Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. And I appreciate the opportunity to be your partner in this. And I would say to the folks on either side of the argument that disagree, they're both wrong, whether they're from the left or from the right. And the bottom line is this: the Fair Tax does everything good that anybody's tax proposal does that is good; it does them all and it does them all better. And I'm happy to take that debate anywhere in this land and have folks that will try that on and we'll finish second in that debate. I quickly yield back because the gavel is in the air.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman would yield, I'd slip another anecdote into this that comes from just last weekend. I was over in eastern Iowa doing an event, and I happened to get reacquainted with a young gentleman by the name of Michael Dicks. Now, he is 13 years old; soon he'll be 14. But when he was 8 years old--I've told this story in the Congressional Record in the past--he saved up his money to go buy a little box of Skittles. So he had his change counted out just right in his pocket--89 cents for a box of Skittles--and had to reach up to the counter, I presume, and got his Skittles off the shelf and put them up on the counter. And he counted out his 89 cents and the checker rang it up and said, that will be 96 cents. And he said, but the price says 89 cents. And the checker said, but you have to pay the tax--that's the sales taxes in Iowa--so that's 96 cents, young man. And he turned to his dad and he said, Dad, I have to pay taxes on Skittles? What a painful experience for an 8- year-old young man. But think of what that means if our taxes are transparent. That young man is going to grow up to be a conservative. He's going to put fewer demands on government. He's going to demand one thing--less taxes, less services. We're going to want to have more personal and individual responsibility, and we're going to let people provide for their own security in a lot of ways and achieve on their own. That is a cultural transformation that comes if you have a transparent tax and if you take the tax and stop punishing productivity and put it on consumption.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. History is replete with the Founding Fathers, literary giants of the time, philosophers of the time, who looked at the Greek democracy and they were appalled at what it had produced. They produced for us a republic instead. But many of them spoke eloquently about what happens when the public would realize that a majority of them could vote themselves benefits from the public treasury. Some of them said democracy ceases to exist; some of them said that will destroy our republic. But I want to guess that most of the people that were providing the wisdom at the time commented on their fear that this country would move towards a majority voting themselves benefits from the public treasury. So that is one of the reasons that we have a Republic instead of a democracy is because those of us who are elected as representatives of the citizens of the Republic are to have a higher responsibility than to listen to, let's say, people who want the fruits of someone else's labor and don't want to labor themselves. And so we're at this situation now where, in the early part of this country, there was a policy that you had to be a land-owning male of age and other qualifications in order to vote because they wanted the public policy to be established by people that had skin in the game. And today we saw a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget fail here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I'd like to have seen a stronger one, but it failed here on the floor of the House. And that was a constitutional amendment with a cap at 18 percent of GDP and a supermajority to raise taxes. Put some of that philosophy back in where it requires a supermajority to raise taxes, there is a restraint there that brings back some of that philosophy that helps offset the disadvantage that the working American has today who's paying those taxes. Your barber is at a disadvantage because some of the hair that he cuts is of people that aren't working. I'd say at least one out of every three heads of hair that your barber cuts is somebody that is in that role of 100 million Americans of working age who are not in the workforce, many of them are voting, they are voting themselves benefits from the public trough. And I'd suggest that we take the tax off of productivity in America, stop punishing production, put it over on consumption. And I'm just looking around for a bill number that I could attach myself to because I'm drawing a blank.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is always my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And I find it a bit ironic that I'm watching the Representatives from Florida, New York and Texas speak to the Speaker pro tem just previous to you about the election situation. I'm thinking about the 2000 election when it was reported--not substantiated to my satisfaction--but reported that as many as 25,000 people from New York voted both in New York and in Florida either for a President from Texas or one from Tennessee where the Speaker pro tem momentarily ago was from. That's a bit of an irony as I listen to this discussion that's going on about the election process here in the United States. And I think there's too little concern on the part of my colleagues whom I do respect and appreciate and count as friends in many respects. I think there's too much focus on how you get more warm bodies to the polls as many times as possible and not enough on the legitimate vote. Now as I listened, the gentleman from Texas said there's no demonstrable evidence that fraud is occurring. I would disagree. I think convictions are demonstrable evidence, and the convictions particularly in Troy, New York, of election fraud. I have seen it in the State of Iowa in a fashion that didn't result in convictions, but I have conviction that it happened. We have paid too little attention to election fraud in the case that I mentioned of people voting in the State of New York and in the State of Florida. If they do both, they surely can't be lawfully voting in each of the States. They may not be lawfully able to vote in either State, but voting in both States. And how does that happen, Mr. Speaker? This is an unexamined subject matter on the part of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. How does it happen that people can vote someplace where they don't reside? How does it happen that people can vote when they're not citizens? How does it happen that they can vote when they're not qualified to vote? How does it happen that they can vote in more than one jurisdiction for the same election, not necessarily simultaneously, but possibly simultaneously? And I can answer those questions to some degree how that is, Mr. Speaker. It works this way: the voter registration lists within the States are not integrated among the States. And so if an individual is registered to vote in New York, they can also be registered to vote in Florida, or any adjoining State for that matter, New Jersey, Connecticut, you name it. All we have to do is go in and register in one State and go register in the other State. In fact, in my own State, it was the case--and probably is not still the case--that the voter registration list does not integrate itself county to county in a definitive way. If John Doe registers to vote in Washington County and goes over to register to vote as John M. Doe in Jefferson County, there's two registrations there, and John Doe can vote in both counties, both by absentee. In fact, in my State where there's 99 counties, it's possible to vote in 99 counties simultaneously by absentee. If you just simply register yourself to vote, put up an address that is perhaps a false address, but an address of someone else, and if the voter registration is unique in any way--the initial could change, it could be ``John,'' it could be ``Jonathan,'' the middle name can change, and that's all it would take. The same person could vote multiple times in a State. Now think how many times that can happen when they're crossing the State lines. No one has yet calculated how many times an individual could vote in the United States if they really wanted to game the system. And we do hear credible stories of buses taking people across the State lines and buses taking people from precinct to precinct to vote multiple times. And who have been the advocates for same-day registration? Who have been the advocates for lowering the integrity of the vote itself? It's been the people on the other side of the aisle. It's been the Democrats. The things that Republicans bring to establish credibility and integrity in the vote are undermined by the Democrats on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. And why? Because they say that people are disenfranchised from their vote. And I would argue that legitimate voters, American citizens who respect the law and vote one time, one place in their legal residence, are watching their vote be canceled out by illegitimate votes. That happens in this country. Because we don't have convictions for people voting in multiple locations for the same election isn't an indication that it doesn't happen. We do have some convictions. We don't have large numbers of convictions as the gentleman from Texas may have implied but not specifically said. And the reason for that is because our voting laws are so open, so lax, and so insecure that it's nearly impossible to get a conviction. For example, in the State of New Mexico, if I were working the voting booths as an election worker in New Mexico, and I opened the polls up at, say, 8 o'clock in the morning, and I'm sitting there for the list of people that come in, and they say, I'm John Doe, I'm Jane Doe, I'm Jim Smith, if one of them walks in and says, I'm Steve King and I live at the address where I live, and I have not yet voted, I am compelled, even as an election worker, to let that false and fraudulent individual vote under my name. It's against the law in New Mexico and other States to challenge an illegitimate voter even when you know that they are illegitimate, even to the extent that they allege they are the person who is checking them off the list. They still have to let them vote, and they can't challenge them. That's how open these laws are. That's the kind of thing that you have promoted, the kind of thing that you won't defend, the kind of thing that I will yield to if you've got a defense for opening up and eroding the integrity of the vote in the United States. And many of these are State laws, I recognize that, but we give direction and leadership. We have the HAVA Act, the Help America Vote Act, that opened it up even more. And I think the gentleman from New York, who spoke within the last half hour--and I do agree on this. There should be a paper trail so we can audit the votes that are cast. Now, we've agreed on that. We've worked together on that cause. We have not arrived at that as far as a conclusion for this Congress is concerned that can be passed into law, but I think there should be a paper trail. And the gentleman from New York and I are in conceptual agreement on that, Mr. Holt. I appreciate that push. I do think it's out of the right spirit of his head and his heart, but it might also be from suspicion that the people that produce the electronic voting machines-- they may be Republicans, they may be Democrats, and that seems to color our judgment. Mine is. Don't give anybody a chance to cheat. And don't let the electronic voting machines be offered in such a way that some programmer can jigger the machine to give an advantage to either party. I think of the election situation that took place in Florida in the year 2000. I spent 37 days focusing on that. I was the chairman of the Iowa State Senate State Government Committee. It was my job to see to it that Iowa didn't become a Florida, the fiasco in Florida. So, therefore, I chased all the way through the Internet, everything that I could find, all the research that I could come up with on the election processes State by State, 37 days of focus. And then after that, not quite as focused, but I followed through on legislation which passed the Iowa Senate, and I discovered a significant amount of election fraud in this country. This is in the year 2000, well before the American public had heard of ACORN. I found, I believed, a significant amount of election fraud. There were a pair of brothers in Florida that had done research on election fraud in Florida, the Collier brothers, both of them now passed away. They've written a book on this and did a video on it, as I recall. And part of that video was walking into the maintenance shop where they took care of the machines that counted the punch-card ballots, the notorious punch-card ballots that were prevalent in Florida in the year 2000. And they have the video of the former election commissioner, who had retired from that and handed it over of course to his successor and gone to work maintaining the vote-counting machines, the machines that you would feed in a stack of punch-card ballots and it would run through, and the machine would read it and it would spit the number out the other side. And on that video--and it was available at the time. I don't know if it's available now. The man walked through his shop and pulled out of the drawer a gear. And he said, here's how we do this, we just grind one tooth off of this gear, and then every time 10 ballots go through it kicks an extra one in on our side. On videotape, there it was. And of course they got nervous afterwards and tried to do what they could to suppress it. Those kinds of things have gone on in America. They have gone on in Florida. They've gone on in other States. And the people that advocate for or defend more open election laws and process are, whether they realize it or not, enabling election fraud in this country. I want it to be as clean as possible, as legitimate as possible. I don't want a single qualified vote to be canceled out by an unqualified vote, let alone one that's designed to be fraudulent. I don't want buses going across State lines loaded with people that are in there to do same-day registration to vote and disappear. We had voters in Iowa that registered from a hotel room where the campaign had out-of-State workers. People don't live in hotels in these kinds of neighborhoods. It may happen in the inner city. It doesn't happen in a hotel in the neighborhoods I'm talking about in Iowa. These are people that come and stay a couple days, or 4 or 5 days, maybe a week, and they're gone again. These are folks that have a home of their own. It isn't a residence. When you register to vote from a hotel, where they didn't have a single guest that stayed longer than 2 weeks in the last year, we're pretty sure that if that's the hotel where they put their campaign workers that came from out of State, it's a pretty good bet that those votes that were registered in that hotel are votes from people that are not legitimate to vote within that precinct, within that district, or probably, in almost each of those cases, within the State. Here's another one, the statement made by the gentleman from Texas: If you have no Texas driver's license, you have to get someone to take you to the polls. Well, is that person a recluse? Don't they have an opportunity for an absentee ballot? Do they ever go to town, for example? And if they do, can't they time their trip to the grocery store to go on election day and vote? And the concern about the primary part of this, yes, I think there are some fraudulent primaries that take place, and there are some that are stacked up that I'd like them revisited. I'd like to see the Granite State revisit their primary process that lets people go to the polls and vote and--say the Democrats go to the polls and vote in the Republican primary. We in Iowa have a caucus system for our President, and there we require that they be registered either as Democrats or Republicans. They have to pick one or the other. And they don't get to switch sides that easily, although it is possible in the State of Iowa. But here's what needs to happen in this country. We need to have voter registration lists that are free of duplicates, free of the deceased, and free of felons where the law applies. And they need to be certified to be citizens, not a motor-voter law that people go in that don't speak English, that get their driver's license and then they ask them a question, check this box, check that box. If they don't understand English, they don't know what they're saying yes to. They don't realize that they are under penalty of perjury if they claim to be a citizen and they are not. And so they will say yes; they get the nod; now they're registered to vote. Now a noncitizen--quite often illegal--is in a position to cast a ballot. And we saw 537 votes be the difference in the State of Florida in the year 2000 on who would be the President of the United States; the Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world decided by 537 votes in the State of Florida. Now, every time they recounted those votes in Florida, I think that Republicans on this side and Democrats on this side will agree that it came back to that same number. And if you've got some other narrative, again, I'll yield to you, you can tell me what your narrative is. But the consensus now, after all this analysis, is we've got a legitimate vote there. George Bush was not the appointed President; he was the elected President. But it was very, very close in the year 2000 and it did pivot on Florida. But how far apart would that election have been if one could actually know which of the votes were fraudulent and which were not? The last time I came to the floor I heard the minority whip come to the floor and make the statement that we didn't have evidence--again, as we've heard from the gentleman from Texas--no demonstrable evidence that fraud is occurring. And the gentleman from Maryland's statement was close to that, although not exact. I'd argue the opposite. We have ACORN--ACORN that admitted to more than 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations, more than 400,000 confessed-to fraudulent registrations. This is the acorn that I carry in my pocket, Mr. Speaker. I carry it in my pocket every day to remind me what happens to this country if we let organizations like ACORN or advocates that seek to diminish the integrity of the vote take over. If they do that, then they erode the faith of the American people in the election. You can have fraudulent elections, but as long as we believe that they're legitimate, the American people are going to accept the results because we do have great faith in this constitutional Republic, which is guaranteed to us from Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, by the way, shall guarantee a republican form of government. But this country respects the election process, and that's why we accept the results of the election process. And if we lose faith in the election process, legitimate or not, then the very bedrock that the foundation of our country--the Constitution--sets on crumbles and the Constitution itself crumbles, and we crumble into some form of anarchy because we will have lost our integrity in our election process. Now, is it too much to ask that if someone goes to the polls that they would bring with them a picture ID? I wonder if any of those folks have ever gotten on an airplane or if they've ever gone to rent a movie and they're asked for an identification to support their credit card when they rent a movie. That's not too much to ask. I've never heard anyone come to this Congress and say: I demand my civil liberties. I demand that I be able to rent a movie without any identification, without any credit card. Why can't we just do that on my word? I'll walk in and sign this paper that says, I'm Joe Blow and I live at 100 Exotic Avenue and I want to rent an exotic movie, and I don't want to have to have identification to do that. We've never had anybody ask for that this Congress. They know they don't have a civil right to do business in this country without identification. If the merchant requires that identification, they willingly supply it. And yet to choose the next leader in the free world, the Commander- in-Chief, the President of the United States, the advocates that have stood on the floor have said to the effect of, anybody that walks up there and attests that they are a living, breathing human being and that they live somewhere, they can vote and they can register on the spot, and they can vote and they can walk away not showing any identification whatsoever. And in some cases it just takes someone to attest to that they are the individual that they say they are. So they don't really even need to misrepresent themselves. They can walk up and say, I'm Joe Blow, I want to vote here, and I live in this precinct. They sometimes will lie about where they live, but they can actually say who they are. And then they can walk to the next precinct and say, I'm Joe M. Blow, and then I'm Joe N. Blow at the next precinct and O. Blow and P, Q, R, right on down the line. They could put a number in for their middle name and vote in 99 counties in the State of Iowa, and they can do it in many of the other States as well. We do not have the integrity in our election process that we need. I know that it's being gamed. I also know that we're not getting the convictions and the prosecutions because we don't have the structure in place even to get those convictions because we've eroded the integrity to the point where there's not a basis there to bring that kind of a prosecution. But then we watch George Soros invest in the campaigns of multiple secretaries of state across the country. And where was it? Swing States. And what happened in those close elections where George Soros was a campaign contributor? We know what happened. Those real close elections, in the last minute votes showed up that were surprises, and the election turned. We have at least one Senator down the aisle in my neighborhood that arrived in that fashion, Mr. Speaker. And so I am disturbed about the results of these elections if they do not reflect the actual will of the American people, the actual will of the people within the jurisdiction that should be voting for those candidates; and I believe we need to enhance the integrity of the ballot. I would shorten the terms that a person could be asking for an absentee ballot, and I would tighten the conditions and so that if it's reasonable for you to vote in person on election day, do so. These elections should not be a drawn out, 45- or 90-day absentee ballot affair. The more we do the absentee ballots, the more we cast our ballots from afar, the more likely it is we're voting for a candidate who's passed away during the campaign, and the less likely it is we will know all the things we need to know to make a reasoned judgment about that candidate. In fact, at spots we have elected a United States Senator who was, who had passed away in a tragic plane accident. And I regret that that happened, but the people went to the polls and voted to elect that person who was passed away. I'm for a voter registration system that's free of duplicates, deceased and, where the law applies, felons. I'm for a picture ID, a government-issued picture ID that has legitimacy, and I'm opposed to motor voter. I'm opposed to satellite voting, and I'm opposed to same- day registration. And all of these components of the election process, I add to that again, there needs to be a paper trail for the ballots. Let's have integrity. Let's have a certification that they be citizens from the secretaries of state of each of the States. And then, if we don't have enough integrity in our ballots, something's got to happen where we crunch the databases of the voter registration against those of the other States to find out how many duplicates there really are. And there would be many. So I have less faith in this than most of the American public does; and if they had the exposure to what I've had the exposure to, I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that there wouldn't be the confidence in this election process that the American public has; and that lack of confidence might result in a different kind of a result here within this Congress and within the States. I think that they would impose more integrity in the ballot process. And so I didn't come here to speak about that. I listened to the gentlelady and the gentleman that spoke in the previous period and felt that I had to express the other viewpoint. I actually came here, Mr. Speaker, to talk about how we transform this economy here in the United States. And being from Iowa, I've listened to the economic proposals of each of the Presidential candidates. I listened to them make their pitch for their vision for America. And I said last January, February, March and on throughout the summer, clear into August, at least, that we don't have a Presidential candidate on the Republican side of the aisle that's put together an economic recovery plan. Yes, they have pieces. Yes, they have components, and they do tweak it around the edges, and they'll argue that one piece or another is what it takes to bring our economy back around to where it belongs. Well, I've watched this economy devolve downward, and it has. It's a deep trough. But worse than the deep trough is the length of this trough that we're in. And it is an economic fact that if you look at the patterns of economic growth and decline throughout the history of the free market world, one will see that whenever there has been a Keynesian economic theory applied, the more vigor with which it is applied, the longer is the trough for a recovery. If one will look at the grandest experiment of Keynesian economics we had seen up till this point it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new deal that he unleashed on the American people, starting at the beginning of his term. The Stock Market crashed in October of 1929, and we saw Herbert Hoover caught up in the throes of that climactic shift economically that was a global trend. Herbert Hoover had--everything he'd touched had turned to gold up to that point. He believed that he could steer government to solve the problem. Well, he went to work to try to steer government, and it went the other way on him. Cool Cal Coolidge had a pretty good handle on it earlier, in the previous century, and that was: Don't just stand there, do nothing, because the free market system will recover itself. Well, instead we had Smoot-Hawley; we had trade protectionism. We had then the New Deal that flowed out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We had billions of dollars that ultimately were spent throughout that period of time, at least in today's dollars. And the CCC camps, the WPA programs, the TVA, the list went on and on and on that came out of Roosevelt. Throw another plan at it, throw some more money at it, borrow some money, grow the Federal Government and put money into the hands of people. And if you do that, the theory was, according to John Maynard Keynes, who was the most influential economist of his time, and his curse lingers on us in this Congress today, that if you would get money into the hands of people, they would spend it and that would stimulate the economy and the economy would recover. In other words, we could spend ourselves into prosperity, according to John Maynard Keynes. Now, Franklin Delano Roosevelt bought into the Keynesian economic theory with more vigor than George W. Bush bought into the Henry Paulson stimulus plan, or should I say the TARP plan. $700 billion tossed in there to pick up toxic debt was the plan. But back in the thirties it was FDR's plan to follow Keynes' directive, which was put money into the hands of people and get them to spend and you'll stimulate the economy, because they believed that our economy was consumer-driven. Well, Mr. Speaker, every Keynesian experiment that I know of in history, and that includes Roosevelt's New Deal, it includes the Japanese, and it absolutely includes Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan, plans his approach to this. And by the way, the President, President Obama has told us directly, face-to-face, that he believes that Roosevelt lost his nerve; that he should have spent a lot more money in the thirties; that because he lost his nerve and didn't spend more it brought about a recession within a depression, and unemployment went up because Roosevelt didn't borrow and spend enough government money. Well, I know what it's like to compete with a government that has more money than the private sector has. I know what it's like to try to hire somebody off of unemployment. I know what it's like to train employees, put them on a benefits plan, and have them finally in a place where they can be a full-time employee that can yield a return on the work that they're doing and you can count on them being to work every day, and look at how their career is laid out working for your company, and have the Federal Government or the State government, or the county government, or even the city government come in and outbid you for those services. And how do they do that? Well, they do that by looking around and thinking, here's this trained employee. What's it take to get them? And they will up the ante until they can hire this trained employee, and inevitably that employee will take the offer of the higher paycheck and a benefits package that competes or exceeds the one that you can offer from the private sector and go to work for the government where they don't have the responsibility, where they don't have to work as hard, where the hours are more predictable, where the risk of employment is less and it's more stable. I recognize that. But better wages and better benefits and all of those comforts that come with a government job work against the private sector. And so private sector employers then find themselves faced with having to go out and hire more help and train more help and see that those employees roll over into the government employment. The real downside, though, is this. Where does the government come up with the money to pay more wages and pay better benefits, which they have been increasingly doing over the last generation? By raising taxes. The government raises taxes. It raises taxes to get the revenue to bid against the private sector. And then the government comes out and makes an offer that says we're going to extend unemployment benefits out to 99 weeks. Now, it makes it harder yet for the private sector to recover because they're competing with the government's offer, the government's offer to hire employees away or the government's offer to pay people not to work. And where does that money come from? This Federal Government borrows it. This Federal Government borrows it. It borrows it from the Chinese, borrows it from the Saudis, borrows it from multiple countries around the world. And about 50 percent of it, to be fair, comes from investors within the United States domestic funds that are invested into U.S. Treasury bills, for example. So a government that believes that it can stimulate an economy by stimulating consumption and completely ignores the part of the equation that requires that there be production for the economy to function. And I would point out that if no one is producing any food, clothing, or shelter, if no one is producing any transportation links out there in the private sector, if no one is making available any of the recreational facilities that will attract those dollars, there's not production. If there's not production, there's no place for anyone to spend their money. This economy is production-driven, not consumption-driven. And we must, to grow out of this economic situation that we're in, we must produce goods and services that have a marketable valuable, both domestically and abroad. When we do that, and we will eventually do that, this country will grow out of this problem that we are in. But we must get government off of our back. We must keep a competitive tax rate for the rest of the world. We must reduce our regulations. We must stimulate our entrepreneurs. And this Republican side of the aisle has now for about 3 years been saying, Where are the jobs? Mr. President, where are the jobs? Well, I've heard that echo many times in this Chamber and across through the media outlets in the country. But I would submit that there is something else out there that's required before there will be any jobs, and that's the prospect of profit. Investors, employers, entrepreneurs must have a prospect for profit before they will invest their money or put their time in or take the risk of hiring employees, especially with ever more regulations, especially with ObamaCare pouring down over everything that we do. We are not going to get to a recovery until investors, entrepreneurs, and employers can see an opportunity for profit and begin to realize that profit because you can't write paychecks for employees from deficit spending very long. You must have profit in order to pay employees. So if there's going to be jobs, and we want Americans to go to work, you must have profit in order to fund the wages. And I don't know why I don't hear that from anybody else. It's as if this word ``profit'' is a dirty word. No, it is a very good thing. America is a country that has to build itself on profit, on free enterprise, capitalism. I just took a look in my desk drawer today. There are flash cards in there that were published in 2008. These are the flash cards that enable one to be trained for naturalization here in the United States. So if you want to become an American citizen, and you come to America legally, get yourself a green card, and what you do is you have to take the test. And part of that test is, what's the economic system? Free enterprise capitalism. That's on the test. It's a little head's up, Mr. President. I hope you could pass that test. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's always my privilege and an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor. As is often the case, I come here and hear the end of the debate that has gone on before me and feel compelled to address it from a bit of a different perspective. As I listen to the gentlemen and the gentleladies talk about the right to vote, I think it would be important for us to remind the body that there has to be a qualified voter. It isn't that everybody has a right to vote. You have to be old enough for one thing, and you need to be an American citizen for another. As I've watched things change over my adult lifetime, the integrity of the vote has been damaged. The gentleman from Maryland made the statement that there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud. I know that it's difficult to put this into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, but I would hold this up as, let me just call this, evidence number one: This is an acorn. It's an acorn that I carry in my pocket every day. I carry it there every day to remind me of what that organization ACORN has done to the integrity of the vote in the United States of America. How much more widespread would you have to be than operations going on in nearly all, if not all, of the 50 States--the major cities--and millions of dollars spent to pay people to go out and fraudulently register voters? There are over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations that this acorn symbolizes that they have admitted to going out and purchasing on a commission basis: We're going to pay you to get these fraudulent voter registrations. Oh, they can be legitimate, but they can also be fraudulent, and ACORN didn't differentiate between the two. They just paid out in commissions. They violated the laws of the State of Nevada, and they violated the laws of the State of New York. This Congress shut down the funding to ACORN, and the national organization of ACORN collapsed. So for the gentleman to say--and I quote--there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud, I think there is massive evidence of widespread voter registration fraud, and from that flowed fraudulent votes as well. We have watched the integrity of the voter registration and the election system be undermined over the last generation in almost a calculated way. Issue after issue has eroded the integrity of the qualified voter in these ways: motor voter during the Clinton years. If you show up for a driver's license--and we know how well that works. How many of the--I think it's 15 of the 19--September 11 hijackers had driver's licenses, that breeder document for false identification? You show up for a driver's license, and they say to you in their native language, Do you want to register to vote? If you answer in the affirmative in any language, they put you down and register you to vote. People don't understand that they're bound by perjury laws. We don't know about the prosecutions that may or may not be taking place. It's not considered to be as serious an offense by, let me just say, the Department of Justice as it should be. After all, they have their prosecutorial discretion. They have testified before the Judiciary Committee, where I serve, that they select which laws they want to enforce and which ones they do not want to enforce. With regard to voting rights in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, we know how that works. They have a policy that has been testified to under oath under several different scenarios that they will not move a voting rights case if it damages a minority. That's the policy of the Department of Justice, and it's the policy of the most recently departed Loretta King, who found that, in Kinston, North Carolina, that voted like 70 percent of the communities in America to have nonpartisan local elections for mayor and city council, they voted to abolish the partisanship and go to nonpartisan elections. So that would be a common practice, and 70 percent of the cities and municipalities have done that. But in Kinston, North Carolina, they were forbidden by the Department of Justice because, if you read the Department of Justice's agent's letter on that--and that was Loretta King--African Americans--no, she said ``blacks''--wouldn't know who to vote for if they didn't have a ``D'' beside their names. Therefore, she forbid them from abolishing partisan elections in a city council and mayor's race in Kinston, North Carolina. That's one example. There is another example of the intimidation that took place with the New Black Panthers of Philadelphia, who were standing out there, calling people ``crackers,'' smacking their billy clubs in their hands, taking an offensive posture in paramilitary uniforms. That's all on videotape--most of America has seen that--and we saw this Justice Department write off the case. The case was made. The convictions were there. This Justice Department canceled those convictions and released everyone except for the one individual, the most egregious violator, who got the tiniest little message. He got an injunction: Don't do this again right here in this city at least for the short term. That was the injunction. Tom Perez, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, testified under oath that that was the most severe penalty that they could have under law. Not true. Under oath, he uttered words that were not true, and we should bring him back before the committee and call him to account for this. So, Mr. Speaker, I want every American citizen who is qualified to vote. I don't want anybody slowed up at the polls and intimidated because of any reason. But to imply that people are denied their right to vote in this country as if this were 1960 all over again really is a false premise to establish this on. We're all about legitimate voters, and I'm all against illegitimate voters that erode the vote and dilute the vote of the legitimate voters. I just mentioned motor voter. Absentee ballots themselves have been stretched out, and they can pass through numerous hands, and the various States have different policies. And whenever a ballot goes from one hand to another hand to another hand, it opens up the opportunity for fraud. I can remember a case in Iowa where near the end of the election, they found 444 ballots, absentee ballots that had not been turned in yet that were--where did they find them? Oh, Democrat campaign headquarters; 444 absentee ballots. So, Mr. Speaker, there is an example of the election fraud. I would call it widespread voter fraud that is taking place. There are convictions in Troy, New York, for example. I also listened to testimony before the Judiciary Committee by the Secretary of State of the State of New Mexico who had to admit under oath that if I were working the election board and am a resident of New Mexico in good standing and am registered to vote, if I went in to work and figured that I would vote at the end of my shift, and somebody walked in, and they said that they are Steve King--me--and they lived at my address, whatever it might happen to be in New Mexico, even if they alleged that they were me, and I am working the board, I can't challenge them by law in New Mexico. That's a law that encourages voter fraud. So what happens when they call up an hour before the polls close and they say, Sally, we know that you voted, but your husband, Joe, is registered to vote, and he's not been in to vote yet. Can you send him down? And Sally says, Well, no. Joe is in a truck in Maine. He isn't going to be voting. And 15 minutes later, somebody shows up and says, I'm Joe, and he votes as Joe. How do you catch that? How do you police that? I suggest you do so with a picture ID, a government-issued picture ID. We need to have a number of things go on. We have people voting on the rolls that--dead people are voting. People are voting in New York and voting in Florida; that happened in the year 2000. We know about those cases. When you have fraud within the States and that fraud flows over State lines, and when people get in buses and take a ride across a State line and go into the polls, and they vote same-day registration in voting, it opens up the door again for fraud. And the people that want to game it and invest money in it are marginally winning those close elections. So this acorn that I carry in my pocket every day, it isn't because I have such an abiding dislike for ACORN, as an entity. But it's because I understand--and I want the American people to understand--what happens to the United States of America if the people that are perpetrating widespread voter fraud get their way. And it's this, Mr. Speaker: the Constitution of the United States is the foundation of this country. It is the foundation of our law. It is the supreme law of the land, coupled with Federal law that's written within the guidelines of the United States Constitution. We often look at it, if we hold on to the Constitution--because if we fail, our Republic will fail and collapse as well. And I embrace the Constitution. I hold on to it. I have one in my pocket every day, and I refer to it on a regular basis. But there's something underneath that Constitution. When you think of the edifice of a building, and you go down and you build a foundation, a foundation on sand, for example, or a foundation on something unstable, no matter how good your foundation is--the Constitution--no matter how good that foundation is, if it's on unstable soil, it will collapse. No foundation can be sustained just by the strength of the foundation itself. And the underpinnings, the bedrock upon which this foundation of our Republic, called the Constitution, sits is free elections, honest elections, legitimate elections, elections where qualified voters, American citizens go forth and redirect the destiny of the United States of America. But they have to be free elections. They have to be open elections. They have to be legitimate. They have to be fair. And we cannot have noncitizens voting. We cannot have fraudulent votes. We can't have dead people voting. We can't have transients that are not American citizens voting. If that happens--and it is happening--and if America loses confidence in the election system that we have, this bedrock that upholds our Constitution collapses. That bedrock of legitimate elections collapses. And if it does, the Constitution itself falls with it, Mr. Speaker. That's why it's important that we have voter registration lists that are free of duplicates. And where the States have laws prohibiting the voting of felons--like Iowa, for example--free of felons, free of deceased--free of deceased, duplicates, and felons, we require a picture ID, and we need to require that the Secretary of State certify that the registered voters are citizens, and we need to enforce it, and we need to police it. And we need to say to the Department of Justice and the attorneys general within the States that have jurisdiction to bring these cases, that you must set this as a high priority. Prosecutorial discretion, when there's an assault on the bedrock that is the underpinning for the foundation of the United States, the Constitution, when that assault comes, it must be enforced to the fullest extent of the law. And this society and this culture and this Congress should rise up and demand that we have legitimate elections in this country. When you think, Mr. Speaker, that a single State and a handful of votes, 537 votes in the State of Florida in the year 2000, determined the President of the United States--it may well have been for the next 8 years rather than the next 4 years--and each recount of those votes in Florida came back to the same or a very similar total--there's not a legitimate argument any longer that Al Gore really won that race. He did not. History cannot write that. Even the recount down by The Miami Herald comes back to George Bush winning marginally by very nearly the same number that the Secretary of State certified by 537 votes. But how many votes in Florida were fraudulent votes altogether? How much closer was that election because of election fraud? How many people voted in Florida that also voted in the State of New York? How many deceased voted? How many felons voted? We've got some records of those. And even though the felons that are voting that we know of are not in great numbers, this could have come down to a handful of votes. This could have come down to one vote. And if a State doesn't have a legitimate election process, and that State's electoral votes determine the President of the United States, and we would stand here and argue that anybody that came into the polls should be allowed to vote because, if not, their vote might be disenfranchised even though they took no responsibility to register themselves to vote, to go to the right polling place to vote, that they should be motor votered and same-day registration votered and walk into any precinct and vote, and that can be sorted out after the fact. That happened in my State. My former Secretary of State, Chet Culver, who later became Governor, amazingly gave the order that anybody could vote in any precinct at any time, and they would sort that out afterwards. So the election that he presided over--where Iowa is the first-in-the-Nation caucus, we were the last in the Nation to certify the vote. And he is the one that also supported an executive order to grant the felons the right to vote, even though a State statute specifically prohibited such a thing. I came to talk about a different matter, Mr. Speaker, and I will endeavor to do that. But legitimate elections with integrity in our voter registration rolls, requiring citizenship, and devoid of duplicates, deceased and felons, where the law applies and a picture ID where the people that maybe can't figure out how to vote under the rules that every other citizen can meet, such as a picture ID, will pop out their picture ID to rent a movie, for example, or to get on an airplane is another example. They can have their picture ID, but they can't be bothered to show up with that. When we're choosing sometimes by a handful of votes the next leader of the free world within the jurisdiction of the States, that if one single State has a corrupt election process, even one that isn't as clean as it can be, even one that's just sloppy where illegitimate, illegal voters cancel out the votes of the legitimate voters and, thereby, by a marginal vote--like we saw in Florida, perhaps--change the results in that State and by doing so shift the electoral votes over to one side or the other for the Presidency, and America gets a President that we really didn't vote for because we didn't have integrity in the voting process. And we could watch, not so much just the fraud, but if America loses confidence in the electoral system, if we don't have faith that the decisions of the American people emerge through the election process, then we lose confidence in our Republic altogether, and that's when the United States, our Constitution, could collapse, Mr. Speaker. So this is a high and important goal that we have. And ACORN was cut off from Federal funding by a massive outpouring of votes in the House and the Senate. When they saw what was going on inside ACORN, even some of the strongest left wing Democrats that sit over here voted to cut off the funding to ACORN. I had introduced the first amendment to cut off ACORN about 4 years earlier, but I'm going to carry this in my pocket because they're reforming. They're reforming in localities and cities and States across the country again. They're coming back, some of the same faces with a little bit different names. They're organizing, by the way, in the Occupy Wall Street effort in New York. Should've known. You know, we could have called that shot early from the beginning. But, Mr. Speaker, I want to make a couple of comments in a transitional discussion here. I didn't set myself up with a segue, and so I'll just jump right into it, that is, I have the privilege to represent a good part of Iowa here in the United States Congress. And I've had the privilege to be involved in and engaged in the first-in- the-Nation caucus process for quite a long time now. It came about somewhat in this way, and that would be an Iowa legislature from years gone by decided to establish the first-in-the- nation caucus. A lot of the rest of the country didn't pay much attention to it. It didn't attract the Presidential candidates in the fashion that they would have envisioned early on. But in 1976, a little-known candidate and low-profile candidate for President who was the Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, came to Iowa. He saw that opportunity that the first-in-the-Nation caucus provided and Jimmy Carter spent a lot of time in Iowa. He traveled the State and got to know people. He built a network and organization and friendships within the State. By the time the caucus rolled around in 1976, Jimmy Carter won the caucus in Iowa, which was a surprise win. People didn't see it coming. The polling didn't show it. And that surprise win was a springboard that launched Jimmy Carter on to the nomination of the Presidency out of this little-known, first-in-the-Nation caucus we have in Iowa. And the State law that was introduced says that we shall be the first competition in the Nation, and it automatically moves the State of Iowa forward if any other State moves their date. This year it will be on January 3. So it's earlier than usual, earlier than I would like; but it will be a significant competition that evening that will give the country the first look at what Iowa activists think about who should be the next President of the United States. Taking us back in history also, something to reflect on, and that would be Jimmy Carter in 1976 won the nomination because of the springboard of the Iowa caucus. If he had lost the Iowa caucus, I don't think we would have heard of Jimmy Carter after that. His campaign very likely would have died. That was 1976. That was the year, by the way, that Ronald Reagan challenged unsuccessfully Gerald Ford for the nomination of the Presidency. Well, 4 years later, Ronald Reagan was a player in the Iowa caucus, but he didn't work Iowa very hard. George H.W. Bush did work Iowa very hard, and Bush won the caucus in Iowa. Reagan expected to, but he took Iowa for granted and George Herbert Walker Bush won the caucus in Iowa in 1980, and then Ronald Reagan had the pressure on him when they went to New Hampshire. And there in New Hampshire Ronald Reagan had the famous line: I'm paying for this microphone, and he pulled the microphone forward, and that was the shot. That was the vignette that went around the country and around the world, and it exemplified the authority with which Ronald Reagan came to the debate and the authority with which he had governed as Governor of California and the authority with which he would later on become the best President of the 20th century. But that moment in New Hampshire was a moment for Ronald Reagan that launched him out of New Hampshire and on to the nomination and on to the Presidency. But if you'll remember, Mr. Speaker, Gerald Ford was under serious consideration for the nomination as Vice President of the United States. And I'm actually glad they didn't make that decision. A former President as a Vice President would be too much friction, too much conflict, and not enough room for the new President to operate. But George Herbert Walker Bush was nominated and became the Vice President under Ronald Reagan, for two terms, 1980 through 1988, or 1981 through 1989 would be another way to describe that. And was, of course, the nominee and was elected to become the President of the United States. So I would just speculate, Mr. Speaker, that had it not been for the Iowa caucus victory of George H.W. Bush, he very likely would not have been named the Vice Presidential candidate since he ran a competitive nomination competition against Ronald Reagan. Gerald Ford was not named Vice President; George H.W. Bush was. He became Vice President for 8 years, and then President for 4 years. And would we have had a President George W. Bush? Had we never had Bush 41, we maybe would never have had Bush 43. So the continuum of history has shifted itself dramatically on the results of what was prior to that time a very low-profile, not-very- significant caucus in Iowa. Now since that period of time, it has been leveraged up again and again and again. And in the last caucus, we saw what happened with Barack Obama emerging. His movement began in Iowa. Iowa gave him his launch to New Hampshire. It wasn't my choice, obviously, Mr. Speaker; but there's a legacy that will play itself out again January 3 of this year. I'm watching all of the Presidential candidates, and I'm watching how they perform and how they resonate with the voters. I have said since January, concluded that it was a slow start on the Presidential race. You know, most people weren't yet clamoring for a Presidential race. I thought we should start seeing and we should be seeing more activity, and so we did some things to initiate Presidential activity in the State, including hosting a Presidential event on March 26 at the Marriott Hotel in Des Moines. That seemed to galvanize and launch this caucus process. A number of the Presidential candidates came there and made their presentations, and we intermixed it with good thinkers on policy issues of the day. That was one of the things that took place. But even then, as I listened to the Presidential candidates, and as I have the privilege to talk with them and get to know them, and it is an extraordinary privilege to know these Presidential candidates in this way, I like them all. I respect them all. Mr. Speaker, every one of them, in my opinion, would make a better President than the one we have. I will have no hesitation about endorsing and campaigning for the eventual nominee. But there have been a couple of things missing. One of them is an economic policy plan. As I listened to the candidates, they would talk about what they would repeal, but I wasn't hearing very much about what they would do on the proactive side. So I even toyed with this idea, Mr. Speaker, and the idea of advancing some of those repeals in my own way. But as I watched the Presidential candidates, they want to tweak the tax policy some and they all want to repeal ObamaCare. I think that looks like plank number one in the platform of the nominee or any of the candidates as they compete for the nomination going forward. Plank number one, repeal ObamaCare. Then they have their tax cut plan and how they would structure the taxes. But I have not seen all year long a significant economic proposal. One of those that has emerged now that people can identify with is Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan. The 9-9-9 is a bumper sticker that does get people's attention. They can remember it. It has a unique ring to it, and it causes them to pay attention and look into it and understand each of the three components. Well, there's a marketing brilliance in the 9-9-9 plan. I'm going to try to avoid discussing the economic components of it, but there's a marketing brilliance. Then Mitt Romney had, prior to that, a 59-point plan. Mr. Speaker, I'm sorry, I can't get through 59 points. What I can't memorize, I can't defend and explain. But subsequent to Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan, then Rick Perry's 20/20 plan. Let's see: cut, balance and grow, or pretty close to that. I call it the 20/20 plan--that also caught people's attention--to go to a flat tax. Steve Forbes is one of the advisers on it. It looks like Art Laffer is one of the advisers on Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan. Both are very respected economists. I'm one who goes for a fair tax, so it's hard to move me on these other policies. But we're starting to see now the Presidential candidates differentiate themselves on their economic policies. But, Mr. Speaker, what I bring this up for is that I'm looking yet for a candidate for the Presidency who can articulate a vision for America on what their view is, what their vision is on how to take America to the next level of our destiny. What does America look like in a generation if they're able to bring their policies into play and lead with the bully pulpit of the Presidency of the United States? What does America look like? What are our fundamental principles that can be inspired by a President with that kind of vision? And how does that mesh in, how does that couple with the policies that they would advocate? I take you back, Mr. Speaker, to Ronald Reagan, again, who for his entire political career talked about America as the shining city on the hill. He didn't talk about the shining city on the hill that he promised we were necessarily going to have. He said, America is a shining city on a hill and standing strong and true on a granite ridge. That is pretty close to a Reagan quote. It may not be exactly right, Mr. Speaker, but this gives you the concept. All of his political life, he had the vision for America as a shining city on the hill. He articulated it. When we heard it from him, maybe we didn't see it with the clarity that Reagan did, but we knew he saw it with the clarity. That was the vision thing. That is what inspired America to come behind Ronald Reagan, and that's what inspired America to become, again, this resurgent Nation where the malaise speech was put behind us and the imagination, the hope and the robust future for America unfolded from the Reagan administration. That's the biggest reason why we see him as the greatest President of the 20th century. The next President of the United States needs to articulate a vision, needs to tell us what America looks like, what are our foundational principles, how they will refurbish those pillars of American exceptionalism, how they can strengthen the measures of life and marriage, how they can strengthen the family, that basic building block of our civilization, and how they can restrengthen the constitutional understanding. I want to hear from Presidential candidates how they would make appointments to the Supreme Court of Justices who will read and interpret the Constitution, the text of the Constitution, to mean what it was understood to mean at the time of ratification. We have a President who is intentionally nominating activists to the Federal courts. It's a tragedy that those kinds of judges would remove the understanding of the Constitution from the American people. And so far we've kind of moved forward accepting the idea that the people in the black robes understand more about what's written and what is meant in this Constitution than other people. All of us in here took an oath to this Constitution. Our Federal workers take an oath to this Constitution in the executive branch. Our troops all do the same thing, and many of our State officers do the same thing. You can't take an oath to a Constitution that is living and breathing. You can only take an oath to a Constitution that means what it says. And some of them take the oath and set about seeking to amend it de facto, amending the Constitution by redefining it. I want a President who understands the pillars of American exceptionalism, who can articulate them and can transfer them into the future as the timeless values that have gotten us to the present; one who can articulate the great, great difficulty of moving to a balanced budget, how we get a balanced budget amendment that will guide this Congress so we can be bound by our obligation to our constituencies; one who has an understanding of foreign policy; and one who has a full and complete tax plan that transforms America. All of those things are things that fit within the vision. And the vision, right now, is what I've tuned my ear for. And I'm hopeful, Mr. Speaker, that we will be able to hear this vision come from the Presidential candidates and, before we get into January, that we'll understand or hear with that clarity from the next President what their shining city on the hill speech is for us. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 806 I was delayed in leaving a meeting with a constituent off the House floor during this two minute vote series and was unable to reach the floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 802 I was not present to vote because I was participating in a public meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers regarding the historic flooding that we have experienced along the Missouri River this year. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 801, I was not present to vote because I was participating in a public meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers regarding the historic flooding that we have experienced along the Missouri River this year. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor. And before I go into my presentation, I want to go into the subject matter the gentleman from Texas has led this previous Special Order on, just as a means of discussing a way to look at victims' rights. For me, I was caused to reexamine the situation as a victim. I had had some heavy equipment that was destroyed by vandals back in the year 1987, a year that shall live in infamy. It was in the middle of the farm crisis years. A lot of that damage was uninsured, but we did catch the perpetrators. A long, long story; it was hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. I followed through on everything, seeing myself as a victim who had an obligation to assist the prosecution as a citizen and a victim would and should. And I remember sitting in the courtroom in Sac City, Iowa, when they brought up the trial of one of the perpetrators. The bailiff announced to the court: This is the case of the State v. Jason Martin Powell. And I sat there thinking, how is it the State versus the perpetrator? I'm not in this equation. I'm not even the versus; I'm just here as a spectator. And so I began to examine what that really means. What it means is that the State and the law enforcement component, in this case the State, is the intervenor. If you have a grievance with someone, and I certainly had a grievance with the people that destroyed my equipment and nearly destroyed my business, before the law and order days, that would be settled in some other fashion, likely in some violent fashion. And if you go back a couple thousand years or 3,000 years before the law was established, like Mosaic law, or Roman or Greek law--but as law was established, it was to eliminate the vigilante component of this, and the State stepped in and intervened. Another way of looking at it would be when everything was owned by the State. The subjects in, let's say, old Western Europe, old England, the subjects were the property of the king. The State supplanted the king. The subjects and everything they owned were the property and the ownership of the king in England, so when you see old English common law and you see how it transfers into the United States, and it becomes the State v. Jason Martin Powell, the perpetrator, convicted perpetrator, I will say, and I can say his name in the record here now, that transfer was, if you committed a crime, you shot one of the king's deer, if you murdered or assaulted one of the king's subjects, you were committing a crime against the king. So in our society when you commit a crime, you are committing a crime against the State. I'm taking us all to this point, Mr. Speaker, because once the State is satisfied that they have established justice, the victim doesn't really have anything more to say about it. The victim is not in that equation. My position needs to be developed more than it is, but my point is if the State is going to intervene, then the State has to enforce the law, then the State has to protect the citizens adequately. And when they fail, then what's the obligation of the State? They are not ensuring us to be protected from violent crime. They're simply doing the best they can without a consequence for the State. All the way around that circle is this. Back in those years, I remember a study that was done, and that study will come to me in a moment. It was a 1995 study. In that study, they put a value on each crime. And I remember that a rape victim--they valued murder at around a million dollars; rape at about $82,000. Now, I can't imagine who would submit to rape for $82,000 dollars, but that was the quantity. Then they also put in that study that a criminal who was loose on the street--an average criminal loose on the street--would commit $444,000 worth of crime in a year. Well, it costs about $20,000 a year to lock them up. They do $444,000 worth of damage to the society in a year. But that damage is not compensated. That comes out of crime victims in great, huge, whopping chunks of their lives, their security, and their property. So I would just suggest that if the State were liable for all of the damage that's caused by perpetrators, we would have a more effective criminal justice system. I'm not advocating that we bring that forward in this Congress, but I just discuss that way of looking at this, how we got to the point where the State is the intervenor. Because the State is the successor to the Crown in old English common law, and a crime committed under the Crown was a crime committed against the King, because he owned everything, and it damaged his ability--even if it was the serf--to produce. So we are now the successor philosophy, but we've forgotten this part, that victims are paying the price. The State is not paying the price. It's no longer a crime against the State, even though the State is the intervenor. I would yield to the gentleman from Texas and thank him for presenting this. It just sparked that memory, and I wanted to put that into the Record and let you know how I think about crime victims.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Texas for making those points. We the people have vested our authority in our government, and that's how that transfer takes place. But I remember clearly the bailiff saying, ``The State versus,'' and that rang my bell; and I looked back through history to understand the root of that. I would point out also that the $82,000 for a rape victim, I believe, was quantified in this way--loss of work, medical treatment, psychological treatment; that kind of impact that was just simply the economic impact on her life, not the emotional impact and the trauma. But even still, to quantify that--and the Department of Justice has quantified crime also with different values. And I don't recall them well enough from that chart, but I know there's a 1992 Department of Justice study that laid some values out. I think it would be a plus for us, even though pain and suffering and the loss of life is immeasurable in a dollar form, if we could quantify it in a way we begin to understand what crime does to society. That would be helpful if we could move down that path. It's been a long time since there's been a real broad study done in this country that laid out the complete loss of all of the crimes in the United States that are committed. I would think it's in the billions of dollars. We accept it because it's a victim here and a victim there. It's not like they're all coming together in one large group. It's scattered out across our society. And the higher the level of crime in your community, the higher your tolerance has been because of the continual incidence of that violence. I appreciate the sentiment from the gentleman from Texas, and I wanted to add some words to the sentiment that you brought to the floor here tonight in this Congress.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, again, I thank the gentleman from Texas. I came here to talk about a couple of other subject matters, Mr. Speaker. The one that's on the front of my mind that I want to make sure I address is the Missouri River flooding that has taken place all down the Missouri River drainage area all summer long. I think for the rest of the country it hasn't been brought to their attention how bad and how devastating this flood is. You can pick your river in the world and you will know that every river has flooded in history. That's what they do. That's why we have river bottoms. They're flattened out because of the floods. Whether it's the Mississippi River flood or the Missouri River flood or any of the floods that we've had up and down--the New Jersey floods, for example, and the other floods in the northeast part of the United States--they have been devastating; and we have watched on television as we've seen people scramble to get above the waterline and to sandbag to protect the assets that they have. We watched as the water flooded into New Orleans several years ago with Katrina and the human suffering that went on down there. Some of us went down and did what we could. Myself, I've made four trips down after Katrina to try to lend a hand down there. I've contributed in some way, and I say humbly, in a small way, Mr. Speaker. But this summer, Midwesterners--people in Missouri and Kansas and Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana--have all suffered from the greatest runoff experienced in recorded history from the Missouri River. This greatest runoff is accumulated this way. It wasn't particularly dramatic in snowcap in the wintertime, not particularly dramatic by March 1 as they measure that snowcap, but several things contribute to the runoff. It's the snow up in the mountains all the way up into Montana; it's the rainfall that takes place there; and it's any dramatic rainfall events. All of those things came together in the perfect storm fashion--late season, significantly higher snowcap up in the mountains, and then early spring rains that saturated and became a significant runoff. On top of that, a very heavy rainfall event around particularly the Billings, Montana, area where they got 10 to 12 inches of rain; 8 inches, I think, in Billings and 10 to 12 across a vast area, some of it up to 15 inches in some areas. So the circumstances were that we had all the snow that needed to come down--a large, large amount of snow. We had a lot more rain than expected. The ground was saturated so it didn't soak in. That was running off from broad rains across that had taken place in April and in May. And then on May 22, the massive rainfall that fell in the Billings area and around that was unprecedented in its volume. All of that together created a runoff that if you think of it in these terms, that the largest experience that they had seen was actually 1997. Prior to that was 1881. In 1881, there were 42 million acre-feet of runoff. That's water a foot deep over 42 million acres; all of that volume, if you just calculate that volume, running off into the Missouri River. There are six dams that have been built in the upper Missouri River, reservoirs created by them. And these six dams start in Montana and string down through North Dakota and South Dakota. The furthest most downstream one is Gavins Point at Yankton, South Dakota, and that would be the last valve that controls the flow of the Missouri River from that point, just upstream from Sioux City, all the way down to St. Louis. That's the control valve at Gavins Point. Forty-two million acre-feet of runoff in 1981, 49 million acre-feet of runoff in 1997, 61--or I guess they said last night 60.4 million acre-feet of runoff this year in 2011, roughly 20 percent more than we had ever experienced before. If you would exempt '97, it was a third more than we had experienced in 1881. These six dams were designed to protect us downstream from serious downstream flooding in the largest runoff event experienced. That was 1881. He used the commonsense logic of the floods of 1881. The floods in 1943, the floods in 1952 accelerated the construction of the Pick Sloan program. By 1968, we had built the six dams. They were completely operational for the full season of 1968. They were built to protect us from serious downstream flooding, and they were designed to the design elevations necessary to protect us from the largest runoff ever. And the Corps of Engineers has always held 16.3 million acre-feet of storage as the volume necessary to protect us from the largest runoff ever, 1881. That hasn't changed. Over five different versions of the master manual, the document that governs how they manage the river, hasn't changed at all; but neither had the largest experienced runoff in history, 1881. Now, I have to quantify that. The 49 million acre-feet in '97 was for the breadth of the year. You compress the 1881 into several months--I believe 4 months of runoff, but it was a shorter period of time. So the monthly volume of runoff was greater in 1981 than it was in 1997. And so the Corps of Engineers had managed this all these years. In 113 years, we had not seen the kind of runoff that we saw in 1881. But it was designed to protect us from the largest runoff ever. This year, we have the largest runoff ever, and the discharge that previously, coming out of Gavins Point, that last valve to release into the river that goes all the way to St. Louis, the largest discharge was 70,000 cubic feet per second. This year, because of the large volume, the discharge became 160,000 cubic feet per second, substantially more than twice as much volume as we've ever seen before coming through Gavins Point. Designed for a large amount of that, it did hold together and the system held together very well upstream. But here's their problem, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the Corps of Engineers has determined that this runoff this year is an anomaly, that it's a 500-year event. And so in a 500-year event, they wouldn't change their management of the river substantially because they argue that it's unlikely that it will ever happen again. My response to that is, a year ago, standing here, no one knew we were going to get the runoff in 2011. The odds of this kind of flood happening that has happened to us in 2011 weren't any greater than they are for the same thing happening next year. And it's the equivalent of--the risks for 2012 are the same as they were for 2011 for a runoff of that magnitude for a number of reasons, but the simple one is this: if you flip a coin twice in a row and it comes up tails twice in a row, what are the odds it will come up tails three times in a row, the third time? Now, that's just one of those classic examples of statistics. You might think that the odds get to be one in six or something like that; but, truthfully, the odds are 50/50 that that coin will come up tails the third time in a row. If you flip it on its tail six times in a row, what are the odds that it will be tails the seventh time? Fifty/fifty, because we don't know next year whether there's going to be any more or any less runoff than we've had this year. The odds are the same, except that because of the damage to our system, our levees, and our storm protection, because of all of that damage, we're not as prepared to deal with a runoff of that magnitude as we were coming into 2011. So the risk is greater, even though the odds of it happening again next year are the same. And no one, no mortal that's looking at 113 years of records--and maybe a little more than that--can tell you what a 500-year flood event is. It's not within the capabilities of mortal man. And the reasons are, because if you're going to calculate the odds of a 500-year event, you would have to look across several thousand years to try to find a pattern to see if you could make that prediction. How many times did this kind of runoff happen in the previous 2,000 years or the previous 3,000 years? I mean, 3,000 years would only be six different increments of 500-year events. Would it happen six times over 3,000 years? Who knows. We have no records to go by. So it's a judgment call made by somebody sitting in an office somewhere--probably in Omaha--that this is a 500-year event. Therefore, they're not going to change the way they manage the river. They got by, okay, for 113 years--not managing the river all that time, just since 1968. But this time we got burned really badly, Mr. Speaker. And I want to make this point, that to visualize this, this thing that Members of Congress haven't seen--not very many of us--the public hasn't seen hardly at all, think of this, think in our mind's eye of what it looks like to go up near the northwest corner of Iowa, South Dakota border--Sioux City, Iowa--and look at a Missouri River bottom that was flooded with water all summer long from around the first week in June until the first week in September. That's a mile and a half wide where normally it's a few hundred feet wide. And go downstream a few more miles and the river is 8 miles wide hill to hill. And go down stream a little further to Omaha, right where Interstate 680 goes across, and the water is 11 miles wide. And once it goes through Omaha, Council Bluffs and Glenwood, that's compressed it down within the levees that miraculously held or we would have had a similar-to-Katrina event in Council Bluffs where we had at least 30,000 people living below the water level in their homes. If there's a breach in that dike, they get flooded like they did in New Orleans. But downstream from there, the river that was narrow enough to go through the cities widens out again four or five, six miles wide on down into Missouri--and Sam Graves can tell you the rest of that story. Now, that's water from hill to hill in many cases, and water that's not sitting there stagnant, Mr. Speaker. This is water that is flowing out in the channel, 11 to 12 miles an hour, and out against the hillside, oh, let's just say six miles away from the channel, or seven. That water is still flowing at four to five miles an hour, and 12, 14, 16 feet deep. Farm buildings, businesses flooded up to the eaves--they're built on the highest piece of ground in the bottom, by the way--this water flowing at four or five miles an hour, dropping sand, debris--not as badly as I thought, but debris--and sand now that's laid out over thousands of acres, some of it 6 feet deep, everywhere, drifts of sand, dunes of sand that are 10 or 12 feet deep. The trees that are up and down the river that have stood in water for 3 months, most of them will be dead next year. Farms have been destroyed. Thousands and thousands of acres have been destroyed. That's the magnitude of this flood. Now we have to put the pieces back together, and some people have lost a lot and they can't be made whole again. There are others that will find a way to put it back together. There is a lot of indecision with floods; that's the nature of floods. And we have trouble getting definitive answers to people. But if they're under water June, July, August, into September, if their building sites are surrounded by an ocean--and I have boated to these farm sites. I've flown over it a number of times, and they are sitting in the middle of an ocean where it might be five miles to dry land. And that's the happy family home where they've invested their future. We can, at the minimum--even though we have some programs, we have some individual disaster assistance, there is some ag assistance, there is also some public assistance for the public utilities that are there, but there is not enough to put the pieces back together. The least we can do is manage the river system so that this doesn't happen again with the similar runoff that we have this year. We built the Pick Sloan program, the six reservoirs to protect us from the largest runoff ever experienced. Now we have a larger runoff. I cannot comprehend how it isn't just simply an automatic to lower the water level marginally in the upper six reservoirs to have the storage capacity to protect us from this type of runoff. And just to do the math on it, the bill that I've introduced requires the Corps of Engineers to manage the river to protect us from serious downstream runoff in the event of the largest runoff in history. All it really does in the end is it replaces 1881 with a 2011 flood year. It is not particularly complicated. Yes, they have to lower some water levels; but if those water levels are lowered, the effect of that isn't nearly as dramatic as some of the people have described. First there were some, I will say, some things that alarmed people when the Corps announced that they would have to lower the water levels 12 feet, and that was too much, and they couldn't manage the river. I looked into that. It was 12 feet on the upper three reservoirs, not on all six; and that was with 70,000 cubic feet per second at discharge at Gavins Point, that lowest valve that we have there just upstream from Sioux City. After a series of questions, they did another analysis. They raised the flow of discharge up to 100,000 cubic feet per second, and just the adjustment of that in the upper three reservoirs changed the 12-foot lowering level elevation down to six. We should be able to deal with six because, historically, since 1968, on average, Fort Peck has been 7.4 feet below the target elevation. We just lower the target elevation 6 feet; it's still higher than the average of what Fort Peck was. That's also true of each of the dams in the top three, which are the only ones they wanted to adjust because they're the largest. So that's the effect of the bill, but it also has the effect of protecting us from flooding, serious flooding downstream. And I'm asking my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to sign on to this bill, particularly those who represent the Missouri River bottom area, those of us who have been affected by the flood, those of us who represent Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. And by the way, all the delegation in Iowa, Democrats and Republicans, have signed on and endorsed the bill. Most of Nebraska has. A lot of the Missourians that are affected have. I'd ask the others, take a look. This isn't complicated. The red herrings that have been drug across the trail have been addressed and corrected. And the meeting last night in Omaha was, I will say, volatile and dynamic with people that have suffered all summer long. They want to be able to make plans on whether they should be investing in trying to put their farms back in shape. They can't do that, Mr. Speaker, unless we give them some assurance that we're going to manage the river to protect them from serious downstream flooding. And while that's going on, we just set that highest priority up. Congress has the authority, in fact, we have the obligation to set the standards for the Corps of Engineers. If we fail to do that, they are, then, whip-sawed by all of the litigation that comes of all the special interests. Those special interests can be taken care of below the level that I'm suggesting, and they can have those same levels of priorities that they had within that--irrigation, barge traffic, electrical generation, recreation, fishing. All of those things can work at that level without hardly even noticing it upstream. But you notice it downstream, and the billions of dollars that it takes to put this back together from the damage can never be matched by the recreational investment that goes on upstream. They'll have it anyway. It won't be diminished in any appreciable way. We need to have the protection. Mr. Speaker, I believe that's H.R. 2942. I have trouble remembering that bill number. I could be wrong. It's the King bill, and I appreciate all those that have cosponsored it; and I'm hopeful that the rest of the Missouri River Representatives will take a look at it. I'm under the understanding that there will be a companion bill introduced in the Senate. Hopefully, it will be bipartisan. That will give us some more incentive to get this done this fall while there's still time to address this issue. If we fail to do so, this river will be managed for another year the same way it was in this past year. Could I inquire as to the amount of time I have remaining?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will then just conclude this discussion on the river and not address any other subject matter. We have not, as a Congress, looked at this Missouri River issue. It's a natural disaster that has been, to some degree, mitigated by the Corps of Engineers. Some of those decisions were awfully tough on a lot of people, and I believe we have an obligation to manage this river system, to protect us from serious downstream flooding, to set that priority and to set the levels, not at 16.3 million acre-feet anymore, that was 1881, but to increase those million acre-feet, not all that much, but enough to protect us from that serious downstream flooding. If the Members of Congress that represent those areas come together unanimously, we can move a piece of legislation through this Congress, and I would think we could do it under suspension. It's a no-cost piece of legislation. It is a commonsense piece of legislation. It really isn't all that tricky, although we went through all 450 pages of the master manual, and it was hard to write; but now it's a pretty simple solution to a complex problem. I would urge my colleagues to take a look. I would thank all of those involved for their public statements last night in Omaha and all the meetings that will be taking place up and down the river. I thank the Corps of Engineers for their cooperation in getting me accurate data to work with. And I look forward to resolving this issue, at least for the long term, while we help put people back together in an individual basis in the short term. With that, Mr. Speaker, thank you for your attention, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his leadership on this issue, and I'm privileged to be on the floor with a lot of pro-life activists. I rise in support of the Protect Life Act, and I think we should talk about what is really going on behind those dollars that would go into abortion clinics. It's been called cruel legislation. Think about how cruel it is to take a pair of forceps and pull a baby apart piece by piece in dilation and extraction, or D&E. Fourteen to 24 weeks, a fully formed, perfect, perfectly formed and perfectly innocent baby pulled apart piece by piece, put into a pan and added up to see if all the pieces are there. It is ghastly, it's gruesome, it's ghoulish, and it's grotesque, and we should never compel taxpayers to pay for something that we couldn't bear the sight of. And you'll never see a video of it for that reason. It is a process that degrades our entire culture. And to argue that women can't spend their own dollars to get an abortion just simply isn't true. There is a side piece in this that still prevails, and there's always that cash right up to the Planned Parenthood. So, Madam Speaker, I urge support for the Protect Life Act, and I congratulate the people that have stood for innocent, unborn human life so many times on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this time to recognize a constituent of mine, Dr. Robert E. Dunker. Dr. Dunker recently retired from Western Iowa Tech Community College after a distinguished 20-year career. During his time at Western Iowa Tech, Dr. Dunker initiated and oversaw infrastructure improvements which have contributed to new program development and enrollment growth at the College. The infrastructure improvements have allowed Western Iowa Tech to create several new programs of study and to procure state- of-the-art equipment to best prepare students for what they will encounter in the workplace. I can confidently say that I have known few people over the years who possess Dr. Dunker's vision and determination to effect positive change, not just for the students at Western Iowa Tech, but for the community at large. Dr. Dunker recognized early on that to meet the educational needs of the area, Western Iowa Tech needed to transition from a vocational/technical school to a full service, comprehensive community college, with arts and general science classes complementing the school's existing foundation of technical and career education. Dr. Dunker also saw the need to develop partnerships with area K-12 schools, postsecondary institutions, and the broader education community in order to leverage the educational resources of Western Iowa for the betterment of all Iowans. I know that Dr. Dunker will be missed in his capacity as President of Western Iowa Tech, not only by me but by all of the stakeholders who have built partnerships and working relationships with him throughout the years. However, knowing Dr. Dunker as I do, I know that retirement will not diminish his passion for effecting positive changes in western Iowa. I look forward to continuing my relationship with Dr. Dunker, and I wish him the very best in all that's before him in retirement.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives for the minutes allocated, and I have enjoyed this privilege many times over the years. I think this is the greatest deliberative body in the world, and sometimes we can do a little better than we actually do, but in the end, the voice of the American people does come here. I look back on the intense debates that we had when we went through the throes of a national debate. Over one summer, it was cap-and-trade, or we called it cap-and-tax, the idea that we would limit American industry, chase American industry over to places like China and India where they would pump smoke up into the atmosphere and send us back goods that were built more cheaply than we would build them under American regulations here. That legislation did pass this House. It was killed in the Senate, but that consumed a summer. The next summer, we had the debate of ObamaCare. I could go into that quite deeply, Mr. Speaker, but I will say that it was an intense debate that took place on the floor of the House of Representatives, on the floor of the Senate, and on the floor of almost every home in the United States of America, in the streets of America and on the grounds surrounding the Capitol and then, of course, in all the office buildings around the Capitol. For the first time that I know of in history, a Member of Congress called people from all 50 States to come here to petition the government for redress of grievances, peaceably petition the government for redress of grievances. That was the plea of the American people; 40,000 to 60,000 people surrounded this Capitol in November, on a Thursday in November, November 5 of that year. Later on in the spring, they came back again and again and again. For the first time in history, the entire Capitol grounds were surrounded by people, not just a human chain touching their fingertips or holding hands all the way around, but a human doughnut six and eight deep everywhere, with thousands of people standing in the curves and the corners. They came here to say to the people that were duly elected representatives of the American people here in this Congress, Keep your hands off of my health care; we don't want Obama administration care. That message echoed in this building. On that night that ObamaCare was poised for passage, the people doing business up here in the Rules Committee couldn't do business for a time because the echo in the windows from the people outside was so great that they couldn't have a conversation to be able to actually conduct the business of passing a rule that brought ObamaCare here to the floor. And there was hokum involved in the process even down to the point of circumventing the filibuster in the Senate and going through a reconciliation package and passing legislation on the promise that other legislation would be passed, and passing legislation on the promise that the President would issue an Executive order to--get this, Mr. Speaker--amend the legislation that was on the floor. That's how bizarre this process became. For a couple of years, a Member of Congress didn't have an ability to bring an amendment to the floor to even force the debate or a vote trying to perfect legislation. That's how far the wheels came off of this Congress. The American people were delivered something that they had resoundingly rejected. That was ObamaCare. In the aftermath of those shenanigans that took place that consumed the summer and the fall and the next spring and longer, the American people went to the polls the following November. They sent 87 new freshmen Republicans here to Congress in exactly the fashion that the Founding Fathers imagined, and that fashion was to have the House of Representatives, with elections every 2 years, be the quick reaction force, that in the period of 2 years--at that time, history didn't turn as fast as it does today, but it's still, I think, soon enough to bring people here to start to reverse the mistakes that are made by the previous Congress. Now, we are not in a position to undo some of those bad things that have come upon this Congress right now. I thought we had that leverage a couple of times already in this Congress. Those moments have passed. And I believe, Mr. Speaker, that now, if we can find and create that opportunity, I am all for it, and I am looking for somebody to lead us into a way that we can undo some bad legislation. But where we are today in this deliberative body is that we put the brakes on most bad things that have been happening here in this Congress, and we are laying the groundwork to call in the reinforcement within the visioning of the Founding Fathers so that we can undo the bad things, and it's going to take some help in the United States Senate and in the White House. So here's America, as we had a conversation here on the side earlier. There was, a couple of years ago, I would say now, a serious discussion about whether I would go back to Iowa and run for Governor, and the questions that I had, Mr. Speaker, in front of me were this: that we were looking at what turned out to be the Dodd-Frank bill, the financial regulation bill. We were looking at cap-and-trade, or cap- and-tax, which is a more accurate way to describe it. We were looking at ObamaCare. I am thinking, I would have to spend 14 months back in Iowa campaigning for that job. And if I carried my luggage into the Governor's mansion and looked out the window onto an America that had been saddled with this burden, the burden of Dodd-Frank, the burden of ObamaCare, and the burden, perhaps, of a cap-and-tax piece of legislation, it would be impossible to undo, and it would be impossible to fix America from a State office such as I have mentioned. Those things weighed heavily on me. Today, here's where we are. This process has moved forward. Cap-and- tax has been essentially killed, temporarily killed, I will say, in the United States Senate, thanks to the filibuster and thanks to the work of the people on that side. It did pass through this House under the Pelosi Speakership. ObamaCare is now the law of the land; but it is repealable, Mr. Speaker, and that gives me great hope. And Dodd-Frank also is repealable. So when I look at the Presidential candidates, who also are poised, seeking the nomination to challenge the White House, the Senators that I am convinced will come into the United States Senate, the new blood that will come into the House of Representatives with even deeper convictions on the Constitution and constitutional conservatism, the idea across America is this: Government has mismanaged so much of what has come out of this Federal Government, they want a smaller, more responsive Federal Government. They want a government that does less with less, a government that balances the budget, and they want to have their freedom back. The American people want to have their liberty back, Mr. Speaker. I would ask this question, and it's this that Ronald Reagan asked in 1980. He said: Are you better off today than you were 4 years ago? And the American people answered with a resounding ``no.'' And they voted ``no'' on Jimmy Carter and ``yes'' on Ronald Reagan, and we got the greatest President of the century, who served two terms and put us back on track and got us believing in ourselves again. Today and throughout this 14 months or so until the next election, we have to be asking not the question of are you better off today than you were 4 years ago--not a lot of people can say they are--but the question really is, Mr. Speaker, are you more free today? Do you have more liberty today than you had 4 years ago? Do you and your children and your grandchildren have more potential to enjoy the fruits of their labor? Is this society more open to success? And is America moving along and continuing to be the dominant economic force in the world, the dominant cultural force in the world, the dominant foundation for Western Civilization? Are we going to continue to be that, or are we going to watch the continuum of this history wind its way down, and will we trail in the dust the golden hopes of all humanity? Is that the future for this country? Now, there's not an image that I can see that the President has laid out for us on a direction on where we can go. I have watched what he has done. I think I know what he believes in. I have looked him in the eye when he has told me what he believes in, and one of those things is Keynesian economics. The President told a group of us on February 10, 2009, to be precise, that Keynesian economics works. He said to us that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal actually did work but that Roosevelt lost his nerve, and he pulled back in the second half of the 1930s when he should have been borrowing and spending more money. And because he pulled back, according to the President, it brought about a recession within a depression. Unemployment went up, and then along came World War II, the greatest economic stimulus plan ever. That was a little classroom lecture. Well, it was a statement, not necessarily a lecture, to be fair, Mr. Speaker. But that was the President's position on that day, and I'm sure that's something he has held for a long time. He didn't make it up while he was standing there. It came out of him as a conviction. That's how it sounded to me. I'm of the exact opposite conviction, Mr. Speaker. I'm of this conviction: that Keynesian economics always was a mistake. Oh, and for the record, John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of his time. He came to prominence in the 1920s and then even more prominence in the 1930s as he proposed that the Federal Government should get money into the hands of people so that people could spend the money. And if they spent the money, it would stimulate the economy. That's the Keynesian approach. Even though he said this facetiously, I believe it illustrates the Keynesian economic theory, this narrative. And this is a narrative told by John Maynard Keynes, himself. He said, I can solve all of the unemployment in the United States of America, and here's how I would do it. Just give me an abandoned coal mine and I will go out into that coal mine--he'd send other people, actually--with drilling rigs, and they will drill holes down all over the coal mine. And then we'll stuff them full of cash. And then we'll fill the coal mine up with garbage and heap it full of garbage and then turn the entrepreneurs loose, which would then solve all of the unemployment in America. Just to flesh that out a little bit, Mr. Speaker, if you turn the entrepreneurs loose on an old coal mine that is full of garbage and has holes drilled with cash in it, they've got to go in and move the garbage off. They've got to locate the holes. They've got to clean out the holes. They've got to get down to the cash, and doing all of that will require somebody to rehandle the garbage again, somebody to set up the showers, somebody to take care of the medical needs and the food needs, and after awhile the banking needs when they start to come up with the cash. See, he understood how the economy goes when you get money flowing in the economy, how that actually happens. But what Keynes missed was, where was the cash going to come from in the first place? You can't go out and borrow money and bury it and have people dig it up and think you're doing something productive. That's the equivalent of paying each other to do each other's laundry. You've produced nothing extra from it; you just trade dollars. What has built America, the strength of this country economically has been free market capitalism competition. And because of the competition, we have had inventors and entrepreneurs. We have had more patents, trademarks, and copyrights per capita, at least, than any other country in the world. And the reason for that is because Americans are natural entrepreneurs. We're natural creators, and we have the resources to do it. And I don't just mean gold and oil, and I always have to put corn in there as a natural resource, Mr. Speaker. I know you use it for grits; but for us, we feed most of it to livestock and turn some of it into ethanol. But all of those resources that we have in this country, Americans have developed them. We've grown them. We've mined them out of the Earth. We've turned our timber into valuable products. We've cut trees and turned them into ships, and we traded around this world. And we did that early in this country. American clipper ships were the class of the world. We have had this success because we produced. We produced goods and services that had a marketable value both domestically and abroad. That is still what will bring America out of the economic doldrums, producing goods and services that have a marketable value both domestically and abroad, not spending money, not the little sugar high of handing somebody money and saying here are your food stamps, here's your unemployment check. Do nothing except go out and spend the money. That is only at best a sugar high. And for the economy, it's temporary. Even if Keynes was right on any part of it, it would be this: Dump in billions, hundreds of billions, and in the case of the President of the United States, we're talking about trillions of dollars dumped into this economy. The best you can hope for with a Keynesian economist on steroids, which is our President, is this: that he might have diminished the depths to which we otherwise could have fallen to some degree. We will never know how much, but what I guarantee you is the depths that might have been diminished, certainly the breadth of this trough of the economic downward decline that we're in is much broader, and it's going to take us a long, long time to recover. And a way to explain that, Mr. Speaker, is this. If you are a small business, a large business, or a government and if you go out and borrow too much money and you have a revenue stream coming in and now you have to service the debt, you have to pay the interest and the principal on the debt. The banker's in there. He's going to collect his money. So you have a fixed income and you have borrowed more money, which means more interest has to go, and it has to also pay off the principal or you can never stop the drain, and it weighs you down. There are businesses--I'll actually say many of them in my State-- that have actually, literally, not figuratively and not virtually but literally, been under water all summer long in the floods of the Missouri River. If all they have for relief is a small business disaster loan and they can get a preferential interest rate of maybe some number approaching 4 percent interest, still if they get stacked with too much debt, they can't have the income to service that debt. The same with the country. The United States of America borrows money and hands it to people and tells them: You don't have to work for this. You don't have to produce anything for this. We just want you to spend it. That's your patriotic duty, to take the money that we've borrowed from the Chinese and the debt burden we put on our grandchildren, and put it into people's hands and say it's the patriotic thing. Take your food stamps and take your rent subsidy and your heat subsidy and your unemployment check, and go engage in commerce. That's patriotic. No, what's patriotic is carry your own weight. I mean, John Smith said clear back in the 1600s: no work, no eat. That's also part of the New Testament. Where he lifted that from, I believe, was in Galatians: He who would not work would also not eat. That doesn't mean that we don't want to take care of people that can't help themselves, but people that can help themselves need to help themselves and all of the rest of us. We're hearing the statements come out of people that generally sit over on this side of the floor, Mr. Speaker, this belief of economic stimulus. The former Speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economic recovery. You get a lot of bang for the buck when you pay people not to work, and they will go out and spend that money immediately. Therefore, we should pass out unemployment checks and stimulate the economy. That statement is ridiculous where I come from, Mr. Speaker, to pay people not to work and somehow in that formula it stimulates the economy. Another statement came from our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who consistently--at least it shows up in the media hits consistently--has said that food stamps are also an economic stimulator, that for every dollar in food stamps that you hand out, you get $1.84 in economic activity. Well, that may be, but if you had somebody actually producing something in exchange for that food stamp, you would have the economy growing. You would be building capital within your economy. We have this massive amount of capital here in the United States of America, and it's built within--part of it is cash. Part of it is the real estate value that's been improved by putting buildings and fixtures out. Part of it is the equipment that we've manufactured, and it's the utilization of that. All of that is part of the capital base of America. Our knowledge base is part of the capital base in America. And here we have the Federal Government and the President's proposal with his jobs plan, by the way, continuing to want to extend unemployment benefits another year, believing that that's an economic stimulus plan. Now, if I were a younger man, or let's just say a boy who was looking at this economy from the simplistic way of what pays and what doesn't, and if someone said to me when I was 16 years old, ``Well, here's how we stimulate the economy. We're going to hand out unemployment checks and food stamps,'' that's what we're hearing, Mr. Speaker. We're hearing this out of the people that speak for the White House. Handing out unemployment checks and handing out food stamps is an economic stimulus plan. I'm back to: Produce goods and services that have a marketable value both here and abroad. When I say that, we have to compete with the value, the prices of those goods other countries can produce so that we have an opportunity to outsell them when they want to sell here and we have an opportunity to outsell them in their countries. We have to be better at some of those things. But this economy will not recover if we're going to continue to borrow money, put the debt on the heads of our grandchildren, and think that spending money solves anything. I have a little granddaughter that's closing in on a year old now. She's just taken her first steps, about 10 or 12 of them last night as a matter of fact. Her name is Reagan Ann King. When she was born into this world, her share of the national debt, what she owes to Uncle Sam when she took her first breath as a new American citizen and a miracle from God, was $44,000, her share of the debt. And we worry about a college student that has a degree with a $40,000 student loan to pay off. I'll submit, Mr. Speaker, they at least have a diploma, in a likely case, and they have an education in every case and an opportunity to earn that back. And from the time they leave college and the toll starts to ring on their student loan, they have an opportunity to go to work and to stop the interest and pay the interest and start to pay the principal on their student loan. But this little girl, Reagan Ann King, that's just taken her first dozen steps last night, this little girl doesn't have a chance to start earning that back. Her $44,000 worth of debt is accumulating interest every day, every day of her little life until--she's turned around a year old--until she's 10, until she's 20, until she gets an education that's good enough for her to start actually earning her share and paying taxes and starting to pay down this national debt. How much is that $44,000 going to be before she gets a chance to stop the bleeding just for her? By the time she's 10 and starts fifth grade, it will be not $44,000, but $88,000. That's an actual calculation rounded to the nearest thousand. It's not just 44 times 2. That's $88,000. Welcome to fifth grade, Reagan Ann King. Now your share of the debt is $88,000. How does that make you feel? Study hard. We'll give you another Republican approach here, Mr. Speaker, that I think illustrates the right attitude. It caught me a little off guard. I had a conversation with my oldest son and his little 6-year-old daughter, who was telling me her favorite subject is math. Our family is in the construction business. We do a lot of work that requires engineering. And so I immediately said to her, Study hard; focus on your math. That means if you're good in math, you can be an engineer, and your daddy needs an engineer. Her daddy said immediately, I don't need another mouth to feed. She can study hard and carry her own weight and make a living in the world. Now, think about the difference in that. Rather than opening up the door and saying, Study hard; become an engineer; I can use one in the company--which I think he could--he said, She can make her own way. The attitude when you're 6 years old, growing up, that you're going to go out into the world and make your own way, even though by then there's maybe a third generation company, it surprised me that he saw the world so clearly and instantly directed his child to, Stand on your own. Mr. Speaker, we need more young Americans growing up being told on a daily basis, You're going to have to carry your own weight. You're going to have to make your own way. You're going to have to build an education and plan your future and control your own destiny. When you do that, the most patriotic thing you can do is serve God and country, in that order. Take care of your family. Take care of your State. Do your thing to contribute to our society and our economy. There is--well, there is, but there should not be--a free lunch. Mr. Speaker, I'm listening to the Presidential campaign and listening pretty closely and talking to a number of the candidates. What I'm not hearing is any of the candidates really addressing the situation we have of, in the United States, there are 72 different means-tested welfare programs, Federal welfare programs. Seventy-two. There's not a person on the planet that can even name them all from memory, let alone read, learn, understand, and draw judgment on how they interact with each other, let alone whether or not they motivate people to take care of themselves, go to work, do the right thing, be responsible. We like to think so. Seventy-two. Why does the Federal Government have 72 different means-tested welfare programs? That's because there were 72 different constituency bases out there that certain Members of Congress decided they could slip into one bill or another and send a press release back to their district and say to somebody, Look what I did for you. Here's your rent subsidy. Here's your heat subsidy. Here's your ADC check. Here's your TANF money. Here's your food stamp money. And then they have the audacity to come to the floor to ask for more and more money for rent and heat subsidy at the same time. I don't want anybody to go cold. I don't want anybody to go hungry. But neither do I want to see generations of Americans who have been conditioned and trained that they don't have to contribute to this society. I will give you an example. It was written up in the Des Moines Register about 15 years ago where they went into a residential area in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Odd that they would go from Des Moines to Milwaukee. But I remember the article. And they did a study in a six- block by six-block segment; 36 square blocks, six squared. It was a residential area of families whose predecessors in the thirties had moved up to Milwaukee from the gulf area in Mississippi--generally in that area, Mississippi and Alabama--to take on the brewery jobs that blossomed in Milwaukee when prohibition was over. These families that had moved in had moved up there for the jobs. Three generations later, they surveyed all of those residences in a residential area 36 square blocks, and there wasn't a single employed male head of household in any of those homes in 36 square blocks. And as I read through that article twice, because I wanted to see what I missed, the lament by the author was--seemed to be, at least--that we couldn't bring jobs to the people that lived in that neighborhood in Milwaukee, so wasn't that the failure of government that we couldn't get jobs established there. I read it completely differently. If your granddaddy moved to Milwaukee to get a job, why can't you, as a grandson, move somewhere to get a job? Why don't people migrate to take a job? And the answer to that question is: seventy-two different means-tested welfare programs. They're being paid not to. The safest thing you can do is stay in a home that's maybe been in your family for two or three generations, that may well be paid for. And you've got the system of the public benefits all figured out, and so those checks come in once a month and take care of all of your worldly needs. And if you need a little cash aside from that, then you can go out and work in the black market, work in cash, or trade on the side. That's what we have for economies. I've sat in those areas in those communities and just watched the traffic. And what does this trace back to? Well, I have a viewpoint that I think is completely objective, and it's just illuminated a little more because I come from farm country, but it's this: All new wealth comes from the land. If you watch any dollars that are flowing anywhere, if you trace them back through the economy, whoever has that dollar in their hand, if you could trace it back to the person that handed them that dollar and the person that handed the second person the dollar, and go on back, where does it take you if you trace each one of those transactional exchanges? It will take you back to the land. In the world, all new wealth comes from the land. You can mine it out of the Earth in the form of gold or platinum; you can pump it out in the form of oil; you can bring out limestone and aggregate of all kinds. That's a new wealth. It sits there, waiting to be developed, and then you turn that into concrete and steel from iron ore, and the list goes on. Or as an exception, I guess, would be if you could seine some fish out of the sea and maybe you can raise a little algae in the sea; but, otherwise, it grows out of the soil. New wealth comes from this Earth in one form or another, and we use it to produce the necessities of life. Those necessities which were simplified down to food, clothing and shelter, all that comes out of the Earth. Those are the necessities. I used to get into this debate with former Congressman Tom Feeney from Orlando, Florida, Disney World territory--a very smart and effective Member of this Congress and a good friend whom I admire and respect. When I would tell him all new wealth comes from the land, he would say, oh, no, it comes from the airport. Well, they do, Mr. Speaker, fly down to Orlando--and it's a refreshing injection of capital into the economy in the Orlando area, but that's not the new wealth. It's just newly arriving in Orlando. When you trace it back, it's the disposable income that comes from the people that are producing goods and services that have a marketable value both domestically and abroad. And they're producing it from the raw materials as are mined out of the Earth or are value adding to the crops that grow from the soil. That's what this country is, and that's how this economy works. And if you don't understand that and you're trying to manage a country that has about a $15 trillion gross domestic product and you believe that spending money is a solution rather than producing goods and services, you can understand then why we're in the situation that we are in. I think the Speaker and I agree completely on what I'm about to say. And I'm going to take this back again to Ronald Reagan, who once said that what you tax, you get less of. Well, I look around the United States and I look at our tax policy that we have, and I start looking for productivity, and that's earnings, savings and investment. They identify the productivity in this country. And if you have any earnings, any savings, or any investment, the first lien on all of that, the one who holds the mortgage collateral on it is Uncle Sam. The Federal Government has the first lien on all productivity in America. So if you walk in and you punch the time clock on a Monday morning at 8 o'clock and you hear that thunk, just think of that as Uncle Sam's arm going out and his hand is out. He will take every dime you earn until he's satisfied--and that might be before noon and it might be after. Then when Uncle Sam puts all that in his pocket, then you can start to earn a little money for the Governor--he doesn't take as long. You can pay him as a rule, and he gets his hand in his pocket, and now you can start to work for yourself and your children and your families. The first lien on all productivity in America is held by Uncle Sam, the Federal Government. Earnings, savings, and investment is all taxed in this country unless they have found a way to get you through this loophole. So because what you tax, you get less of, that means that you get less production because we tax it all. If you produce and the Federal Government taxes it, it's a disincentive for production, so we produce less. If we're going to come out of this economic decline that we're in, if spending were going to solve this problem, we would have solved it by now--this Keynesian economic experiment of the President's. But it's production that will solve it. We need to take the tax off all production in America, which is all earnings, savings and investment, so that it will thrive and it will prosper. And when we tell people in this country, you can invest all the capital you want to invest, you can earn all you want to earn, you can save all you want to save, and when you do that, we're not going to tax any of it; you can pile up as much cash and capital and savings as you want, not one dime of Federal tax will be on any of that that you earn, when we do that-- and I pray one day we will do that--the average worker will get 56 percent more in their paycheck. There will be a lot more production in this country; it will be a lot more competitive. And then people can pay their tax with a national sales tax, the option of paying taxes, which is a decision that you make when you consume. That's what the Fair Tax is. And that's what brings us out of this mess that we are in, and it needs to be a very high priority. I need to hear the Presidential candidates talk about their position on a national sales tax. They talk around it, and they will say, I'm for a Fair Tax or a flat tax or anything that taxes us less. That's not good enough. If you want to lead this country, lay out a tax proposal that actually solves this problem that we're in. I have looked at this proposal, Mr. Speaker, for more than 30 years now. And I don't know how many years ago it was when they invented the Rubik's Cube, where you could turn that thing around and arrange the colors on all the sides of the cube, but I have turned the Rubik's Cube of the Fair Tax over and over, every possible way that I can look at it. And the more I look at it--usually when you get to looking at something, it starts to look a little worse the longer you look at it. The longer I look at this, the Rubik's Cube of the Fair Tax, the better it looks to me. And that's more than 30 years of looking at the proposal; and, actually, that's more years than we've had the proposal, but I've advocated for a national sales tax since about 1980. And that was back when I got audited one too many years in a row and I decided, why do I have the IRS in my life? Why are they making Monday morning quarterback decisions? Why am I looking at paying interest in penalty on a tax liability that, to this day, I do not believe that I legally owed? It's because the IRS has so much power that you can't fight them. You can fight them, but you're going to lose. That was a painful thing for a person of principle to come to, a realization that I had to go to the bank and borrow money to pay the IRS, because even though I'm right, it would cost me my business if I stopped producing long enough to fight the IRS. That was the equation that I was faced with. So I want to challenge anybody in this House of Representatives that wants to debate tax policy on the Fair Tax. I would be real happy to yield to anybody that would come down here on the floor, set up a Special Order for the purpose, go just about anywhere I can logistically get to face off with somebody that thinks the Fair Tax is a bad idea. It is a great idea. I sat down with Alan Greenspan within a month of the time that he stepped down as chairman, his retirement, and I said to him, Here are all the things that the Fair Tax does, and I went through the list. I said it eliminates personal income tax and corporate income tax and payroll income tax, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. It puts a check and a prebate into everybody's household to reimburse them a prebate for the taxes that they would pay on their spending up to the poverty level. It provides an incentive for people to invest money, and it will attract capital from all overseas. I went through all of that, and I said, I need you to challenge me on any point that I have made. I don't want to be making this argument across this country and have a position that I can't sustain. Test me. Challenge me. He listened as I went through the list, and he looked up at me and he said, You left out provides an incentive for savings and investment. This country needs an incentive for savings and investment. Add that to the list and keep saying it. You're right on all of those points. Well, I had actually just forgotten to say it provides an incentive for savings and investment. But it illustrated to me how carefully Alan Greenspan was listening to that presentation, how he identified the omission that I had left out. And it was an astute response. And I said to him, I need you to advocate for this. And he said to me, You will not find serious economists that disagree with you on this position. The fair tax does all the things that you say it does. It's not an economic question, because serious economists will not disagree. It's a political question, and you are the politician, meaning me, Mr. Speaker, and you need to solve the political question. It's not an economic argument. So it comes back to the same thing over and over again. Here we are in this great country. We are a wealthy country. We are also a productive country, and we do have a good work ethic even though it's being undermined by 72 different means-tested Federal welfare programs. We're a great country, and we have the resources to solve any problem that can be solved. We can come up with the money to do it. We either have the technology or we can develop the technology. We've got the man- and womanpower. We've got the work power to do all of that. We can solve everything. But when I look at the problems that are unsolved and unresolved in the United States of America, invariably it comes back to the political question. It's politics that stick in the middle of this. It's not because we don't have enough people with common sense. We have people with competing interests, and we have people that confuse the issue, and they bog this thing down, and they make it a lot harder than it needs to be because they're looking for some kind of political benefit from it. But we have the solution here at our fingertips. This Congress, if we were able to get a fair tax bill to the floor of the House of Representatives for an up-or-down vote, I would say there'd be a Vegas line on whether that would pass or not, Mr. Speaker, but I believe it would. I believe this House of Representatives would vote to scrap the entire Internal Revenue Code and scrap the IRS, itself, and replace it with a national sales tax. I believe this House of Representatives would vote to take all the tax off of productivity in America and put that tax over on a revenue-neutral basis onto consumption, instead, of goods and services, goods and services that have a marketable value both domestically and abroad. I believe the House of Representatives would pass that legislation if we could get it to the floor for a vote. And I believe, in the process of doing this, they would be granting to American manufacturers, in the stroke of a pen, a 28 percent marketing advantage over foreign competitors when it comes to manufacturing. If you take a Mazda that's presumably built 100 percent in Japan, compared to a Ford built 100 percent in America, and each of them were sitting on a dealer's lot, perhaps across the street from each other and the sticker price on these two comparable valued vehicles was each $30,000, then competition would have set that. Well, into that Ford is embedded 22 percent of Federal taxes that are built into the price of that Ford, because corporations don't pay taxes; consumers pay it. Corporations aggregate them, and they put it into the price of the products that they produce. So your $30,000--you pass the fair tax, competition drives out of the Ford the embedded Federal tax. So your $30,000 Ford becomes $23,400. That would be the new sticker price. Now, it would take 12 to 18 months to turn the inventory over and get competition to drive that down. $23,400 would be then the new sticker price on your Ford, with the fair tax passed. But your Mazda's still going to be 30,000 because its tax structure is Japan, not the United States. So then you add in an embedded 23 percent sales tax into both vehicles, and your Ford price, to drive it off the lot, presuming it's not a deductible business purchase, goes from what was $30,000, knocked down to $23,400 because the embedded Federal tax comes out of the price, and you add in 23 percent tax. You drive your Ford off the lot for $30,400. But your Mazda needs to also pay the 23 percent embedded tax. It comes off the lot at $39,000. So you end up with an $8,600--28 percent--marketing advantage, the Ford over the Mazda. Now, what does that bring about, Mr. Speaker? Instead of $800 million worth of Mazdas coming to the United States aboard ships on an annual basis, you've got Fords being sent to Japan and to Korea and to China and to Europe and all around the world. We're making more and more cars, and we're shipping them all around the world because we now have a tax structure that ceases to punish production and provides an incentive for savings and investment and gives those workers that are making the Fords 56 percent more in their paycheck. And those people that run the manufacturing plants, whether it's cars or whether it's trailer axles or whether it's the modern version of the widget, all have a competitive advantage now that gains 28 percent. We've reached a static level in the things we produce, and sometimes a half of a percent is enough to make the difference on whether you sell large volumes into foreign countries. A half of a percent, maybe even a tenth of a percent. Well, can you imagine sitting there, let's just say--I'm just thinking shipping product over into a place like Asia, and you're there where the margins are so tight sometimes you can sell, sometimes you can't, and you've got to ratchet your price down a little and try to get it sold. This goes on every day, people that are looking for that tiny little edge that lets them get in there and export something to a foreign country. With the fair tax, they're sitting there with a tiny little edge or no edge. Maybe they're behind the curve, and all of a sudden here comes a 28 percent marketing advantage. Whoosh, it goes overseas. We light this country up. We light this country up. We become the manufacturing center for the world again. We find jobs for people. They're out there for American labor to produce a high return so that their highly productive workers--we're the most productive workers in the world today, and we will increase our manufacturing. We will increase our exports. We'll reverse this trade imbalance, and it will be a surplus of exports. And instead of us being a debtor nation, we will become a prosperous nation. By the way, if exports are working, think what can happen. We've got a dollar that's being devalued by the White House and by the Fed. They're printing money and dumping the currency in, and the value of the dollar is dropping. And what is one of the reasons? It's because, if a dollar doesn't buy much, then people in foreign countries can buy more things from the United States. Look how it works the other way. When we get this 28 percent marketing advantage, we can start to tighten up our currency and start to give it value again. Maybe we can get to that point where we can put a gold standard under it or a basket of currency, a basket of commodities that would be used in lieu of a gold standard so that our dollar has a value that can be anchored to commodities that actually can be exchanged for, rather than the full faith and credit of the Federal Government. The fair tax solves everything good that can be solved by a tax policy. It does everything that anybody else's tax policy does that's good. It does them all. And it does them all better. And I will stand on that statement, Mr. Speaker. And I will challenge any Member of this Congress or anybody that has a legitimate reputation out across this country to stand up and we'll take this issue on anywhere. This is one of these times when I'll just say that this is one of the things that I have been right on for a long time. A lot of others have been right on this for a long time, and it's getting to the point where it's high time that we move a fair tax. We had a little hearing in the Ways and Means Committee here a few weeks ago. I'm glad to have that. I don't know if the Earth shook when we did that or not, and I don't know how much it illuminated the knowledge base of the Members. But I will tell you that the public would be disappointed if they knew how shallow the knowledge base is among many of the Members of this Congress when it comes to a national sales tax. It's shallow. They can't pass the test. They don't want to spend the time to do that. They're just navigating themselves away from the political liabilities that come up every day in this trade. They don't have the time to dig down into it. And so you need to focus them, and the public needs to focus them, Mr. Speaker. The fair tax needs to move. We need to have it in the debate of the Presidential race. I want to do all we can to bring it up in that debate. And as the clock ticks down, I want to shift the gear a little bit because it's important for me to address what's going on with the natural disasters in the country, primarily the floods that we've had on the Missouri River. We have been underwater since early or mid-June. We have more water that's come down the Missouri River than at any time prior to this year in history. This is from Sioux City, downstream. And they can talk about it very well up into the Dakotas. Kristi Noem and Rick Berg are very knowledgeable on what the disaster has done to them upstream. But where we are, Sioux City on down, that river has been, since June, and I will say mid-June, it's been about--the narrowest typical place that you would see would be the water would be a mile and a half wide. This is a river that, I wouldn't recommend it, but it can be swum across. And about a mile and a half wide downstream from Sioux City, and as you go further south it gets to be 4, 5, 6, 8 miles wide at Glencoe, and north of the Omaha airport, 11 miles wide. Water 11 miles wide, and it narrows up downstream from Omaha to 4 to 5 miles, maybe 6 miles wide, all the way down into Missouri and into Sam Graves' district, typical, on down. We have seen more water come down that river this summer than ever before. And it is a flood of massive proportions. And when I tell you a river that's 11 miles wide for 3 months long, it gives you a sense of what it is, but people have to be thinking it's stagnant water that's sitting there that can't escape. But it's really not. It's water with a velocity of 3-5 miles an hour, even out away from the central stream of the channel; and in the central stream of the channel it's 11-12 miles an hour but out a way at the base of the hills, and it's flooded hill to hill. The water is moving along at a clip that's, oh, a fast pace if you're walking, is what it would be. And we have watched business after business, farm after farm, residence after residence go underwater. They sandbag, set up pumps, and then they lose the battle. And then the house and buildings fill up with water, sometimes clear up to the eaves, sometimes halfway up on the windows of the living room. And we have miles and miles of trees that have been standing in water that is 10-, 12-, 16-feet deep for the better part of the summer. I'll say all summer. And when the wind blows and the water starts to go down, the trees just tip over. Miles and miles of huge trees laying down, the swath of them just fallen over by wind and gravity and nothing for their roots to hang on to, and hundreds of thousands of farm fields that are underwater, and flooded with huge sand bars that are created by the current and all kinds of junk washed out into the middle of them. This is what we're dealing with on the Missouri River. The Corps of Engineers has built in the upper Missouri River six dams. They're known as the Pick-Sloan Program. That began sometime in the '40s and '50s. They looked back on the historically highest flood, which was 1881, and they had a large flood in 1943. It wasn't as much as 1881, but it was a heads-up wake-up call that started Congress working. And they began working on this Pick-Sloan Program to prevent flooding in the Missouri River. In 1952, there was a huge flood, and that accelerated the construction. They completed in the late 1950s and early 1960s the six- dam reservoir complex of the Pick-Sloan Program that goes clear on up into Montana. They wrote a master manual for the Corps of Engineers that guides them on how they shall manage the reservoirs and how they shall manage the Missouri River. The master manual, Mr. Speaker, has been amended. I believe there have been five different versions. But in each of those versions, the Corps of Engineers says use the same amount of storage capacity for flood control. There is a permanent pool, and above that permanent pool they have always kept 16.3 million acre feet for flood control. The reason that they have 16.3 million acre feet is because that was the amount that was calculated that was necessary to protect from the floods of the largest run-off ever experienced, which was 1881. In 1881, 49 million acre feet of water came down. In 2011, the number will be 61 million acre feet of water. So I have a bill I trust was introduced this afternoon or will be before the fall of the gavel today, Mr. Speaker, that requires the Corps of Engineers to manage the Pick-Sloan Program, to protect from serious downstream flooding, and to adjust those flood levels to the largest amount ever experienced. And that language then means 2011 run- off rather than 1881 run-off. So if we get another year of this kind of run-off, we will be using the storage rather than having it be part of the permanent pool so that all of this downstream flooding that has wiped out hundreds and hundreds of square miles and set it under a flowing current of water for the whole summer can all be protected. They easily have the storage capacity to protect all of us downstream from that type of serious flooding. The legislation that I have that has been sponsored by representatives from at least four States along the Missouri--and I'm not sure who else might have signed on it this afternoon--just simply says to the Corps of Engineers: Adjust the flood storage from the 16.3 million acre feet to an amount that will protect from serious downstream flooding. That's the message in the bill. That's what I'm going to ask this Congress to pass. That's what I think we have a reasonable chance of having unanimous support among the States affected by the Missouri River floods all the way up to the headwaters and all the way down to St. Louis. I'm hopeful every Member will sign on. It's bipartisan. We have about the same number of Democrats as we do Republicans on that bill, and it's something I feel the need to notice this Congress that is something that I'd ask for support, and hopefully we can start to move it through. So, Mr. Speaker, as we get close to wrapping up business in this Congress for this week, I think about what we have ahead of us. Of course one of the things we have ahead of us is how do we fund this government beyond September 30. That will be ultimately, I believe, a CR, a continuing resolution. We have the debt ceiling debate behind us, at least for now. We have the pressure points that are set up by the debt ceiling bill. I have never been a fan of a supercommittee of 12 apostles sitting in a room, deciding for all of the rest of us what they think is best. The product that may come from there, if it's used right, can be useful, and it can produce a happy ending here. I'm hopeful that they will make suggestions and work with the committees. And the cuts that we must get in this Congress, I believe, need to be produced by the committees that have the most and the best knowledge about the subject matter at hand, that it's not just a slash- and-burn from inside the--perhaps, and maybe not--closed doors of the supercommittee. And I think this country has got a long ways to go. But in the end, here's what gets us where we need to go. Pass the Fair Tax, Mr. Speaker. That turns this economy back around and does all the things that I've said. It does everything good that everybody's policy does. It does them all. It does them all better. It gives people back their freedom. It gives them 56 percent more in their paycheck. They decide when to pay taxes when they make a purchase. And it rewards production. It stops punishing production. And in the end, it inversely rewards production. People will produce more. They'll earn more. They'll save more, will export more. Our dollar will be worth more. People's labor will be worth more. And the 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can't have a Nation of slackers and then have me have to sit in the Judiciary Committee, listening to them argue that there's work that Americans won't do so we have to import people to do work Americans won't do and borrow money to pay the welfare of people that won't work. That is a foolish thing for a Nation to do. We've got to get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker roles and on to the employed roles. That and revalue the dollar. We've got to balance the budget. That means pass a balanced budget amendment that actually is a legitimate balanced budget amendment with a supermajority required to waive the balance, a supermajority required to raise the debt ceiling, a supermajority required to exceed 18 percent of the GDP, and a supermajority required to, as I said, raise taxes, balance the budget, and exceed the debt limit. So if we can do those things--repeal ObamaCare, pass the Fair Tax, pass a balanced budget amendment out of this Congress, ask the States to save us--that would be a pretty good foundation to build this country on, and it would be a good foundation for little Reagan Ann King, who's just taken her first steps in the last 24 hours, to look ahead and think, Grandpa actually is doing something here in Congress. It's going to open the door up for her and all of her generation to come in and contribute to this country and still have something left for themselves and start to get to the point where we can one day start to pay down this national debt. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention here this afternoon, your service in this Congress as well. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The gentleman from Iowa is happy to be recognized. Addressing this issue, in particular it's this: that the intent of this bill is a good intent, and I support it, providing an extra incentive for high quality charter schools. It rewards those high quality charter schools with an opportunity to receive grants that are rewards for that excellence that's there, and I certainly support the initiative and the philosophy behind that. It also identifies high quality charter schools as those that have achieved strong academic results, student safety, financial management, statutory and regulatory compliance, and has demonstrated significantly increasing student academic achievement for all students. And I emphasize ``all students.'' But when I read the bill, then it says, also has demonstrated success in increasing student academic achievement for the subgroups of students described in, and that's where a lot of people stop reading the bill. But when you go back and look at the reference, it sets it up so that it requires not just that the schools be open and available to students that meet these categories, four categories, Mr. Chairman-- economic disadvantaged students, students from major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, and students with limited English proficiency--but, in fact, the language of the bill requires that all four categories must be met in order to qualify for these grants. I know there's misinformation out there, but this language has been something we have drilled through now for days. What my amendment does is strike that requirement that they meet all four categories. They will have to show academic achievement for all students, and that's what I hope to achieve with this amendment. We go back to all students, which automatically includes the redundant list that is, I think, unnecessarily in the bill. And the result will be, if the King amendment doesn't go on, then we'll have high quality charter schools that will have to meet four standards, those four standards of minorities and disabilities, economically disadvantaged, and limited English proficiencies. For example, an inner city school that might have all African American students with no limited English proficiencies might qualify on the other three categories but be disqualified because they must meet all four. That's the purpose of my amendment. I urge its adoption. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield myself such time as I may consume. First, I appreciate the tone and the tenor of this debate, and I'm completely convinced that all parties involved here want to accomplish the same thing, and that is to provide an opportunity for all young people in America to achieve to the extent of their ability. That's the purpose of this legislation that's before us, high quality charter schools, and it's the intent of Mr. Miller and Mr. Scott and Mr. Kline and everyone else that likely will vote for this bill. It's also my intent. I strongly want to see people reach the highest level of their achievement. We need to be in the business in this Congress and aware of it on a daily basis of seeking to increase the average annual productivity of our people. We can do that one at a time, every three- hundred-and-six millionth of us. Every one of us that increases our productivity on a daily basis helps the whole. Every class, every generation of people that improves their productivity is good for all of us. It takes the load off of the higher earners to have the income coming on the lower earners, for example. It brings that balance about. I want that. I think that's the intent of this bill. When the gentleman from California says it's not what the law says, that I have somehow misunderstood this, I will tell you that I think it has been misrepresented by some analysts behind the scenes--not on this floor--and I will just read this into the record in short version. I will compress it and then I will give you the quote. High-quality charter schools means a charter school that, A, shows strong academic results; B, that has no significant issues in the areas of student safety, financial management, statutory, regulatory compliance; C, has demonstrated success in significantly increasing student and academic achievement and attainment for all students served by charter schools. I want that. We want that. But D says, has demonstrated success in increasing student academic achievement for subgroups of students described, and they are this: economically disadvantaged students. Now, that's fine. Most kids are going to be economically disadvantaged. Some students from racial and ethnic groups, that may not be the case. North Dakota or Montana, for example, might have to go a long way to find someone who meets that category. Students with disabilities? Perhaps, but not always. Are we going to ask them to go out and recruit students with disabilities in order to qualify as a high school, and a high-academic achieving school, high- quality charter school? And the fourth one is students with limited proficiency. That doesn't exist in every region in America where there is a need for a charter school. This sets up a requirement that all four categories be met. If we wanted reporting, as the chairman of the committee has suggested, I would say then let's ask for a report rather than write this all in as a requirement that can't be met because there only can be two results of this. Either we're going to follow the law, if it becomes law, in which case many, many schools will be disenfranchised, will not be able to become high-quality charter schools, or we're going to ignore the law. I don't like either of those results. I want to follow in here with the intent of this legislation. That's why I've offered this amendment. I would urge its adoption. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 333 I was delayed in leaving a meeting with a constituent group when the vote was called and was unable to reach the House floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 413 I was delayed in leaving a meeting with a constituent group when the vote was called and was unable to reach the House floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 461, I was detained off the House floor during this vote series and was unable to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''