Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. It is subject to training and regulation as prescribed by the Attorney General.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, on that specific question, I cannot answer ``yes'' to or ``no'' to. I am working with a piece of language I believe in, and I have not looked a Federal official in the eye that specifically asked me.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Yes, Mr. Chairman, it applies only to Federal officials who will represent the United States of America in a court of law, the voice of the Federal Government in a court of law.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. First, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank Chairman Sensenbrenner and Mr. Gohmert for bringing this underlying bill to the floor, H.R. 1751. My amendment specifically addresses the problem of violence in and around Federal courthouses. The amendment authorizes any Federal judge, magistrate, United States Attorney, or any other officer of the Department of Justice who represents the U.S. in a court of law to carry firearms. They would be subject to training and regulation as prescribed by the Attorney General. Currently, a number of States permit State prosecutors to carry firearms. However, this right is not extended to all Federal prosecutors and Federal judges. My amendment would allow both Federal judges and Federal prosecutors to carry firearms for their and their families' protection and provide for training and regular certification. The need for my amendment was made clear by the recent tragedies involving, and we have heard the chairman speak to these issues, the brutal murder of family members of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow; the slaying of Judge Rowland Barnes, his court reporter, deputy sheriff, and a Federal officer in Atlanta; the cold-blooded shootings outside the Tyler, Texas courthouse, among others. These situations underscore the importance of security for judges and prosecutors. There is a significant need to allow judges and U.S. Attorneys to carry firearms because threats and dangerous assaults upon them are steadily increasing. By virtue of their positions, United States judges and prosecutors are high-profile targets. They and their families have often been victims of violent crimes, murder, and threats to their personal safety. United States judges, justices, and U.S. Attorneys bravely serve the people of the United States of America. They prosecute our most serious, sophisticated, and violent offenders. These offenders range from international terrorists to armed career criminals. Protecting the courthouse is important, Mr. Chairman, but the courthouse is just a building. This amendment is designed to provide meaningful protection to the actual person and his or her family. My amendment extends protection from the courthouse to the homes in the areas where the judges and prosecutors live. Our Nation relies and depends upon the sound and unintimidated judgment of these dedicated public servants. We owe them every reasonable tool to protect themselves and their families. This includes the right to carry an effective personal security tool. Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``yes'' vote on this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I have been informed that, yes, we have Federal officials that have asked for this legislation. I would point out that it is not mandatory that they accept carrying a firearm; it is their option that they exercise under the regulation provided by the Attorney General.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for organizing this Special Order and her leadership. At this time I would like to address the Deficit Reduction Act. It seemed like it was heavy lifting for a lot of people in this Congress; it should not be. It should not be when you are going to reduce by one- half of 1 percent the trajectory of the increase of Federal spending down range 5 years. I do not find that heavy lifting. I find that a piece of cake for somebody who has had to balance a family budget, a business budget, and meet payroll with my own employees for over 1,400 consecutive months. We had to find a way to make it work, and we did not have a budget like this to work with, and we made it work. I want to talk about the agricultural aspect of this. First, we brought this package before the Committee on Agriculture, and we went for approximately 3 hours in debate, listening to demagoguery about how painful it was to squeeze down some of these categories within the agriculture budget. And this is over 5 years. One of those subjects is the commodity programs direct payments. We reduce that, the projected spending, by 1 percent. That is $1 out of $100. The actual effect out in the field is approximately one-twentieth of the payments going into a region like I represent where we raise corn and soybeans. The people that I represent there are fiscally responsible people. They watch their budget. They invest their dollars wisely and do a good job of marketing and managing, all because it is good business. That is what it takes to have black ink on the bottom line instead of red ink. I am very confident I can take this back and look my neighbors in the eye and say we did the best we can for the agriculture economy. We did the best we could for our agriculture producers. We pinched that down by 1 percent on direct payments. We are looking at WTO trade negotiations coming up in Hong Kong in December. We are talking with the rest of the world about how we want to really eliminate export subsidies, and we can do that without great pain to this country and reduce domestic subsidies and be able to get access to the developing world so we can sell our products. Our agriculture producers know they can compete with anybody in the world if they can get access to the markets without having punishing tariffs at every developing country in the world. We brought some of those people in as trading partners. We are going to expand that. But if that 1 percent here is a painful thing, then I am going to say we are going to have one difficult debate when the time comes to adjust our long-term trade trajectory. By the way, there was not a single Democrat that would support any of this reconciliation package, and it became a partisan issue just to pass CAFTA. People in sugar said, no, it might take a teaspoon a day out of our markets. Possibly so. Aside from that, there was not even an argument that CAFTA was not good, but it became a partisan issue. I am watching trade become a partisan issue. I watched budget responsibility become a partisan issue, and I listened to criticism after criticism from the other side of the aisle about what we are doing to our producers during a time of need. It is always a time of need. But it is also a time where we have just pulled in the best 3 years in agriculture ever where I live. We have harvested the best crops in the last 3 years. Their overall accumulated value is more than it has ever been. We raised more corn and soybeans this year than any time in history, except last year, which was a record. That came upon a good crop for 2003. It is a good time to be responsible in agriculture, and I believe the producers will stand up and take this just fine. We minimized some of the damage to agriculture as well. Some money was left over in the watershed rehab program, and so we put that in our Deficit Reduction Act. The Conservation Security Program, I like that program. I spent my life in soil conservation. I have built more terraces than any Member of Congress, and I do not have to wonder who is second. More waterways, more watershed dams. I have spent my life protecting soil and water. I like those projects. We took no money out of any one that was qualified today, but were required to pull some money out down range in order to come with these savings that we needed to get, which is $3.7 billion out of agriculture. Skipping across some of these, the food stamp program, that probably consumed, out of 3 hours, probably 2 hours of the apportioned demagoguery for the day. It was how we could take food out of the mouths of babes, pregnant mothers, senior citizens, everybody you can imagine. I sat there and listened to that, and if I did not have a brain of my own to work with, I would have felt so guilty I would have crawled out of that room after they got done with me. The truth is when you look at it, we did not take any food out of anybody's mouth. We saved overall $844 million up to the year 2010. I went back and looked, how much waste do we have in food stamps just for the last year we have records. Well, $1 billion in food stamp waste. That is fraud. Mr. Gingrey spoke about how we will cut waste, fraud and abuse. We did that in the food stamp program, and we did not do it randomly. We realized there are States that grant food stamps to people who do not qualify for any other benefit. That is a pretty good sign it is a fraud. We conditioned it if they need another benefit, like TANF, it will qualify them for food stamps. Unless they do, we are not going to give them a bunch of food stamps because, likely, they are not qualified. Most of the States are that way. Iowa is that way. It works for us. We do not hear complaints because it is a responsible way to manage. The other side of the food stamp piece was we extended the period of time. When people come into this country legally, they pledge they are going to be self-sufficient. We say to them, under current law that means you do not get these benefits for 5 years. Then you can be unself-sufficient and we will help you out. We extend that time on food stamps from 5 years to 7 years. That picked up $275 million. We found our $3.7 billion without a lot of pain. I will not say it was easy, because I had to listen to 3 hours of demagoguery; but we did not hurt anybody, and we helped people and we helped the taxpayer. We have another way we can help this country. I have got to say this because agriculture is so susceptible to energy, but we have 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out there under the Outer Continental Shelf. We are paying $14.50 per million Btus here in this country. In Venezuela it is $1.60 compared to our $14.50. The same with Brazil, Argentina, and most places on this continent; and we have got 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas right there next to the pipeline. All we have to do is move our drill rigs a little further to the east, sink them in the ground, hook the pipes up, and go to the same refineries and we can drive this price down. If we do so, we can cut fertilizer prices down and gas drawing prices down for our grain as well. Go up and drill in ANWR, fix the energy piece in all of this, and we are going to see a big difference in this country. This is not all of the work we need to do, but this is a bunch of the important work we need to do. I am looking forward to getting on with it.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), a person who has become a good friend, and such a good friend that he is over working at night in his office and he sees me having a little difficulty with my voice and comes over to help me out. That is the kind of camaraderie we have here. We have seen a lot of Iraq together, and we do see it through the same eyes, and I appreciate his 4 trips over there and my 3 trips over there, and each time we are there, the troops appreciate it. But I can tell my colleagues that we appreciate them a great, great deal, and it is an honor to be with them at a time like that. There are so many pieces of subject matter, Mr. Speaker, that I really intended to talk about tonight, and as I got into the depths of this Iraq issue and this worldwide war we are fighting, militant Islamic extremists, I wanted to make sure that we defined our enemy and defined them accurately. There are a lot of places on this globe, and they are perhaps 16,000 Madrasas in Pakistan alone, places where they teach a kind of fundamentalism that sets the framework, sets the foundation for them to turn that into an active hatred. France and Great Britain perhaps are higher populations and more concentrations and further along in the growth and development of the kind of societies that reject those who have accepted them. They have rejected assimilation, they do not want to live as French or British. In fact, many of them do not really want to live as Americans. So I am a great proponent of assimilation. I will not take up that subject. But I have 2 others that I would like to address here in the next 12 or so minutes that we have here. One of them is I wrote down a list of the things that I heard from the people on the other side of the aisle and I really only got to subject number one. The next one that I heard was energy. Mr. Speaker, there are many things we can do with energy in this country. We are not getting help from the Democrats. There is a strong segment of I will call them environmentalist extremists. I do not claim to be an environmentalist myself. I am a conservationist. I have spent my life protecting soil and water. I have built more terraces than, I said earlier tonight, than any Member of Congress; waterways, farm ponds, larger reservoirs. You name it, we have protected the water and also protected our soil and sent the rain drops down through the soil profile. I believe in all of that. I am one of the people that has been up to ANWR, and I challenge anybody here in this Congress out of the 435, if you are opposed to going up there and drilling in ANWR and have not been there, to see the environmental success that has been established on the north slope. We began drilling up there with that entire operation in 1972. You could fly an environmental extremist over the oil fields in the north slope and they could look down from a thousand feet, and they would not know they were over the oil slope oil fields. They would say, where are the derricks? Where are the pump jacks? Where are the oil spills? Where are the pipelines? Where are the roads? Where are the electrical lines? Where are the distribution systems? Where are they burning off the gas here? How come I do not see an oil field below me, when you tell me I am right over the top of it? The reason is because there are no derricks, there are no pump jacks, there are no electrical lines visible, there are not any collection pipelines visible. All of this is underground. The pumps are all submersible pumps. When you fly over there and look at that, it is simply rock pad for a work-over rig. It is perhaps 50 by 100 or 150 feet long of I call it limestone; it is probably not; say 3 feet above that swamp floodplain. There are ice roads to go in there in the wintertime and work on it only. The ice roads melt. There is no impact whatsoever on the environment, except caribou herds now have gone from 7,000 in 1970 to 28,000 head today. So they have done pretty well. We should go up there and drill. God put the oil there. I could not think of a better place. I cannot improve upon that. Where would you have the oil if you cannot have it up there where nobody goes, or we cannot have it up there where nobody goes, where we can do that with almost no impact on the environment, and if we can do so with .04 percent, 4 hundredths of 1 percent of a footprint on that region. Yet, where is our help over here from the other side of the aisle? Mr. Speaker, 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore in the United States. There has never been a natural gas spill that has impacted anybody's environment. It is just scientifically and physiologically impossible. The gas dissipates. By the way, there is natural gas bubbling up out of the ocean all the time. No impact on our environment, 406 trillion cubic feet, many times more gas on the outer continental shelf than there is on the north slope of Alaska. Where is our help over here to lower the highest price of natural gas anywhere in the world? And we pay that price, every American. If you want to help, let us do something proactive. They come to the Floor and every single night, negative, negative. I could not get out of belt if I felt like that. By the way, I do not believe that stuff anyway. The argument about outing a CIA agent, Mr. Speaker. I listened carefully twice through to the special prosecutor's presentation that did bring out the indictment of Scooter Libby. He did not make any allegations that there had been any CIA agent outed. It was the purpose of his investigation. He apparently did not discover that, or he would have brought an indictment for that. But if the special prosecutor cannot find it in 2 years, how can the 30-Something Group find it over here? I would like to hear some more details on that. By the way, I read Bob Novak's column too and he argued that it was a common known thing that there was a CIA agent that was married to the gentleman who went to Niger, and I am not talking about Joseph C. Wilson, our Member of Congress who is Joe Wilson from South Carolina, we call him the good Joe. But the Joseph C. Wilson that went via the CIA to Niger to look and see if Iraq was out there seeking to purchase yellow cake uranium, came back with a report that apparently conflicts his public testimony. By the way, if you are a CIA agent and you are being paid to go to Africa and investigate as to whether Saddam Hussein is trying to purchase uranium so that he can develop nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, I might add, would that not be a classified report, or is that individual going to come back here and give a report that says, well, yes, there were some people negotiating to do business with Niger, but no, I do not think they are trying to buy uranium. I do not know what else he would buy there, and neither did he. But he makes that report, that when he disagrees with his own report, he makes that public? Why kind of an agent of the CIA would do that, and why are we not challenging that in this country? Why are we not going to wait until there is a trial and find out what really happened under those circumstances, Mr. Speaker. So it saddens my heart that these conclusions can be leaped to from the same people who would say that the impeached President was innocent until proven guilty. Talk about a culture of corruption. No, I do not believe it exists, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, looking at this clock, I want to bring up one more piece of subject matter here and it is of significant importance, especially to the Midwest, but all over this country, and that is the issue of methamphetamines. I want to point out on this chart, this is the Iowa experience. Mr. Speaker, we have some of the worst meth abuse in Iowa than of anyplace in the country. We have busted quite a lot of method labs. There are only a couple of States that can compete with us in the number of meth abuse labs that there are. We recognize that it takes some things to make methamphetamines, the worst illegal drug this country has ever seen. It takes pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, or a product called PPA. Those things are all available in the midwest. We have more experience with it than anybody else, Mr. Speaker. So we began addressing this. When I was in the Iowa Senate about 5 years ago, we did some things to take some of that off the shelf. We did not do enough. So in our first try, we found out that these people are creative and they will find a way around you. So they wrote some new legislation. I was not involved in that. But I want to commend the Iowa legislature and the governor for signing legislation into law that was enacted on the first day of June 2005. This red line on this chart, Mr. Speaker, here are the meth labs that were busted from the previous year, this year, for the same period of time, 2004-2005, meth labs running per month: 229, 185, 122, 127, 213, 146. A law was passed right here, kind of at the peak of the meth labs being busted. March is a big month. And they began, the retailers began pulling the precursors off the shelf by April. By May, by the end of May, we had seen a dramatic reduction in the number of meth labs that were busted by our, I will say, very efficient drug enforcement people in Iowa. And that May number went down from 42 in May to 29 in June, to 25 labs only in July, to 12 in August, to 12 in September, to 10 in October, and then this is up until October 28. That is an 80 percent reduction in meth labs because we took the precursors off the shelf, except we made sure that moms that had kids that get sick in the night could go down to the convenience store or the grocery store and pick up enough pseudoephedrine to get those kids through the next day. And this is what you can buy in Iowa off the shelf today legally. This product right here, Mr. Speaker, is 360 milligrams active ingredient of pseudoephedrine in this product that is by one of our grocery stores, a good old home-grown Iowa chain grocery store. They private-label package this in a 360-milligram package because that is the amount that you can purchase for a single day in Iowa. And you can go out and do that the next day and the next day and the next day in Iowa, or you can go into the pharmacy, in either case, in a monthly supply you can purchase 7,500 milligrams. But in 1 day what I have on display back here, Mr. Speaker, is what I bought in a single day, and all but this from a pharmacy in Cherokee, Iowa. Mr. Speaker, this represents the pseudoephedrine that you can purchase at one stop, all of these behind me that you can purchase in one stop in Iowa. And that is plenty enough to take care of a family for a good long time. We have passed some legislation out of the Judiciary Committee today. Instead of limiting it to 360 milligrams a day, it limits it to 3.6 grams or 3,600 milligrams a day. We have a 7,500 milligram per month purchase that we can do in Iowa, but that quantity needs to be purchased from a pharmacist who will watch that volume. The law that passed, the language that passed out of the Judiciary Committee today, that 3.6 grams a day will allow a meth cook to go and make 19 stops around through retail establishments. Now, they sign up each place. They give their ID at each place, but there is not a way to track one retail place to another. So they will go from place to place. They will do 19 stops. They will pick up perhaps 70 grams of pseudoephedrine, go home and make an ounce of methamphetamine and they can get that all done all before noon. And that ounce of methamphetamine will last one addict 90 days, or their 1-day supply, and then they go sell the 89-day supply, go back again in the afternoon and produce another 90 days' worth of methamphetamine under law that came out of the Judiciary Committee today. We can do better. I have introduced the Meth Lab Eradication Act. These are the conditions that are part of it. We have set it to comply with Federal law. Schedule 5 drug, penalties are associated with the Schedule 5. This was so easy to adapt to in Iowa with regard to the retailers, the pharmacists and the consumers that the adjustment, according to the author, of this bill was simply pathetically easy. We need to do that in this Congress so we can eradicate meth labs in America. Mr. Speaker, I promised earlier tonight that I would solve all the world's problems in 60 minutes. And you know, in fact, it is possible, but I did not solve them all tonight. So I am going to pledge to come back and keep working on the world's problems in an optimistic, solution-oriented way. And I appreciate the opportunity to address this Congress.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be recognized, and as I get organized here, I would point out that I have had the privilege to listen to this dialogue here tonight. I know that this group comes to the floor nearly every night, and that shows a certain kind of tenacity, and I appreciate that effort they put into this. But I wanted to just start down the list of some of the things that I heard and address some of the remarks. I happen to have seen a poster that I hope was not presented here, because I believe it would have challenged the mendacity of the President, and I believe that would have been out of order here in these Chambers, Mr. Speaker. So I hope that kind of poster is never presented. But I will say that I have heard that challenge made in a number of different oblique ways. I have looked into the eyes of this President, and I think there is a distinction that should be made in a very clear way to the people here on the floor every night, the 30-something Group and all the Members of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and the people in this country, and that is there is a difference between a mistake and a lie. I look back on a Presidential campaign, and I remember the face and the voice of Charlton Heston as it came on television over and over again. He said to the previous President over the airwaves of television, ``Mr. President, when you say something that's wrong and you don't know that it's wrong, that's a mistake. When you say something that's wrong and you know that it's wrong, that's a lie.'' That distinction seems to be lost amongst many of the Members of the minority party in this Congress. And by the way, I would not concede that the President has made a statement that was even wrong, let alone a mistake, and certainly a long ways away from a lie. When you look into the eyes of this man we have as our commander in chief, you see those eyes look back at you with conviction. You hear it in his voice, you can see it in his bearing, and you can see it in his actions. I would like to go back to an event that maybe was not designed to be spoken about necessarily in public, but I think it speaks well of this President, so I want to mention it at this time. A few Members of Congress were invited to the White House for a small luncheon. It was on a Monday noon, and I recall it was the Monday noon after the Columbia had gone down on Saturday. It was a hard time for all of us. We saw our space program go up in flames, along with the lives of the brave men and women that were up in space. We knew that our NASA program was going to be suspended for a good, long time. Thankfully, we are back on track, at least to some degree. I was surprised that the President had gone ahead with the luncheon that day, because I believed he would be taking care of so many issues that he would not have time to sit and talk with us, but he did. There were maybe 15, 20 people in the room, a few of the President's closest staff and about 10 or so, maybe a dozen Members of Congress, myself among them. As we sat around the tables and had our lunch, the President got up and stood at an old, rickety, wooden podium, a podium not as stable as this one. I wondered if it was really quite suitable for the White House. And as he leaned on the podium this way and that way, he went through the whole spectrum of issues that we were concerned about at the time, Mr. Speaker. He talked about the impending operations in Iraq. He talked about our national security and al Qaeda, and about September 11. He talked about the overall budget and the tax cuts that we needed to stimulate this economy. And he talked about education. Now, remember, we had not gone into Iraq at that point. It was speculated about certainly, but we had not gone in at that point. As he got through the education cases, he said, just a minute. I want to back up a minute and I want to tell you this with regard to Iraq. My critics have me wrong on Iraq. The media has me wrong on Iraq. There is only one person that orders our men and women into battle, and that is the person that hugs the widows and the widowers of those who do not come back home. I will never forget the tone of his voice, the look in his eye, and the look on his face. He told me afterwards that to finally give that order, he knew it was going to be hard, but it was a lot harder when the time finally came that he had to make that decision and give that order. I look at this entire operation in this view of the war in the Middle East and in this war against terror and this war against militant Islamic extremism, and I will always see those eyes and hear that tone in his voice; and I will always understand that this is not a President that would give an order that would put anyone in harm's way and do so for any reason other than a profound conviction that it was necessary for the protection, the preservation, the future of the people in this country and the destiny of the United States of America. Never would that order come unless it fit that standard, unless it fit that very high standard and that qualification. The order was given. And it seems as though there are a couple hundred Members in this Congress that do not understand this war against terror, as we define it, and this war against militant Islamic extremism, as I define it. I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that this battle that is going on in Iraq right now is a battle. It is not a war; we are at war with an entire group of people who are philosophically opposed to us, and we have known that for a long time. We did not do anything to offend their sensibilities, not to such an extent to justify losing 3,000 Americans in the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. That was an unprovoked, sneaky, stealthy, I guess I would say a pretty well strategized attack on American people. We had never had that loss of life on our own shores in the history of this country. That should epitomize the level of the hatred that is embodied in the people who are pledged to kill us. Yet I still hear from the other side of the aisle that somehow, if we would just pull our troops all back home to the shores of the United States of America, plant more flowers around our bases, and ask them how can we better understand you, can we sit down and have some kind of an encounter session, can we somehow feel or emote in some other way so we can connect with the people pledged to kill us. I do not believe you can negotiate with people like that. They want to establish their caliphate across this country and across this world. Their number one enemies are capitalism, coupled with Jews or Christians. I think they actually prefer Jewish capitalists first, probably Christian capitalists second, but anybody that is not like them, even other Muslims. If you look at the death loss around the world, I think you will see that al Qaeda and their colleagues have killed really more Muslims than they have any other category. But, Mr. Speaker, they hate us worse than they hate the other Muslims, because some of the other Muslims are sympathetic. In fact, many of them are sympathetic, and that is another part of the problem. But we have seen the terrorist cells in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and we went there and settled that question. And, by the way, for the first time in the history of the world they had free elections on the soil of Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. It was an astonishing accomplishment, something never accomplished before in their history. We went there so quickly and were successful so quickly that most people in this country do not remember the voices of the naysayers, the voices of the people that said no one has ever gone up the Khyber Pass and not been slaughtered. No one has ever been able to go into Afghanistan and invade or liberate and occupy. It is impossible to bring freedom to people that have never experienced freedom before. The American military cannot do what has never been possible before in the history of the world. It came from this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, over and over and over again. And it was only muted when it was clear that there was a full victory established in Afghanistan. And when we saw the elections come up, we had at least 750 Iowa Guardsmen on the ground in Afghanistan protecting the voting booths, protecting the travel routes to and from the voting booths to make sure that there would be free and fair elections in Afghanistan. It was astonishing accomplishment, an accomplishment that came about because of the vision of George W. Bush, because of the courage, the training, the tactics and technology of our U.S. military and because of the selfless sacrifice and risk that was taken by our men and women in uniform. Mr. Speaker, those men and women in uniform went to war as the single highest quality military ever to take the field in any war, and I am including this entire war against the militant Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and whatever theater we might be in right now and not know about, or whatever theater we will be in in the future and find out about sometime down the line. The reasons for that high quality are many. One of them is that we have a strong mix of our National Guard people. These volunteers had a little more age on them, probably more gray hair in this military than we have ever had before in a foreign war. But this is a day when we have high technology. It takes a lot of technology and a lot of training to be able to manage that technology. Our National Guard and military Reserves are seasoned to the point where they bring their professionalism from their walks of life into their military, and when they are deployed overseas they perform extraordinarily well. Couple that with an outstanding active duty force, all of them volunteers, because everyone who has gone to war has gone as a volunteer, that does something for the spirit. That does something for the esprit de corps, as they say in the part of the world that is in flames now, which would be France. And I may get to that subject matter before this hour is over, Mr. Speaker. I want to speak highly of the people who went to Afghanistan. We have lost 200 Americans in Afghanistan, liberated 25 million people. That is a legacy for the world and a legacy that the United States is leaving there for them to pick up as they earn their freedom. Why is nobody saying, Pull your troops out of Afghanistan? Can their troops not handle the security? Can Afghanistan run their country themselves? Why is no one on this side of the aisle addressing that? Why are they not saying, Get the troops out of Afghanistan, or Kosovo, for example. Mr. Speaker, the President that ordered the troops into Kosovo promised the world that our troops would be back from there in 1 year. I have to go back and check the calendar, but I know it has been over a decade; I expect it is 12 years. They are still there. No one on the other side of the aisle is saying, Bring the troops home. No one is saying the President previous to our current President Bush, no one is saying, He did not tell the truth to the American people when he ordered troops into Kosovo and said, They will be back in a year. But I would submit that the accuracy of this President exceeds the accuracy of that statement. So we have troops in Afghanistan, and 200 Americans have lost their lives there. One of my constituents was lost there, the son of a friend of mine. I stop at his grave, and I commemorate him and all of the soldiers we have lost from time to time. That is how I symbolize his loss, it is how I remember everyone. I remember the freedom in Afghanistan and the pride that the remaining troops had when they came home, how his father led them all in with a big American flag on the back of his motorcycle, and how the highway was lined with American patriots who stopped, took off their hats and saluted that young man that had given the ultimate sacrifice and helped free 25 million Afghanis, and no one is saying, Let the Taliban grow their ranks or let al Qaeda go back into Afghanistan. No one is saying, Bring them home, Mr. President. What is the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq? I think the people that are critics of the operations of Iraq ought to draw a distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq. I believe from a national strategic standpoint they are one and the same. They are not the same by the numbers of casualties. By those that say, We have reached the 2,000 death casualty list in Iraq, bring them home, that is too many casualties, none of those people had the courage or the foresight or the conviction to make an announcement as to what was a tolerable number of casualties to free another 25 million people. No one was willing to speculate how many lives they would be willing to invest of American patriots to preserve and protect the lives of 282 million Americans. No one is willing to say it is not worth risking a single American life to protect 282 million Americans. No one is willing to look back in history and say, I wish we had not stepped in and defended ourselves in Korea or World War I or World War II, I wish we had never fought the Civil War to free the slaves or fought the Spanish American or Mexican American, or I wish we had never fought the Revolutionary War. None of those people that say that risking a single American life is never worth it is willing to go back and unravel history. They would not be standing on the floor of this Congress if not for the lives of the brave men who have gone before us who have carved out our freedom from the jaws of tyranny. That brings us back to 1898. I recall a speech by President Arroyo of the Philippines here in Washington, D.C., at one of the hotels. My wife and I went to that dinner and sat and listened to that speech. I believe I was the only Member of Congress that was there to hear the speech, the rest was downtown people and other Representatives. She was not speaking to the faces of Congress, she was speaking to Americans. She saw that group as a few hundred Americans that had gone to dinner to listen to her keynote address. But President Arroyo said, Thank you, America; thank you, America, for sending the United States Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thanks for their sacrifice, thanks for liberating us. Thank you for establishing that stability and establishing a stable government in the Philippines and allowing us to be a free people. Thank you for sending your missionaries over to the Philippines that taught us Christianity. Thank you for sending 10,000 American teachers over to teach the Filipinos reading, writing and arithmetic. Thank you for teaching us your language because we learned English, and today 1.6 million Filipinos leave the Philippines and go work anywhere else they want to in the world, and send that money back to the Philippines because they have a command of the language that is universal in the commercial world. All of these blessings have come from the freedom that came to the Philippines as part of the Spanish American War, I will say. Now we have a friend over there in the Philippines. Now we have a people that speak English, who are engaged in commerce. And because of that, a people who understand democracy and a constitutional republic. That is an example of what happens when you are willing to take a risk, when you understand that this mantle of freedom is not something you can wear lightly, and it is not something that comes without responsibility. There were people that believed that prior to September 11 and, in fact, even after September 11 that we did not have a responsibility to the rest of the world, that we could just retreat back to our own shores, our own borders, run the United States of America, disregard the rest of the world, not do any trade treaties, not engage in any foreign conflicts. If we were not at risk, we should not be involved in anything else going on in the world. But we know what the history of the world is. In fact, I take you back to the years that built up to World War II, and I want to compare that to the war we are in now against terror and the militant Islamic extremists. We are having trouble today connecting the idea that you can have al Qaeda that is run out of perhaps the mountains in Pakistan, Afghanistan, up in that region. So al Qaeda is there, and some of the other sympathizers that are around the world. There are a whole number of different splinter groups, groups that are in Iraq and Indonesia. We have seen these attacks around the world, and we know there are cells all around the world. We know there are second-generation Pakistanis that set off bombs in the subway in London. We have first-and second-generation Middle Easterners, both North Africans and Middle Easterners, mostly Muslim, probably all Muslim, that are running all over the streets of Paris as I speak, burning approximately 1,000 cars a day, and buildings, and attacking the very facilities designed for them. So how is that Saddam Hussein could have been cooperating with Osama bin Laden when bin Laden is an Islamic fundamentalist and Saddam Hussein is a secular Arab and a Baathist and a Sunni? They could not get along, surely, because they are not motivated by the same things. We forget about this thing that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Well, we are the enemy of those enemies. It is easy for them to be friends, whether you are secular or a fundamentalist. In fact, Saddam had the entire Koran written inside a mosque with his blood. It is kind of hard to be secular when you give that much blood to be written inside a mosque. So he kind of joined himself with his blood with Osama bin Laden. There is a philosophical connection. You do not have to be on a e-mail list and distribution tree from Osama bin Laden to be wired in with the philosophy worldwide. So this network rolls around here. People can work autonomously. The bombers in the subway in London may or may not have had direct orders from Osama or Zarqawi or whoever else the leaders might be. The people that are out running in the streets of Paris today, I do not think each one of them gets their daily marching orders from on high. It becomes spontaneous after awhile. You get a sympathetic support and a kind of synergy that grows and a philosophy that connects. And they start to think, if they can cause this trouble, so can I. If they can blow up this embassy, I can blow up the USS Cole. And if Ramzi Yousef can go in and strategize the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the next person can come along and figure out how to fly two planes into there and take it down. It does not have to be one command person sitting at the top distributing all of this. Now going back to World War II, and that is that people in those days prior to World War II had a little trouble connecting how it could be that a national socialist, a Nazi like Hitler, could be connected with and allied with a Fascist like Mussolini in Italy. That did not quite fit. People said they are not philosophically connected. And we had the civil war going on in Spain, and people did not put it together as any kind of axis powers. There is no genesis of the axis of powers. Furthermore, how could, for example, the Soviet Union be allied with and make any deals with Hitler because they really are not philosophically connected. One is a Nationalist-Socialist and the other is a Socialist or a Communist, take your pick. And I say, if you take people's freedom away at the point of a gun, you are a Communist. Stalin was a Communist. You look across and you see that the revolution was beginning to form itself in China, culminating in 1949. And looking at the Japanese, they invaded Manchuria and wound down the coast of China. They invaded Singapore. How in the world could the Imperial Japanese have something in common with the Nazis in Germany and be tied with an axis power effort of the Fascists in Italy? And how does it work with the Soviet Union in the middle that really has a little bit of trouble figuring out who their friends are and who their enemies are? All of that was an unfathomable equation to most people until September 1, 1939, when the Soviet Union, and I will say the Russians, and the Germans carved up Poland. It did not last very long. It was over in a matter of 3 weeks. Then they began to see maybe they can find a way to cut a deal, shake hands and make a treaty. So World War II began. As it began, we did our best to stay out of it. We did a lend-lease program, and we tried to help the Allied powers. The British essentially were standing there without a lot of help. The Australians were with them from the beginning, and then the attack came on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese. As soon as that happened, as quick as administratively it could be done, Hitler and Germany declared war on the United States. Now it all starts to fit together. We know it from the historical perspective because we have seen it unfold. Now it makes sense. Now we do not even ask the questions: What are the philosophical differences between Nazism, Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, and the Communism that was Russia at the time? How did they all get together? Well, if you have a common interest, you can be joined together. This common interest of opposing the United States, this great Satan that they declare us to be, is plenty enough to join together the people that danced in the streets when the Twin Towers were hit on September 11, 2001, plenty enough to bind them together. We should understand by now this enemy far better than we do, and it is predictable what is taking place in France right now. And I do not remember if this is the 12th or 13th night of riots going on in France. The population of France, perhaps 10 percent, is Muslim. These people have come from North Africa and the Middle East. France opened up their doors and said, Let us have an open border policy. We will make a place for you. I am starting to hear they did not make jobs for them, but I am not sure that is the government's job. I do not think government can create jobs. You have to set the structure and let the private sector do that, and we recognize the French have a different view. What I saw were probably hundreds and perhaps thousands of radical Middle Eastern, North African Muslim demonstrators running all over the place with Molitov cocktails, torching buildings, torching cars and trucks, attacking schools and libraries and churches. Yes, churches. You will listen to CNN for a long time before you will hear ``church burned in France.'' And you will listen to ABC, NBC and CBS a long time before you will hear the words ``church burned in France.'' In fact, we will listen to them for a long time before they will say ``Muslim youth'' torch anything in France. They will say ``youth,'' ``disgruntled youth,'' ``unemployed youth,'' ``disenfranchised youth.'' But they do not want to say ``Muslim youth attack France.'' So what do the French do when they are being attacked? Essentially we could define it as a civil war going on there right now. Had I been Jacques Chirac, I would have declared martial law a long time ago. I would have put the French troops out into the streets. I would have established a curfew. I would have had people on the rooftops with infrared sniper rifles. We would have said looters will be shot on sight. Anybody with a molotov cocktail, we will try to shoot that molotov for you from the roof so you can experience what it is like when you are at the other end of that bomb. None of that is happening. They had their high-level meeting and put out some warnings; and as far as I know, they arrested 250 people or so. They have not done the hard things that needed to be done early to shut this off. So instead, 1,000 Frenchmen and women put the tri-color banner on and marched in the street for peace. Well, they have got a little trouble over there, Mr. Speaker, because we have an enemy that is not interested in negotiations. They are not interested in hand-holding. They are not interested in talking. They are interested in killing the people who are not like them. And, by the way, we are not guilty of doing something. We are not guilty because of something we have done or failed to do. We are guilty and deserve a death penalty by their viewpoint because of who we are, what we are, what we are born; and it cannot be rectified. So we cannot talk and negotiate with these people. This is really difficult for the French, Mr. Speaker, because when 10 percent of their population lives within them and among them and they are out there burning things, some of which you built and provided those facilities for them, day care centers, schools, libraries. Maybe not the churches. I do not think they are burning any mosques. I am pretty confident they are not. But a people that are determined to kill them, and yet there is no organized head from the top to the bottom. The French cannot go surrender to Osama bin Laden. They cannot find him. They cannot find Zarqawi and surrender to him. In fact, if every Frenchman held up a white flag, and I imagine some have by now, there is nobody to surrender to. They do not want us to surrender. They want to kill us. They want to take over Western Civilization. They want to destroy Western Civilization. And I happen to believe that Western Civilization, as civilizations go, has been a great gift to all the people in the world. I would be willing to state also, Mr. Speaker, that of all of the missionaries that have ever gone to Africa or to anywhere in the world, and God love them for all the work they have done and it has been a lot of good work, free enterprise capitalism has done more for the world, more for the well-being of humanity than all of the missionaries that ever went anywhere from a standard-of-living standpoint, from a medical care standpoint. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that the investment of capital and the desire for profit has developed this technology that has raised everyone's standard of living. And the health care that we have, because we have research and development for pharmaceuticals, for example, for new surgery techniques, for preventative health care, most of that was driven as a desire to make a little money. Well, a good thing. A good thing that that happened. A good thing that we have a motivation in this country to lead the world in patents, lead the world in creativity. We have that because we have freedom. That all came from Western Civilization. Mr. Speaker, this is the Western Civilization that our enemy wants to destroy, this great gift to the world, this descendant that we can trace back to; and I will say Western Civilization has descended from the Greeks, the Age of Reason, the age where the Greeks sat around and analyzed and set up a structure that let them rationalize their way through and establish science, the beginning of the rationalization that has allowed us to develop technology. And the Greeks took great pride in their ability to reason. And there were philosophies and we can name many of them. Go back and look at these readings. They did not know a lot about science and technology then, but they established the theorem principles that have carried us through to this day, Mr. Speaker. And that Age of Reason that became the culture in Greece back in those years, 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, found its way into Western Europe in later years and established the Age of Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment, I have to say, centered in France. I will give the French the credit for that. And as the Age of Enlightenment developed, we saw the technology come. We saw some of the mass production come. We saw that, as that technology and that science took a step forward, took another step forward, Western Civilization had successfully manifested itself in the Age of Enlightenment in France just in time to be transported across the Atlantic Ocean and be established here in the United States of America where it found the most fertile ground it could have imagined because here we were in the United States establishing a free country, a free country unfettered by taxes, by regulation, by restrictions, by managed economies, by managed societies, where we let people go out and invest capital and the sweat off their brow and their labor and to grow technology at the same time and energize this manifest destiny and settle this continent in record time, lightning speed, fertile ground here in the United States for Western Civilization to establish itself. And, yes, we descended from Europe, but we are different than Europe. The difference is many of the people in this country came here to get away from the restrictions and the oppression that was there, both religious and otherwise. The royalty structure that was there kept people from really being free. The property right structure there kept people from owning and keeping property and passing it along to the next generation, they did not have the freedom that we have. One of the examples that would be, and I am speaking in of all the Europe, Holland today is probably the most liberal country in the world. They have euthanasia. They have abortion. They have legalized drugs, legalized prostitution. And they have their troubles too with a lot of Muslim immigrants that are there. But it is a whole different politic than the Dutch areas that I represent in northwest Iowa, where they are very conservative. They would not think of ending someone's life at the end of life. They believe in life being sacred from conception to natural death. Life is sacred from the instant of conception until natural death. They have a maximum number of churches, a minimum number of bars. They do not believe in illegal drugs. Those things that I have said that are all legal and open and open and part and parcel of the culture and civilization of Holland did not get transferred here to the United States because they left there to get away from some of those things. They knew what they wanted to get away from. They knew what they wanted to establish. That is just an example of the many people who came over here for religious freedom. They brought their standards with them. And the strength that we have in this Nation, Mr. Speaker, is a strength of a three-legged stool built here in this Western Civilization that we have. And I will argue this: that the strength comes from Judeo-Christian values, free enterprise capitalism, and Western Civilization. Science and technology and the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment and all of its descendants came over here where we had all of these natural resources and this unfettered free enterprise capitalism to join with this Age of Enlightenment and blossom this economy that was here and established more patents than any country had ever created, more creativity, more freedom, more opportunity, more economic growth. And all of that would have created an imperialistic Nation that would not have just been manifest destiny out to the Pacific Ocean, but imperialistic to dominate the rest of the world. What kept us from doing that, Mr. Speaker? Our Judeo-Christian moral values put the brakes on that kind of a robust desire to occupy or command or own the world. We recognize our responsibility for freedom. We recognize our freedom comes from God. We have a morality and a responsibility to restrain ourselves because of the Judeo-Christian foundation that is the culture of this country. No matter how one tries to secularize America, we have a Judeo-Christian foundation that is part of everything that we do. And that has been the restraint, the brakes that have held us back, that has caused us to try to project and promote our way of life to the rest of the world without imposing it on the rest of the world. Which brings me back, Mr. Speaker, to Iraq, Iraq where we have lost more than 2,000 Americans. 300 to 400 of them were not combat deaths, but they gave their lives for freedom and liberty just the same. And I have held some of those widows and looked them in the eye and prayed with them, the mothers, the fathers. It is hard, but they are some of the most patriotic people that I have met. And some of the most meaningful times I have ever had as a Member of this United States Congress have been standing in that living room, understanding and to some extent trying to take some of the pain away from a family. Mr. Speaker, Iraq is a country that is a cell. It is a place where, yes, there was al Qaeda; yes, Saddam did send agents around the world; yes, he did provide sanctuary for the first planner and strategist for the first attack on the Twin Towers; yes, he did send one of his security operatives, who was a colonel in the Iraqi military security, over to Malaysia. He was there. He was in the meeting that planned the second attack on the Twin Towers. Not only that, but there were al Qaeda training camps in Iraq. And whether or not there were massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the President could not take that chance. We cannot take the chance of having hundreds of thousands of people there and an ability to fund this kind of enemy and someone who has continually funded terrorism around the world, give him weapons of mass destruction. And, by the way, a lot was made of David Kay's report when he came back to this Congress and reported. As I listened to the other side of the aisle, their interpretation was there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; David Kay said so. And I read the report. It is kind of interesting sometimes when we read the actual text of something after we hear the interpretation. What I read in there was David Kay did not find mass quantities of inventory of weapons of mass destruction when he was there. He was not sure what might or might not have happened to them. He could not argue that they never existed. Certainly not. But in his report he did say that Saddam Hussein maintained the ability to reestablish his system to develop weapons of mass destruction and could do so within 2 weeks. And, by the way, it does not take a lot of bacterial germ agent to produce a lot of problems. And I would argue that if you give me $2 million and put $1 million in one coffee can and $1 million in another coffee can and give me a posthole digger and send me to California with a GPS, I will go out there and bury those two coffee cans someplace in California and then come back out of there, let it rain, if it rains in California, and you go to California and look for those $2 million. There is almost no chance of finding that. And that is about what chance we had of finding some of the weapons of mass destruction. And we are continually digging up different weapons in Iraq that we stumble across. I read an article just the other day. But I would argue this to the people on that side of the aisle: we know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He used them against Iran. No one argues that. He used them against his own people in Kurdistan and killed at least 5,000 people there, perhaps more. In fact, I met with the judges in the tribunal, and in a moment we will hear from the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess). Those three judges talked about, if I have got the number right, and I am going to ask Mr. Burgess to give us a precise number, but it was over 100,000 Kurds killed and slaughtered by Saddam. I do not know how many were by gas, at least 5,000. But I would argue this: either Saddam Hussein had significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and we know because he used them on Iran and on the Kurds and other places, either he had those quantities or he used up his last can of mustard gas on the Kurds. Is there anybody over here willing to say they believe Saddam Hussein, out of all that inventory that he used against the Iranians and the Kurds, used up his last can of mustard gas and we just lied to America because we knew his warehouse was empty, but nobody else did, not even Bill Clinton, not Al Gore, not the Israelis, not the French, not the United Nations, not the United States, not Great Britain. Everybody's intelligence said the same thing. It was logical. It was rational. And now the ridicule that comes from the other side is an irrational ridicule, Mr. Speaker. And with that I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), who, by the way, last August joined with me over in Iraq where we saw some extraordinarily interesting things, one who performs so well for the people from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the gentleman picking up this responsibility that actually was mine. And as you know, even though the scheduling around this city does not reflect that you cannot be in two places at one time, in fact, we can only be in one place at a time. One would think that with all the work that you have done on the natural gas situation here, the need all across this country, that sometimes you are in two places at one time with the media that we have today. And it takes that kind of a voice. I want to lend my voice in support of the work that you have done, and I am glad that you stepped up to take the lead. I know it takes a lot of commitment and it takes a lot of research. It takes a lot of background and it costs a little sleep from time to time and a lot of energy. So that is what we are after here is energy in this country, and I want to see if I can add a little bit different perspective to this energy issue. Of course, we talked about fertilizer costs and we talked about the cost for manufacturing, the cost of heating homes and the list goes on and on. But I want to emphasize that Pennsylvania and Iowa run across about the same latitude. You can draw a line of latitude that will intersect both States, and we are tied together for a lot of other reasons. You are kind of the eastern end of the corn belt and we are kind of the heart of the corn belt where I am. But anybody that raises a crop uses nitrogen fertilizer. And if you are raising corn you are probably going to use more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. And 90 percent of the cost of that nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of natural gas. And we have seen in the last few years the price of natural gas go up 400 percent here in the United States. That means the cost of your nitrogen fertilizer goes up 90 percent of 400 percent. And that would be 360 percent increase in nitrogen fertilizer cost, just to do the quick math. Now it is not just the cost of that. And of course we are seeing our grain prices are not showing an increase. And so the overhead goes up and up, and the margin gets narrower and narrower, and the producers, I will say our corn producers, have to figure out a way to increase their yields to compensate for this. They do that. Of course, the landlord then sees that and raises the rent. It is a vicious circle that we are all involved in. It is free enterprise, I know. But a nation has to have a solid and sound natural gas and energy policy, and you cannot just wake up some morning and say, Gee, I wish I would have done this different 30 years ago, throw a switch and fix it. This is a long-term, down-range plan that we have to have; and we are paying a price for not acting for years and years. In fact, for a generation we have not been nearly aggressive enough in opening up the energy supplies here in the United States. And we can go down on this argument, this argument that says, Well, gee, if we would just conserve more energy, if we would drive cars that get 30 miles to the gallon instead of 26 miles to the gallon or even 40 miles to the gallon, if we would use alternative energy sources and renewable energy sources, we can do that and we should do many of those things. I will not subscribe to all of those things. In fact, I will tell you that I support the expanded use of nuclear for electrical power. It is the safest and cleanest and the cheapest that we can produce. And the record in this country establishes that. But that is one part of it, and we are not likely to be able to build more hydroelectric so that we can generate more electricity with just the gravity of water flowing through there. Because of environmental barriers people want to take out dams rather than let us build them. And so coal is another difficulty. We had a little problem with air quality. We have done pretty well with that. But you cannot do everything with coal. And by the way, it takes, you have got to haul coal sometimes a long way. And I know that there is coal that is trained from Wyoming on down to my area in western Iowa. That is a long way to haul the coal. Now, but we need gas for a lot of reasons. We need to heat our houses, we need it for our businesses and we need it for our fertilizer. And by the way, you take a fall. Now this is a good fall, and there was not a lot of grain dried. If you have a wet fall, you will dry a lot of grain. And we will use not really exactly natural gas, but we will use LP. And the difference is this, that the LP comes out sometimes from often the same hole as the natural gas and you use a gas separator in there. The natural gas is the methane, and the LP is mostly propane, but it also can have butane in it, so you use the gas separator. Seventy-eight percent of the LP that we use to dry our grain comes right out of the natural gas well; 22 percent then is stripped out in the crude oil processing and the refinement process when you are making gas and diesel fuel and oil you get the balance of that LP out of there, merge that together, pipeline that up on LP to the Midwest and we put that in to dry our grain in the fall and to heat our houses outside and out in the countryside where we are we do not have natural gas connected to us. All those things are tied together. It comes out of the same hole. The cost of LP is linked to the cost of natural gas. Energy is all part of the whole equation, but there is a difference in natural gas energy because it is not a portable energy that is easy to put on a ship and bring it here, because by the time you compress it and liquify it, bring it here and convert it back to gas it costs money and costs time to do that, and we have got limited capacity. We are looking to build a couple more liquefied natural gas plants refining plants to convert from liquid into gas again. It takes time to do that. But we have a tremendous supply of natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf in the United States. And God bless Ronald Reagan for drawing that dotted line out there at 200 miles offshore in the United States. I believe that was in about 1983. When he did that he opened up a tremendous amount for energy resources for the United States, not just natural gas, other minerals out there too that we have not even found yet, plus a lot of crude oil in the same areas where you will find natural gas in many cases. But that 200-mile limit that Reagan defined for us is a limit that lets us have an almost unlimited supply of natural gas. Now, I will give you some examples here on how that works. The North Slope of Alaska, where we went up there in 1972 to open that area up and drill for oil on the North Slope of Alaska, where we had to build the pipeline from up there down to Valdez in order to put that oil on tankers to get it down here to the lower 48 States so we could market it. But the provision was not in place at that time to build a natural gas pipeline because why would you pipe natural gas down to Valdez to compress it into liquid, put it on a ship, send it down to California, turn it back into a gas when you had a countryside that had all this natural gas in it, natural gas that was probably less than 2 bucks back there in 1972. So we did not develop the natural gas, but it is there. The wells are drilled. It is available. There is 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the North Slope of Alaska sitting up there right now. It needs a pipeline down to the Lower 48. It is over 4,700 miles from Prudhoe Bay, mile post zero on the Alaska pipeline on down to Kansas City if you want to pick a place in the middle of the country, over 4,700 miles. If you go the other way and go south, where is there a lot of gas south? Well, we know offshore in Louisiana, offshore on the entire gulf coast. Go a little farther. Venezuela, there is gas that we are paying $14.50 for is $1.60 there. You know that is only 2,700 miles from the coast of Venezuela up to Kansas City and it is 4,700 miles from Kansas City to Prudhoe Bay and the North Slope of Alaska. But it is not just a measure of a pipeline from Alaska to Kansas City which, I do support that because I want more energy into the Lower 48 States for a lot of different ways. But it is not the measure then of 4,700 miles from Alaska to Kansas City versus Kansas City to Venezuela. It is because there is another measure, and that is the measure of 406 cubic feet of natural gas that is on the Outer Continental Shelf that is right there next to already processing plants, pipelines, drill rigs. We have the network all there. All we need to do is expand that drilling. This country needs it. And these Americans deserve it. We need to drive this $14.50 price down. We have got to cut it by half at least. We can do it if we can open 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona and the gentleman from Virginia on this enlightening discussion we have had on immigration. I am quite pleased that an individual from Arizona would have the phrase, good fences make good neighbors. I thought that was an Iowa phrase. I want to point out, too, that when you build a fence or a wall to contain people, if you do that to keep them from leaving a place like it might have been East Germany, then that is wrong from a philosophical standpoint. If you have a place that is such an attraction that you build that fence to keep them out, that is a moral thing to do. There is a big difference. So, the fence in Israel, for example, between the West Bank and Israel proper, that is a fence to protect the people from the folks on the other side that want to come across with bombs. It is not immoral to build a fence to protect yourself from people that are assaulting. In fact, the southern border in the last year over 1,159,000 illegals that were collared at the border, so to speak. We heard T.J. Bonner, a border patrol, say here a couple of days ago that approximately 4 million came across the southern border during that period of time and we collared 1,159,000. Of those 1,159,000, all but 1,640 of them promised to go back. We cannot verify that any of them went back, but we did actually adjudicate 1,640 of the 1,159,000 to go back to their home country. So we have got a very small percentage here. The catch-and-release program is real. I got into a little buy-in when I made that statement that it was a seven times catch-and-release program before they were adjudicated for deportation. Some of the bureaucrats took issue with that and wanted to have a meeting. So they brought eight of their people into the room, and the first statement was I am wrong, we need to retract the statement. An hour and 45 minutes later, they admitted that, even though that was not the written policy, it was the practice, and in fact, it might be more than seven times catch-and-release. That is how bad it is. I want to say just a couple of words about the new IDEA bill that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) mentioned that I have drafted and that we have significant cosponsors on. It is clear for us, build a fence on the border, beef up the border patrol, but we need domestic enforcement. We know that the administration has not sanctioned a single employer for hiring illegals in the last year. That is an issue that needs to be enforced as well. But, on top of that, how do we dry up the jobs magnet? How do we get a policy in place and get some administration agency that actually is willing to enforce that policy? So I looked around the country, and I thought who really are the junkyard dogs of bureaucracy? Who likes to go to work and who does their job? Who has a reputation that you know they are going to follow through? The times I have been audited I can tell you it is the IRS. So I said, well, let us see if we can find a way to get the IRS into this game and enforce this illegal immigration. So that is where the idea comes from to remove Federal deductibility for wages and benefits that are paid to illegals. Let the IRS come and do a normal audit, and if the employer uses the InstaCheck program so they can verify over the Internet in an instant whether that employee is legal to be hired, go back on the Social Security Administration database and Department of Homeland Security database, come back with a positive hit, hire that person. We put safe harbor in the bill. If you are a responsible employer, you use InstaCheck, the basic pilot program to verify the employability, then the IRS will not touch you on that hire. But if they run the numbers when they do the audit, use the InstaCheck, and it finds out that the Social Security numbers and the identification does not match anything, then the wages and benefits that you spend on that employee become not a deductible expense but taxable income. So, for example, if you are a corporation and in a 34 percent tax bracket and you are paying $10 an hour to illegals, the IRS will come in and say, well, no, that $10 an hour is not a deduction. We are going to tax that at 34 percent, and we are going to add the interest and penalty on there. Now that becomes about a $6 an hour penalty on the $10 an hour person, so now the illegals cost you $16 an hour. In theory, a least, a legal employee that you could hire for $16 an hour becomes a rational decision. As that happens, then the illegals that are here working at this discount rate because it is rational for employers to hire the illegals, they are cheaper for a lot of reasons, it becomes rational instead to say, no, sorry, I cannot put you to work because the IRS sometime in the next 6 years can come back and audit me and I will have to pay the bill. So I might as well pay it to somebody who is here legally for the right reason. This changes this great migration of four million people pouring across our southern border, and it sends them back again. Because what are they going to do if they cannot get employment here? It is a jobs magnet. New ideas. It is one piece of many things, as Mr. Goode spoke about and Mr. Hayworth did. So I am part of all of this. I want to stand here with it. If we have any more ideas, I want to hear them all. We need them from the American people. The American people are the ones who will move this Congress, so they need to write letters and send the message, and this Congress will hear you. So I thank the gentleman on the immigration issue tonight. I also had two subjects in mind that I feel is important to bring up, and energy is the other one. As we listened to the minority party on the other side do their 60 minutes of nightly lamentations, we heard about the cost of gas, the cost of energy, and I did make a few remarks about how we can help that cause. But I would point out that I represent maybe the number one corn-producing congressional district in America. If you are going to raise anything, you have to have nitrogen fertilizer to do that. All crops take nitrogen. Corn takes a lot of nitrogen. About 90 percent of the cost of nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of natural gas. Natural gas has gone up 400 to 500 percent over the last 3 years, and we see the cost of natural gas going in the area of $14.50 per million BTUs. We look around the world, and Mr. Peterson will give us more details on this in a moment, and we see not far away, natural gas coming out of Venezuela of $1.60 compared to the U.S. at $14.50. The other day they said they were going to go ahead and build the natural gas pipeline from Alaska down to the lower 48 States. It is 4,700-some miles from the north slope down to Kansas City, the heart of America. Up there, there is 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we know of. There is probably more in ANWR that we will open up, and hopefully we will drill there for oil as well. So, 4,700 some miles from the north slope of Alaska to Kansas City. Build the pipeline down to the lower 48, and we can get 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Venezuela is making fertilizer and selling it to us now off of gas that costs about $1.60. Russia is doing the same thing off of natural gas that costs us 95 cents. We are losing our fertilizer industry in America. It does not take very much to control food production if you have control of the fertilizer itself. But down there in that gulf area, for example, all that gas in Venezuela, Venezuela is 2,700 miles from Kansas City, for example. So that gas is closer. But closer than that yet is all of this natural gas that we have on the Outer Continental Shelf of America, with 200 miles, 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Now, tell me, would you go to Alaska for 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and build a 4,000-some mile pipeline to get it down to the lower 48? Would you go to Venezuela and ship that gas in as liquified natural gas and go through the exchange process and the plants at the terminals that it takes to handle that? Or would you just go down there nice and close, where we already have a system all set up, and plug right into that existing massive quantity of 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we have on the Outer Continental Shelf? To continue to be hostage to energy prices at $14.50 per million BTUs when the rest of the world is getting along on numbers like 95 cents or $1.60. China is up to about $4 something. But we are at a great disadvantage. And if we only open up this natural gas marginally, we will only lower the price marginally and we will still pay a great price economically, because we know that energy is the price of everything we have and everything we own. Having said that, Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), who is really the lead on this issue, and I am very happy and proud that he has taken this issue to this Congress.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) for his presentation and with clarity I appreciate. I want to add that we are taking a look into the functionality and the failure to function in citizenship and immigration services. It is this Congress' responsibility to have oversight. It is this Congress' responsibility to investigate. If we believe there is impropriety in some place, lack of efficiency, we are to bring this all together. This is our responsibility to the taxpayers of America, and it is our constitutional duty. Because there are a couple of minders there that will not allow an individual to speak, then that does not mean that we are going to back away from this. It just means we are going to resolve the situation eventually in the appropriate fashion, with patience and professionalism. That is the perspective that I think we need to take a look at with this. I want to touch back on an immigration issue, but the moment that I do that, I want to transition over to the energy policy. So, in the interim, I would be happy to yield a few minutes to the gentleman from Arizona for his concluding thoughts with regard to immigration.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, before I pass this microphone over to my good friend and colleague, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth), I cannot help but express some of the frustration with sitting here and listening to this. I am really grateful that the American people do not have the same sentiment that I have heard tonight on the floor of Congress. When I go to the coffee shop and to the break room in my district, I do not hear anything like this rhetoric that I have heard here tonight. When I hear that we have cut food stamps, I was involved in that. We did not cut food stamps. What we did was we changed the regulations so you have to be on some other kind of benefit so there was less fraud. There is $1 billion of fraud going into the wrong people in food stamps just in the last year that I have a report. We only touched about 20 percent of the fraud, Mr. Speaker. Fuel prices. Help us open up drilling on the outer continental shelf. Help us drill in ANWR. Let us develop the energy that we have in this country, and we will not be looking at $3 dollar fuel. We know who is to blame. It is the environmental extremists. And if Exxon Mobil made $10 billion in the last quarter, let us take a look and see where they invest it. If they invest it in that drilling, the American people will reap the benefits. There are a whole series of things here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and that frustrates me greatly. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the immigration issue. I would ask my friend, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth) if he would pick that issue up.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth) for his eloquent presentation on a lot of things that ail us that we heard about here tonight and also the border control and the immigration issue and the future of our country. As I listen to that group that comes here nearly every night, and it was interesting to see the gray hair amongst the 30-somethings that we had, it is extraordinarily depressing to hear that viewpoint. I happened to at random bounce across some Web pages that must be the perpetrators of that kind of thought process because it just does not connect with the rational reality of what is going on here with our authorization bills, our appropriations bills, the responsibility that we have, the fiscal responsibility, the vision we have for America. And I do not think that you could read the facts and connect the lingo that is coming from the other side and measure the two together. But it is depressing and I think sometimes that if I felt like that I do not think I could get out of bed every morning and go to work in this place and drag everybody else down when we are trying to lift this country up. Their vision seems to be, I will say, surrender and get out of Iraq, turn that over to Zarqawi, let that be a terrorist center for the world. Let them come in here and attack us whenever they want. Do not take any self-defense mechanism. Soak the rich. Starve the businesses. Get rid of the jobs. And the list goes on and on and on of the lamentations that we heard. We are an optimistic party. Even though when they say the name of our party it comes off as profanity, it really is an optimistic party. We have always reached for the stars and brought this country forward. The tax cuts that we did turned this economy around from the depths of September 11's trough and, in fact, this year we have $274 billion in additional revenue beyond what was calculated by CBO and anticipated because of the tax cuts that we provided, and we need to make them permanent. On the immigration issue, which is our subject here tonight, that is important to our national security issues, the issue of the citizenship and immigration services and the job that they are supposed to be doing and the great difficulty they have in carrying out that task, the internal problems that they have, we have the gentleman on my left from Virginia (Mr. Goode), and I would be happy to yield to him.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the special order of the gentlewoman of Virginia (Mrs. Drake) given earlier this evening.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) for bringing this bill to the floor as chairman of the Judiciary Committee which I have the privilege of serving on. I rise today in support of the Private Property Rights Protection Act. This spring, the Supreme Court put a ``For Sale by Government'' sign in front of every American home, farm and business. It does not matter how many coats of paint you put on your house or how much landscaping you do, no amount of your investment and upkeep can match the tax base provided by corporate America. If the government thinks that it can get more tax revenue from your property when put to a different use, a bigger house, a new factory, you are out of luck and out of your home. We were taught as children and read in the Constitution that eminent domain meant that government could take property only for public use, like roads and railroads, but the 15 Connecticut citizens who had their homes and businesses taken away from them in the Kelo case found out that public use now means whatever the powerful want to do with your home, as long as it might bring in more tax dollars. Whatever happened to our rights to life, liberty and property, which were the very rights so important to the people who founded this country? Mr. Chairman, the Supreme Court took that right away. The Framers had no intention of allowing Federal judges to impart their wisdom on this issue. That is why they put the eminent domain clause directly into the Constitution by the Bill of Rights. The Constitution here in my pocket says, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' If we do not act today, the consequences of that Supreme Court decision will not be hard to foretell. The winners are those with great influence, wealth and power. What happens when the potential buyer of a property is a foreign-owned entity? Or if a Nevada church is bulldozed to make room for a brothel? Americans will not stand for usurpation of their constitutional rights by the Court. Today, we have the opportunity to restore those rights that we fought so hard for. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 4128.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably absent due to illness during rollcall votes 521 and 522. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on 521 and 522.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for coming to the floor to stand up and let America and the Speaker know the circumstances in southern Texas and how that has impacted you all down there. I will pick up on the flow of this. I had the privilege of going down there very early. In fact, my district director was on the ground near New Orleans on an air base on Labor Day which was just barely in the aftermath of the hurricane. It was important, I thought, to have someone down there to see what was going on so we could measure the magnitude of the disaster down. He went down with a KC-135 load of Air Force MP's out of Colorado and reported back to me immediately. From what he saw down there, he said he thought there was so much military activity on Labor Day that it reminded him of the DaNang base during Vietnam when he was there. So that gave me a sense of how much military effort there was even that early, and yet the public does not have the perception that there was a Federal response that was nearly as aggressive or as comprehensive as it actually was. I would say further that I did not wait. The following week I was there on the eleventh and twelfth of September. I came in very early on that Sunday morning. I got a good look at much of what was going on and went up in a Black Hawk helicopter and flew all over New Orleans for a couple of hours. I went back down and had the meetings that I had asked for. I was given a ride over the Corps of Engineers headquarters. There I entered their administrative offices where they rode out Hurricane Katrina, and looking at the drawings that they had and the maps of the area, and I had studied the elevations and the levees and the system that had been constructed. I had also read the reports that were predicting the worst-case scenario, which essentially Katrina was the worst-case scenario for New Orleans with the exception that maybe the winds could have been a little stronger, but it went in the most damaging path it could have. It was almost the perfect storm, and I will return to that description perhaps in a few moments, Mr. Speaker. But when I think of the immediate military response that kept the air bases looking like Danang with so many planes landing, we had fixed- wing aircraft landing more often than one every minute, whether it be C-130s or KC-135s, cargo aircraft coming in with manpower and also with supplies, equipment, everything they could imagine that they could muster up from our military. Those fixed wing aircraft were landing on the runway. The military had set up their power system, and they had taken over the communications for the air traffic controllers which did not have power. So the military system kicked in, and they were controlling the fixed-wing aircraft to land one more often than every minute on the runway there. Then, on top of that, the helicopters were coming and going; and they were landing crossways of the runway, asked to yield the right-of-way to the planes that were landing, a very, very busy place on Labor Day that early after Katrina hit. So I would just fast forward to, in fact, exactly 7 days later when I found myself in a shelter in Slidell, Louisiana, visiting some of the people who had been evacuees from their homes and were looking for a place to lay their weary heads. They had set up the gymnasium there with perhaps 300 cots, a Red Cross-structured shelter. As I walked through there and visited some of the victims of the storm, I got a sense of the stories that they had lived through and a feel for the way they had been helped out and the helping hands that came from volunteers from all across this country, and in fact, hearing the stories of the traffic that was going south, while the evacuation was going north, people coming to help were a traffic jam themselves. That is the American spirit, Mr. Speaker; and in that gymnasium, I met a young man who was a specialist with the 711th Signal Battalion out of Mobile, Alabama. He was Specialist Cunningham, and I asked him, of course, what unit he was with. He said, 711th Signal out of Mobile, Alabama, sir. I said, how did you get here out of Alabama? Didn't you get hit by a hurricane there, too? He said, Yes, but our orders were to come over here and help the people that needed it worse than we did. I said how did you get across Mississippi? His answer was, We used chainsaws and we used Humvees and chainsaws, and we essentially cut away across the trees that were down over the highway, and we drug them out of the way and we opened the road and worked our way over here. So they had cut all the way or worked their way and cleared some of the way, if not all the way, across Mississippi to Slidell, Louisiana, on the eastern side of the Louisiana border, right next to the Mississippi line. People from Mobile, Alabama, 300 strong, in there early, and they started out on Monday. That is Monday Labor Day, the same day my district director landed down there near New Orleans, the same day that the air traffic was landing, one plane more often than every minute, with helicopters landing in between, bringing manpower and machines and equipment and supplies in for people that were in need. Mr. Speaker, the Federal Government did provide a fast response; but it was a huge area, 90,000 square miles to start with; and now it has been added to significantly by Rita. Of course, we learned from Katrina; and some of the things that were in place in Texas in preparation for evacuees, particularly those that might come out of Galveston in the event of a hurricane, were very beneficial to the people that came from New Orleans and found themselves in Houston. I am quite impressed with the effort of the region and the resources that they pulled together and the ability that they had in the Astrodome to have supplies there and water and food and medicine. I think the report was 400 different kinds of pharmaceuticals in a pharmaceutical shop that was set up there along with cots and all the services that they needed, medical help and psychological help, and the list went on. Plenty of volunteers were able to take thousands of people into the Astrodome and have the supplies there so that it was orderly, clean, and neat. It was not littered. Apparently, the people who went to the Astrodome helped clean the place up. I do not know, but every time I saw a picture of that, it was a clean place; and whenever I saw a picture of the Superdome, it was a very, very filthy and littered place that appeared to have no order, and it was a chaotic location, as we all pretty well know by now. As the Committee on Government Reform meets and holds hearings and examines the circumstances that unfolded, I really do think that we need to let them do their due diligence. I think we need to let them listen to the testimony, and we heard the now-just-resigned director of FEMA give his testimony yesterday. More testimony followed today, I understand. It will follow in the days and weeks ahead. It is important that we put on record the chronology of what happened when, where was the storm in the path, what notices went out, what decisions were made at what time, who was in the position of authority, and at what time did they make those decisions, who did they consult with, what was the basis of the facts of the information, what equipment did they have to work with, what alternatives did they have, what had they done in the past history to prepare themselves for such a disaster. Certainly, it was not a surprise that a hurricane might someday hit of that magnitude, because that was published in the New Orleans Times- Picayune newspaper, I believe it was in late 2002. I have read all those articles, and I have read the worst-case scenario, and I cannot believe that I would be one of the few people, but many, many people in that region were aware of the worst-case scenario, and that is essentially what transpired. I think it is important to let the committee do their work, the Committee on Government Reform, bring the witnesses forward, put their testimony on the record, take the documents, the supporting documents, and put those into the record and have the staff and the interested people and the public and the media be able to take a good look and examine the facts and then write up the scenarios. This committee will issue a report, and I want to reserve my judgment on all the things that I think went wrong until such time as I can point to them and say these are congressional findings, they are facts; and I want to base my judgment off of those facts. I will give, Mr. Speaker, a couple of opinions on what I think happened, and not to be passing previous judgment but simply to give an overall sketch of how it looks to me from what I have seen, what I have been involved in, and that is, that I think Hurricane Katrina, and Rita to a significantly less effect, but Katrina particularly was almost the perfect storm. It did what the director of Homeland Security said here on this floor, that it came in in a military fashion. If you were going to attack a city and you wanted to immobilize a city, what you would do is wipe out the communications, the power and electricity. That is the first thing that Katrina did. Then you would cut off all the transportation routes into the city, and that is what happened with the flooding and the roads that were taken out. Then the third thing that would happen would be, of course, you would attack, and that was the flood. The flood, when you start filling up a city like that, it immobilizes everything. It put everybody out of commission. So it was almost a perfect storm from the standpoint of the damage that it did and the direction that it took. I can speak about that perhaps a little bit more, Mr. Speaker; but I would add to that then, when local services disappeared and when we saw that many hundreds of the first responders were victims of the storm themselves, either their places were damaged by the wind, damaged by the water, under water, or damaged by the wind and the water and under water, but the first responders took a serious blow, and they were not there to help coordinate. They did not have a communications system to help coordinate with. I am sure that there are many, many stories of heroic people that toiled in oblivion in that chaos of the first few days that was the effect of the storm that hit New Orleans. I will say that that rolling chain reaction of disaster, the effect of the city's response in particular was not as effective as it may have been due to lack of communications ability, due to lack of resources in places where one would think they might have been, and then the loss of communications so that it was not possible to salvage the operations, salvage the response to the storm because the resources were not there, had there been the right decisions made, I think to provide them. So you take it up to the next level of the State, and there, again, communications and decision-making are certainly something that will be questioned. It kept the decisions out of the hands of the Federal Government, except for those National Guards like 711th Signal Battalion out of Mobile, Alabama, who came in and under whose order I do not know, but I am awfully glad they came. I was awfully proud to look at young Specialist Cunningham in the eye when he told me that they had chainsawed their way across Mississippi to get to Louisiana. That is the American way, Mr. Speaker, and when I hear the anecdote that was told by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) a few moments ago about the decision to place the vehicles on a couple of ships and keep them safe from the hurricane, and that offer was made by a couple of captains, he said that they made the decision in just a few minutes to place vehicles on a ship. They did that right away, and they protected all of those vehicles, they were in good condition, good shape, because a decision was made at the local level. Quick-thinking people that looked around and saw the resources that they had, that has always been the American way. When we let government make decisions, we delay. For government to make decisions, the bureaucracy moves too slowly, the information moving up to the bureaucracy gets there too slowly; and even if the right decision is made, chances are it does not get back down through and does not get implemented in time for it to have the effect that it might have. You really need people on the ground that are thinking for themselves and have enough self-confidence, enough leadership ability and enough authority to make those decisions like that decision was that recommended by the two ships' captains that saved all those vehicles, so that as soon as the storm was over, they could roll them off the ships and put them right to work rescuing people. I thought that was a good example, and to think that we maybe could have had those kinds of decisions in other areas around the disaster area if we had gotten government more out of the way and let the local and those people make those decisions, but they had to make the right ones in preparation, too. That is the part that I think that the Committee on Government Reform will bring out here so that Americans will see it with a true perspective. If I could, I would appreciate the opportunity to yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) who knows her mind, comes here and speaks it, speaks up for the right causes and the right principles; and I am very pleased to be associated with the gentlewoman from North Carolina.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) for her contribution to this discussion and this debate and her involvement on the Committee on Government Reform, which has got an important role to play, and always has when it comes time to streamline government and bring more responsibility out of government. This is an especially important time. There are a lot of Federal dollars being poured into this region as we speak. And as the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) said, she voted no on the $52 billion. I am one of those people that voted no on the $52 billion. Actually, $51.8 billion, to be precise, not that a couple hundred million dollars is not splitting hairs in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, but I think it is. And I voted no because there was approximately $5 billion in there that was easily identifiable as not emergency spending, Mr. Speaker. It was money that was being directed towards 300,000 trailer houses, of which 270,000 were back ordered. Back ordered trailer houses, and mitigation of future disasters is not emergency spending. I wanted to focus the money on emergency spending, and I wanted to get about another $10 billion down there to keep FEMA going for another week so that we could do a better job of oversight. Because, as you know, once the money goes out the door, it is a lot harder to watch where it is spent than it is to put the strings on it before it leaves the door. I believe we could have done a better job of that, but I do believe that we are joining together here to do a better job and looking back on some of that appropriations, to do the best we can to make sure it is spent as well as we can in any future requests. I want to make sure that we weigh in very carefully on where those dollars go. That is the biggest reason that I went down there fairly early in this, on September 11 and 12, and I got a good look at all of New Orleans from the air. I also flew down from the Corps of Engineers' headquarters there over the Mississippi River, which runs approximately 90 miles south, in a little bit of a winding pattern down to the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River outlets into the gulf. Most people in the upper Midwest think that New Orleans is on the coast, that it is the outlet of the Mississippi, but in fact it is another 90 miles or so. Of course, when I was there, it was only about 75, I believe, because the water was so high and the damage that was done it really shortened the Mississippi River by a significant proportion. Nonetheless, that disaster that I saw down along the channeling of the Mississippi River, or I will say next to the Mississippi River channel, where the river has perhaps, and I will state the information that I have is that the levees built to keep the Mississippi River in the channel are 25 feet above sea level. Then on the west side of the Mississippi, from the levee and going west, there is perhaps an average of about a half mile of bottom land there. That is protected with another levee about 25 feet high which protects the gulf, so that the gulf does not come into the backside of that levee that controls the Mississippi River. That area in between those two 25-foot levees is the area that is about a half mile wide and generally about 90 miles long, perhaps 45 square miles, with six or seven towns in there. Those six or seven towns were all wiped out. The wind hit them all hard and damaged them severely. Even some of the best structures were really damaged severely. The wind hit, and then the water surged over the levee from the Mississippi River side and flooded that area in between those two 25- foot dikes with that half a mile in between, and then the water surged over from the gulf side and did the same thing. So I am going to say wind damage like I have only seen in the worst of tornadoes, the entire area wind damaged like that, with entire buildings just blown away into splinters. Then, when the flood came from the surge, any buildings that were not blown away were mostly washed away. They floated and crashed up against each other against the levee. Mr. Speaker, I have here on the easel a picture of one of the better built buildings down there in that bottom land parallel to the Mississippi River. This may be, just guessing, perhaps 30 miles south of New Orleans along the Mississippi. This is a building that is built with steel pilings driven in, and who knows how deep, but down deep enough to get a very solid bearing in order to build a building that can withstand a hurricane and can withstand the kind of water surge that was going to come. As you can see, as good as it was built, it still blew everything from here on down away, and there is not a lot left to salvage here. One might be surprised that the structure seems to be fairly sound. I saw this all over, but I also square mile after square mile that had been homes that was nothing but a footing or a foundation or a concrete platform. I did not bring pictures of those because they are not so impressive, Mr. Speaker. That is just water-covered concrete footings and nothing left. There were trees were the wind blew so hard it simply blew the leaves off the tree and the trees died. The salt water that came in, of course, killed most everything green. That is another piece that we do not hear much about, Mr. Speaker. I have saved this particular picture because, in a way, it is kind of heartbreaking. I was walking along a levee south of Slidell, Louisiana, a levee that runs over towards New Orleans. And as I looked at the devastation after devastation, debris after debris, it was numbing after a while. It is hard to be shocked. In fact, you just get that sense of how can anything be worse and you start counting things in the trees, like counting life jackets that are hanging from the trees, hundreds of them; and counting refrigerators up in the trees, and I will say dozens of them. Odd things that stick out in a person's mind. I ended up with about 1,800 pictures, which when I go back and look at them, I see things in those pictures that I did not see when I was there in person. But this caught my eye. Laying on the ground beside a place that used to be a home, and it says Happy Anniversary. This has not been disturbed at all. It is exactly the way it laid. You can see where the grass is laid over the top of the handle. Whether it was a husband that bought that for the wife, or the wife for the husband, or the children for the parents, or whether it was the grandchildren for the grandparents, I do not know, but when I look at that, I see one of the doves that was on top is broken and laying here and it seems to reflect on what happened to some of the families that lost a loved one maybe have not found a loved one yet. We have done a pretty good job of locating people, but the effort still goes on. And when the waters came up, and they came so fast that there might be a 17- to 20-foot surge that would go from zero to 17 to 20 feet in a matter of 3 minutes, maybe 4 minutes, that was not much time to get away. A lot of people had to go up the stairs of their house up to their attics. And when the water came and filled their attic, they needed something to chop their way out through the roof in order to climb out on the roof to save themselves from the flood. I do not know how many people did not have a means to chop themselves out of their own attic. I do not know, but as I look at this, I cannot help but think that it may not be this family that lost someone, but I believe it represents many of the families that did lose someone who was celebrating their anniversary not all that long ago. On the positive side, Mr. Speaker, this is a very resilient Nation, and we have a strong character and a strong resilience. We also have a sense of defiance, which is rooted back in the defiance of King George. So when we are met with disaster, no matter how bad the disaster, no matter how bad the blow, we have people that stand up and they look around and they think, all right, if that is the best you can give me, then I can take that and I am going to rebuild. I will put my life back together, my business back together, put my house back together, and I am going to live here and make it. I am going to be profitable and contribute back to this country and the neighborhood and the economy. This is a symbol of that defiance, Mr. Speaker. This is one of the things that warmed my heart as we flew by there. The individual or the family that owned this place had lost almost everything. This is mostly trash and rubble. If you look up here, this is debris that has all been pushed over by the wind. That is just floating debris, and the water has been over the top of this levee. That is the Mississippi River right at the top of the picture. As the owner came and found nothing, he did find a flag pole that was still standing. There is no way the flag that was on that flag pole originally survived that wind. But, Mr. Speaker, the first thing he did was went and got a fresh Old Glory and ran it up to the top of that flag pole in defiance of the storm and in proud independence that he would be, and I assume it is a he, rebuilding. One day I will go back down there, and I hope I can identify that flag pole, because I think there is going to be some buildings that have been reconstructed again, and the place will one day look better than it did the day before the storm hit. We have a lot of big decisions to make: where the Federal dollars will go, where they will come from. We have an obligation to look for offsets. We cannot continue to put debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren. We can find the savings. I am convinced that this Congress, working together in a bipartisan manner, will be able to find ways to save money so we can get the resources into the gulf coast to help out our friends in Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, and to a lesser extent some of Florida. I am hopeful that we can join together in a way to do that. I have a few ideas myself. I am not going to enter into this debate here tonight with them, but I have been working on my own list on how to fund Hurricane Katrina's reconstruction. It is essential that we find offsets, and we can do some reconciliation legislation. It will be a blessing for us because we will find a way to make government more efficient. We will have that debate here. It will be on the floor of Congress. But also finding ways to pay for it is not enough. We also have to spend the money wisely. We need to limit it to the extent we can while still taking care of our obligations from the Federal Government. I have looked at the things that we need to do to protect New Orleans again. It is below sea level. There was 16 feet of water standing in parts of New Orleans. That whole area with standing water is below sea level. We have to find a way, and there was discussion whether we could construct below sea level. Those questions landed on my ears. Actually, I thought they were prudent questions that needed to be asked, deliberated upon, and we need to bring more facts to the table before we can come up with a definitive answer. But when you look at New Orleans and see the downtown buildings that rise up out of the water, and I was able to see it on a day when it was a bright blue sky, and the sunlight reflecting off the downtown buildings made the water blue, as the downtown buildings stood up, I looked and it was clear to me, yes, you cannot let a great city like New Orleans stand in water and not be reconstructed better than it was before. We need to rebuild the city, but we need to rebuild the city in a wise fashion. My first recommendation is New Orleans, the levees that protect it and the systems that protect it from a hurricane, be constructed in preparation for a category 5 hurricane. If you can imagine a worse one, let us reconstruct for that. Let us do the hurricane mitigation work so the worst storm we can imagine cannot come in and do the kind of damage that Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans. The first step is as the water in Lake Pontchartrain increased by that 14 to 15-foot average water depth, and as it went up another 8 to 10 feet, because of the storm surge from the gulf, as the low pressure center raised the level of the water in the ocean and that hard south wind at 150 miles an hour drove that water up into the lake, stacked it up against the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain and filled that lake up with 8 to 10 feet more water, and then when the hurricane shifted to the east and winds came from the north, it drove that high wall of water down against the levees on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain. The waves added another 8 to 10 feet, it washed over the levees and flooded the city. We know what happened, and to prevent it from happening again, I believe we need to do the engineering study, do the financial analysis, but repair the levees on the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain to a level that can protect Lake Pontchartrain itself from a category 5 hurricane so it cannot be breached, and to put hurricane gates in where necessary so we can close those in the event of a storm and keep the ocean water out of Lake Pontchartrain. That is step one. Step two is if it gets in there or if there is a surge of the water in there, and I do not know if it is possible to have that kind of an effort under any kind of a storm, but if the water does get into Lake Pontchartrain, then we need to be prepared for the second level of protection. That second level would be to build the levees between Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans to an elevation that will protect New Orleans from 25 feet above sea level from a category 5, and then to put hurricane gates in at the inlets of the canals, the 17th Street Canal being the most infamous of them all. That can be done and protected. We need to come out with a cost and engineering analysis of that and make a decision in this Congress. I believe if that cost is anywhere near reasonable, we need to get that done before there is new construction going on down below sea level in New Orleans itself. So that is two systems that would protect New Orleans from a flood. I point out there is a significant amount of construction done in the world below sea level. Holland is one of those examples. I am told a third of Holland is below sea level; and when I was told that, I said they have reclaimed another portion from the sea since when I went to school and a fourth of the nation was underwater. That is probably the case. They continually reclaim. They construct below sea level. I believe we can do that in the area of New Orleans. I have some more questions from the engineering perspective that I do not have the answers to, but protect the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain to keep the ocean water out and storm surge out, and keep the water in Lake Pontchartrain there by putting gates at the inlet of the canals, and perhaps raise the level of the hurricane levees on Lake Pontchartrain. The third thing is the pump stations have to be raised up well above the high water mark of this flood, and they need to have redundancies built in so they can pump water if the power goes out. If the power goes out, they automatically kick on. And the water that is being pumped out of New Orleans now over the last week and a half or so, it is a massive quantity of water. It is 27,000 cubic feet per second, more than twice the amount of water that runs down the Missouri River at Sioux City, Iowa, in the area where I live. Mr. Speaker, Florida has a lot of experience with reconstructing in preparation for category 5 hurricanes. They have perfected a lot of the method of how to prepare for a hurricane, how to evacuate, how to zone the houses and the buildings so they are prepared for that kind of wind and damage. Requiring shutters is one thing, and building off the ground is another. There are a number of ideas from an architectural standpoint. There is much that has already been established. We should look at that opportunity to take the language of those zoning restrictions that they have and the emergency response system that they developed in Florida and bring that into Louisiana, Mississippi and parts of Texas; but Louisiana needing the most help, it appears. I think we can learn from our experience. We need to also be able to have a Federal requirement on the construction of the levee so if there is a levee that can be breached and put that much property in jeopardy, we need to have Federal oversight over that levee. There is much that can be done and should be done. I will be involved in the effort to identify the mitigation work and looking at the cost and the engineering design and the recommendations. I would also point out that there will be a population loss in New Orleans. I do not know that number, no one knows that number, but perhaps a loss of a quarter of the population, perhaps more. If that is the case, the homes that will be condemned, many are still under water today, that will be the last place that needs to be reconstructed. The reconstruction of the homes can go in the higher elevation areas where they do not have water. Those decisions need to be made so people can make plans for the future. That is part of this Congress' responsibility. Wherever there are Federal dollars, we have an obligation to the taxpayers that they are spent wisely. There are private sector solutions to this, and we need to listen to our representatives from that area, those that are advocating for less pressure on taxpayers and more pressure on individuals, and the solutions of tax credits and I will say commerce-friendly zones, tax free zones, for example, lay all of those ideas out on the table. The gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Boustany) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jindal) both have been very active, along with the other Representatives from Louisiana. The gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. McCrery) has been very vocal here. I am looking forward to their input and working in cooperation with them so we put a solution together that will leave a legacy of making it better when things are bad in the event of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would pose a follow-up question. Does the gentleman have any idea why it is some folks oppose the drilling offshore when it is out of sight?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address my colleagues tonight and address this House of Representatives. As I sat and listened to the Chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), I cannot resist the sense of duty and obligation to weigh in on some of his remarks that he made with regard to General Myers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Of course, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) has worked very closely with General Myers and he knows him far better than I do. My work in relationship there has been not as deep, but I have been as impressed as the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) has been with Richard Myers, the chairman of our Joint Chiefs, and with his vision and his ability to see beyond the horizon, as the gentleman said. I also had the privilege of meeting General John Kelly over in Iraq before the operation that ended the battle of Fallujah, and I was impressed with his dedication and his vision and his understanding of who our enemy was and what needed to be done, and I was pleased to sit here tonight and hear the remarks made by the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), honoring the family, the family commitment to the military and to the defense of this fine Nation that was made by General John Kelly and his children. Mr. Speaker, let me shift to the subject matter that I asked to speak about tonight and that is the subject matter that I have come to call ``Katrita.'' We have been here on this floor a couple of hours in the past 2 weeks, and I have spoken at great length about Katrina and, in these past few days, we have seen the aftermath now of Hurricane Rita. I just merge them together, because essentially they did merge together, Mr. Speaker, as Katrina hit New Orleans and points on the east and Rita hit points to the west of New Orleans on over into the bay and into Texas, so they have crossed those lines and the damage of the two hurricanes have overlapped on each other. When I take Katrina on the one side and Rita on the other side and merge them together I get Katrita. It is the largest natural disaster I believe that this Nation has ever seen. We are fortunate that it has not been the largest loss of life, although we mourn those who we have lost, and we are still in the process of recovery. But this financial loss and the term of time that will be required for reconstruction I think is the most devastating that America has seen. We are going to need to pull together on this. I am well aware that there are Members of Congress who have districts that were hit hard by the dual hurricanes, and they are the most sensitive to these issues. I am up in the upper Midwest, although I have made my trip down there and much of my staff has been down there, and in fact, I have a staff person there today who will be there for some time. We want to lend a good hand to the people in the gulf coast intelligently and responsibly. Before I get into that in any great depth, I will be happy to yield the floor to one of those individuals who does have constituents in the area, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would pose a question to the gentleman, as the gentleman raised the issue with the natural gas and oil drilling that goes on in the gulf, I have seen the map of where those rigs are, the platforms that are out there, and what I cannot see when I go down there along that shore and what I cannot seen when I go along there and in a plane or a helicopter is any rigs. Can you see the rigs from the shoreline, say if you are sitting on the beach anywhere down there?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I am advised that the last oil spill we had in any offshore drilling for oil was 1969. I do not know if the gentleman can confirm that, but in that question could the gentleman also respond to the question of, does the gentleman know if there has ever been a spill of natural gas drilling offshore? And if it did spill, would it kind of look like the gas that is boiling up out of the water in New Orleans where it would just dissipate into the air and is there a reason to be concerned, even if we were irresponsible with regard to natural gas drilling?

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. Chairman, I offer an amendment.