Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, as I sat here and listened to this debate tonight, a number of things crossed my mind. I would like to pass backwards through the comments that were made by the distinguished members of the Congressional Black Caucus and address some of the subject matter. As you sit in your living rooms this evening and you consider what you have heard, you have heard our President's name used over and over again, never in a complimentary fashion, not particularly derogatory, given some of the evenings I have seen in this Chamber, but we need to keep in mind that the apparent Democrat nominee for President is a Member of the other body. According to the rules of this House, I cannot nor can any Member use the name of that Member of the other body and designate them in the same fashion that the Members we have heard here tonight have the latitude to speak about our President, our Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world. And so that is a restriction that I have. And when I reference the apparent Democrat nominee for President, you will know who I am speaking of. However, what we have heard here is that the Congressional Black Caucus budget has fiscal responsibility because they offer a balanced budget. But the balanced budget that they offer is balancing the budget by raising taxes, putting a burden on the private sector. By the way, there are two sectors to this economy. There is the private sector where the jobs are created, where the dollars get invested, and where Americans make a decision that they are going to save up their money and invest it and maybe buy some stocks, some mutual funds or start a business or go borrow that money and invest it in a business, which is what creates new wealth and which is what creates jobs. It is not a zero-sum game. It is a multiplier. We are always seeking to promote the maximum productivity of our citizens. That is directly proportional to the strength of this entire economy, that is, the sum total of the productivity of all of our citizens, all of our citizens working together, the maximum number of them going to work every day, producing the maximum amount of goods, the maximum amount of services multiplies itself through our economy and promotes our export markets and competes with our import markets and provides for the technology and the training and the capital investment and the higher education and all of those components that make our economy grow. When we raise taxes to balance the budget, there is a huge presumption in the minds of the people that advocate such a thing because they are presuming that the economy is going to move along in the same fashion as it did and that tax increases are not going to provide a disincentive for people that get out of bed and go to work. I can tell you as a businessman, one who started a highly capital intensive business with a 100 percent loan back in 1975 and went to work every day and operated that business with the checkbook in my shirt pocket and provided a service and collected the money and paid the bills and dealt with the Federal Government and the IRS and the regulations and all of the burdens that are there, and paid the taxes, of course, that there is a limit to how much anyone is willing to risk their capital, risk their sweat equity. At some point if you punish people for their work, if you punish productivity, you will get less productivity. Ronald Reagan said, What you tax, you get less of. What you subsidize, you get more of. If I just address the tax side of this, if we tax and tax and increase taxes to balance a budget in a time of recession, and we are coming out of that recession today, we will get less productivity. Less productivity equates to less revenue for the Federal Government and what you have done, then, is you have discouraged the goose that lays the golden eggs. And so I would point out that we are coming out of a dip in a recession. If I can direct your attention to this chart on my left, this is what I am going to describe as the dot-com bubble. Right about in this area here and if you were watching the economy grow as I did and as many of the investors did and they put their money in the information age and in technology, because we had an ability, a growing ability, a dynamically growing ability to store and transfer information more quickly and more efficiently and more cheaply than ever before in history, in fact, beyond the imagination of most of the predictors back in the earlier years in the nineties. So we invested in the ability to store and transfer information. People were investing in dot-com businesses, betting that those businesses would turn over and that this economy would continue to grow. Well, it grew and a lot of this economy here was speculative economy. It was an economy that grew like a chain letter as people invested more money in more dot-com businesses and in more technology and in more things that did not really reflect the value of information technology. Because, this was the major misconception, just the ability to store and transfer information in and of itself has value. I will point out that that is not the case. The marketable value of being able to store and transfer information is to the extent of two things: Can you take that information and improve productivity? And can you deliver that product more cheaply and more efficiently? And to a much smaller degree, what can you market this information for for recreational purposes? So information has value for research purposes because that information then allows us to be more effective and more efficient. That is the good thing on the economical side, but the recreation side is when people get on the Internet and they pay their $21.50 a month or their 40, 50, 60, $70 a month, depending on their service because they like to be able to get access to entertaining Internet information. That is a marketable value of information. The others are to be able to produce the good or the service more efficiently than before. So what we have with the dot-com bubble is this bubble right here was bound to burst. As some of us saw this coming and talked about how long we could sustain this level of this growth, it was a lawsuit that started against Microsoft that popped the bubble. I believe it would have popped of its own just of the sheer stress and tension of the dot- com bubble as it grew and inflated higher and higher. Sooner or later it would have burst because of its own pressure. But what happened was some of the States attorneys general got together with some other interests and entities; and they sued Microsoft and when that happened, this dot-com bubble burst and the money that was invested in this economy came tumbling down, and we lost billions and billions of dollars' worth of wealth all the way through here. That happened through this stretch. If you look here, you can see what happened when we got to September 11. George W. Bush was sworn in here, and then we had the September 11 attack, which came about right in here. The economy was already racing down; and when our transportation industry came to an immediate and screeching halt within hours of the attacks of September 11, that stopped also a huge sector of our economy. We have had to recover from this bubble being burst and being dropped down into these levels. If you look where we are today, the Bush Jobs and Growth Act, which we passed in this Congress a little over a year ago, has grown us, then, back up to essentially the level where we were before. We have dealt with this dot-com bubble, made the adjustment to it and the real economy today is the economy of the ability to be able to produce goods and services more efficiently than before and the growth in our gross domestic product. But it is not the time to increase taxes, punish businesses and convince them that they should pull in their capital investment and produce less to avoid the tax liability. It is the time to make the tax cuts permanent, the time to be able to send the message that we are a business-friendly world where jobs are created by the private sector, not by government. As I listened to the gentlewoman from California and she referenced the Bush administration, and our President in particular, she said with regard to jobs, ``They don't have a clue.'' I would think that statement would be accurate, not with regard to the analysis of our President's statement, but with regard to the person who uttered that statement, not a clue on what creates jobs, if you cannot believe that private sector investment creates jobs and that is where the wealth is. That is part of the sector of our economy. The other one is the public sector. The public sector of the economy is the anchor that drags our private sector economy. We have people that get out of bed every day and produce a good or a service that has value and they market it in the marketplace and every day they try to figure out how to be more competitive, how to produce more of that good, more of that service for a more competitive price. Surely they are trying to maximize their profit; but when they do, they have got some money left over then to invest in technology, higher education, capital investment so that they can be more competitive and be able to provide that good or service even more competitively yet. That is going on around this economy millions of time every day. It is part of the equation that is in the minds of our managers and our workers, all in the private sector. The public sector, which now I am a member of, and my lifetime and my career and my training have all been in the private sector where I have competed for those jobs, public sector jobs are often in the regulatory section. Regulators are people that get out of bed in the morning. They go out to look over the shoulder of the people who are producing a good or a service that has a value that is marketable in the marketplace. In essence you have to take from the profit from the private sector to pay your public sector regulator, the watcher of the work, the one who regulates the work and sometimes the one who obstructs the work. So there is always a drain on the private sector to fund the public sector jobs. What I heard mentioned over here this evening was a whole series of public sector jobs, from police officers, more teachers, on down the line. I did not hear anything that would address a way that we can create more jobs or fix the climate so that the private sector can create more jobs. It was all public sector requirements, all burdens on the private sector always to wear down this economy, always to make it harder and harder for us to recover from this place that we are in today, which is not too bad a spot and we are moving up. And another proof of that would be, if I go to chart 2, the unemployment rate that we are dealing with. This would be the early days of the Reagan administration. About the time when Ronald Reagan took office, we had extremely high unemployment, extremely high inflation. And with the Reagan plan, we were able to drop this unemployment level down to under 6 percent for the first time in about a decade. And then, as the unemployment grew through the 1990s, this would be about a third of the way through the Clinton administration, then it went down, and we were arriving at about a 4 percent unemployment rate. But historically that was an unemployment rate from the year 2000 back to 1970 that we had not seen in that period of time. In 30 years we had not seen unemployment as low as this, corresponding, by the way, with the dot-com bubble that burst at about this point. And now we saw unemployment go up. These were technology jobs, by the way. And we had import foreign labor, H1Bs, a lot of technology people. And now we are back here at historically about standard level, at about 5.6 for our unemployment rate. But we have made significant progress. We can expect these things to happen. The growth is on the way. And we should feel comfortable and optimistic about the future of the United States economy. The reference to No Child Left Behind, I come from the State of Iowa, and we can argue that our K-through-12 education system, in our public schools in particular, ranks at the top or very near the top in education. If we measure our Iowa basic skills test, which, by the way, are taken all over world as far away as China, and if we measure our ACT test scores compared to the students from the schools in the other States in the Union, we can argue that we are either at the top or maybe there are two other States that can argue competitively with the success of the public school system that we have. And yet we are dealing with No Child Left Behind in the same fashion as some of the States that are at or near the bottom in their K-through-12 education. So I hear a lot from the teachers in Iowa about the burden of having to fill out a lot of paperwork and meet the administrative requirements on No Child Left Behind, and yet we do not want to leave any child behind. There are States like Mississippi and Arkansas and Alabama that need this help, that do not have the commitment to education that I happen to have the privilege to live within and have been the beneficiary of. We have a tradition in Iowa on education that I believe roots back in about 1878 when the general assembly of the State of Iowa, in a series of about three different pieces of policy, put together a policy that no child would grow up and have to walk more than 2 miles to a school. So it set up the rural school system, our country school system, and my nearest one was a school about 1\1/2\ miles down the road from me, which I just missed going to by 5 weeks, the way the transfer of people in schools went. But there in those country schools where if no child was going to be more than 2 miles from a school, then the school districts were often, especially in the flat country, 4 miles wide and 4 miles high. So that would be 16 square miles to a school district with a school sitting right in the middle. Sometimes the farmer could not get out of sight of the school from his tractor, his team of horses, but they sat on the school board. The property taxes for that 16-square-mile chunk of that school district funded the entire school, and the school board was elected from the property owners that lived and raised their families and farmed within that 16-square-mile section. And so the elected school board then approved the curriculum, hired the teacher, built the school, carried in the coal, carried out the ashes, fixed anything on the playground, and pretty much it was a community center for that area. But as we watched those young people grow up in the country schools and get that education with a single teacher in grades K through 12, and then later on the high school students would go on to the nearest town to go to school, but as that happened, we established a commitment to education, a tradition for education that I believe is second to none in the country, primarily because it is rooted in that commitment to education to the extent that in our State budget we commit 62 percent of the entire budget to education. If we did that in this Congress, there would be a lot of thunder to pay, and I would hear a lot from over on this side, but it is important to not let children fall behind. And as the President addressed the ``soft bigotry of low expectations,'' let us push all of them to reach their expectations. And I will say this: I would not have voted for No Child Left Behind had I been in this Congress when that bill came up, because it was not something that Iowa needed. But we have it, and we are going to meet the regulations on that. And there is funding for No Child Left Behind, but we have it because we want to lift those students up in those States that do not have that kind of support, whose States are not committing 62 percent of their budget to education. And I am committed to reaching out to those students because we want to again maximize the sum total of the productivity of our people. And education equates to prosperity and prosperity equates also to freedom, and I am all about the freedom. But when we hear that it is underfunded, do not buy into that. There is a difference in this Congress between authorization and appropriation. Authorization is a number that says, all right, we can appropriate up to this number, but there is a cap; do not appropriate beyond that. So authorization almost always is higher than appropriation, and when we hear over here the criticism that No Child Left Behind is underfunded, that is the measure of, well, it was not appropriated up to the level of the authorization, it was somewhere down here. And if we look back at the criticism we have seen with the Bush administration, tracked through the previous administration, and I can say his name, President Clinton, in 1994, the last time that there was a Democrat in White House and a majority in this House for the Democrats and also for the other body, I have to say, the authorization for the education bill was higher than the appropriation. They had the chance to do it, and they did not fund it; but they are not willing to accept the criticism that it was underfunded education then. And we did not argue that it was cut. Now I am hearing an argument that would not have fit in 1994. If the shoe did not fit then, it does not fit now. With regard to Homeland Security, Homeland Security was formed by putting together a number of different agencies into the Department of Homeland Security. And it was done quickly, and it was done in the climate of the beginning of the war on terror and in an effort to find a way to reach out and gather together the information and the data that we needed to quickly establish a way to protect and secure this country from what we anticipated very soon would be another domestic attack. I want to compliment our FBI and our law enforcement people and Homeland Security to the extent that they were all involved in protecting this Nation; and we have intercepted a number of terrorist attacks on our soil. There has not been a significant one on United States soil since September 11, 2001. We have to call that a success. We have to believe that al Qaeda wants to hit us. In fact, if we look at Spain, it is pretty clear that they are going to be turning their sights on us in a far more aggressive way. Maybe a little more on that later. But Homeland Security, FBI, to the extent that the CIA has turned out information that has helped us overseas in the war on terror, we have been safe in our homes and on our streets from these attacks, not at a small cost, at a high cost. Those agencies that were put together for Homeland Security were put together with an effort to save money. Merge these agencies, get rid of duplications of services, provide those savings, and then be able to roll those savings into more appropriate ways to spend money. Looking at 2 years' budget in the Department of Homeland Security, we are looking at nearly double-digit increases each year. And where does it stop? And when we build on a 10 or 12 percent increase, we have got the line in the graph going up dramatically. The next year we are up here, and we build again another 9\1/2\ percent on homeland security, I do not believe we have the mechanisms in place to be sure that we are spending that money appropriately. I believe there is a significant amount of money that is wasted in Homeland Security, and I happen to have information that we have bureaucrats there who are making $150,000 a year, in another department, retired, took their golden parachute, their $100,000 a year, and went on to answer the phones at Homeland Security and started to cash a $150,000 check. That adds up to about a quarter of a million dollars to answer the phone, and I think we can hire people in this city for $25,000 a year to do that, not $250,000 a year. That just addresses the wage waste that I believe is there; it does not address the inefficiencies that I believe are there. And I do not think that we are able to scrutinize Homeland Security enough because all of us in this Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, live in fear of another attack; and if there is an attack on this country tomorrow, we can bet the fingers will be pointed at me for even uttering criticism. But I think we have a responsibility in this Congress to hold each department responsible to prudently spend tax dollars, and if they cannot do that, then we cut their budget until they find the savings. We are looking also for waste, fraud, and abuse, but each department will find them if we squeeze their budget down. And, by the way, I do not get all that motivated about being able to cut the deficit in half in 5 years. That just does not get me to charge the windmills. I want to balance this budget, and I supported the Republican Study Committee budget today because I think it goes closer to what we need to do to put fiscal accountability in. We need to grow our economy. We need to make the tax cuts permanent. We need to do a lot more to take this burden of the public sector off the backs of the private sector. But we need to move this country towards a balanced budget sooner rather than later. This budget we approved tonight moves us in that direction. I would have preferred that it had been more dramatically, but I am absolutely opposed to the idea that we can raise taxes, balance the budget, and there are not economic prices to pay. Certainly there are. So I listened to some of the other debate tonight. The discussion about the Bush administration, again using that outsourcing, because unfair trade practices are costing us jobs within this country. Yes, we are losing jobs in this country. We are losing some of our manufacturing base, our textiles industry. And I am wondering why that should be a mystery to anyone when we look at the tax burden that we have, the regulatory burden that we have. Over $850 billion is the weight of the regulatory burden from the Federal Government alone, and so when we are paying a tax burden that has a 22 percent embedded cost in anything that we might export overseas and we are competing against foreign countries who have 68 cents an hour with the same kind of equipment on the lathe or the punch press, and they are producing products coming into the United States, it is not just unfair trade practices. It is people working far cheaper than we are willing to do, and we cannot compete with those kinds of wages in perpetuity without improving our productivity for every single worker. I do not know how we can do that, especially in competition with developing nations in the lower-skilled jobs. So we can expect that we are going to be seeing jobs drift overseas. What I want to do is slow that loss of those jobs and I want to incent the creation of new jobs, high-tech jobs, and I want to hold the industrial base in this country. We have got to hold some industrial base. If we do not, we will not have the facilities to build our military equipment, and that makes us vulnerable to the rest of the world. But outsourcing jobs, it is competition, and there is a reason why those jobs are going. I will come back to that in a moment. I also want to associate myself with the remarks made by the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) tonight with regard to the nuclear power. It is about time somebody stepped down to the floor of this Congress and spoke about clean energy, nuclear energy, the accident- free energy and the environmentally friendly energy. I compliment the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) for those remarks, and I think we need to raise this kind of subject matter continually until the public begins to realize the safety and the efficiency and the cleanliness that we get with our nuclear fuel. But it is not the only kind of environmentally friendly fuel, not the only kind of fuel that is good for our economy. Being from Iowa and being from the number one corn-producing State, I have to raise the issue of ethanol. Ethanol does those things, too, and we produce not quite 3 gallons of ethanol out of every bushel of corn, and we are producing millions and millions of gallons of ethanol in Iowa and across the country. I have some numbers here that I think will be of interest. In Iowa, we produce ethanol out of an estimated 262 million bushels of corn, and that is a lot of corn. In 1980, we produced 175 million gallons of ethanol. Today, in this country, we have 74 plants, and they have a capacity of 3.1 billion gallons of ethanol production. As we develop and build that production, we believe that that production will go to 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol for the year 2004, which is a 25 percent increase over 2003 in ethanol production. This ethanol does a whole series of good things for this country. One, it is a value-added ag product and it is multi-pricing its value close to home, close to the corn stalk; and that value added there creates jobs, jobs in a location where we have been losing jobs over the last 20 to 30 years. It puts the dollars back in, keeps them there, there are good paying jobs and we add value to that. We are able to take the byproduct from the ethanol plants and feed it back to livestock. Whether it is distillers grain or gluten, it has a tremendously high demand for the feed value. I happened to run across a lady just yesterday who has a whole series of recipes to take the distillers grain and turn it into cookies and bars and neat little things like that. You will not know what you might be eating within the Capitol cafeteria here in the next couple years if we can find another way to add value to our corn. Ethanol is clean, clean burning and environmentally friendly. It replaces MTBEs. MTBEs are declared to some degree to be a likely carcinogen. I would ask you, would you rather drink a glass of ethanol, or would you rather drink some MTBEs? But it is environmentally friendly. We have an energy crisis in this country. The gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) and I are addressing the energy situation here tonight. As we look across our entire economy, I will tell you that there is a component, there is an energy component in anything that we do. Whether you are producing a product or a service or delivering it, there is a production cost of energy, and there is a transportation cost of energy. So I am going to tell you that I think there is an E-tax on everything that we buy, and it is related to the energy cost. But the energy is not what the E stands for in my E-tax; it is the environmental cost, the unnecessary regulatory environmental cost that goes on top of all of our energy in this country. Natural gas is critically important to us. In our part of the country, we use natural gas for all the traditional things that it gets used for in all the rest of the country with regard to heating our homes and our factories and providing the energy to manufacture those goods that we are marketing. But also we use natural gas for drying grain in the fall, and we use natural gas for producing nitrogen anhydrous ammonia so we can raise more corn in the spring. Sometimes in the fall we have fall applications too. That makes us more vulnerable to natural gas prices than maybe anyplace else in the country. In addition, natural gas is used to produce ethanol. So there is a component of that gas price that is a cost of every gallon of ethanol we produce. When natural gas prices are unnaturally high, that puts a burden then on the Midwest, on the corn belt, and really on the rest of the United States, because the ethanol we have goes into 30 percent of the pumps across America, and it is going to get to be more and more as time goes on. This environment tax is a challenge for us, and it is an unjust burden for the cost of our energy, and I am sensitive to this environmental burden. For example, the transportation bill, we have with Federal user fee on a per gallon of gas, which is 18.3 cents per gallon, out of that 18.3 cents, that money goes then to build our roads. Well, that is okay with us. When we put the hose in the tank, we expect we are going to pay 18.3 cents for Federal, and whatever your particular State gas user fee is. In Iowa I think our numbers add up to 41 cents or 43 cents a gallon. The 18.3 is Federal. Of that, and according to a very well-informed chairman in this Congress, 28 percent of that amount goes to pay for environmental costs, what it costs to go around a wetland, what is costs to build a bridge across a river from hill to hill so you do not go down a scenic area, for example, or any of the environmental burdens of going in and doing the archeological study, doing the environmental impact study. All of these costs that are obstructions along the way of building our roads take 28 percent out of that entire user fee that we think we need to, and we do need to, go out and build more roads, because transportation is an essential component of economic development. It is the very first component of economic development. Now we have taken 28 percent out of transportation fees to spend it for environmental interests, and nobody knows that. The American people do not know that, that when they put the gas hose in their tank and squeeze down on that nozzle that for every dollar's worth of gas that they buy, or every dollar that goes to the Federal Government for the road fee, 28 cents of that is going to take care of the environmental demands. The environmentalists have become an obstruction to the economic growth in this country and raised the cost of transportation. They have raised the cost of natural gas. We have a lot of natural gas in Colorado, but we cannot get it to market because the environmentalists block it. I have yet to see a natural gas well that polluted anything. If you have a leak, the gas dissipates, and if you have a spill it dissipates. From my perspective, maybe they object to the idea of looking at a derrick for 4, 6, or 8 weeks while there is a well drilled that will tap into the natural gas. Then you tear the derrick down and put a little head there and run a line to it, and there is your gas well. There is no logical reason why we cannot develop natural gas wells in Colorado where we have a good supply. Last year on the energy bill in this Congress, we had an amendment on the energy bill, and this amendment simply would have inventoried the natural gas offshore for Florida, just to go out there and calculate how much is there, and then if we can calculate how much there is, maybe we can also know we have a reserve and start to plan our energy development strategy and not be dependent upon foreign energy. But we could not pass the amendment that simply inventoried natural gas reserves offshore for the State of Florida. That tells you how strong the environmental interests are and how much of a religion it has become. My life, by the way, has been about soil and water quality and environmental issues. I spent 35 years of my life building terraces and farm ponds and waterways and wetlands and enhancing mother nature and sending the rain drop down through the soil profile, which is what purifies the water. My life has been about soil conservation and water quality, and I would not be supporting a policy that undermined our environment. But I believe it has morphed into a religion rather than logic. So we need to promote this ethanol market, and we need to move the energy bill, and we need to promote natural gas drilling in the lower 48 States and where we can tap into this gas, up on the North Slope. We have got to move this energy bill that is over in the other body. Remember, I cannot say that, the people over there in the other body. We need to move that bill so that we can get our ethanol production up and going, so that we can get our biodiesel production up and going, and so that we can bring a natural gas pipeline down from the North Slope of Alaska into the lower 48 States to be able to slow this increase in gas prices. That is part of the energy component. But, in addition, the oil exploration in the United States has diminished significantly within the last year. We have gone from a 10 percent share of the world's investment in exploration down to a 7 percent share. We have the same environmental concerns. I saw advertisements on television that showed beautiful forests, and it said ANWR. The ANWR up in Alaska stands for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But when you see that it says Arctic, when you see an advertisement that shows you pine trees and a beautiful forest and mountain scenery, do not fall for that if it says it is ANWR, because Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that word Arctic is a key phrase. If you go back to your 8th grade geography, you have the equator around the middle of the Earth, and you have the Arctic and Antarctic. When you ask the question how did they define the line around the top and bottom of the globe that defined the difference between the temperate zones and the Arctic, that was defined by that line of the Arctic Circle, the point north of which trees could not grow. So if you see a picture of trees and it is identified as ANWR, you will know that it is not, because trees do not grow up there. I went up to take a look at ANWR to verify this for myself. By the way, I flew over the North Slope oil fields. As we looked down on those oil fields, and I have worked in the oil fields and know a little bit about that, but I looked down from the air and they said we are flying over the North Slope oil fields. Well, I do not see any oil pumps down here; I do not see any oil wells, roads or collection systems. How do you know that we are over the oil fields in the North Slope? The answer was, well, look at those little square white patches down there. We were at about 750 feet in altitude, and you can see them clearly. They are white patches, patches of white rock that are about 2 to 3 feet above the Arctic coastal plain, and those are pads that work over rigs, have a place to pull up and sit on the level, if they have to go into a casing and pull a submersible pump and maybe do some repair work there. But there is not a pump jack out there that you can see anywhere, the old traditional oil pumps. There is no leakage going on around the rod that some people think is going to drip on the soil and pollute the soil. These are submersible pumps with a collection system that is invisible; and when it gathers that all together and goes off to the terminal and then off to the refinery, the only place you see is the terminal. Then you see the Alaska pipeline, that large pipeline. You can see that go across the Yukon River. But there are not roads to each one of these wells, because we only go in there in the wintertime on ice roads, and then the ice melts and there is no sign of damage. Another thing that is a misnomer, a mistake, a misunderstanding and a perpetration of something that is an untruth, is the argument that well, you will never get the tundra back. Once you tear up the tundra it is gone forever. We met up there at Kaktovik, a small little Eskimo town of 290 people right on the Arctic shore, not a tree in sight, I will remind you; and there the President of the Eskimo Corporation, and his name is Fenton Rexford, pointed ought to us they have reestablished tundra, and it is not that unusual. But if it should get torn up, and some of that has happened over the years in his lifetime experience, and he was about 56 or 57 years old, they would go in and drag that smooth and seed it over; and in 5 to 6 years, the tundra had grown back again. I saw some of that from the air. The difference that I could tell was that it was a little brighter green. You know how new seeding looks after you plant your grass in the spring before it gets established? Five or 6 years later it all flows in, so we can reestablish tundra. We will not damage tundra. We are going to have ice roads. There is no logical reason not to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We should be ashamed that this Congress cannot step up and put up a vote that allows that to happen. This House approved, took a look at an amendment, that would have allowed for the disturbing of only 2,000 acres on 19.5 million acres. That is all they really asked for to go in and start to develop that. I had people on the floor of this Congress on that night come up and ask me, How much is an acre? How much is 2,000 acres? And my answer was, Well that is not even a good-sized farm where I come from. A tiny little spot on 19.5 million acres. And even that would not be disturbed, but only just a little bit. Then there is the concern about the environment. What do we do if the caribou herd is decimated by developing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Well, we developed the oil wells on the North Slope of Alaska, not very far from there, in the same type of topography. The caribou herd in 1970 was 7,000 caribou. As I was up there last August, that caribou herd is 28,000 caribou. So it cannot be argued that we damaged the environment for the caribou; and it can be argued that we improved it, that they come up on the pad where they are not having calves down in the swamp, where the calves might freeze and die, and they get up where the breeze can blow the flies away, and they like to get next to the warm pipeline. All of those things were improvements in the living area, the living room, living space of the caribou. When I pointed that thought to a reporter sometime back, he said, well, of course the population went from 7,000 to 28,000 caribou, because those pipeliners went up there and shot all the wolves, so they did not have a natural enemy any longer. I had a little trouble keeping a straight face with that. Of course, that is not the case. If any pipeliners had fired a gun at any animal, they would be gone in a hurry and punished severely. We need a comprehensive energy policy. We need to develop our natural gas from an inventory off the coast of Florida, access the natural gas in Colorado, build the natural gas pipeline from the North slope of Alaska on down to the lower 48 States, and we need to renew our efforts to drill for oil in ANWR, and we need to promote all of the ethanol we can promote and all of the biodiesel we can promote. By the way, the wind is a pretty good project too. One day I went up to a groundbreaking ceremony for an ethanol plants in Cherokee County, Iowa. We turned over a couple spades of dirt there and congratulated each other. By the way, that project is moving along very, very well. As I drove from there across country through about 20 miles as the crow flies from the grand opening of an ethanol plant, I drove through 259 wind chargers that we have on an area called Buffalo Ridge producing electricity, surrealistically spinning in the wind and pumping that electricity down for collection in the feeder line, and from there down to a second ethanol plant, all within about 20 miles. And the thought occurred to me, the area that I represent, 5 to 6 years earlier had no, no energy production whatsoever, and today we are an energy export center. We are an energy export center that takes some of the burden off of importing foreign oil and enhances our environment, and it multiplies and value-adds to our economy. It does all the things we need to do environmentally and it replaces MTBEs. Now, those are all good things that come from technology and capital investment. By the way, these are private sector investments, not public sector subsidies. I have another issue with regard to transportation in my part of the world, the Missouri River. In about 1952 there was a huge flood that flooded the bottoms all the way from north of Sioux City clear down through Missouri. There was a tremendous effort put together and it ended up being a fixed loan program to build six dams on the upper Missouri River to control flooding, to control flooding and to generate hydroelectric power, and to be able to promote some, some irrigation, and to establish barge and transportation traffic along that corridor of the Missouri River from Sioux City, Iowa, all the way to St. Louis. That project is an amazingly efficient hydrological engineering accomplishment. It has worked very well since 1952. We have not had the flooding damage that we had had in previous years; it solved the flooding, it has given us our barge traffic, it has kept the cost of transportation on the rail lines and on the truck lines down, and it has produced economic hydroelectric energy that comes out of the dam where the turbines are. Well, we are going through a drought cycle and because of that, there was an unanticipated economic piece up in the Dakotas and in Montana. When they built the reservoirs, they stocked them with walleye, and so folks from all over the country would go up there to fish for walleye. Now, when the drought came, the water table went down, and it went down to 25 feet and maybe a little more below that static water table where they would have liked to have been able to maintain the pool. That, of course, diminished the habitat for the fish, diminished the recreational aspects of it and caused some of the docks to be 1 mile or more from the water. Well, that is unfortunate and that is a tragedy, but we cannot make it rain. And when it rains, it will fix that problem. There is nothing we can do to enhance the water tables upstream; even if we shut our dams down all winter long, we can only gain about a foot of water a month. But the recreational interest in the Dakotas took a look at how they would build a coalition. I heard the name of these species for the first time in October of 1993: The least tern, the piping plover, and the pallid sturgeon, three species that I had never heard of before, and they were species that were either threatened or endangered that lived and relied upon the Missouri River for their environmental habitat. In 1993, we had a massive flood in Iowa. The Missouri River did not flood, but almost everything was under water regardless. I came out here to Washington, D.C. in October of 1993 to a Midwest flood reconstruction and cleanup conference. There, the Director of Fish and Wildlife, who was the lead agency on the flood recovery team, Molly Beatty, and a fine young lady who tragically passed away of a brain aneurysm some years ago, but she came before us and she said, Agriculture looks upon this flood as an economic disaster; frankly, we here at Fish and Wildlife look upon it as habitat rehabilitation. Madam Speaker, that did not make me happy when I heard that. That put animals ahead of man. We are to have dominion over this Earth. We have a Missouri River master manual plan that denotes how the water flow will be managed, and it was going to be altered and changed in the interests of these three species, and I wrote them down: the least tern, the piping plover, and the pallid sturgeon. In October of 1993 it was in my notes, and I have not forgotten those species since, and we are still battling with them. By my calculation, this came up about 12 years ago. We are still on it. And they are still using the species to try to alter the flow, try to do a spring rise with the idea that if we raise the water table in the river and let it charge down the river long enough and hard enough, it will wash the willows off the sandbars and then, when the river goes down, that is a place for the birds to nest. The environmentalists will not let the Corps pick up the nests and move them out of the way of the high water that could take them out. That would not be natural. The pallid sturgeons have to be floated out into the Ox Bows so they can lay their eggs out there, and then the river comes back down. Well, they swim around the Ox Bows all summer long and the ones the pelicans do not get, we have to raise the river again and go out and round them back up again. Surely we have negotiated a little bit and some of this logic does not connect as well as it did 11 years ago when I dealt with it. But this diminishes the efficiency of the river, and I must stand on the flood control, the hydroelectric, and the transportation side of this, and I will do so. We need to continue to work with the Corps, and this Congress will ultimately, I believe, have to address the situation. There is another issue before our economy, and it is an issue that the American public speaks very little of, but it is a burden that we all carry. And that is this burden of litigation that is on the backs of this entire economy. Some time back I sat down at a meeting at the boardroom table at Merrill Lynch up in New York City. Their building was the nearest building to Ground Zero of the September 11 attacks, the nearest building to survive. They lost the glass out of that building, something like 32 stories up, and you cannot look over that railing and believe that we are not in a war. That was a war zone. But that briefing focused on tort reform. And in that briefing, there was a compelling case made that convinces me that 3 percent of our gross domestic product is being consumed by litigation, by the trial lawyers, by lawsuits in this country, 3 percent of our domestic product. Now, if we want to grow this economy and grow this economy at a reasonable rate so that we can have enhancements in technology and improvements in transportation and improvements in our infrastructure and be able to educate our young people so that they can pick up the balance and they can do the same, if we want to do that, we have to grow this economy an average of about 3.5 percent. Fortunately, today, we are running on about a 4.1 percent growth, so we are ahead of that curve just a little. But even though we have that 3.5 percent growth, it is not enough, because the trial lawyers get 3 percent right off the top. So we have to grow at 6.5 percent to sustain, to sustain our way of life and to have that extra revenue that it takes to meet a growing population and the demands on our infrastructure. Three percent off the top to the trial lawyers. There is a series of malpractice pieces that we have dealt with in the House Committee on the Judiciary and brought to the floor of this Congress. One of them is medical malpractice. There are awards that go way beyond anything that is logical. We can go back to the cup of coffee and the fast food chain that was looking at a huge settlement because the lady spilled hot coffee on herself and seemed to be surprised that it burned her. That has been negotiated back some. But we have had to step in, this Congress, and defend those fast food chains, not because of the hot coffee, but because of a calculated nationwide strategy that is driven to us by the class action lawyers that they are going after the large industry of fast food, that large industry that employs 12 million people in this country and is viewed as having very deep pockets, to tap into them. Because why? They super- size our french fries. Now, what a surrealistic world we live in when we debate on the floor of Congress how we are going to protect people because a group of class action lawyers, and also working sometimes in conjunction with the State attorneys general, are going to file a lawsuit to sue people who serve food in a healthy and efficient fashion. As if it is a surprise to any of us that if we eat greasy foods, it might clog our arteries. We accept that, but I reject the idea that it should clog our courts. It should not go into our courts whatsoever. It is a frivolous lawsuit, but yet in this Congress, we have to step forward and protect the fast food chains or they will be decimated in the same fashion as the asbestos companies have been decimated. We have lost 60 companies in the United States due to asbestos litigation, and now they are going into the second phase and they are filing suit against the successor companies. I am calling upon the people in this other body, those folks over there with 100 people that go to work doing the same thing we do here, let us get the asbestos legislation moved. Let us protect those people. Let us save those Fortune 500 companies that put their capital up and lifted those bankrupted asbestos companies out and put them back into some kind of production. There is not any kind of responsibility that can be put on our Fortune 500 successor companies with regard to asbestos, and it is essential that we move forward; and it is essential that the other body move forward quickly before this cannot be resolved and the horses are all out of the barn. So medical malpractice, another one. I will say that we went to California for a model. It is not the first thing I advocate. But in this case, in California, they established a limited medical malpractice of $250,000 for noneconomic damages. We assure, in our medical malpractice limitation that we passed here in this House of Representatives, we assure that anyone who is injured by medical malpractice is made whole. They get their medical bills paid and they get made whole economically. But when it comes to punitive damages, not just pain and suffering, but punitive damages, we cap those. We cap the noneconomic damages at $250,000. It takes away some of the incentive to go out there and go ambulance chasing, and it still allows the patients who need relief to receive that relief. That bill needs to move from the other body as well. This economy is being dragged down because we are not able to get the litigation reform, the malpractice, and the asbestos and the fast food chains and all of these reforms, we are not able to get those into place. We have to get that done. If they can move those over in the other body, then we will bring more here in this Congress. We are actually holding back because we do not want to stack up too much work over there. The same subject matter, a runaway judiciary. In 8th grade civics classes we learn that we have three branches of government. We have the executive branch, which is the President and all of the people that support his endeavors, the Cabinet and their agencies. We have the legislative branch, which is us in this Chamber and the folks in the other body. And then of course we have the judicial branch, and they are all three designed to have a separation of powers, a healthy, static tension between them, and a bright line between the separation of powers. Today, what I have seen happen in the judiciary branch is an ever- growing activism, an activism that, I would have said a year ago had blurred the line between the legislative branch and the judicial branch of government. But today I will tell my colleagues, the line is no longer blurred. It is literally obliterated. We have an activist court that believes that they can take any responsibility into their hands and they can usurp the authority of the United States Congress or any other legislative body within the United States of America. That separation of powers is something that threatens our Constitution and our way of life itself. It is essential that we redefine this line of the separation of powers between the judicial and the legislative branch. If we do not, we will have a constitutional crisis, and the government of the people and by the people will perish from this Earth if we fail to redefine this line. I declare that an impending constitutional crisis. A couple examples would be the affirmative action cases, the University of Michigan, when Michigan was bestowing a certain academic value to being a minority. The case of Grutter v. Bollinger was one of the Michigan cases. The Supreme Court ruled that diversity, as indexed to ethnicity had, if the university believed they had the right critical mass, that that diversity had academic value. The Supreme Court ruled that the diversity had academic value. Now, I will argue that diversity of human experience may have academic value if it is a good and essential and positive experience that can be shared in a classroom. And it is good to interact with people of all ethnicities from all over the world, and the more of that experience you can get, the better your educational experience is. But ethnicity does not have academic value. The Supreme Court ruled it did. They concurred with the University of Michigan and said, you reached that critical mass, you can be the sole determiner of that critical mass of diversity. Then, what we will do with this is, we are going to let you continue down this path, although you cannot have just a formula that spits something out of a spreadsheet, you have to have something that deals with each one of these individual students. Well, okay, so it takes a little more attention to get the same result. But, in the end, the court suspended the 14th amendment, the equal protection clause that is established in our Constitution, suspended equal protection so we could have a critical mass of diversity as defined by the university, because that diversity, as indexed to skin color, had, in the minds of the court, academic value. And then the court, in its majority opinion, ruled that perhaps in 25 years, we can go back and we can revisit this subject matter of preferential treatment and affirmative action, revisit this subject matter and maybe, perhaps, this civilization, this culture, this American populace, will have moved forward into the new world far enough that we can then reestablish the 14th amendment equal protection clause, and maybe we do not need to have critical mass of diversity that we are going to declare to have academic value again. Where does that come from, Justices? How do you believe that you can suspend the 14th amendment, for academic value on skin color and think we will be able to adhere back to our Constitution again? And if this Constitution does not mean what it says, if it can be suspended as simply myopic as this idea of critical mass of diversity, if that can happen, what meaning does the Constitution have whatsoever? Is it simply a document that happened to fall in our laps that the Founding Fathers stumbled across and stumbled into, and it happened to be a convenient thing that got us through the first 220 or so years of our existence? Or is it something that means what it says? Is it something that has a provision for amendment for a reason that we are to adhere to the Constitution, the letter of the Constitution and the intent of the Constitution and not deviate from same unless we are willing to step forwards and amend it? That is what our Founding Fathers intended, but it is not what we see happening here in the United States Supreme Court, and it is not what we see happening in the inferior courts that have been established by this Congress. It is not the only example. And by the way, many of these examples are using foreign courts' opinions. Zimbabwe, Jamaica come to mind as places we can go to be further enlightened on how to better evaluate the original intent of the Constitution and the letter and the intent of our Federal law and our State laws and constitutions and legislation. Foreign case law imposed upon United States of America? It is impossible to anticipate how the courts will rule given just U.S. court decisions let alone foreign, and some of these countries by the way do not let their people have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or freedom of religion or they cannot go to the polls and elect a leader. So those decisions in the courts will not reflect the will and the character of the people. We need to redefine this line. The Congress is also culpable; and I will hold them, in fact, more accountable because I think it is natural if you are a member of the executive branch of government, you are going to wanted to expand the authority of the executive branch. That is where you have got the most leverage, and that is where you have the most faith. And if you are a member of the legislative branch, as I am, I wanted to expand the power we have here because I think it reflects the voice of the people; and that voice of the people should be preeminent. And if you are a member of the judicial branch, I cannot image why human nature would not also apply there. And if you are a member of the judicial branch I would think you would want to then expand the power and leverage that you have in the judicial branch. I do not blame them for that. But I will ask the courts, please rein it in because if you do not rein it in, sooner or later this Congress will. We do have the authority to do so; and if we exercise that will, that sets up a conflict between us. And I would rather see that be resolved in a peaceful way, a willing way with the best interests of the American people than I would want to have to impose that upon the courts. In fact, I am a little apprehensive that we cannot find the will in this Congress until it becomes a crisis. Speaking of a crisis, the filibuster rules in the other body have set up another impending constitutional crisis. When we have a justice that is appointed to a Federal court and the Constitution requires that the President when he makes his nomination seek ``the advice and consent of,'' and now I have to save the other body, that advice and consent clause that is in our Constitution is something that is very well established. We do not have any problem with the advice part. We get plenty of advice from those people over there and some of it is down right offensive to the nominees. In fact, some of it is just plain out and out religious bias. It is character attacks. Declaring a nominee to be a Neanderthal is beyond the scope of what someone of that position ought to be in. Madam Speaker, I appreciate your attention tonight and I will take this issue up at a later date.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 81 I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address a subject matter, and that subject matter has to do with Spain. First, I would like to thank the Spanish people and the Spanish leadership that they have had over the past several years for their allegiance to the principles that built this great Nation that we have the privilege to live in, their commitment to free enterprise and their commitment to the allies that we have pulled together in Iraq. I have watched their economy grow in Spain as free markets took hold, and I have seen that Spain has become a competitor with us and made us both be stronger economically. They stood with us in times of toil, and they stood with us in times of terror. They have stood with us in Iraq, and the warm feeling we got when President Aznar was here to speak before this Chamber was a heartfelt appreciation for a nation that shares with us many of the same ideals and principles. However, there has been a situation which has changed things dramatically in Spain. We also stand together with the Spanish people in their grief for having lost 201 of their citizens and hundreds of them wounded in the cowardly bombing attack on the trains in Madrid just 2 days before the election. There are not many people on this planet that do not believe that the elections were profoundly changed because of those terrorist attacks. We know not what went on in the minds of the voters in Spain that would bring them to the conclusion that going down the path of appeasement was preferable to going down the path of fighting terror wherever we find it. But that decision was made by the Spanish people, and we respect their decision. However, the challenge to our President that has been issued by Prime Minister-elect Zapatero that they would withdraw their troops from Spain and realign themselves, and presumably realign themselves with some of the nations in Europe that have opposed our policy in Iraq is a regretful situation. And we have not seen a leader of a foreign country challenge a seated President in the time of an election as we do on this particular circumstance. In fact, the question I think has been answered, the question of the apparent Democrat nominee for President in this Nation has stated that he has the support of foreign leaders. He will not name those foreign leaders, but I believe one of them has come out and made the endorsement to support the Democrat candidate for President of the United States, thus injecting himself into our domestic politics, thus identifying an individual that might have been referenced by our candidate; thus taking them both down the path to appeasement. This is a regrettable circumstance. The headline I am looking at is from the Salt Lake Tribune and it says, ``Spanish socialist supports Democratic-apparent nominee.'' Spanish socialist, that should tell us something. Spanish socialist appeaser. The legacy of Neville Chamberlain hangs in the atmosphere across all of Europe today, and the message sent to the terrorists is, you have won. Al Qaeda understands they have won the election in Spain by blowing up innocent civilians and moving the electorate in Spain toward the socialist candidate, the appeasement candidate. I do not know what goes on in the minds of voters in a time of grief, but I have to believe and I have to pray that American voters, if confronted with the same thing, will react in an entirely differently fashion. For the last 3 weeks, I have been warning the people in my district and across the country that I fear a terrorist attack in this Nation prior to our Presidential election and an effort to change the election results in this country and elect the candidate who has been endorsed by the socialist from Spain. Well, I believe the character of the American people is different than the response that we have seen by the Spaniards; and I believe that we will stand up, if that tragic time comes to pass, and now they have certainly been encouraged to attack us in this country because of their success in Spain. I believe we will stand up, and I believe we will stand with George W. Bush, our President, the man who understands terror, defines terror, and knows we have to fight the terrorists wherever they are, the one who said if you are not with us, you are against us; you are either a terrorist, and if you are a terrorist, we are opposed to you. If you harbor terrorists, if you support terrorists, if you fund terrorists, you are a terrorist. Now there is some habitat in Spain that might cause terrorists to settle in there, and that might potentially be a risk for more terror to come out of there. Maybe they will leave the Spanish people alone, but that does not mean the rest of the people are safe. So we are confronted with appeasement over there. We need to stand together here. We need to stand together with our allies who have come together behind the United States. No other nation out there seems to be willing to crack and go off in that direction. We have a large job ahead of us, to stand with our military, those who have given their lives and limbs, those who have given years out of their lives to protect us and protect our freedom. I will continue to defend our President in this country, and let us be ready for any attacks. If we have to do it, let us go to the polls and defend our war on terror.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I rise today not only because of St. Patrick's Day but because it is also National Agriculture Week. Iowa ranks number one in the Nation in corn, soybean, pork and egg production, and second in total agricultural exports. We have a fertile State with some of the richest and most productive soil in the world. And we use this resource to provide the safest food supply in the world. This week I am asking Iowans to celebrate our rich heritage of agricultural production; but I also want us to look with anticipation to the future of agriculture, value-added agriculture, and our youth. Iowa agriculture is no longer just about growing commodities that we ship away by truck, train, or barge. Farmers in western Iowa have realized that if we do all of our business this way our small towns and cities will lose its youth, a very precious resource. As I look at the youth of my district, I want them to have all the benefits of growing up in a farming community. And I want to see them in our communities making a difference, choosing to raise their families in western Iowa for years to come. There is no better place if we can continue to be innovative in agricultural development. Our farmers and community leaders have led the charge to develop this new generation of agriculture because we think differently in Iowa. Let us use National Agriculture Week to thank them not only for rich heritage of agriculture production but for looking to the future and building a foundation for a new rural western Iowa.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I stand here on the floor of this Congress, and I sometimes think I have passed through the looking glass. I wonder what our Founding Fathers would think if 200-some years later we would be standing here with a piece of legislation on the floor debating about someone ordering a super-sized order of french fries and not being able to push themselves away from the table soon enough so that that personal responsibility, so ingrained in the American character, is being pushed off across the entire American society. We might have to add on to every order of french fries if we are not able to protect these food suppliers. I declined to sign onto this bill, although I support it, for that reason, that if we have to go down the path of protecting individuals and individual professions, we will never get done. I would like to see some blanket reform. But I stand in opposition to the Ackerman amendment. A couple of points I would make. The Department of Agriculture, on balance, even though they have been more aggressive on downer livestock than I would have cared for, has done an excellent job in response to the BSE. The beef supply in the United States of America is the safest in the world, and the credibility that is there with our producers and the quality of that beef has been established by the confidence, as has been demonstrated by our consumers. That is what has held this market up. The system we have in place does not need to be shaken up, nor does it need to have the safety of our food supply challenged on the floor of Congress when it has got such an outstanding record. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the Ackerman amendment. The purpose of H.R. 339 is to protect the food industry from having to defend themselves from frivolous lawsuits. Baseless lawsuits drain away our economic productivity and interfere with economic growth. It is important to point out that this bill does not change the fact that anyone legitimately injured by substandard food can sue. However, the Ackerman amendment would open the door for countless groundless suits that could potentially bankrupt our agra businesses and our farmers. I believe this amendment is a schematic way to gut the purpose of the entire bill, allowing Americans to continue to avoid taking responsibility for food choices. With that said, I am opposed to the amendment that defines a downer animal. I am from western Iowa. In my State, we raise about 25 percent of the pork. This amendment would put market hogs in the same category as older cows that are to be tested for BSE; but as clearly stated by the gentleman from Texas, there is no linkage there between a downer animal and a diseased animal. Market hogs can suffer unintended injuries on the way to market that cause walking problems and thus subject them to this amendment. But these injuries have nothing to do with the safety and quality of the meat we eat. It is also important to note that hogs are not subject to neurological diseases like BSE. So I urge the body to oppose the Ackerman amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) yielding me this time, and I profoundly appreciate the work of the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Hart) on this issue, as well as the work of the chairman and the subcommittee chairman, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot). I urge Members to vote against the Lofgren substitute amendment. At issue today is whether there is one victim or two. When a pregnant woman is murdered, there are two victims. When a pregnant woman is injured and her baby dies, the law must recognize that and punish her violent attacker. Pregnant women deserve the full protection of our laws. When Laci Peterson and Conner Peterson were killed, there were two victims. This substitute treats Laci's child as if he never existed. Conner did exist. Laci and her family were looking forward to his birth. If we allow Federal law to recognize only one victim, we are guilty of covering up for the criminal who robs an expectant mother and in other cases the father and the rest of the family of their baby. Grieving family members need to know that criminals will pay the full price for killing their son or daughter and that society recognizes their loss. No woman should ever be told she has lost nothing when she loses her unborn child to a brutal attacker. Women deserve better than this. We should recognize her injury, and we should pursue justice. Roe v. Wade may, and I pray temporarily, provide for a woman to decide temporarily the fate of her unborn child, but this does not affect the Roe v. Wade decision. What we are proposing is someone else stepping into the shoes of the mother. I urge Members to vote for Laci and Conner's law, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and I thank the sponsors of this bill, the chairman of the committee, and the folks who have worked so hard.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of Israel's security fence. Next month the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague is scheduled to hold hearings on the international legality of Israel's security fence and it is my hope that the court will rule Israel's security fence a necessary measure to protect their people from the people who believe that their way to salvation is by killing Jewish women and children. The construction of the temporary and defensive barrier is a legitimate means of protection and the lawfulness or appropriateness of this measure is not the issue. At issue is simply the question of whether complex and contentious issues can and should be placed before the International Court of Justice. The United Nations should not be imposing their politics on the sovereign nation of Israel. The ICJ has been acting in an anti-Semitic, anti-capitalistic and anti-self-defensive manner. The court does not mention the fact that Israel is building the security fence to protect Israelis from over 20,000 attacks and that they have the right of self-defense and the attacks are the result of the Palestinian leadership's failure to take measures to prevent terrorism. Furthermore, the Palestinian government glorifies homicide bombers as martyrs and Yasser Arafat, the agent of terror, is still calling the shots and is a clear obstacle to President Bush's road map to peace. Congress must send a powerful and clear signal to the U.N. and to the Palestinian Authority that the United States will not allow either to compromise the freedom and safety of the Jewish people.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was absent during rollcall votes 620, 621, 622 and 623. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye'' on 620, 621, 622 and 623.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I firmly believe that it is unconstitutional to require a higher standard for nominees than the simple majority specified in our Constitution. Janice Rogers Brown, Carolyn Kuhl, Charles Pickering, William Pryor, and Priscilla Owen, who are all waiting to be confirmed, deserve an up-or-down vote. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring attention to the House of a few of these well-qualified nominees. Janice Rogers Brown. announcement by the speaker pro tempore

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I point out to the body and the American people that the President had made an excellent nomination in the name of Miguel Estrada. And for 28 months Mr. Estrada was held in limbo while we waited for the Constitution to be upheld in the other body. And that would be the advise and consent clause of the Constitution that establishes that the Senate shall confirm the President's nominees. Now that 28 months and 5 days have passed, Mr. Estrada determined he needed to move on with his life. But the rules in the other body that establish a 60 percent vote to end a filibuster, have effectively established that standard as a requirement for a confirmation of a justice. And now today, and as I read some of the publications that are out, I am heartened to learn that through the newspapers that the other body is planning to debate judicial nominations starting on Wednesday evening of this week. They pledge to debate the issue all night to get their message to the American people. I applaud them in their endeavor, and I will do all I can to support their efforts. The blockage of judicial nominations by a determined minority is one of the most important issues before our Nation. Nothing less than our Constitution is at stake. I believe the Constitution is clear: a minority cannot impose a supermajority requirement for confirmation of a judicial nominee. The President is entitled to confirmation of his nominees if they garner a simple majority. The advise and consent clause, which is article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution requires a simple majority of 51 votes for confirmation of a judicial nominee. Many nominees have 51 such votes. And that standard is the standard that has existed since the ratification of our Constitution in 1789, well over 200 years. But there is a new standard now, brought about by the minority. I firmly believe that it is unconstitutional to require a higher standard. announcement by the speaker pro tempore

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I will adhere to that directive. I will say these are reliable people. And in the case of Janice Rogers Brown, she is a classic American success story. She is a daughter of an Alabama sharecropper who became a member of the California Supreme Court. She was reelected to the Supreme Court by 76 percent, which was the largest margin of any justice running that year. More importantly, she is a well-qualified and excellent judge. She applies the law without bias and with an even hand. William Pryor, another nominee, has a model judicial temperament. As attorney general, Pryor has demonstrated an ability to make decisions in full compliance with the letter of existing law, despite his own personal beliefs or preference. Even while Pryor personally opposed abortion, he has faithfully applied the Supreme Court's rulings on partial birth abortion and instructed Alabama officials not to enforce the State's partial birth abortion ban in a way that would violate the case law. It is clear that William Pryor would interpret the law, not make the law from the bench. Mr. Speaker, I hope the American people will support this endeavor. I hope the American people will listen next week when the qualifications of nominees such as William Pryor, Janice Rogers Brown and others are debated by the other body. At issue is one of the most important Constitutional questions of our time. Will the Constitution be upheld? Or will a determined minority be allowed to thwart the clear text of the Constitituion and the will of the American people?

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the remarks of the gentleman from Arizona. What we are really talking about here is means testing versus entitlement. Means testing says, we do not want to tax poor people to put drugs and Medicare into the accounts of Bill Gates. And entitlement means, we are going to do that for everybody so we can level this across all classes of people in America. That is not the American way. We do not do things like that. We are here for the underdog, and that is what means testing does. It protects this system for the poorest among us. If we listen to some of the discussions about Social Security reform, we will hear, raise the age, lower the benefits, increase the contribution. All of those things are part of what happens if we do not provide for means testing, because then we have to draw it out of the pockets of the working people. I am from Iowa. In Iowa we pay attention to Medicare. We are last in the Nation in compensation rates where I come from. I represent a district that has 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa, and in Iowa we have the highest percentage of our population over the age of 65. We are extraordinarily sensitive to providing these resources to people who need it. When I came here to this Congress, I pledged to support a prescription drug Medicare plan that was means tested and also provided for the reform in Medicare so that we could utilize those dollars in the most effective way possible and penalize the producers in this country the minimum amount possible. We do not have that in what is appearing to come together before our conference committee. I rise in support of the Flake motion to instruct for that reason, so that we can promote means testing and impose the idea of this entitlement, which weighs down this system. So how did we get here? Two years of expectations raised by the Congress that said we are going to do prescription drugs. That brought us to this point. Then we set this number up on the wall that said $400 billion, then began to write prescription drugs-Medicare that hit that $400 million target. Really, the actuaries drove a lot of this policy, and it does not appear to resemble the things that I came here to support. So I am for reform. There are places in this country where they get more money for Medicare compensation than they need and they use that to buy down insurance premiums in private payers in places in this country where they get substantially less, and Iowa is one of those. We are not addressing quality care or cost effectiveness. In an effective way, our $400 billion plan is about 25 to $27 billion worth of reform, and the balance of it is prescription drugs because it is an entitlement. Mr. Speaker, I think the Flake motion goes directly to the heart of this, and to carry this philosophy into the conference committee and bring it out and bring it out to the floor with really the right thing for the right philosophy for Americans is the thing that we ought to do.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate Ms. Joanne Stockdale on the great honor of being named Iowa Small Business Person of the Year by the Small Business Administration. It is because of the excellent reputation that she established since purchasing Northern Iowa Die Casting, Inc. in 1984, that she deserves this recognition. Small businesses are the backbone of Iowa's economy, and it takes true entrepreneurial spirit and determination to ride economic waves in order to remain successful. It is to her credit that Northern Iowa Die Casting, Inc. has grown from six to 100 employees, with sales soaring from $225,000 to $10 million. She is to be commended for bringing jobs and commerce to Lake Park, Iowa. I also recognize her for the great honor of representing Iowa small business at the National Entrepreneurial Conference and Expo held this week in Washington, D.C., while competing for the national Small Business Person of the Year Award. As a small business owner for 28 years, I have great personal appreciation for both the struggles she faces and the joys of seeing the fruits of her labor. Since arriving at the U.S. Congress in January, I have made small business a legislative priority, and my work on the Small Business Committee has already enabled me to assist in creating legislation that will help small business leaders like Joanne Stockdale.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate Ms. Joanne Stockdale on the great honor of being named Iowa Small Business Person of the Year by the Small Business Administration. It is because of the excellent reputation that she established since purchasing Northern Iowa Die Casting, Inc. in 1984, that she deserves this recognition. Small businesses are the backbone of Iowa's economy, and it takes true entrepreneurial spirit and determination to ride economic waves in order to remain successful. It is to her credit that Northern Iowa Die Casting, Inc. has grown from six to 100 employees, with sales soaring from $225,000 to $10 million. She is to be commended for bringing jobs and commerce to Lake Park, Iowa. I also recognize her for the great honor of representing Iowa small business at the National Entrepreneurial Conference and Expo held this week in Washington, D.C., while competing for the national Small Business Person of the Year Award. As a small business owner for 28 years, I have great personal appreciation for both the struggles she faces and the joys of seeing the fruits of her labor. Since arriving at the U.S. Congress in January, I have made small business a legislative priority, and my work on the Small Business Committee has already enabled me to assist in creating legislation that will help small business leaders like Joanne Stockdale.

Mr. KING

Mr. KING. Mr. Chairman, I would have amended H.R. 2989, the Transportation, Treasury and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act of 2004, to address concerns about an unfunded mandate and ensure integrity in our voting system. However, this amendment was not in order. My amendment would have given States a waiver from compliance with the Help America Vote Act until it is fully funded at the authorized level. States should not have to comply with an unfunded mandate in 2006. Many of our states are facing serious budget crises, and worry that if they are not first in line to receive the federal matching funds the money will run out. If this happens, the local taxpayers will be left holding the bill for compliance with the unfunded HAVA mandate in 2006. My amendment would not require states to comply with the HAVA mandate until it is fully funded at the level authorized. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires, among other things, that each precinct have at least one Direct Recording Electronic voting system, or DRE. However, currently these machines do not have a permanent, auditable and individually verifiable trail. Questions remain about whether electronic voting system software could be hacked into and election results tampered with. Until DRE machines have a verifiable audit trail, we should not spend federal tax dollars on unreliable machines. The Help America Vote Act was motivated by electoral integrity--we must insure that the DRE machines meet that goal before spending millions of dollars on them and requiring states to use them in every precinct. At a cost of $4,000 to 5,000 per DRE, we can't afford to be wrong. In fact, at a cost of thousands of dollars per machine, many rural precincts will have only one voting machine available for voters, and it will have to be a DRE according to the requirements of the Help America Vote Act. If sparsely populated rural voters are forced to vote on DRE machines that are susceptible to fraud, we risk mass disenfranchisement of rural voters in small precincts. This disenfranchisement will extend to disabled voters who use a DRE to vote, which was hardly the intent behind the voting reform legislation. Ensuring electoral integrity and preventing vote fraud is a high priority for me. Although I was not able to offer my amendment today, I intend to continue to work towards solutions to these problems.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of both resolutions, H.R. 2738 and H.R. 2739, the Chilean and Singapore Free Trade Agreements. The U.S.-Singapore and -Chile agreements will help a wide range of U.S. businesses, including manufacturers, service providers and farmers to get back into the game on international trade. This Free Trade Agreement also raises the bar for the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Implementing the Free Trade Agreement with Chile, the leading economic reformer in Latin America, sends a message to other countries taking part in the Free Trade Agreement negotiations that the U.S. is prepared to improve trade relations with countries that stay on the path of economic reform, free markets, and democracy. U.S. agriculture needs trade agreements in order to obtain the global market access necessary to expand sales and farm incomes. Since 96 percent of the world's population resides outside the United States, access to foreign markets is essential for the continued growth and viability of U.S. agriculture. Bilateral agreements such as the Singapore and the Chile Free Trade Agreements are essential, because they provide benefits immediately. They help the U.S. keep pace with global competitors who currently have better access than U.S. exporters due to existing preferential trade agreements. This agreement is comprehensive, calling for an eventual duty-free, quota-free access for all products. I would point out that Adam Smith wrote this in about 1776, that ``if you can buy it cheaper than you can make it, you ought to buy it; if you can make it cheaper than you can buy it, you ought to make it.'' That is what this is about, this Free Trade Agreement. The Free Trade Agreement for Singapore works to guarantee access for U.S. firms into Singapore's industries, such as express delivery, legal services, financial services, and communications. Congress, not the U.S. Trade Representative, has plenary power over immigration. I firmly believe that immigration policy does not belong in free trade agreements. I thank the U.S. Trade Representative for working with the Committee on the Judiciary to address some of our bipartisan concerns about the Chile and Singapore agreements. As a member of the Committee on the Judiciary, I offered amendments to help fix problematic immigration provisions in the Chile and Singapore trade agreements. I particularly appreciate the cooperation and promise of Ambassador Zoellick that immigration provisions will not be included in future trade agreements. Many Members have supported trade promotion authority in the past. However, if the U.S. Trade Representative includes immigration provisions in future trade agreements, support for extensions of this authority and of the free trade agreements themselves will be jeopardized. The outcry here in Congress shows that the U.S. Trade Representative cannot garner the necessary support for any future trade agreements containing immigration provisions. The message is clear: Immigration provisions will not be tolerated in future trade agreements; that is the province of the United States Congress, according to our United States Constitution. We must step forward and fulfill our constitutional obligations here. We have done so from the Committee on the Judiciary. I will continue observing these trade agreements as they are negotiated and carried out. I do appreciate the cooperation of the Trade Representative and also of our chairman, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), who has led the battle on this issue, and I intend to be part of that team. But I will vote in support of this trade agreement.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to offer this amendment. I am going to do something slightly unusual and simply read it since it is short and it does describe what it does. It says, ``None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to engage in negotiations respecting a trade agreement with another country which creates or expands a nonimmigrant visa category authorizing the temporary entry of professionals into the United States.'' Mr. Chairman, this issue arises out of our U.S. Trade Representative's including nonimmigration status, created a whole new category; it was a ``W'' category that now we have changed into H-1Bs. It is being included now in at least discussions in other trade agreements across Central and South America. And so I rise today to offer an amendment to prevent the United States Trade Representative from negotiating changes to U.S. immigration law in trade agreements with other countries. Our Constitution in article 1, section 8, gives Congress, not the U.S. Trade Representative, plenary power over immigration. Immigration policy does not belong in free trade agreements. My amendment provides that none of the funds appropriated by the bill may be used by the United States Trade Representative to negotiate trade agreements which create or expand a nonimmigrant visa category authorizing the temporary entry of professionals into the United States. Recently, the U.S. Trade Representative has negotiated free trade agreements which contain immigration provisions that infringe upon the plenary power of Congress over immigration matters. The first draft of the implementing legislation for the Chile and Singapore free trade agreements included the creation of a new ``W'' category for visas for professional workers. Only after the Trade Representative received serious resistance from the Committee on the Judiciary did they agree to slightly change the immigration provisions to accommodate some, but not all, of the concerns of the Committee on the Judiciary. The inclusion of immigration provisions in the Chile and Singapore agreements is especially troubling since the agreements will likely be used as a template for future free trade agreements, including those with Central America, Southern Africa, Australia, Morocco and others. The U.S. Trade Representative has negotiated these immigration provisions without any authority or decision to do so from Congress. With my amendment, Congress can reassert congressional primacy over immigration law. The United States Trade Representative's practice of proposing new immigration law in the context of bilateral or multilateral trade negotiations usurps Congress' constitutional responsibility for immigration law. Trade Promotion Authority eliminates our ability to amend such proposals, taking the plenary power over immigration out of the hands of Congress. We cannot allow this to continue and must prevent the U.S. Trade Representative from agreeing to include immigration provisions in trade agreements. The practice of including immigration provisions that usurp congressional authority is not limited to the Chile and Singapore trade agreements. The North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Trade in Services both included such provisions. In NAFTA, the Clinton administration USTR agreed to a limitless professional worker visa category containing not even a prevailing wage requirement. In GATS, the USTR divested from future Congresses the ability to make possibly crucial modifications to the H-1B visa program. I am not opposed to free trade agreements. In fact, I am a free trader. We need to make trade agreements with other countries, for example, to increase our agriculture exports. However, the Trade Representative does not need to change immigration law to achieve that goal. As Members of Congress, we often disagree as to what our immigration policy should be, but we are all united in the belief that the responsibility for crafting an immigration policy belongs to Congress, not the executive branch; and we take our duty seriously. I ask Members to support my amendment.

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

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, as I listen to this debate, I think there is a point that needs to be clarified and that is what the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) seeks to do is simply say that if you are a local government and you have passed an ordinance that prohibits your employees from cooperating with Federal law by providing information to, and this is the Federal law, specifically, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996. We have out here about a baker's dozen of major cities in this country that have passed an ordinance saying we are going to be a safe haven and we will not cooperate with the Federal entities or Federal law, and the ordinance says so. So if we are going to have any linkage at all between Federal dollars and this rule of law that requires cooperation between all levels of government, we need to put some strings in here; and that is what we have done. I was rather taken aback some years ago when the fairly new city of El Cenizo, Texas, precluded their employees from complying with Federal agents. I thought that was an anomaly; instead, it is becoming a standard. With regard to the comment that there is no jurisdiction over the Bureau of Immigration and Customs in this committee, I do agree with that particular statement as far as the jurisdiction is concerned. But we need to have a hook in here. This is dollars, and it just says that if you have an ordinance that prohibits your people from complying with this Federal law, we are not going to allow the dollars to go then to that particular political subdivision or community.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding. Just a few quick points to make on the remarks made by the gentleman. First of all, it is Congress' authority to establish immigration policy, and when we open up and provide that opportunity to the U.S. Trade Representative to inject immigration issues into any and all trade agreements that they might make, that is voluntarily giving up congressional authority that is constitutionally vested in the United States Congress. We have a responsibility to defend our oath of office, which is to uphold the Constitution of the United States; and once we move outside of that, our Founding Fathers knew better. That is why they put that in the Constitution. We are not allowed to amend a trade agreement. So by not being allowed to amend a trade agreement, that means that they can inject immigration issues into a trade agreement and those of us who believe in free trade, but do not believe that we should set up the authority with a Trade Representative to bring in any limit of immigration, that puts us in a position of having to decide, devil's choice, are we for the trade or are we against immigration policy? So it is Congress' authority. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to bring forth S. 1399, the William J. Scherle Post Office Building Redesignation Act, to honor the selfless service of a great Iowan, Bill Scherle. I want to thank the Iowa delegation in the House of Representatives for joining me and Senators Harkin and Grassley in supporting this well-deserved gesture to honor the service of a great American by their cosponsorship of my House version, H.R. 2758. Mr. Scherle was born in Little Falls, New York in 1923. After serving this great country in the Second World War, Mr. Scherle attended Southern Methodist University and subsequently served in the United States Naval Reserve. After serving his country in the military, Mr. Scherle decided to engage in grain and livestock farming and settled in rural Mills County, Iowa. Mr. Scherle was elected to 3 consecutive terms in the Iowa House of Representatives. In 1966, he was elected to his first of four terms in the United States House of Representatives. Bill was known as a watchdog of government waste who brought a keen eye for economic accountability to the Congress. Bill was an outspoken and persistent voice for the members of the captured spy boat, the Pueblo, during 1968 when the boat and crew were captured by the North Koreans. Thanks to his daily reminders on the floor of Congress, the members of the Pueblo and their plight were kept at the forefront of the Congress' consciousness until they were released by the North Korean government. Mr. Scherle promoted personal responsibility, agricultural growth and innovation, and was the embodiment of common sense conservatism during his tenure in this honorable House. After serving in the United States Department of Agriculture and as a consultant in Washington D.C., Mr. Scherle retired to Henderson, where he currently resides with his wife Jane. Mr. Speaker, members of the House, please join me and the entire Iowa delegation in voting to designate the Glenwood, Iowa Post Office the William J. Scherle Post Office Building.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Graves).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I will concede the point of order.