure it does not happen again. Because, frankly, Americans have a right to be disenchanted with the President's failure here of not getting to the bottom of this. Mr. Speaker, the President has been working about 3 feet from the Deputy Chief of Staff for a year-and-a-half and, as far as we know, has never said, Karl, what went on here? What was the deal here? Were you involved in this in any way? As far as we know, the President has never asked the person working with him on an hourly basis what happened here. It does not look to me like a President who wants to get to the bottom of this whole thing and clear out this nest of subterfuge as quickly as he can. The American people deserve that. That second excuse just does not pass the laugh test. The third excuse that I have heard proffered by the attack dogs defending this abuse is that Mr. Wilson did not vote for President Bush this time. He is a member of this loathsome, underworld group called Democrat. Well, I am not sure it is actually true, since Ambassador Wilson supported the candidacy financially of actually both Republicans and Democrats in the past. He has actually supported them about equally, since he got a congressional letter from the guy who hired him, the first President Bush because of his courageous work in Baghdad. He does not look like a particular pacifist to me that is sort of on the left wing of the spectrum at all. Now, after the administration of President Bush destroyed the career of his wife and jeopardized her safety, he probably did not vote for this current President, but I am not sure that is a reason to violate the security laws of the United States potentially and blow the cover of a covert agent. I guess what these people on the right wing are saying is that it is okay, it is acceptable, it is consistent with American ethics to go after a man's wife as long as he is a Democrat. It is okay to destroy the covert and protected status of our secret agents, as long as they are related to somebody who might have voted for a Democrat in their life. I disagree with that. I disagree. I believe that covert agents who are putting their lives on the line for America ought not to be abused, I do not care what their political situation is. I do not care if they have held signs calling for the removal of President George Bush from the White House. This is not the way America is supposed to act. We expect more of our administrations. No administration has the right to punish political activity in this country, and no political administration has the right to punish an American who told the truth to power, who pointed out that an administration started a war based on a falsehood. Nobody has that authority in a democracy. I, frankly, do not care what Ambassador Joe Wilson's political inclinations are, because I know one thing, I know one thing for sure: Americans deserve to be treated fairly. And when this administration attacked a man's wife and exposed her to danger and violated the national security and removed the integrity of our national security, it was wrong. I do not care what party Joe Wilson is in. It was simply wrong. So we have now looked at three excuses that the administration has offered for the outing of a covert agent in the United States of America. This identity thing is a laughable argument. They clearly destroyed the cover of this agent. The argument that somehow they were simply innocent does not wash, because here is another reason I have not addressed: it does not matter what the motivations were for the Deputy Chief of Staff to blow the cover of a secret agent. It may have been virtuous; it may not have been virtuous. It does not matter. The fact of the matter is, the national security of the United States has been jeopardized. This secret agent's covert status has been blown. We really do not, perhaps should, care what the motivation was. We know that at least two people, if Mr. Novak was, assuming he is telling the truth, there are at least two administration officials who willfully blew the cover of this agent. Whether they were angelic or demonic does not matter. It was wrong. It damaged our security, and it should not stand. And the third thing is that Ambassador Wilson should be punished. Rightfully, he got what he deserved and his wife got what she deserved, because he did not vote for George Bush this time. That does not comport with American values of democracy. So these excuses, they have been offered, do not remove the necessity for the United States Congress to act in our oversight role of the executive branch. The judicial system is not the only branch of Government that has an obligation to protect Americans from the train of abuses of the executive branch. We know there is a pending investigation of the criminality of this matter. Whether this is criminal or not, by the way, there may be no indictments ever filed in this case; I do not know the answer to that. But even if there are no indictments filed in this case, I am convinced, and I think a number of my colleagues are convinced, that this was not good for the national security of the United States. It was unfair. It was wrong. It was unjustified. There is no excuse for it. It violates, if not the felony laws of the United States, the code of democracy and the way we expect our administration to handle national security. So we need to get to the bottom of this, and Congress needs to act. I also may note that we will hear the argument that Congress should not act because there is an ongoing criminal investigation. I am sensitive to that. I am a former prosecuting attorney. And I am sensitive to that. Fortunately, we are told that that investigation has now completed interviews of people in the administration they sought to interview. And it should be in no way difficult in pursuing the Congressional investigation of what happened in this case on a two-track basis. And it is necessary, not just from a national security standpoint; it is necessary from a democratic standpoint, with a little d, the democracy for all of us, in all parties. The reason is, we have seen this movie before. You know, when administrations, when they have the whistle blown on them, when they are not totally being candid with the American people, they very frequently go into this defensive crouch. And the defensive crouch is, they do two things, maybe three: First, they do not share the honest information with the American people. Second, they say things to the American people that are not true. And third, and this is what I think happened in this case, I believe they try to destroy the credibility of the people who are criticizing the administration. This happened in my lifetime in one egregious case where Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers that exposed the multiple falsehoods of Richard Nixon's administration. President Nixon was not being candid to the American people about the War in Vietnam, and Mr. Ellsberg and other whistle blowers disclosed the truth about the Vietnam War. And the Nixon administration's response was immediately to attack Mr. Ellsberg. And what they did in that case, they burglarized Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist to try to get, you know, the psychiatric records on Mr. Ellsberg to damage his credibility. And it was a reaction to Daniel Ellsberg telling the truth. Now, in this case, what happened, and we cannot pry into one one's motivation 100 percent, but it certainly makes me suspicious, at least, that what we are seeing is an attack on the credibility of Ambassador Joe Wilson by attacking and punishing his wife. Is that the way America is supposed to work, that when you tell the truth about an elected official, and it turns out that you were right and the elected official was wrong, that the President of the United States, his administration attacks your wife? Is that the way America is supposed to be? To try to damage you through a shot across the bow, to make sure everyone else in the CIA and everybody else with information knows if you say anything bad about this administration, look at what we are capable of doing to your family. Pretty good intimidation. Did not intimidate Ambassador Joe Wilson. He was not intimidated by Saddam Hussein, and he was not intimidated by the Deputy Chief of Staff of this administration. He is not easily intimidated. So the fact of the matter is, what is sad about this situation is, instead of the White House saying, you know, instead of the President saying, I am going to get an affidavit from 20 of my top lieutenants, I am going to demand them to have an affidavit on my desk by 5 o'clock tonight telling me exactly what they know about this so I can make a decision about whether they get fired or not; the President said, I am not going to do anything about it. I'm going to let the criminal prosecution go ahead and hope that the Fifth Amendment and Miranda and grand jury secrecy rules and everything can delay this as far as possible, and so far, it has taken a long time. Yes, we have these issues. We have had to work through the investigation. So I guess, to some degree, it has not worked, but what is sad about this is that the attacks on Ambassador Wilson continue today. Now, remember, Ambassador Joe Wilson is the guy who had the courage to point out a falsehood in the State of the Union address. That is not easy. You got to understand, when you challenge the most powerful man in the world, President George Bush, it is not easy, to point out that in this particular instance the President was wrong in what he told the American people. And he was right. We know that because Secretary Rice has said on multiple occasions that, if the President had known what Ambassador Wilson reported, they would never have put this in the State of the Union address. Now, we are told that what Ambassador Wilson reported never got to the President. That is most unfortunate. But the point is, it took a lot of gumption for Ambassador Wilson to point this out to Americans. And yet, today, this administration has condoned, clearly condoned the majority party operatives, the political operatives in a national attack on Ambassador Joe Wilson for just doing his job. His job was to go to Niger and report the truth. He went there and did that. It was no picnic. He was right. He pointed out to the American people what was true about this situation. And what was his reward from the administration? It reminds me of a quote from Shakespeare, if I do not botch it: Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. And that is what they are waging right now on Ambassador Joe Wilson. I think it is most unfortunate. Instead of joining forces on a bipartisan basis today for Congress to get to the bottom of what happened here, they have started this smear campaign against Ambassador Joe Wilson, a person who has conducted himself with honor and has done great service to the United States. And they did perhaps even worse to his wife, the former but no longer able to act as a covert agent for the CIA. And I think that is sad. And it is not consistent with what we should expect from our presidents or from our administrations. We can do better, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, they all deserve better in this situation. We cannot let this happen again. President Bush is never going to stand for reelection again. His electoral prospects are not important in this. Politics are not important in this. What is important for Congress to do is to find out a away to prevent this from happening again, to make sure that future administrations know that these excuses are not going to be acceptable to the American people. It is very important that Congress go on record saying that presidents in the future cannot just wink and say, well, go ahead, go ahead and blow the cover for this agent because it might help us politically in one way or another. Just do not spell their name, because then we can get away with it. It is for Congress to say, that is inexcusable. It is important for Congress to say that whether you are a Republican or a Democrat in this country, if you've got a close family member who is a covert agent, it does not matter who you voted for, it does not matter who they voted for, it is wrong to blow their cover and create personal danger for them. It is important for Congress to say that. It is important for my Republican colleagues to join me in saying that. It is important that this be a bipartisan statement. And I am hopeful that this resolution of inquiry, I am hopeful that my Republican colleagues will have the gumption to join us in saying, you know, what we need to do to get to the bottom of this. There is actually a little bit of hopeful signs that I can report to Americans, and that is that there was a suggestion by a Republican chairman the other day that he may entertain hearings that would look at issues pertaining to breaches of national security, including this one. This may not be the only issue we have in maintaining confidentiality of our national security. I think that is a positive sign. I hope that it is followed. I hope that we can fulfill our congressional responsibilities jointly, in a bipartisan fashion. So, in conclusion, I am just here to state one central American principle: Top secret spies serving the United States need to stay secret. No administration, no matter how powerful, no matter how popular, of either party should ever be able to get away and offer excuses for blowing the cover for an agent in this regard. I am here to say that the United States Congress owes an obligation to the American people to get to the bottom of how this happened. We need to make sure that this does not happen again, to make sure that Congress draws a line in the sand, to indicate how serious this issue is, and that this country can move forward in a bipartisan way to make sure that our national security is protected for all members of the greatest country in the world, which is America. And one of the reasons it is the greatest country in the world is that Congress has fulfilled an obligation to blow the whistle on executive branches of government when they have abused either the national security or the rights of Americans. And we need to make sure that job gets done.

Mr. INSLEE

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

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. I think you bring a very good point about Congress's obligation to investigate the executive branch. We do have a checks- and-balances system here. I think that is very important in this case, because essentially the President has said, as he said yesterday, look, this is a criminal investigation, so I have no responsibility whatsoever, he implied this, to find out what happened here. He says, you know, there is a prosecutor here, so I have no responsibility to find out if people who work literally in my office had outed a security agent for punishment for someone telling the truth. Whether there was a crime or not, any President, and this President has said so, should fire a person who discloses secret information of a covert agent's identity in part to punish a person who told the truth in criticizing the administration. Even if that is not a crime, it is a crime against the code of the west and the expectations of millions of Americans, where we do not allow our elected officials to punish us for criticizing the administration. We do not allow a President's agents to jeopardize a man's wife who is a secret agent, and expose their two young children, and this couple have two of the most delightful young children that you will ever meet in your life, and you can assume that this covert agent for the CIA mother has the same concerns about her children that you would when you are a covert agent and someone has blown your cover, and then they attack Mr. Wilson's wife. The President has an obligation that goes beyond simply upholding this felony laws of America. His obligation to Americans is greater than that. And he ought to call these people in and say, did you have anything to do with this? And if they did, he needs to make a decision about their continued employment. And yet he refuses to do that. That is most troublesome. You know, there are fifth amendment privileges. There are all of these little technicalities in the law. This is not a technicality, we are standing up for the proposition that Americans should not be abused in this regard. We are running out of time. I want to yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Watson).