Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding. I came down here to the floor out of support for Guam, half a day, where America's day begins. And the first cup of coffee in America is there on Guam. So I have a special place in my heart for Guam, and I support the educational components of this legislation. I also come here, Mr. Speaker, and I think it is a bit unusual, but I support the balance of this underlying legislation that was amended to the gentlelady from Guam's bill in the Senate. I do that, but I also support the words of Mr. Hastings of Washington, who says that Democrats have admitted they were wrong. We have to look at this legislation and see that the minimum wage was imposed upon the Northern Marianas and American Samoa in 2007. Two tuna canning factories; now one has closed as a direct result of the imposition of a minimum wage. And the sole garment factory in the Northern Marianas has also closed because of a direct result, at least in significant part, because of the imposition of minimum wage. It is a microcosm economy that anybody that understands free enterprise should know that when the government artificially raises the cost of wages, businesses that have to stay, therefore a profit, can't stay open unless they can operate from a profit. Labor is, Mr. Speaker, a commodity. It is a commodity like gold or oil or corn or beans. Labor: it is a precious commodity. And the value of it needs to be determined by supply and demand in the marketplace, not by the United States Government. And so here we are with a damaged economy out in the Pacific in America's territories and an example for all this Congress that if we continue to increase government-imposed regulations, government-imposed minimum wage, for example, and all of the burden that's been put upon the free enterprise system over here with this over-management and this Keynesian economist on steroids, which is our President's economic policy, we're going to pay the price in the United States of America the same way they're paying the price in American Samoa and the Northern Marianas. I support the bill.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, this formally most deliberative body that has such a long and deep tradition that goes back two centuries and a generation or more. And here in these Chambers and the Chambers that have preceded these across the capital throughout the years have come the discussions and deliberations that have helped direct the destiny of America. Times of wars have been declared here. And there have been many State of the Union addresses delivered and heads of state that have come here to stand here at the rostrum and tell America, to the United States House of Representatives--accompanied often by the United States Senate and the Cabinet members and the Supreme Court, representatives from the Pentagon and others--to address the destiny of America and help direct our destiny. And it has been true that the voices of America have been heard in these Chambers over and over again throughout the generations. And it's what it was designed to do by the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. Our Founding Fathers understood--and I believe that God put them to work on our behalf--our rights come from Him. We know. And it is a matter of fact that's clearly delineated in our Declaration of Independence. It's been carried out by many of the words of the leaders that we have had that have emerged over the years, over the centuries, and over the generations. Our rights that come from God, debated here in the United States House of Representatives, in this American destiny which is the product of His Providence and the product of the collective judgment of the American people and the vision and the wisdom of this Republic. The Constitution guarantees us not a democracy but a republican form of government. That means a government that's established by representatives of the people. And those of us here that are the products of the elections that have the privilege to represent the 435 congressional districts in America, we aren't the products of a democracy. We're the products of the votes by the citizens of America that direct us to carry out our duty as representatives in a republic. That means that we owe our constituents our best efforts and our best judgment. And part of that best judgment is to spend a lot of time back in our districts listening to our constituents, carrying out our arguments, using them as a sounding board because they're busy in real lives. They're busy going to work every day, raising their families, living the American dream in many cases. And they have asked us, directed us, hired us, and we've asked for the privilege to represent them here with our best judgment, here in the center of the capital of the greatest Nation on Earth, the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, the United States of America. You hear this magnet of Washington, D.C., which is the center for information that comes in the world, and it's available to us. Each of our offices is a magnet for information. And through our office comes the wisdom of our constituents and the wisdom of America. It's our job to hear the pleas of the people and understand the arguments that they make, and evaluate them, the empirical data, evaluate the urgency that they deliver it to us with, and sort out the highest priorities and bring those priorities into this body. And we're also here gathering data from around the world and from around the country that comes directly into our office, and we're to evaluate all of that and bring out of it a rational, prioritized solution for the destiny and the direction of America. That's the vision and the wisdom of this constitutional Republic known as the United States of America. The vision and the wisdom. And I note that in Texas when they went through the effort to establish the textbooks that would be delivered and often go all the way across America, they made sure that they changed the language in the books so that it is clear that the students in Texas know, and soon it will be clear that the students all across America know, that this is a constitutional republic. So here we are, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, a place where we're to gather and bring to this floor the wisdom of America, coming out of the mouths of 435 Members of the United States House of Representatives. And that, brought up to and compared to the wisdom that's collected out of the 50 States from the 100 Senators, from that's to come the policy of the United States of America over to the desk of the President, where he has the opportunity to sign and ratify or veto the legislation that we send to him. And here we are today with a Congress that's dysfunctional, Mr. Speaker, a Congress that over 200 years of tradition and history and practice has provided for open rules that allowed for any Member of Congress to bring an amendment to an appropriations bill. Maybe even at the last minute. Maybe an amendment that was written not on a piece of parchment--that was a little bit before my time anyway, but possibly it could have been. Could have been written on a napkin. Could have been written on a place mat. It could have been produced on a computer in an office or typed out now on a BlackBerry and sent down here. But introduced to the Clerk of the House as an amendment even at the last minute. And any Member could, under those circumstances of an appropriations bill, bring that amendment up, require a debate and force a vote on the subject matter that was before this Chamber. That practice had taken place for over 200 years, Mr. Speaker, and now it's gone. It's been taken away by Speaker Pelosi. The first year that she held the gavel of the Speakership we still had the semblance of an open rule that went on for about half of that appropriations cycle, and then it was shut down. No more open rules to appropriations bills. Shut down. During that period of time, my staff advises me that I was successful in passing more amendments than anybody else in the United States Congress. It wasn't my goal to rack up more amendments, but it was my goal to make sure that my constituents were heard. And we brought those amendments to the floor in 2007, many of them successfully. But in the aftermath of that abbreviated appropriations season, what we saw happen was a change in the rules that restricted Members from bringing amendments and eventually became the de facto closed rule system that shut down and shut off the input that came from all of these Members of Congress, who had been out reaching out and gathering information and becoming the repository for the collective wisdom of their congressional districts. Added to that their judgment, their research, their analysis, all of that shut down and shut off by order of the Speaker of the House. No more amendments on appropriations bills unless the Rules Committee up there in the hole in the wall committee where very seldom does any press go and very rarely is there a television camera in there. And they meet often in the middle of the night. And they write a rule such as a rule that deems a bill to have passed. It's pretty infamous that the chair of the Rules Committee, Louise Slaughter, advocated that they not bring ObamaCare to the floor of the House for a debate and a vote, just simply deem it as passed. Deem a bill as passed. Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, how the Founding Fathers would shudder at the thought that they could create this great deliberative body and this constitutional Republic that could be reduced down into the chair of the Rules Committee advocating that they simply deem that a bill is passed rather than debate it, put it up for amendments, and allow the collective wisdom of the United States of America, as processed through the voices of the Representatives, to work their will so that we can produce a policy that's good for this country? They set up the right debate structure, they set up the right process, and it's been usurped by this Speaker to the point where even it's a closed rule on appropriations now. Where one can't even begin to offer an amendment. Where I went up to the Rules Committee to--you are supposed to go up there and beg them to allow you to make an argument or a debate. I have never done that. I can't bring myself to beg the Rules Committee. But, nonetheless, at 1:30 in the morning on ObamaCare, I had 13 amendments up before the ObamaCare bill was to come to the floor the next day, and I waited a long time in line for an opportunity to make my case for those 13 amendments. And the Rules Committee, one of the senior members had the audacity to lecture me for wasting staff time to write the amendments and apparently for wasting trees to print them up in paper. Because whatever ideas might come from a Member of the House of Representatives, I should have known--and he told me I should have known--that the Speaker has decided that none of my amendments will be considered, therefore why did I waste the time. Why did I waste the paper to introduce them into the Record? That's the kind of thing they can get away with when they are up there in the hole in the wall, the Rules Committee up there in the corner, unaccountable to the press, not on television, no one reviewing them outside of this body. And I can come down here and tell you that, Mr. Speaker, and a few people will hear it, and a lot less will be outraged; but even that intolerable circumstance is even worse than that because of the no open rules on appropriations has now been reduced to for this year no appropriations bills and no budget. So when the President proposes his spending plan, I guess you could call it a budget--we don't accept the President's budget. This is the House of Representatives. The Constitution requires that all spending bills start here. They don't start in the White House. The White House makes a recommendation, and it's our job to process it through the Budget Committee and produce the document that is the collective wisdom for supposedly the entire United States House of Representatives that sets the spending limits for the appropriations process. A budget that says don't outspend your budget, and you can spend it in these categories that are laid out by the Budget Committee. And that's the fiscal restraint. No budget bill in this Congress; no appropriations bills in this Congress. So we no longer need the rule that says you don't get to offer an amendment on them because there are no bills to amend. Mr. Speaker, we're at the point where this United States Government is being run by the iron fist of the Speaker hanging onto the gavel, dictating to 435 Members what she will do. And we're no longer accessing the collective wisdom of 306 million Americans. We're just accessing the collective wisdom of the Speaker's staff and whoever else can penetrate through that circle as part of that staff. And how can we believe that the equivalent of a dictatorship can run this country as well as the collective wisdom of the American people? Our Founding Fathers saw the wisdom. They set up the constitutional Republic so we could gather all the wisdom of the American people and sort the good ideas from the bad, the wheat from the chaff, and bring the highest priorities to the top throughout the system of representing each district and coming in here to introduce legislation, bring it through the hearing process, the subcommittee and the committee process, and to the floor of the House. Where, then, when a product is produced by the wisdom of the entire House, it can go down to the Senate, where they can work their will. And if they have some better, some sage, ideas, go ahead and fix it a little bit and send it back to us. And if they are good ideas, we'll ratify it, and we'll send it to the President. That's how it's supposed to work, Mr. Speaker. It is not working that way. The system, the process has been shut down. Democrats and Republicans should be outraged at what's happening to America because the wisdom of America is being locked out of the process here in the United States Congress. And we watched, and a number of us vigorously opposed what some declared to be the passage of ObamaCare. ObamaCare, the President's signature piece of legislation, rejected by the American people, who under the constitutional guidelines came here to the Capitol building on at least two occasions, and I would argue several more, by the tens of thousands to petition the government for redress of grievances and to argue don't take our liberty away. The people in the United States want to be able to buy the health insurance policy of their choice. They want to be able to take care of their own personal responsibility. They don't want to have the Federal Government cancel every health insurance policy in America, which they will do under ObamaCare. And they don't want the terms of their health care dictated by the Federal Government. They want to be able to buy a catastrophic health insurance policy with low premiums and high deductible. They want to be able to couple that with an HSA and grow that into a retirement fund once they've done a good job of managing their life's health. They want to be able to shop for a policy of insurance across State lines so they can look for cheaper premiums and fewer mandates. They don't want Federal mandates on their health insurance. None. And they surely don't want an expansion of Federal mandates on health insurance, whether it's brought to them by Democrats or Republicans. No Federal mandates on insurance. Let people vote with their feet. Let them buy across State lines. Repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which is the Federal statute that allows the States to establish monopolies for health insurance companies within those States. Let people break out of those chains. But ObamaCare came at us and was passed here off the floor of the House of Representatives when it did not have the majority support of the 435 Members that were here. And, Mr. Speaker, you might ask how did it pass then? How did it pass here barely, by a small little margin of votes if it didn't have the support of the majority of the House? And the answer to that is, well, there had to be a couple of backroom deals made that had to be announced to the press so that they could at least make the excuses that they made, but they didn't have the votes to pass ObamaCare as it was. That bill that turned into almost 2,500 pages of legislation could not have passed the House if it weren't for two promises. One of them was that there would be a reconciliation package that would come out of the Senate that would come here to be voted on within so many days of the passage of ObamaCare, and another one was the President promising to Bart Stupak and others, the ``Stupak dozen,'' that he would issue an Executive order that would fix the problems in the legislation that were created by the language of Ben Nelson, the Senator from Nebraska. So in that day, under that scenario--think of this--they could not produce 218 votes to pass ObamaCare unless there was a solemn oath that convinced the people that were going to vote for ObamaCare, that were elected to vote for ObamaCare, that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package that made a number of other changes and that the President would sign an Executive order that would amend the Ben Nelson Federal funding for abortion language. Think of this: How naive would you have to be? How far would you have to stick your head into the sand, Mr. Speaker, to believe, first, the language that came out of the Senate in the reconciliation did happen, but to believe that the President of the United States could sign an Executive order that would amend the law that was passed by the House of Representatives and the United States Senate? That is an unconstitutional concept to its very core. Congress has the legislative authority, not the President. The President's responsibility is to faithfully ensure and take care that the laws are enforced and the policy that the Congress directs is carried out. That's what needs to happen. That's the constitutional framework. The President doesn't have the authority to sign an Executive order that amends the language that has been approved by a majority vote in the House and a majority vote in the Senate. But a number of people over on this side of the aisle cast their vote for ObamaCare--about a dozen--on the promise that President Obama would sign an Executive order that would alter the legislative language and its effect when it came to Federal funding for abortion. That is what I and many others would call the tiniest little fig leaf for people who wanted to vote for the bill in the first place but said they took a stand on principle and they wanted to find a way out from underneath that. So they hid behind this tiny little fig leaf called the President's Executive order. But the votes weren't there to pass ObamaCare on that day without it and without the promise that the Senate would pass legislation that would change the language that was being voted on in the House. Think of it; the chair of the Rules Committee just simply wanted to deem that ObamaCare passed and not have a vote, deem it passed. And the promise, though, was that the Senate will pass some legislation to fix a mistake that you are about to make; and, by the way, if you think that taxpayers shouldn't be compelled to fund abortions in the United States of America, the President will fix that with an Executive order. And we are here to believe that this is still the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world and that it's the collective wisdom of America? I say not. I think not, Mr. Speaker. This system, this process has so devolved downward that it no longer functions as the Congress was envisioned to function. We now must alter, abolish, and change the direction that this Congress is going and put new people in place, people with gavels in their hands chairing committees, people that adhere to the Constitution; put in place the requirement that we introduce legislation that identifies the specific sections of the Constitution that grant the authority of this Congress to introduce and pass such legislation, that there's a constitutional foundation for all the legislation that we pass. And I believe there is a reasonable chance that that will happen and that the changes will take place in November and that there will be a major sea change in the seats in this Congress. A breath of new constitutionally and fiscally responsible vigor will come a-washing in over this Chamber. But in the meantime, we need to lay down the parameters and reestablish this covenant with the American public that we will function in a constitutional fashion, that we will balance the budget and start to pay down the national debt and be straight with the American people on how difficult that is. I want to see a balanced budget come to this floor that balances this budget in 1 year--not in 20 years or 50 years or 10 or 9--1 year. And, yes, I expect that that first balanced budget offered that balances the budget in 1 year will be so painful that it's not going to pass. But we need to tell the American people what we have to do to balance this budget. Right now this Congress doesn't have the will to even tell America what it takes to balance the budget. And we must, as an early--and I will argue first--order of business, bring the repeal of ObamaCare to the floor, to pull ObamaCare out by the roots, lock, stock and barrel, root and branch, so there is not one vestige of ObamaCare left behind, Mr. Speaker, because ObamaCare is not the product of the American people. It's the product of legislative strong-armed activity that used the maneuvers of ``deemed to pass,'' the Senate promise of reconciliation, the President's Executive order, and the willful neglect on the part of Members of the House of Representatives. I yield to the gentleman from Texas so much time as he might consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time just to pose a question to the gentleman from Texas, if you are suggesting that the people who are in the majority in this Congress know that there will be a punishment that will hurt businesses, and that would be why some of them would want to extend these Bush tax cuts or make them permanent, as I do and as you do, is that really it? Is it their conscience, or is it the political pressure that is coming to bear now before the election, and what will be the results and the aftermath? Is it in their heads and their hearts to keep the taxes up because they think government can spend the money better? And is it in their political survival instincts to try to posture themselves in straddling the fence until such time as there is an election so that they can continue to allow the tax cuts to expire at the end of the year?

Mr. KING of Iowa. In reclaiming my time here, Mr. Gohmert, I'm just thinking about how this works. The expiration of these Bush tax cuts has been marching towards us for a long time. We know, when we get into the silly season of politics, any decisions that are made in Congress are made to send a message to the voters and not necessarily to provide the best policy to the American people. Call me a cynic, but I think your pundits and your historians will recognize that Congress does things just prior to an election that aren't particularly rational unless you put them within the context of the lens of sending a message to the voters that you're really not as bad as they think you are, for example. So any of this decision could have been made with responsibility and foresight. It could have been made in any of the preceding months. It could have been something that was concluded in June or July, for example. We could have extended these tax cuts for 10 years, or we could have made them permanent, which is as I would have preferred; but it didn't happen. I take this back to 4 years ago, in 2006, when Democrats won the majority in this House of Representatives. Charlie Rangel, the esteemed former chair of the Ways and Means Committee, was the apparent person who would become the new chair, formally, on the third day of January of 2007. Charlie Rangel went on the talk shows all over America, and they began asking him: Which of the Bush tax cuts would you like to keep? Which of the Bush tax cuts would you be willing to see or like to see expire? I listened to a lot of that. I never heard a definitive answer from Charlie Rangel. In fact, it has been a long time since we've heard a definitive answer from Charlie Rangel. Yet, throughout that period of time, from November until February, the pundits were asking questions, and smart money investors were making decisions and were drawing a calculus on what they thought might happen to the potential extension of the Bush tax cuts. Smart money concluded almost 4 years ago that there would not be extensions of these Bush tax cuts. Then you saw, beginning in late January and early February of 2007, a dramatic drop-off in industrial investment because smart money knew that the cost of capital was going to go up and that the profit margin would go down. That, I believe, was one of the early indicators that started to drive our economy down. Where we sit today is watching these cuts that could have been extended and could have been made permanent in any month prior to now. Now we're down to the last week before the election, and we're pretty confident it is not going to happen. As bad as it is to see this large, huge, looming tax increase, the most immoral and diabolical of all is the death tax--the death tax that doesn't exist today. People who pass away in 2010 can pass the entire amounts of their estates on to the next generations without a tax penalty. George Steinbrenner, one of those examples, avoided the taxman. However poor the happenstance was of his being called home this year, the billionaire George Steinbrenner's family didn't have to pay an estate tax. However, at midnight on December 31, at the instant the ball drops in Times Square in New York, someone who passes away a second after that ball hits bottom will be looking at a new death tax that has a $1 million exemption, that starts at a 55 percent tax and goes up from there. That means that the family farm that might own two sections of land in Iowa will have to give up half of that land just to pay the taxman, and there is no relief in sight. It is the class envy component of this which concludes that, no matter how much you pay, no matter how many taxes you pay on the equity that you have, if you have paid the tax on it and have accrued the capital and the net asset value, we are going to tax you again after you're dead. I've taken calls in the past, and I think many Members of Congress have taken calls in the past from family members who have had someone of whom they were having to ask the question of whether they should put them on life support or whether they should take them off of life support. The question was predicated upon: Will there be a tax liability or won't there be associated with the life of a loved one? This Congress must resolve this issue because, if we march forward to December 31 at midnight, there will be thousands of Americans lying on death beds, with their families gathered around. Sometimes that terminally ill family member will be coherent and rational and will say, Do not pay this tax. Don't put me on life support. Unplug me from life support. I want to pass away in 2010 so you don't have to pay the taxes on everything that I've earned all my life and that I've already paid the taxes on. Those are the circumstances. This diabolical and cruel policy will put families in the position of having to ask the question of whether they should try to keep their family members alive longer, with the chance that they might have some weeks or months of fulfilling lives, or whether they should take them off of that life support. Worse yet, it will happen. The time will come. If we don't fix the death tax, it will happen that there will be family members who make decisions to unplug or to not plug in loved family members, even at their requests, because those family members are not expected to live past midnight on December 31. Then, at the stroke of midnight, if that person draws another breath, there is immediately a 55 percent tax levied against all but $1 million of his life's work and his life's savings. It is cruel, it is diabolical, and it should not ever happen in the United States of America. That was set up because that was the best deal that could be gotten, and there was a belief back in those years of 2001 and 2003 that this Congress would have a conscience, a conscience that would prohibit them from allowing us to go forward to December 31, which would put people in a position like that. Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that, of all of these taxes, the death tax is the most cruel. It is the most egregious. It is the most diabolical. It is a sin to put people in this position, and this Congress is determined to go down that path because their class envy trumps their compassion for people who have to make decisions like that. The gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. A couple of things I would add to that. I want to go back and cap off the estate tax argument and one of the other ways it applies. You said land rich and cash poor, and that happens all across this country. And some of that land is poor. When people say they are land rich, they're land rich with poor land even, but that's the expression. And there is a tradition that goes out; there are roots that go into the land. Those of us that have lived on the land and made a living out of it and look around at our neighborhoods and know that the generations that grow off and on of that land are committed to making a living out of it and seeking to establish a way that they can pass that land along to the next generation. It's a matter of tradition. It's a matter of pride. It's family lore. It's a distinction of having that chance. People came out across the prairie in a covered wagon and walked behind the oxen to live free or die. They put their stakes out there in the four corners of their 160 quarter section and homesteaded it. We have a lot of family farms in Iowa that go back 100 years, even 150 years, and some of those are broken up by the estate tax that looms over the horizon. One of those that is at risk of being broken up right now is one that I actually came across last week, and I want to make a statement here for the Record tonight, Mr. Speaker. The representative of that farm is Landi McFarland, a mid-twenties young lady that is a sixth generation that has been raised on that land. That land that's known as Hoover Angus Farm. And they run a pure Red Angus operation and the other things that go along to make that balance within that land that's down there in southern Iowa and those beautiful rolling, grass-covered green hills in that part of the State and that part of the country and the world. And as a sixth generation who lives and breathes to live on that land and carry out the dreams of her ancestors and her father and her grandfather and the people that went before her, wants nothing more than that chance for the next generation to live there and do the same thing and build on Hoover Angus Farm. And yet, they're looking at an estate tax that would wipe out half of that land that's been put together. And the cruel, cold heart of people that don't understand that, that never lived that life, that don't know about being land rich, even with poor land, and cash poor, and knowing that half of that land could be taken away just to satisfy Uncle Sam, do not begin to understand that when you put together an operation, sometimes it takes generations to pick a piece of ground here, a 40 here, an 80 there, a 160 here. And after a while you've got a unit, a land-based unit that's symbiotic, it's balanced. It produces the feed and the productivity and has the grain storage and the transportation links and the building network that allows for the whole unit at all to function as a unit. And if Uncle Sam steps in there and half of that has to go, a lot of times it will destroy more than half of the value. You can't just cut it in half. You can't just say, Well, here's your half acre, and here's Uncle Sam's half acre, and turn it into a checkerboard and think it functions again. It does not. It becomes dysfunctional. And the value of the unit diminishes. You can't split it. So you have to decide whether you can sell something off and maintain that unit or whether that unit becomes of less value and no longer functional and competitive, in which case it gets split up to other interests--perhaps sold at a discount because it's no longer a unit-- and the legacy of six generations of Hoover Angus and then Landi McFarland could end overnight if we don't fix this estate tax problem that we have. And another component that the American people need to think about is the chilling development in ObamaCare. And it is this--and I have said, Mr. Speaker, a number of times right here from this same podium, that ObamaCare is the nationalization, and when I say ``nationalization,'' I mean coming under the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government, ObamaCare is the nationalization of your skin, Americans, and everything inside of it. It's the Federal takeover of your skin and everything inside it. The second most sovereign thing that you have is your health. The first most sovereign thing you have is your soul. The Federal Government takeover, nationalization of your skin and everything inside it, and a 10 percent tax on the outside if you choose to walk into the tanning salon. A tax on the outside of your skin to fund ObamaCare. How outrageous can that be? And here's the milestone, Mr. Speaker, it's the first component of a national sales tax with all of the elements of the Federal income tax and all of the things that Mr. Gohmert has talked about and identified here that are expanding and poised to grow and increase dramatically. One of our fears has been that we would have a sales tax coupled with an income tax and all of these other series of taxes. The tanning tax is the very first Federal sales tax that's imposed on anybody that goes into a tanning salon. Now, I don't suggest that it's a tax on a lack of melanin in the skin--although some have suggested such a thing--but I will tell you flat out specifically that it is the first national sales tax on a product. And if the Federal Government can impose a national sales tax on a service, they can impose it on any sales or service whatsoever in the United States of America. And if we're to do that, we need to abolish the IRS, eliminate the Federal Tax Code, wipe it all out, and convert it all over into a consumption tax. Free us up from the burden of the IRS. That's what needs to happen, Mr. Speaker. But these are two points that I think are essential to make. When you watch family businesses where the tax has been paid on the equity in that business and watch when it passes to the next generation, if the Federal Government's got to step in and impose a tax on an estate that's already paid its taxes on its equity, it takes that family business, that family factory, that family farm, and it separates it in half, and like a lot of things, even the baby that Solomon spoke of, it's worth a lot less in two halves than in one whole. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention and your indulgence tonight, and I'm absolutely convinced that I have convinced you. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is a privilege and honor to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to do so on such a significant day. This is a day of events, I believe, that will be marked for a long time in at least political history, and hopefully it will be marked in the hearts and minds of the American people as well. And I can think of a couple of events today, one that is unfolding as we speak, and another that unfolded earlier when the United States Senate had a cloture vote and didn't have the votes to force Harry Reid's version of the Department of Defense authorization bill to actually come up for a vote before the United States Senate. The cloture vote failed because he attached two unrelated issues, unessential issues, to that bill. The politics of it are such, pick your side of the argument. My side of the argument, Madam Speaker, is that they were unnecessary pieces of legislation that were attached to experiment socially with the military, not essential legislation. And the objection on the part of even the Republicans that supported each piece of that legislation was that procedurally, the majority leader in the United States Senate had crossed the line. So the Department of Defense authorization bill is now frozen in place. I think it must come forward at some time. The indications that we are getting is that will not happen until a lame duck session. That means after the election and after a new United States Senate is elected and after a new United States House of Representatives is elected. Then the people who no longer represent the will of the American people come back to do the essential business of the United States of America, but they don't have the support any longer of the voters who have chosen some different people. But the two pieces of legislation I am talking about that were attached to the DOD authorization bill are the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which is something that was implemented under President Bill Clinton back in the era when he wanted to put gays in the military, found that he ran into a political buzz saw, and settled for a compromise. And I didn't support it at the time, to be straight about that, Madam Speaker, but in retrospect it was a pretty good policy. Essentially it was we have people with different inclinations, and those who come to serve America can do so without announcing their sexual preferences. And as long as they keep that to themselves, they can serve in the United States military. That policy has served our military well for these last 15 or so years that it has been in place. I suspect it has actually been longer than that. Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Bill Clinton's policy. Now, because of the activism of the homosexual community, they have pushed an effort, and the President has made a campaign promise that he will repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell and recruit into the military openly gay people. That is a social experiment with our military, Madam Speaker. The military is not a place to conduct social experiments. One would think that our military personnel should have a say on this. One should do a study. There has been a request for that study through the Department of Defense to get the results of what our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines think of this, and then make a determination on whether to go forward with a different policy. I am hearing continually Don't Ask Don't Tell worked. Opening it up undermines the effectiveness of our military and it breaks down their readiness, and it is bad for America's national security. That seems to be the tone that comes from the enlisted personnel. It comes from some of the officer personnel. But we know that when you are, let's see, one of the joint chiefs, for example, or if you are the Secretary of Defense, and the President of the United States is your commander in chief, and if he should tell you in a Cabinet meeting, for example, that you are going to support the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, or you are going to be mum on your opinion and keep it to yourself, so this repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell that opens up access to the military for gays, so that comes about and that happens. That is what takes place. Our officers in uniform take their orders from, on up through the ranks, the commander in chief at the top. They get the message from the top. So you don't hear the straight answer from them that we like to think that we are getting from our military personnel. I believe if you could hear that straight answer, you would hear a far different tone coming out of our Joint Chiefs, for example. But the study should be done. It should not be an experiment to play with. What has happened over in the Senate is that they refused to invoke cloture because it is inappropriate and improper to stick the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the DOD authorization bill. If Harry Reid and others believe it should be repealed and we should open up the military to openly gay people, then they should put it up as a stand-alone piece of legislation. They should allow for amendments on it. They should debate it, and they should allow for a recorded vote. And why not do it right now, Harry Reid? Why not bring that up right now as a stand-alone piece of legislation? Why not roll it out on the floor of the United States Senate right now? And if you can pass it over there, send it over here to the House, and I hope that Nancy Pelosi picks that up. I hope Speaker Pelosi picks that up and runs it out here for a debate and a stand-alone vote so the American people can see where these Members of Congress stand. When you roll it into and you hide it in a DOD authorization bill, then you are trying to push a social activist policy without the accountability of a recorded vote. And that is what the Senators objected to, and that is why they voted no on cloture. That is why Don't Ask, Don't Tell will not be repealed, at least in this period of time between now and the November elections. If there is a pledge over there to bring it up in a lame duck session, we know how those pledges work. If they do so, a policy of that magnitude in a lame duck session, after watching the dynamics in the United States Senate change because of the elections that will take place election night in November, and after watching a change that will take place here in the House of Representatives, to come forward with a bunch of lame ducks and try to pass legislation that is rejected by the American people would be another insult. It would be another affront to the American voters, the American taxpayers, to American citizens. Don't Ask, Don't Tell needs to stand. That is what the American people want. That is what the military wants. And there is a study out there that needs to be completed. I want to look at the results of that, and I want to look at the methodology of it. I am not necessarily endorsing the results. I have not seen them, nor have I seen the methodology. But I believe, Madam Speaker, that our military personnel that put their lives on the line every day, that strap on that vest and that helmet and that uniform and face the heat and the cold and the bullets and the shrapnel and the IEDs, and all of the things that put them at peril, deserve better than a social experiment taking place here in the halls of Congress, just to pay off a political constituency group before an election. That is what offended the Senators over there today who voted no on cloture. The other component in that legislation was brought up for the same reason. It is called the DREAM Act. It is one of those things that happens. We come up with bad ideas for legislation here in this Congress, and we try to put nice-sounding titles on them so somehow or another if it has a good name, it has a better chance of becoming law. Well, if we had named it the Selective Amnesty For a Certain Class of Illegals Act, I don't think it would have had much chance to get to where it has. But it is called the DREAM Act. I would like to be able to say that you are dreaming if you think you can impose amnesty on 2 or more million people that came here illegally and set it up as a reward just because the compassion of your heart says that is what you should do. The people that support the DREAM Act are the people that are looking at this thing in the same way they are supporting the broader overall amnesty policy. What is the bottom line motivation? We would like to think that we are all looking at this policy from a constitutional perspective and a rule of law perspective, and setting up statutes so there is a framework that strengthens America and that respects the rule of law. But instead, we have seen the immigration law in America has simply been pushed off the edge and hijacked towards the line of opening up our border for the cynical political purposes of wanting to provide for people to come here and vote that will vote for a certain party. Madam Speaker, I heard this about 3 years ago, and I heard it right outside this House of Representatives out here on the West Lawn when there were about 150,000 people that came to protest they wanted their amnesty. Many of them presumably were illegal. But Senator Ted Kennedy, alive and relatively well at the time, went out to speak to that group of roughly 150,000 people. He said to them: Some say report to be deported. Then he waited for the interpreter. Then he said: I say report to become an American citizen. And then he waited for it to be interpreted. And then there was a cheer and applause that went up from the 150,000, the multitudes that came to the Capitol to demand that they receive amnesty and exemption from America's immigration laws. But I report this to you, Madam Speaker, because I heard clearly that day the clarion call that came from Senator Teddy Kennedy that said: We are going to give you all amnesty, and we are going to give you all citizenship, and we are going to let you all vote to redirect the direction of America, and just know that I represent the Democrats, and remember that we are the ones that gave you amnesty and the path to citizenship. So report to become an American citizen, remember who said so, Teddy Kennedy, vote for his party. Now there are some people on my side who got this wrong. I have said for a long time that the driving force on immigration here in the United States is this. On the one side, it's kind of like a set of barbells. Over here on one side, we have business that thinks that they've somehow got a right to cheap labor. Among these businesses, there are Democrats and Republicans, increasingly numbers of Democrats on the Big Business side of this who want the cheap labor. Yet there is a business interest. It's all the way over on this side of the barbell. Then you've got the bar through the middle, and on the other side of the barbell are those who want open borders and amnesty for the sake of all the political power that it brings them. Now, Madam Speaker, that might be something that doesn't exactly resonate when I say that, that illegal immigration gives people political power in America, and I know I have to explain that. It's this: We've already completed the census. We've counted everybody in the United States. I hope we have. Now redistricting is beginning all the way across America. According to a CIS report of a couple, three years ago, there are between nine and 11 congressional seats in America that would shift from the States they are in because we count people rather than citizens for the purposes of reapportionment in America. If you go across the South to States like Florida, Texas, California--and perhaps Arizona--Florida, Texas and California, by my recollection, would be States that would lose a seat if you were to count citizens rather than just people. Those seats, those nine to 11 in the aggregate altogether--and there would be other States that would lose seats--would be scattered back around America and reapportioned to the States that are a little bit short right now. Utah, for example, is on the cusp of picking up a seat. Well, if we counted citizens instead of people--``people'' is a class that includes illegals, the people who shouldn't be here--then there would be States like Utah and Indiana that would pick up a seat. A State like Iowa is more likely to keep the number of seats that it has, but the seats would be scattered across the United States in such a way that there would be a nine to 11 shift. There would be nine to 11 congressional seats that would shift, and they would shift from the hands, according to that analysis, from Democrats into the hands of Republicans. So what do we know about this? Each congressional district has, roughly, 700,000 people. Let's just say, if you had 600,000 illegals in your 700,000-person congressional district, you would only have a universe of 100,000 people who you could draw from to get votes. So, when you look around America and you see that some of us get elected with 30,000 or 40,000 votes and others like me require about 120,000 votes to win an election, you begin to understand that the high populations of illegals within some of these congressional districts have a voice. They have a voice here in this Congress. Even though they supposedly can't vote, they have a voice in Congress. They have leverage because they create congressional seats in places where there is sympathy for illegal immigrants. That is how the political power comes. That is one of the ways that it comes. Then you also have the businesses that depend on the illegal labor, and that's just those who use the labor. There are the businesses then that market to the illegal labor, and they begin to see that they are dependent upon that flow of cash that goes through in that fashion, and now you've got a constituency group that advocates for open borders. It is for their self-interests, but they advocate for open borders for their self-interest purposes whether it is for the political power that Teddy Kennedy so clearly laid out the clarion call for--that's this side of the barbell--or whether it's the weights over on this side, the business interests, that believe they have a right to cheap labor. By the way, that labor is subsidized by the taxpayer because cheap labor can't sustain itself in this society any longer. This society has become a welfare state. I mentioned the barbells--cheap labor's interest on this side, advocating for amnesty, and the people over on this side, advocating for amnesty because they get a massive amount of political power. Here in the middle is this barbell, the bar for the barbell, and it gets squeezed. That is the middle class. That bar that holds up either end is the middle class in America. The blue collar people, the middle- income people, the people who just want to buy modest homes and raise their families and give them a chance to go off to college, to go to work every day, to church on Sunday, and to live life as the American Dream are being squeezed. The middle class is being crushed in the middle of this. There are the people who, let's say, emerge from high school, whether they be Americans who drop out or those who finish and don't go on to higher education. There was a time--oh, there was a happier time--when a person who decided that he just didn't want to stay in the educational system any longer, but who was a hard and smart worker, could walk from that school and go over and get a job in a factory or in a processing plant and punch that time clock and go to work for 8 hours a day and do that for 40 or more hours a week and make a respectable living and take care of his family. Maybe he pinched his pennies and paid for his house eventually, drove a respectable car and lived life. Those times aren't entirely gone, but they are diminished dramatically because, first, we have expanded the professional class in America, the professional class that believes that now they have a right to live in a gated community and to hire cheap labor to take care of their lawns. We have that class of people that has expanded. Then over on the other side we've got the illegals and the low-skilled people who are more mobile than the American population. They can travel to the jobs more quickly because they're not tied to any hard assets like real estate, for example. So they can get in their vans or minibuses and go to Washington and pick apples if they decide to do that, and their wage scale is about half of what it would be if we had a tighter labor supply. Illegals are undercutting the lower-skilled labor in America, and they're taking away the opportunities for those Americans who don't want to go on to a higher education and take on more professional jobs. There used to be--and in my mind there always will be--great pride in those working men and women. They put their hands to the task. A little dirt under your fingernails and some calluses on your hands is an honorable thing. All work is honorable--all productive work is honorable--but this society has now morphed into a welfare state. I want to go back to the welfare state part; but when I crossed over to this side, I mentioned the gated communities. Think of what has happened to the elitist attitude, the elitist attitude that says, Well, I don't have to worry about the security for America. I don't have to worry about walking down the streets anywhere in America and being mugged or having illegal drugs pushed on my children because I will live in this protected environment, in a gated community, with a fence around the house and with, maybe, steel iron bars with spikes on them on top of the fence. That's out there. Then they raise their children to go off to Ivy League schools so they can come back and live in other gated communities. They live in an isolated America--upper class people, professional class people, living in isolated America. But you know what? They open the gates for somebody who is illegal to come in and fix their roofs or to trim their lawns or to work in their gardens or to clean their mansions, to take care of their laundry and to run errands. I mean, we heard Colin Powell just the other day say that, first of all, he supports the DREAM Act. He also said that he needs the illegals to take care of his place. What's he thinking? This is a man who I thought could have been, and perhaps at one time should have been, President of the United States. Now he is advocating that we grant amnesty to the people who are here illegally, and he is openly stating that he needs illegals to take care of his home. Madam Speaker, if you get to the point of desperation where your house is so big and your home is such an expansive mansion that you can't go out and cut your own grass or trim around your own flowers or paint the trim around the windows or do the things that you do and if you must have servants to take care of that place and if you can't afford to hire legal workers to take care of that place, I would suggest you put it up for sale and go get an apartment somewhere where you can manage the maintenance of it yourself if you have to cross the line and break the law to do the maintenance on your home. I'm shocked that a man of that stature would make a statement like that. Furthermore, I'd put a little reminder out there for the General Powells and others in the world to think about the DREAM Act and about what the DREAM Act really means. It means this: If you are under the age of 35 and if you were brought illegally into this country before you were 16, then you are not at fault and are no longer accountable as long as you would agree to go into the military for 2 years or would agree to go off to college for a couple of years. If you will do that, then we'll give you that path to citizenship because, after all, you really were nurtured in this country, legal or illegal, and we'll give you that path to citizenship. You just have to agree to go on to an education a little higher than high school or go off to the military for a couple of years. Now, I don't know how you would sign up for a couple of years to do that, but I'm trustful that there is a special program that way. And we will chase you down with your citizenship papers and get you to become a complete citizen. And if you're a resident of a State, then you get to enjoy the in-State tuition discounts. We know that this has happened around the country in a number of places. California is one of those places. Iowa tried to pass the DREAM Act. I heard about what was going on there. The DREAM Act started. The foundation of it was--and, I believe, still remains--in-State tuition discounts for kids who are in the United States illegally and then suspends the enforcement of the law against them so that they can't be deported as long as they are going to college--or now we expand it to the military. Now, think about this. An in-State tuition discount for someone who is in the United States illegally, that's the equivalent of a scholarship. They're not a lawful resident of this respective State, so you can't give them in-State tuition discounts without a statutory change, without changing the law. So they want to change the law. So, let's just say the tuition to go to--who shall I pick on? I'm reluctant to pick on anybody, actually, but let's say tuition to go to the University of Iowa as out-of-State tuition, $20,000 a year; in- State tuition, $10,000 a year. And we have someone who is in the country illegally, who was brought here the day before their 16th birthday, and they had been in America for 3 years. I think that's another one of the qualifiers. So we'll say to them, Well, you wanted to be a good citizen, so we're going to give you this in-State tuition discount to go to the University of Iowa, and it's going to save you $10,000 a year. That's the equivalent of a $10,000-a-year scholarship fund for someone who is not in the United States legally. Now, think--to the General Powells of the world and others who think that the DREAM Act is anything other than some form of class amnesty, think what that is like then to have--what if we had ICE come up and deliver that de facto scholarship for $10,000 a year. We just put them on the road in their Humvee and they can drive out there and we are going to hand these out to those people that came here the day before their 16th birthday--it was their parents' decision, not theirs--and we will give them a de facto scholarship of $10,000 a year. Well, that's a great deal; right? And then they go off to college and sit down in a classroom and we feel so good about ourselves. But we should keep in mind that somebody wanted to go across the river, across the State border and go to the University of Iowa and take classes at that university but they were not a resident of Iowa any more than the illegal that's the beneficiary of the DREAM Act is a resident of Iowa. And so they have to pay the out-of-State tuition at $20,000 a year, paying twice the tuition. They're paying, over the course of a 4-year education, a $40,000 premium to go to a school out of State--like, let's just say, Illinois to Iowa--a $40,000 premium, while at the same time this other student that sits in the desk next to them has been delivered a scholarship that's a $40,000 discount, a $40,000 difference between the two. And if ICE would have driven up with their Humvee to deliver the de facto scholarship, they would have had to deport that student because they would have been in violation of America's immigration law, unlawfully present in the United States. Now, that should be enough to bring a pause to someone who has worn as many stars as General Powell has and deserves to wear. But let me take it another step for those General Powells and others in the world, Madam Speaker. Let's set that illegal student down in a classroom with their de facto scholarship of $10,000 a year sitting in a classroom. Now, let's just say it's not a regular student that came across the river from Illinois. Let's, instead, think about what will inevitably happen. Inevitably, it will be the widow or widower of someone who has given their life in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan to protect our freedom and liberty. And this widow or widower wants to go off to college to sit in this classroom to upgrade their education so they can take care of their family, take care of those children that perhaps lost a father or a mother, and they're paying the premium of out-of-State tuition, $40,000 more for a 4-year education. And they're sitting at a desk next to an illegal student that, if the law were applied, would have been deported but, instead, gets a tuition discount. Now, how do you reconcile that scenario with the warrior's widow sitting at a desk paying a premium of $40,000 and the illegal--that's eligible for deportation by every standard except the DREAM Act-- getting a $40,000 discount on that tuition, Madam Speaker? That's an outrage. That's an outrage to do that to those Americans who want to go to school out of State. It's an outrage to do that to the families of our veterans. It's an outrage to do that to the rule of law. I will submit that the people that are for the DREAM Act haven't thought about this on a rational basis. They've simply thought about it from whatever their particular sympathy basis is. This class of people that are here illegally are here because most of them, the class that is part of the DREAM Act target--because most of them, their parents brought them here against their will. Yes, I concede that point. But where do you enforce the law if you don't enforce it against someone who is 35 years old and was brought here to the United States the day before their 16th birthday? Do you enforce it the day after? Or you can take it back the other way and you can say, if somebody was brought to the United States the day after they were born, should they be deported? Yes. Because that's the line. We drew that line and that's the law, and we can't grant amnesty. We set the standards. And because we haven't enforced the law, we set up, instead, the effect of a magnet that brings illegal people into the United States of America, and it is essentially a magnet that turns out to be a reward for breaking the law. So, if the DREAM Act passes and you're pregnant and outside the United States of America and you can't quite get here in time to have the baby, don't you know that you can just sneak in and keep that child and raise them here and nurture them here--maybe you only get them in when they are 14 years old and they go to a school in America for 3 years. They qualify for the DREAM Act, presto. They can get an in-State tuition discount, a college education. They can go into the military. They can get their citizenship. And then what? Then they can start under the family reunification plan, going back and pulling their whole extended family into the United States under the family reunification. And that's out of our control. Madam Speaker, when you look at the numbers, America's legal immigration standards only have between 7 and 11 percent of the people that come into the United States legally. Only 7 to 11 percent of them are based on merit. The balance of that is based on some other connection, either the visa lottery or the family reunification plan or some other category, but not based on skill sets and merit. Now, if we look at some of the other countries and the policies that they have--you can look at Canada, United Kingdom--Australia, for example, they set up a scoring points system that rewards people for being able to contribute to the host country. Now, I have long said that the immigration policy in the United States of America should be designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States. That should be, actually, the policy of--any sovereign nation of the world should establish an immigration policy for the purposes of enhancing the economic, social, and cultural well-being of that particular sovereign state. In this case, it's the United States of America. We should also understand that one of the essential pillars of American exceptionalism is the rule of law. And if we have contempt for the rule of law, if we have some of the highest profile people in America openly speak about hiring illegals to take care of their home and at the same time advocate for the DREAM Act, which is amnesty for a specific class of people, reward for illegal behavior, a magnet for bringing more children into the United States that would be here illegally, and getting them to qualify under the DREAM Act so they can go off and be funded partly by the taxpayers and go off to college, or the argument that comes from the Department of Defense, which is that it's good for our military readiness to have the DREAM Act. That's another Colin Powell argument, And it does come out of the Pentagon to some degree. Now, how can it be that a Nation of 306 million people can't field an army without granting citizenship to people that are here illegally? I mean, I could not have pitched such an idea, Madam Speaker. I can't with a straight face make such a proposal. This military is working with a social experimentation agenda. And who is to think that the military, the Pentagon, and the United States is for the DREAM Act when they have a Commander in Chief that tells them what they think. They're for the DREAM Act because it's important for military readiness. I don't take them that seriously any more. I don't think they are able to deliver their own objective opinions into the media without having to pay a consequence to the Commander in Chief, or whatever kind of retribution that would come out of the White House. Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Again, experiment in the military. Can you get a straight answer out of the Pentagon any more with the Chicago-style politics of the Commander in Chief? I say not. And now maybe this looks like it's just a coincidence that we come across the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell--both of those social experiments wrapped up under the Department of Defense Authorization bill and rejected by the majority--I believe it was the majority, at least. No. It was rejected at least on a cloture vote in the United States Senate. And you think that those two, Madam Speaker, might be anomalies. I will make another point to tell you. It's a pattern. Here's the thing that supports my conclusion. There's been an effort to take calories out of the diets of our young people, an effort to reduce the calories accessible to our young people by 1.5 trillion calories. I think that's a year, but I don't know. Take a couple of Doritos out of the Dorito bag, thinking those kids are only going to go for one bag and not two. Reduce the calories in a Power Bar from 150 calories down to 90, thinking that overweight, voracious feeder that you have that's 16 years old isn't going to go for a second Power Bar. If the kids want the calories, they're going to eat them. Reducing the size of the servings just means they'll open up more packages. But the military stepped in in support of this effort, this healthy youth effort. Data that has been reported, at least, says that Americans kids are--30 percent of them are overweight. And the Pentagon has said it affects our national readiness, that we can't recruit young people to come into the military, can't recruit enough of them because too many of them are overweight and can't meet the physical standards. Madam Speaker, I'll submit that you can take an overweight 16-, 17-, 18-, or 20-year-old, and they're still a pretty good physical specimen even though they've got a little bit of weight hanging over their belt. And it's not a security risk for the United States of America. We can solve that problem. If it came down to not having enough people to put on the uniform because some of them were too fat, let's just get some basic training uniforms for some that are a little bigger and put them on those young people and put them out there in basic training a little while longer. Once they're on the military diet and the military exercise plan, we've seen millions of them come back home squared away, upright, gut gone, toned up, in shape, proud, with a look in their eye that they're another noble soldier and patriot. This is not a national security risk because 30 percent of our kids are overweight. This is an indication of what goes on when the White House starts to pour down in a cascade through the executive branch of government an ideology that's inconsistent with the military. It's inconsistent to force openly gay policy on our Department of Defense. And there isn't any pattern out there that could show us that that would be a successful result. It's inconsistent with the rule of law to propose the idea that for national security purposes, we should pass the DREAM Act and put these people that came here illegally into the military and give them citizenship along the way. That undermines the American dream. It's inconsistent to think that a general that has worn four stars honorably would think that the rule of law doesn't apply when it's time to hire somebody to cut your grass. It's got to apply every time. Equal justice under the law. Lady justice is blindfolded. She stands there with the scale. She's blindfolded. It must be that way or America is undermined. And this broader philosophy of illegal immigration and how to deal with it is something that I'm invested in pretty deeply. I want to roll over if I can, Madam Speaker, as to what's going on downstairs right now in the basement of this Capitol. There is a pledge to America that's being rolled out. It's being discussed by the Republicans here in the United States Congress. It is something that brings back memories of the Contract with America that was rolled out here in 1994 about this same time in September. And this is, I understand after doing a quick Web search, named Pledge to America. And now, I don't know all that's in that that's being unfolded right now. I just know what I wanted to have in that, what I hope is in it. I'm hopeful that the document is a clear document, a document that says we have made these promises, we're going to keep these promises. And I expect that there's going to be language in there that says that we are going to support a 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare, all of it. Pull it out root and branch, lock, stock, and barrel, so there is not one vestige of ObamaCare DNA left behind, because this toxic stew of ObamaCare has become a malignant tumor in our land. And it threatens to metastasize. It's affecting us already. It's driving up our premiums for health insurance, especially for young people that most can't afford it. It's got to go. It's got to be pulled out by the roots. It's got to be eradicated. And that's got to be step one, plank one. It's got to be our promise, our pledge to America that we will repeal ObamaCare in its entirely. Not the most egregious aspects of it, not a component here and a component there, not chipping away at it and leaving other pieces there--because if that should happen, that foundation of ObamaCare then, as I said, it's a malignant tumor. It's a cancer. Then it metastasizes. It goes into this robust growth and it swallows up and consumes and chokes off our liberty and our freedom and takes away our personal choices, and already under the statute that exists today, shrinks down our health savings accounts and cuts our ability to contribute to them by more than half and almost eliminates catastrophic insurance and takes away personal choices one after another after another. I'm hopeful that repeal of ObamaCare as a stand-alone--rip it out by the roots, follow through on discharge position number 11, which is here, Madam Speaker, at the desk, and any Member of Congress that wants to establish that they're opposed to ObamaCare and they want to see it repealed can come down here to the well and ask the Clerk of the House for Discharge Petition Number 11--that's legislation that I introduced to repeal ObamaCare--and sign that discharge position. There are at least 173 signatures on Discharge Position Number 11, which repeals ObamaCare. And the last language of the bill--it's only 40 words--it says, ``as if it had never been enacted.'' That's the quote. So it pulls it all out by the roots, and it's what Americans want. Pick your number, but well over 60 percent of Americans want to see repeal of ObamaCare. I see numbers that go up to 73 percent that want to see repeal of ObamaCare. So those who want to keep it, they're not the balance of the difference. If it's 73 percent that want to repeal, it doesn't mean that 27 percent want to keep it. It means that some of those 27 percent want to keep it and some of them are undecided. But if a Member voted for the Speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, and the San Francisco agenda, ObamaCare, cap-and-tax, and others, put that vote up--the most important vote that any Member of Congress ever makes is for their leader, their Speaker. And if that vote went up for Speaker Pelosi, it enabled the San Francisco-Obama agenda to be forced to the floor of this House against the will of the American people, who let everyone here know their objections in a constitutional and peaceful and litter-free way. But still their hearts were hardened and they imposed ObamaCare on us, even though the bill itself could not have passed that night except that the President promised that he would write an Executive order that would amend the language that was coming to the floor. That was part of the deal. And part of the deal was that there would be a reconciliation package that would be passed in the Senate that would circumvent the filibuster that would come to the House to seek to fix some more of the problems. Oh, no, a bill didn't come here to the floor of the House that had the support of the majority of the Members. A bill came to the floor that was conditioned upon an executive order by the President and another bill coming from the United States Senate that then satisfied just barely enough. Didn't satisfy any Republicans, and it dissatisfied 34 Democrats. Thirty-four Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. All of those 34 Democrats voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. Many of them told their constituents in the 2008 election that they wouldn't commit to voting for Speaker Pelosi, that they were an independent voice. We even have one at least that's running television ads that says he's an independent voice that's willing to stand up to President Obama, and stand up to Nancy Pelosi, and vote against ObamaCare, but at the same time vote for Nancy Pelosi. Now, when you do something like enable Speaker Pelosi's agenda by voting her into that position, and then when you see cap-and-tax come down on top of us that penalizes coal country in a big way, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, some of those States come to mind, Wyoming, you see that agenda being driven out of the Speaker of the House, when you put up the vote, stood up here and audio out of your voice said the name, Pelosi for Speaker, that's the most important vote that gets cast in any individual Congress in any 2-year period. And it enables the agenda of the leader, Speaker Pelosi. And then when that same individual votes ``no'' on ObamaCare and postures himself to say he's independent, willing to stand up to the President and the Speaker of the House because here's the signal, voted against ObamaCare, that's no sign of independence. That's a sign of being let off the hook by the Speaker. That's the sign of a permission slip to vote ``no'' so you can go back and tell your constituents that you are an independent voice. The distinction here is we have a discharge petition. And a signature on the discharge petition says you mean it. It says that you want to see the bill come to the floor unamended, with an up or down vote to repeal ObamaCare. One hundred seventy-two Republicans signed the discharge petition number 11. One Democrat has signed discharge petition number 11 so far. There are others out there that are going to need to say to their constituents, listen, I really do stand up to Speaker Pelosi. Watch me. I will go down and ask the Clerk of the House for discharge petition number 11 and get my pen out, and I will sign my name on that. That means that if it comes to the floor that I'll vote to repeal ObamaCare. That's what sits out there right now, Madam Speaker, and that's the distinction. But I believe that we will move forward with a pledge to America that repeals ObamaCare, rips it out by the roots in its entirety without equivocation. And I trust that's what's being discussed downstairs as we have this discussion up here. I hope and expect. That's one of my requests. Another one would be that we pass English as the official language of the United States of America. That's an issue that has somewhere between 83 and 87 percent support all across this country. We haven't discussed it very much in this Congress because we know who holds the gavel. But Americans want to have an official language. An official language of the United States needs to be English. And there are at least 28 States that have established English as the official language. And it's no longer possible to drive from Mexico to Canada without driving through a State that has English as the official language. That's how the map looks when you happen to look at the map. English is the official language of the State of Iowa. It's the official language of Nebraska. It's the official language of 26 other States. That's because of the simplicity that every other country in the world understands you have to do business in a language, and that if you encourage a multitude of languages and require the interpretation in those languages that costs a lot of money and causes a lot of confusion. And for a long time people that watch and study humanity understand that a common language is the most powerful unifying force known to man. I mean when they were working on the Tower of Babel, God understood it. He looked down at the Tower of Babel as they were trying to build that tower into the heavens to try to achieve heaven without going through God. And it was a blasphemy towards him. And God looked down at the Tower of Babel and he said, behold, they are one people. They speak all one language. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. That's how powerful one language was. And so to break up the Tower of Babel, God gave them, caused them to babble, and scattered them to the four winds. And there is at least a Biblical belief that that's where the different languages came from that have been located around the world. But we know that if we come together as Americans and we speak all one language we can communicate quickly, we can understand each other, we don't need to go through expensive interpretations. And we also are listening to the advertisements for different means of learning foreign languages under the immersion process. It's the best way, the immersion process. Now, I encourage the studying and the learning of languages. I think it's great that Americans take that upon themselves to do that. It's important for our foreign trade and our international travel. It's important for our military and our State Department. It's important for international relations. But a Nation should have a language where you can go from corner to corner in that Nation and expect that you can communicate in one language. If it had been Swahili, then so be it, Swahili should be our official language. But it's not. It's English. But speaking of Swahili, it happens that in some places like Kenya, for example, they do speak some Swahili, but the official language of Kenya is English. And they are grateful for it. It's brought so much along the way. So I am hopeful that this very simple, common sense, powerful, unifying force of language, official English, which has a massive numbers of cosponsors on it and a vast support of the American people, even though we haven't debated it during the time that Nancy Pelosi's been the Speaker of the House in a real legitimate way anyway--there is a lot of things we haven't debated, won't be allowed to come to the floor--I am hopeful that that pledge to America has official English in it. I believe that we should have a House rule that gives a priority that we actually first pass a budget resolution. But I also believe that we should have a House rule that gives priority to the balanced budget that's offered so that it can be offered and it can be debated here on the floor and brought to a recorded vote so the American people can see how hard it is to balance this budget. It's hard, Madam Speaker. And it's going to be really painful to bring the thing to a balanced budget. And if we do it all at once there will be some serious whiplash in this country. Now, I voted for a balanced budget here. I have asked for one to come to the floor. We brought one under the Republican Study Committee. It first started out balancing in 10 years and then 9 years. It wasn't aggressive enough to suit me. But at least it was a vote on a balanced budget. And we started to debate what it takes to balance the budget. And if you don't do that you never get there. If you don't define your goal and your target, you never get there. So I would want to see a rule come here to the floor that we could support in a bipartisan way that would give precedence towards a balanced budget to be offered first. And if the majority or the other party, be they majority or minority, offers a balanced budget, then that budget would take precedence over the budget that's offered that is let's say the chosen budget from the majority of the Budget Committee. So that we have a record on what it takes to balance the budget and who's willing to vote for a balanced budget. And I would think that we could get together on that in a bipartisan way. And then we need to work to pay down the national debt. And I want to see the day that we have a balanced budget and we start to pay down this national debt. That's the third thing I would like to see in the pledge to America. The fourth thing is I want to put an end to Federal funding of abortions. And I would phrase it this way. I want to statutorily prohibit all Federal funds from going to any entity that provides abortion services or counseling. That simple. And that should have, I think, strong bipartisan support. And that's been demonstrated in some votes here in this Congress. So then it would enshrine the Hyde amendment and the Mexico City policy. And we are going to repeal ObamaCare so we wouldn't have to go after that specific component of ObamaCare that ends up funding abortions. I will call that the Ben Nelson language. Fifth thing I would like to see in the pledge to America that's being unfolded right now as we speak, Madam Speaker, I would like to pass legislation that modernizes E-Verify. E-Verify right now is you are limited. You can only use E-Verify with a new hire. So when you look at someone's application and you can't verify whether they can work in the United States legally, then you have to give them the job. And then once you give them the job, they are on your payroll. They qualified for your insurance and all of the burden that comes along with bringing somebody into your employment. Then and only then can you run their data through E-Verify and it might come back and it can't confirm. And if it does that, you have probably got someone on your hands that can't legally work in the United States. And so you give them their time to cure their data and if they can't get it cured, then you have to fire them. I just simply, with the legislation that I am hopeful that we are able to bring, probably not this year, next year, to fix E-Verify so that you can use it on current employees, legacy employees, so someone can decide I want to clean up all my workforce. I have had some people that have been here for a year or two or 5 or 10. Some may have been here illegally. I just want to have a legal workforce. I want to run all their names through E-Verify. Why not? Why not give the employer the tool. The second thing is why not let them use E-Verify with a prospective employee with a legitimate job offer? We have that under a drug testing law in Iowa, and it's completely without any litigation or complaint. If you show up and you want a job, you can go through all of the hoops and they can say to you, I have done the interview, you have passed all the tests but this one. You have got to go off and take a drug test before I can put you to work. That's what we do in Iowa, and no complaints, no lawsuits. It's the employer's prerogative, and I encourage them to do that. They should be able to provide a drug-free workplace. We should also be able to provide, as employers, an illegal- free workplace, modernizing E-Verify so it can be used on current legacy employees and with a legitimate job offer is a legitimate thing to do. The third component that we need to do, Madam Speaker, out of this is we need to clarify that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not deductible for Federal income tax purposes. Doing that allows the IRS, during a normal audit, to run the Social Security numbers and the information data of the employees of the audited company through E- Verify. And if they come back, they can't lawfully work in the United States--and we will give the employer safe harbor if they use E-Verify. Then the IRS can deny the business expense. This is a piece of legislation that I have drafted called the New IDEA Act. So the net result is this, if you paid out a million dollars in wages, and the IRS--well, let's just say multiple millions--but the IRS has determined that a million dollars of those wages have gone to illegals, then they can deny that as a business expense. And we know when that happens it goes over on the profit side of the ledger, and it becomes taxable as income. So now you have got income tax to pay on a million dollars instead of having a million-dollar deduction that avoids that income tax. The corporate income tax on that is a profit, plus the interest, plus the penalty, calculates out to be, if you are a $10 an hour illegal, you become about a $16 an hour illegal. When you get to that point, now you have lots of employers that have decided that they want to make a decision to clean up their workforce and hire only legals and that shuts off the magnet here in the United States in an effective way. The last thing I want to do, right before I yield, is I want to sell off all of this property that the United States has taken over and nationalized, including the shares of General Motors and Chrysler. Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to the balance of my time?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I want to thank the gentleman from California for hustling here to the floor to weigh in. I yield to my other friend in life, Dr. Paul Broun.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlemen from Georgia and from California for coming in to weigh in on this. We are here at a time when we have got to reestablish the rule of law, and we have got to shut off the bleeding at the border, and we have got to shut off the jobs magnet. This bill, the New IDEA Act, does shut down, if not completely off, the jobs magnet. And New IDEA stands for the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. Madam Speaker, we often say here there are no new ideas here in Congress, that it's just recycled old ideas. Well, this was kind of an audacious move to declare it to be the New IDEA Act, but it defines what goes on. The New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, right now, we have not eliminated illegal deductions. Instead, we have the IRS that's not calling the shots on this. It's letting the deductions come, so people can hire illegals with impunity. It really is against the law to deduct wages to illegals, but they are not enforcing it. Another piece that this law does is it requires the IRS and the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to set up a cooperative arrangement. So they have to sit down at the table and decide, well, here are these no-match Social Security numbers. We will roll these over here in the Department of Homeland Security so they can go check them out when they go look at the employers, and the IRS can take those numbers as well when they bring it into their audit and bring the focus on so that we are coordinating the agencies in America to get at the goal. The goal is to enforce the law. The goal should not be to advance amnesty by the DREAM Act or any other way. And we cannot be the great Nation that we are yet to become if we don't take our path up that way by supporting and strengthening the rule of law, one of the essential pillars of American exceptionalism. That's the argument, amnesty or the rule of law. It's two choices. And it looks now like the DREAM Act is not coming at us until perhaps in a lame duck session. If it does, out of that Senate in a lame duck session, that is an offense to the American people to bring a bill like that with impunity against the American people when you no longer represent them because of the election that will take place in November. So, Madam Speaker, again, I thank my colleagues for coming to the floor. I appreciate your attention on this matter. I appreciate the American people's attention on this matter, and I believe they will stand with the rule of law and against amnesty.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, we all agree that those who heroically responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks should get the treatment, compensation, and liability protection they need. The American people are grateful to those the ground zero workers and the emergency responders that worked heroically, day and night, for months in rescue, recovery and cleanup efforts at the World Trade Center site. Unfortunately, the approach this bill takes to accomplish these goals is unreasonable and irresponsible. During committee hearings on reenacting the 9/11 Fund, I expressed the view that if the fund is reenacted, it must be done in a manner that properly compensates the victims while at the same time protecting the taxpayers. First, I asserted that if the Fund is reenacted it must provide adequate compensation to the victims without handing the keys to the U.S. Treasury to trial lawyers. Unfortunately, this bill does not contain these protections. Rather, the bill allows trial lawyers to request compensation from the fund for work that is not directly related to their clients' recovery from the fund. Second, I stated that if the Fund is reenacted it must include provisions that will protect the U.S. taxpayers. However, instead of protecting the taxpayers, this bill abdicates Congress' legislative authority to the unreviewable and virtually unbounded discretion of the Special Master. Third, I counseled that if the Fund is reenacted it should be for a reasonable, but limited, period of time. Once again the authors of this legislation did not listen to my advice; rather, they propose to keep the fund open for 21 years despite congressional testimony by Special Master Ken Feinberg that ``no latent claims need such an extended date.'' Finally, I suggested that if the fund is reenacted it should be paid for. Apparently, the bill's authors listened to me on this count, but unfortunately, rather than choosing a pay-for that protects U.S. taxpayers, they have chosen one that will actually cost American jobs. We could be considering a reasonable consensus proposal to reenact the 9/11 Fund today. Instead, I have to urge my colleagues to oppose this legislation because not only does it fail to protect the taxpayers, but it also fails to ensure that those REAL victims that answered the call of duty on September 11, 2001, will actually get the care that they deserve. Unfortunately, we have brought a bill to the floor today that will cost American jobs and creates gimmicks to hide the bill's true cost. The taxpayers and those who responded to the 9/11 attacks deserve better.

Mr. KING

Mr. KING. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 473, had I voted I would have voted ``no'' on the bill that opposes the mission of our troops and our foreign policy.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. It is always an honor and one of the reasons I try to come down here often and convey the values that emanate from the Midwest; and hopefully some of the people across the rest of the country that don't adhere to those values can index with the things that we believe in. But what I have found out, Mr. Speaker, as I have traveled around the country is that we have a tremendous amount of common values, from corner to corner of America and up through the Midwest as well. When I think of the States that I have been to in helping other candidates in trying to convey a message, from the Northeast to the Southeast to the South, up through the Midwest, down to the Southwest and off to the West, what I have found is that the people that show up, that care about our Constitution, the constitutional conservatives, the newly energized Tea Party groups that are out there, the 912 Project people that are there, the independents that aren't affiliated that care a lot about America and fiscal responsibility, when they show up, they show up with their American flags, they show up with their yellow Gadsden flags, the Don't Tread on Me flags; they carry a Constitution in their pocket or on their heart; and they know that if this country is going to be refurbished and put back together again, that we need to go back to the Constitution and this Congress needs to adhere to our oath to the Constitution. We have to ensure that our road map, and a road map is not someplace out there in Never-Never Land of progressivism that has always failed. We have a century and a half of progressivism that we can look at that goes clear back to the shaping of those kind of ideals in the utopian segments of non-English speaking western Europe. We've watched what's happened. They have been at each other's throats in wars. They've killed tens of millions of each other. Their economy and their industry has collapsed over and over again. They've propped it back up. Their growth has been slower than ours. We've provided them the global defense from the enemies to enemies that are still lined up against each other. The Soviet Union imploded because Ronald Reagan was right. He was right because he decided that we could press the Soviet Union to the point where their economy would collapse before they could keep up with us economically and build themselves up militarily. All of that has taken place. When we saw the Soviet Union go down, I thought, now it will be obvious even to the most leftist American that you can't grow and prosper and move on into the 21st century and lead the world economically, culturally, politically, militarily, every measure that there is, unless you have a free enterprise system. Free enterprise. Free enterprise. A simple thing. It's so simple that on the flash cards that are produced by USCIS, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the services that provide the path for legal immigrants to become citizens of the United States. When you're training and you're studying to become an American citizen, there are a lot of things there. You have to learn a little about our history; you have to be able to have a command of the English language in both the spoken and written English language; and there are a number of questions in the test. And the flash cards that are proposed, that stack of flash cards produced by USCIS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, glossy flash cards, red cards, about like that, they will ask questions. They would be questions such as, Who's the father of our country? You snap that card over and the other side says--you know the answer, I trust, Mr. Speaker--George Washington. Another one will be, who emancipated the slaves? Abraham Lincoln. What is the economic system of the United States of America? You flip that flash card over, if you study and you want to be a citizen of the United States, and it says free enterprise capitalism. How about that? Now that's one of the questions we would consider to be basic, rudimentary, something that any third grader--well, they may not know that, but a sixth grader will; an eighth grader will for sure, or should. It should be taught in all of our schools: The vigor and the vitality that comes from free enterprise capitalism. It is a basic question. If you want to become an American, you have to understand our economic system; free enterprise capitalism. I wouldn't say that the President doesn't understand the system, but I am not convinced that he adheres to the free enterprise capitalism system that we have. I have yet to see a single move on the part of the President of the United States or this administration or the progressive leftists in this Congress, House or Senate, that supports the underpinnings of free enterprise capitalism as the engine of our economy. And I've seen move after move after move that undermines free enterprise, over and over again. Nobody over here is going to stand up and say, ``You're wrong, Steve King. You're wrong. I'm a free enterprise capitalist.'' You can't say that. If you're going to raise taxes, if you're going to raise taxes to the tune of something in the area of $1.5 trillion? If you're going to be part of a $1.5 trillion deficit on top of it? A deficit that we have never seen in this country. And be part of punishing--they say punishing the rich. What about the job makers? What about the job givers? What about the employers in America? What happens when you punish the people that produce the jobs? What about big employers, big job givers? Do we punish them? Yes, you guys want to do that. You're doing it every day. You're advancing regulations. You're advancing taxes. You think that the goose that lays the golden egg which is free enterprise capitalism, that somehow if you slaughter the goose, you find all of those golden eggs inside. Well, it doesn't work that way. It's one egg at a time by the economic engine that is out there struggling to make some profit. And the people over on this side of the aisle, I wish somebody would stand up and tell me that they created a job, that they signed somebody else's paycheck on the front, not the back; somebody that had invested capital to establish a business, that had a chance to make some profit. And out of that, you're only as good as the employees that you have and you're not going to make money in business if you don't have good employees. So you want to hire the best employees you can hire and get the most production out of them that you can. And in today's world it's not good enough, Mr. Speaker, to work hard. Hard workers are respected, certainly. But this is a technological era. You've got to work hard and work smart; do both of those things together. If you work hard and don't work smart, you're going to be down there in the lowest income levels in America, the under-skilled jobs. And then those folks are the ones that are receiving public benefits in greater percentages and numbers than anybody else. Here's how this works out. And tomorrow morning, Mr. Speaker, I will have a guest at the Conservative Opportunity Society, an organization that was founded in 1984 by Vin Weber, Newt Gingrich and others for the purposes of identifying the roots of our prosperity; the Conservative Opportunity Society. I happen to be the chairman of the Conservative Opportunity Society. Over the course of the last 6 years or 5\1/2\ that I have had the honor of that task, we've had a whole variety of excellent educators and speakers that have come forward. Tomorrow morning it's Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. Robert Rector is one of those guys who goes back in the back room and does that deep due diligence research to try to come up with the numbers to quantify and identify what is actually happening in America, economically, socially, culturally. Robert Rector is one of the people that I think if you take him out of the equation in 2006 or 2007, that grand coalition of the President and Teddy Kennedy--President Bush and Teddy Kennedy and others--would have passed a comprehensive amnesty piece of legislation on us. But Robert Rector gave us the facts that showed us the cost to illegal immigration in America. And now he's done a new study. This is a new study that identifies what's happening with welfare reform in America. This study goes back and looks at that time in the mid nineties when this Congress went into showdown mode on welfare reform. And for a time the government was shut down because the Republican majority in the Congress refused to knuckle under to the demands of President Bill Clinton at the time and he demanded that they spend more money and he demanded that they not reform welfare, that we let people continue to be paid not to work in the same numbers as before, because of his sense of compassion. But Republicans persisted, and we got a welfare reform bill. In the end, though, they blinked when it came down to who was going to give in. It's kind of like a street brawl when whoever's standing there when it's over is the one that won. Well, in that case Bill Clinton won the final showdown on who would give in to put the government back at work instead of leaving them shut down. But we got some welfare reform. America thinks that there was a real model of welfare reform that was accomplished, and some of that was a model that came out of Wisconsin from Governor Tommy Thompson, who's done an outstanding job in Wisconsin and set a pace here for Washington. A lot of that actually was done in the neighboring next- door Iowa without that level of fanfare, but that came here to the Capitol. That's where our federalist system that leaves the decisions as much as possible to the State had manifested itself. And the model of Wisconsin and Iowa--as some will say, it's a better program even than Wisconsin--was reflected here in Washington with welfare reform. Well, we thought we reformed welfare in the mid-1990s. But when you track the dollars that are handed out in welfare benefits, you look and you find out it's not just that handful of welfare components that we might think of such as food stamps and rent subsidy and heat subsidy and aid to dependent children and some others, but it's 72 different programs. And these programs are so myriad in their number and disparate in their varieties that it's impossible for a citizen that's sitting at home reading the newspaper or tracking--maybe they're tracking the Internet now. If you're a student now, you could figure this out. Seventy-two different programs, many of them, most of them, maybe even all of them, growing. And so what we've seen, if you chart the graph, is welfare spending was going up. You hit the mid-1990s, the reform came and it leveled off, dipped down just a little bit. And then it went up again at a pace that accelerated at a level greater to or equal to what it was in the mid-1990s, because they added so many programs in, blended so many in that it crept in on us before we knew what was going on. Robert Rector's nailed that down. Now I'm looking forward to hearing him at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, and I hope there will be a good number of Members that will arrive down at the Capitol Hill Club at that 8 o'clock breakfast, and we will get into this subject matter. This is one of the things, Mr. Speaker, that goes on in this Congress that doesn't get any press, that we're back behind those doors constantly sticking our nose, our eyes, and our ears into programs trying to find ways that we can better configure this government, ways we can save money, ways we can get more productivity out of the people in this country. And our job, our job, Mr. Speaker, is to increase the average annual productivity of our people. Average annual productivity. That doesn't mean everybody is going to be producing. Some people are going to be in a hospital bed, some are going to be in a nursing home, some are going to be shut-ins at home. Some will be retired because of their age or maybe they've earned it. Maybe they're retired because they have earned the kind of wealth that let's them retire. Their capital is still working. But we need to have the able-bodied people and the able-minded people in this technological era--doesn't always have to be able-bodied; able- minded--that are contributing to this economy, that are producing something on a daily basis, that are proud of what they do, that are creative. And when you add that all up, 306 million Americans. And just think, if every single one got up every day and did something that's constructive and productive in the private sector, how much difference that would make. Think of this. If we're all on a great ship sailing out across the ocean back in the era where you had to grab ahold of the oar and pull on the oar to go anywhere, you're in the calms. Sails aren't helping you. You can man the sails when the wind is blowing. So if everybody goes down there and grabs ahold of an oar and pulls on that oar, you sail through the water without a lot of effort. But every time somebody let's go of the oar and goes up and sits in the steerage passage, in the steerage compartment and watches as the ocean goes by and watches everybody else work and pull on the oar, do you know what that does? Every time somebody lets go of an oar, it's harder to keep that ship going at the same speed. In fact, it must slow down because you've got fewer people pulling on this economic engine. And the more people that quit and give up or are provided an incentive--let's just say it pays the same to pull on the oar as it does to sit up there in steerage. Let's just say the food is the same. The service is the same. You get a bunk that's just as good. Why would you pull on the oar? If you're living as good a life without having to go down in the hold and do your share of the work and carry your share of the load, why would you do it? Just out of good conscience because you like to row the boat? Mr. Speaker, that's not the way it works in the real world. Some people do like to row the boat. Some people work just out of conscience. Some of them give from an altruism from within their heart. But that's not what keeps the economy going. What keeps the economy going is--it contributes. But what ensures that the economy goes is people are rewarded for their labor. People are rewarded for their creativeness, for their entrepreneurial spirit, for inventing, for producing, and for marketing. People that add to this economy need to be rewarded for what they do in proportion to their contribution. And only the markets can determine that; not some government bureaucrat, not some pay czar, not somebody that decides this CEO should get paid X and this CEO should get paid Y. Or like the President who can decide this CEO needs to be fired. Well, Mr. Speaker, I'm not making that up. That is a fact of history, undenied by the President of the United States or any of his spokesmen in the White House. The President fired the CEO of General Motors a year ago, a little more, fired him. Came out in the press. President eliminates the CEO. There was no denial out of the White House. He essentially took a bow. Remember how many times he said Barack Obama or President Obama or just put ``Obama'' in there and then put in quotes in your Google search ``I'm the President.'' How many times has he said ``I'm the President'' in the last year and a half or a little more? A number that I can think of. He constantly reminds us that he's the President. But no President in America should ever have the authority to fire the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or anything else. Let him fire his own staff. Let him fire his own Cabinet. Let him fire his own executive branch right on down to the lowest person on the totem pole. That's fine with me. That's his shop. General Motors and Chrysler were private companies taken over by the Federal Government, and the President of the United States fired the CEO of General Motors and approved the replacement hire, and he fired and replaced all but two of the board members on General Motors. And he ordered, his people ordered, the elimination of 3,400 car dealerships. Why? Because his car czar and his people in the White House had some off-balance idea that, if you eliminate dealerships, you can sell more cars. Now, I come to this office with, I think, maybe a gift of the common sense that comes from the Midwest, and I'm sure that it exists in all of the rest of the country, too. But here's what I know from where I come from. If you want to manufacture widgets, especially if you invent a widget, but if you want to manufacture them--let's just say you go in your little shop and you go and create and you manufacture a widget, and you decide, ``I can make these things pretty good and I can mass produce them, even, so now I want to sell them.'' What would you do? Simple. You'd go to the county fairs. You'd go to all of the county fairs and you would show these widgets to all of the people walking by. And when they stopped and showed a little interest, you'd say, ``Hey, I'll tell you what. You should be a franchisee. I want to let you be my dealer, and you can take this widget home with you--pay for it, of course--stock it in your inventory. I'll give you the material and you can sell widgets out of the window of your shop or out of the implement lot'' or whatever the widget might happen to be. And you would know that if you want to sell a million widgets, you can't stand there and sell every one of them. There's not enough time. But if you can get enough dealers out there, if you can get 3,400 dealers out there with enough widgets on the lot, you can sell a whole lot more widgets than if you don't have any dealers. So do 3,400 less car dealers sell more cars than 3,400 car dealers? The answer is obviously no. It is a stupid decision to believe that you can eliminate car dealers and sell more cars. And what's happened? The company that was not dictated to by the White House is the one that's selling the cars and growing and turning a profit--Ford Motor Company. And I've not been one that went out and bought a Ford as the first vehicle. In fact, it's been hard for me to buy a Ford in the past. But it's looking a little more attractive to me now because they're American cars, American made, that are not propped up by the taxpayers. And they're proving what free enterprise does. When you get out there and compete, you can build a good product. Now, I'm not saying necessarily that I'd go out there and change the brand that I currently drive. I'm happy with that. But, Mr. Speaker, my point is the White House has been dictating to the private sector. They have nationalized and taken over General Motors and Chrysler and three banks, three large banks; AIG, the insurance company, to the tune of $180 billion; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--this just popped up a couple of days ago--in addition to that, the $145 billion that has been poured into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prop them up. We also have the other agencies--FHA, Federal Housing Administration--and some other loans that are rolled down through other Federal agencies. The loans that have been issued throughout those other agencies, now the no down payment and the very low down payment loans, and that means the low down payment of 3\1/2\ percent. From 3\1/2\ percent down to zero, that's $1 trillion in loans that the Federal Government is the guarantor of, $1 trillion. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac give the taxpayers a contingent liability of $5.5 trillion. So what happens if these loans all blow up? That means the taxpayers are stuck at 5\1/2\ plus one, and I know the math on that: $6.5 trillion in contingent liability for the American taxpayers because the people that don't understand free enterprise think somehow the only reason that somebody that doesn't have an income, doesn't own their home, is because nobody's offered them a no down payment loan, and somehow they're going to figure out if they don't have any money how they're still going to pay mortgage payments on a house. Now, that means here's your house, you have no skin in the game, and it takes at least 6 months to foreclosure in most of the States on a loan like that. Well, who wouldn't take a home? I wouldn't actually, but there are many people that would take a home for no down payment, you get to live here for 6 months without making payments before we figure out how to evict you. We had a bankruptcy clawback bill that was brought through the Judiciary Committee and here to the floor of the House that exempted some people and gave them breaks in whose homes are being foreclosed on. And I offered just a simple amendment in the Judiciary Committee, and it was this. If someone had defrauded their lender or attempted to defraud their lender, they wouldn't be able to take advantage of the special provisions in this special bankruptcy clawback law. That amendment passed the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker, by a vote of 23- 3. But guess what happened? The will of the committee was reflected in the vote, the recorded vote, but by the time the bill got to the floor the language was changed miraculously. By whom? Well, maybe the staff of the Judiciary Committee, with the consent of the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, with the complicity of the Rules Committee chaired by Louise Slaughter, and I think that at least in the silence of it all, within the arrangement of the Speaker of the House's method of running this place, Speaker Pelosi. So this franchise that as every Member of Congress, each of us that represents about 700,000 people in this Congress, we come here to carry the values of our constituents, and out among our districts we have all the solutions for America. We have all the answers that man and woman can devise out there among our constituents, 700,000, I have the privilege to represent, added to the other 305.3 million or so that are represented by the other 435 Members of Congress. We have an information network. We gather input, we gather data, and we have those voices coming into my office constantly. That's what we do, and it's part of my job to weigh those ideas, place them in the right place, get them to the subcommittees, get information before the hearings, get them to the subcommittees for the markups, and get them to the full committee for the secondary markup, get them to the floor with amendments, before the Rules Committee, if it's just that they go there, and get this into the debate. If we don't get it solved, we want to go down the hallway to the Senate and weigh in over there and use whatever kind of influence we have because it's so important that we collect the wisdom of the 300-plus million Americans. That's what a constitutional republic does. That's what it's designed to do, Mr. Speaker. But we have a draconian House of Representatives that has shut off the input from the citizens of the United States, has shut down the process to the point where an amendment can be offered and passed in a markup of a bill before a full committee like the Judiciary Committee, or the Energy and Commerce Committee would be another example, Mr. Speaker, where this has happened on ObamaCare, on cap-and-tax as well, where the will of the committee is just ignored and they go rewrite the bill and bring it to the floor. They don't say anything to anybody. They don't ask permission. They don't ask for a signoff or a consent from the people that recorded their vote in support of those amendments. They just simply ignore the entire will of the committee or defy it and rewrite the bill after the fact and send it to the floor without notice. And when caught red-handed, their answer is, well, it was so obvious we knew you'd catch us. That really gives me a feeling of comfort. How many were not obvious, how many didn't we catch when they changed a little word like a ``may'' to a ``shall'' or vice versa, something that can completely transform the meaning of an entire piece of legislation. If you're looking at every word, I suppose you would catch it, it's obvious a ``may'' to a ``shall'' or a ``shall'' to a ``may'' or a ``notwithstanding'' slipped in somewhere or was taken out. But it should have the integrity that the will of the group as brought out by the chairman of the committee and that decision of the committee must be sacrosanct and honored, and it should not ever be changed unless it's changed by a vote, not of the Rules Committee, to change the language of a bill that goes up there. If there's something that's been a mistake or there's a change of opinion, then whoever wants to change that conclusion of a committee should have to bring an amendment to the floor of the House of Representatives and debate it here. That's how a constitutional republic is supposed to work. That's how it was designed to work, and in fact, it's dysfunctional if it's not run that way. This is a dysfunctional Congress, Mr. Speaker. The will of the people is not being reflected in this Congress in many, many ways. So this takes me to a couple of issues. Cap-and-tax passed this House almost very close to a year ago today. Looks like it's balled up in the Senate, and I hope that it stays buried there. They will keep trying. That didn't reflect the will of the people. That was a high-handed leverage operation, and I won't go so deeply into that because I actually don't expect we will see that at least before the election. And after the election, if there's a lame duck session--and there likely will be--it better be just pro forma activity of this Congress to get the business done that must be done so this country can function, because the people in November will have spoken, Mr. Speaker, and their will needs to be reflected after the election. A lame duck session that brings transformative pieces of legislation breaks with the trust of the American people. It would be a defiant action, and it should be met with the defiance of the American people, and anything they should try to do in that kind of environment should be repealed, and the President of the United States ought to say so. He ought to say no transformative legislation should be brought before this Congress in a lame duck session. A President that honored the Constitution and the will of the people would reinforce that position right now and do it today, Mr. Speaker. But another one of those pieces of legislation that was brought before this Congress that defied the will of the people is ObamaCare, and I will just tell you what ObamaCare is. It is what the President has identified it. He's referred to it as ObamaCare. I happen to remember February 25 at the Blair House this year when President Obama talked about this health care plan as ObamaCare. That's the moniker he would like to have on it, and that's what he would like to have for his legacy. The American people can't have ObamaCare and have freedom too. It has to be one or the other. It cannot be both. They are not compatible with each other. Freedom and liberty cannot coexist side by side with ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker. This ObamaCare that was contrived and recontrived and manipulated and remanipulated and sent up to the Congressional Budget Office for another CBO scoring after another CBO scoring turned logical contortionism inside out to get to a conclusion that ObamaCare wasn't going to be expensive, and the assumptions that were made defied rational thought. One of them was, well, we'll save $532 billion by cutting Medicare $532 billion. Think of it. Here we are, the senior citizens are now the baby boomers arriving at retirement age, and in my district--I have Iowa--Iowa has the highest percentage of its population over age 85 of all the States, and there are 99 counties in Iowa. Ten of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa are in my district, western Iowa, the Fifth District of Iowa, which is 32 counties. Draw a line from Minnesota and Missouri and put a third of the State on the west side of that, that's the Fifth District. In those 32 counties, we have 10 of the 12 most senior counties in the most senior State in America. So I will submit by that standard that I represent the most senior congressional district in America, a district that would have most likely the highest percentage of its people on Medicare and Social Security. This President and his administration proposed and force fed legislation on the American people that would slash the already tight undercompensated budget of Medicare by $532 billion because of a couple of things. One is they allege that there is fraud and corruption and waste, fraud and abuse in ObamaCare. We don't know whether that's true everywhere in America, but we know or I am confident that it's not true in the small towns in the rural areas, especially in the Midwest where I happen to have the privilege to serve. And so the idea is slash the budget of Medicare and then if you do that it will magically find the corruption and the waste and chop it out. Well, the people that are involved in gaming the system are the best at gaming the system. So those that are simply working on a stable budget providing services that aren't waste, fraud and abuse, they are likely the ones that get their budget cut because they are not going to be gaming the system. They are just honest people that are trying to provide services to senior citizens that need the help. A $532 billion cut, now here is where we find out also that ObamaCare, if you look at the real numbers, the numbers that are emerging, it's a trillion-dollar deficit, a trillion dollars over the budget projections. We are also seeing that they are putting things in place to ration our care; they are putting a CEO in place who is convinced that the United Kingdom, their socialized medicine is the best plan, worships at the altar of socialized medicine. It looks like the British are starting to repeal their socialized medicine plan, and we have just adopted one in the form of ObamaCare. The American people don't yet know what all of this means. The Speaker tells the Americans we have to pass ObamaCare, we have to pass the bill, she said, in order for you to learn what's in it. As if we can't read 2,300 or 2,400 pages and figure it out. Well, it's true, it isn't possible to read the bill and figure it out because you have to be able to understand and predict what the bureaucrats will do to write the rules in the aftermath, and that is just beginning. But here are some things that I have seen and things that I know, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the President said he wanted to provide some competition into the health insurance industry and the problem was there wasn't enough competition for health insurance. So he wants to set up a public option. Do you remember that public option? His public option would be Federal Government setting up an insurance company that would compete with the private sector health insurance companies. All right, so if there isn't enough competition, the first question the President should have asked and the first question that the pundits should have asked would be, Mr. President, do you have any idea how many insurance companies, health insurance companies there are in the United States? If you want one more company to provide more competition, wouldn't you at least, before you came to such a conclusion, as the President has, wouldn't you ask the simple question, this is like the dumb question, how many insurance companies are there in America selling health insurance? I know it sounds a little dumb, Mr. Speaker, but there are a whole lot of people out there that made decisions on this that don't know the answer to this question. So I checked it out: 1,300 health insurance companies in America, 1,300; 1,300 health insurance companies selling insurance in America and the President says we need more competition, so let's have a government company to compete against--I don't know what's in his head, one or three or five or so health insurance companies--1,300, Mr. President. That's a far cry from not having enough companies, I would say. And if you add one more and it's a government company, it's 1,301 companies. Is that really the bright, perfect balance number? His motive isn't to provide more competition. His motive is to replace the private sector. He campaigned early on for the public option and also for a single-payer. The President is on record being for a single-payer. Single-payer is the government takes care of everything. They take care of providing all of the health insurance and all of the health care that there is. By the way, where they get to the point where they would have a monopoly, it would wipe out the insurance component of this by arguing that we are wasting money administratively by helping people's health insurance policies. Why don't we just give them the health care? Why would we tell them you have to own your own policy, carry your own insurance card, pay your premium and we will back-fill your account. We will subsidize your premium if you aren't making enough money. We will tax you if you are making too much money. This is a share-the-wealth Robin Hood strategy. The only thing is the President's idea that we are not going to increase taxes on anybody that is making less than $250,000 a year turns out not to be true. It turns out to be false. The question that needs to be asked there with the President is, Was it a mistake, Mr. President, or was it a willful misinformation to the American people? That's the question. I remember during the campaign in 1996, when Charlton Heston at the time was the president of the National Rifle Association, ran commercials against Bill Clinton, the President. Charlton Heston said, you know, the question was did President Clinton tell the truth or did he lie, Mr. Speaker? Charlton Heston's comment was this. He said, Mr. President, if you say something that's wrong and you don't know that it's wrong, that's called a mistake. If you say something that's wrong and you know that it's wrong, that's a lie. The question becomes what did the President believe when he repeated to the American people that he would not raise taxes on the American people if you made less than $250,000 a year? ObamaCare raises taxes on many people that make less than $250,000 a year. It imposes an individual mandate that requires everybody to buy insurance or be fined and punished and penalized for doing the same. That's never been a requirement by the Federal Government in the history of this country that the Federal Government would produce a product or approve a product and compel the American people to buy it. So if they are going to approve the health insurance policies that are produced by, let's say, Wellmark or some other company, we say, we like your policy and your policy and your policy and our health choices health administration czar, I call him the commaczarishioner, will pick some of these 1,300 companies that exist when ObamaCare was passed and say, I anoint these policies but you have got to adjust them all to match the demand of the rules to be written by the Health Choices Administration commaczarishioner. Once we approve all this, then it will be a decision of how many companies will be left to do business and the Federal Government injecting themselves to compete directly against that, and then every health insurance policy in America under those standards-- well, actually, every health insurance policy that is effective today will be effectively canceled by the Federal Government under the law and under the rule. They will have to requalify. Actually, they will have to qualify under Federal standards yet to be written. There is not a single policy in America that the President of the United States himself, even if it was at a beer summit back in the South Lawn of the White House, of all 100,000 policies in America, Mr. Speaker, there is not one that the President of the United States himself could pull out of that stack of 100,000 policies. That's a pretty deep stack, maybe that high, and point to it and say this policy, Mr. or Mrs. American, is your policy and you get to keep it, and the substance of the benefits on it will not be changed, and your premiums will not increase or be altered dramatically different than the markets would normally move it. Not one policy out of any one of the millions of Americans that are insured and not one policy out of the 100,000 varieties that are out there to be sold can be guaranteed, even by the President of the United States. The man who fired the CEO of General Motors, replaced the board of directors, all but two, reminded us that he is the President and he gets to do these things. Maybe he is also the one that has brought about the firing or the elimination, the replacement of the CEO of BP. I think he would be pretty proud of that if he could get right down to the inner soul of who he is. But there is not one policy in America that he can point to and say this is yours, you get to keep it; the premium is not going to be altered substantively and neither will the terms of the benefits that are in it, not one. They will all get canceled. All of them that will be viable on the other side of the implementation of ObamaCare after 2014, all have to qualify. You know, that's like, that's like going to the racetrack and having the fastest car and you have been around and around the racetrack, and you set your standards. And when you pull on there with that nice, fastest car, and you have got to go back and you have got to run the laps and go again and qualify again and again and again, that's what it is. That's what it is. Everybody's got to qualify. Many won't. Many companies will be broke. They will be driven down. A lot of these policies will have to be rewritten, premiums will go up, but that's also part of the equation. There's more to that. Employers will look at the penalty, the 8 percent penalty on payroll, those that employ 50 or more, and they will decide, many of them, I can pay the 8 percent penalty for not insuring my employees cheaper than I can pay their premiums, so why would I knuckle under and comply with a Federal mandate when it's cheaper to do something else? And then you will have individuals that will be self-employed, those who will be working for companies that don't have 50 or more employees. Those companies are going to be providing health insurance less and less, and those employees that don't have health insurance are going to be more likely to just pay the penalty because they know this: They've got guarantee issue. They've got preexisting condition language that's there. So why would you buy insurance if you could just simply buy the insurance when you get sick, on your way to the hospital, in the hospital, from intensive care? Sign the application, pay the premium like somebody that's completely robustly healthy and pay the same premium. This is the myopic thinking that comes from the White House and from the other side of the aisle. They don't understand how business works. They don't understand how insurance works. They understand how socialism works, and they're seeking to drag us there. Now, I used to refrain from saying such things, Mr. Speaker, but the evidence is so replete, and it's a constant out there among the American people. They understand this. Some of this actually began at the end of the Bush administration--all of this, though, with the blessing of now President Obama. But we had a $700 billion TARP program that was a mistake; $350 billion of that was passed in the lame duck of the Bush administration. And then there was the nationalization of three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, General Motors/Chrysler, a takeover of the student loan program in the United States that not that many years ago was all private. Now it's all run by the Department of Education, every bit of it. And if you're wondering about this pattern, this isn't something that they don't understand. They know what they're doing. Back in 1960, 1960, 1961 and 1962, in that era, the only flood insurance that you could buy in America was sold at the private sector, property and casualty flood insurance. So if you lived in a floodplain, you could pay the premium to a private sector company and you could protect yourself from floods. But the Federal Government decided they would get involved in the Federal flood insurance program and they passed that. Just a few years later, there was no longer any private sector property and casualty flood insurance in America. There hasn't been any for almost 50 years. Almost 50 years since we've had private sector property and casualty insurance, because the Federal Government got in the business and they couldn't compete well enough in the beginning, but then they passed legislation that required that anybody that had a loan through a national bank had to buy flood insurance. So the flood insurance premiums were compelled as a condition of the loan, and so they imposed a requirement to pay those premiums. And over time, they pushed out the property and casualty people, the private property and casualty people, and the flood insurance program became 100 percent Federal Government. Now, you can't go out in the market--and for years you have not been able to go out in the market--and buy flood insurance. You have to buy that through the Federal flood insurance program. And curiously, that program is $19.2 billion in the red, Mr. Speaker, and they're looking for ways to compel more people to pay premiums because the value of those premiums hasn't reflected the risk or else they paid out the benefits in such a way. I think it's a combination of the two, but mostly the premiums haven't reflected the value of the risk. They haven't run their insurance company very well. They're the government, after all. And if they fail to meet a casualty, they don't go broke. They just run deficit spending or come back to this Congress and ask us to borrow money from the Chinese to backfill their business inefficiencies, and that's the model. So we've got a Federal flood insurance program that is a bust--$19.2 billion. We've got the student loan program now taken over by the Department of Education and done so in the dark of the night as part of a reconciliation package that circumvented the filibuster rules in the Senate and was attached to the last-minute deals that were made in place on ObamaCare. And now we've got ObamaCare, and it will move itself towards the nationalization of our health care. In fact, I'd say it is the nationalization of our health care, because there isn't anybody in America that will be able to manage their health care anymore at their own choice. The markets will not establish the demand. You will not be able to go to an insurance company and, say, if you and a million other people in America want to be able to buy low-premium catastrophic insurance-- let's just say you're 22 or 23 years old, in robust health and you've got an income where you're making $25,000 a year and your employer is not providing your health insurance, but you want to be responsible and you want to pay for catastrophic insurance and you say, I want to have a $2,500 deductible premium that only pays catastrophic. You should be able to buy that really cheaply in the marketplace. And what's going to happen? I guarantee you, it will not exist. It will not exist because the community ratings at 3-1 already eliminate catastrophic, low-premium health insurance for young people, which means they have to pay a disproportionate share of the premium. And when they look at that, they wonder, What am I getting back for my money? Well, they're getting the privilege of paying somebody else's health insurance premium that levels this out a little bit, as if the generations has an equal shot at it. But here's what happens. Young people that are healthy don't have very many health insurance and health care claims. Their premiums generally have reflected the risk in the States where the States allow them to do that, and it's many--in fact, it's most. But under ObamaCare, with the 3-1 community rating, now that premium can't be anything less than one-third of the highest premium that's charged out there. So if you have somebody with, let's say, a bad health record that you would charge a high premium to, your low-income guy has got to subsidize the high-claims guy. And the world doesn't sit there just so that a younger person with low health care claims can't afford to pay a lot more premium than that. Well, they're not a lot more risk than that either. But somebody that gets on upwards to their income peak earning level--I don't know what that number is but I'm just going to say 55 just to pick a number. Your income earning capacity increases throughout your lifetime to a certain point and then it tends to level off as people start to retire. So let's just say mid-fifties. That's the time also that health tends to cost more, in the aftermath of the mid-fifties. So the premiums go up, and that's a higher income time of life. Why would we go down to the younger people and discourage them from buying insurance, people that will drop off and pay the penalty instead of the premium because we've rigged the game in favor of the people at the upper age group and the upper claims group of this? Again, it defies logic. We could go on and on about how bad ObamaCare is, Mr. Speaker, but I just want to make this point. I brought legislation to repeal ObamaCare. I could not sleep the night this passed. I typed up a request for the bill draft and I sent it to leg. counsel at the opening of business that morning. It was a Monday morning. That draft came back to me completed in legislative form within 3 minutes of the time that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's repeal bill also came down. Within 3 minutes. Each of them were 40 words. They were verbatim to each other, pieces of legislation that were pure in their simplicity, 2,000-plus pages of ObamaCare ripped out by the roots, lock, stock and barrel if we pass this legislation that is so simple that repeals all of ObamaCare, 100 percent of ObamaCare, lock, stock and barrel, not one vestige of it left behind, not one particle of ObamaCare DNA left behind. It has become a malignant tumor in our society. It is metastasizing as we speak, and it has got to be repealed. Every single word of it, every component of ObamaCare has got to be repealed. Michele Bachmann's legislation does that. Mine does that. Connie Mack's of Florida repeals it. Also, Parker Griffith's of Alabama, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, all--those are the ones I can think of. I think Jerry Moran will be another one--have introduced legislation that repeals ObamaCare, all of it, lock, stock and barrel. That needs to happen, Mr. Speaker, if we're to have our liberty back, if we're to have our freedom back. If we're to have our American vitality back, it's got to go, all of it. Now, what I have done is worked that legislation pretty hard. I ended up with 89 signatures, and I'm still taking more if they will sign them on, to the repeal legislation. Most of those people who signed onto my bill I asked to sign onto the bills of the others, especially onto Michele Bachmann's, because she had worked it so hard, but it ended up there were a few more signatures on my bill than on the others, so I introduced a discharge petition some 5 or 6 weeks ago. A discharge petition, Mr. Speaker, is the one single tool that the disenfranchised majority opinion in this Congress can use to bring legislation to the floor over the will of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Any other method that we might have to move legislation here in the House is blocked by the iron fist of the Speaker. Any legislation we try to move through committee will go nowhere. No matter what the support is for a bill, if the Speaker doesn't want it to move, it doesn't move. If you want a hearing for a piece of legislation before a committee, you will not get that hearing. If you want a markup before a subcommittee or a full committee, you will not get that markup. The Speaker will decide whether it moves or whether it doesn't. It is an iron fist, a draconian hand, that shuts down the opportunity for the will of the people to be manifested in a recorded vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. There is only one tool--only one tool, Mr. Speaker--and that is a discharge petition. It is there to give relief for the will of the people in America reflected in this republican form of government that is guaranteed to us in the United States Constitution. It is a discharge petition. When a bill has been introduced here into the House and has been allowed to cure for a minimum of 30 legislative days, then it can be converted into a discharge petition on file right over here with the Clerk of the House, and that requires a signature on that document and an initial of the Members of Congress who support it. Now, those signatures are accumulated here on this discharge petition, Mr. Speaker, and it is discharge petition No. 11 that repeals 100 percent of ObamaCare. That discharge petition that is on file has my signature at the top. It has Michele Bachmann's right there with mine and with Connie Mack's at the top, and it goes right on down the line. When I first filed it, some of the critics out there in America said, Well, there's an act of frustration. He won't be able to get anything done on this. They aren't going to sign onto that discharge petition. Well, we can take a look and see what has happened today, Mr. Speaker. In fact, we can check it currently, and I might be able to do that, actually, on the fly. We are at least at 159--I think at 160--on the discharge petition. When we get to 218, then we will be able to bring that bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote. No amendments. It cannot be blocked by the Speaker of the House. That is what a discharge petition does. Let me see. There we go. I'll get this going and try to give you a report, Mr. Speaker. This discharge petition No. 11 is here in the well. Republicans have lined up to sign that petition, and they have done so repeatedly and consistently. It is a logistical difficulty to get that many people to go to the well and sign a discharge petition, but we are up to 159 or 160 on this petition, and there are others who have agreed to sign. Of the Republicans, Mr. Speaker, there are only 14, by current count, who haven't either signed this discharge petition or haven't agreed to sign the discharge petition. All of the elected leadership has signed. In fact, I am seeing a notice here that all of the appointed leadership has signed. The entire leadership team has agreed to sign the discharge petition. Actually, the entire leadership team on the Republican side has signed the discharge petition. That's 100 percent support by the leadership team and by the Republican Conference. That is Leader Boehner. That is Whip Eric Cantor. That is Republican Conference Chair and master communicator Mike Pence. That is everybody along the line who you will see who line up at the microphones to lay out our Republican policy. One hundred sixty of us altogether have signed. There is at least another four who have agreed to who haven't quite made it down here to put their John Henrys on the discharge petition. That is very, very close to a full court effort here in the House, and I think that the Republican numbers have an opportunity, by the end of this week, to be signatories on the discharge petition, totaling perhaps all but maybe four who have a little difficulty getting there. I'm expecting that we'll have a chance to get to that point, and maybe, just maybe, on the best day, every Republican will have signed the discharge petition. I hope we get there because here is what it is about, Mr. Speaker. Thirty-four Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. Every single Republican voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. It was universal. Every Republican opposed it and 34 Democrats opposed it. Why did they vote ``no''? That question is out there. The American people are wondering this, Mr. Speaker. Why? Did they oppose ObamaCare? Did they do so on a philosophical basis? Was it a policy question? Every one of them would like to tell you it's a policy question. Well, is it ever a policy question in some of their cases? I think we're going to find out. Were they voting ``no'' on ObamaCare because the Speaker of the House said, ``I don't have to have your vote. Go ahead and vote `no,' and then you can posture yourself back in your district as someone who is against ObamaCare and as someone who is not necessarily doing the bidding of the Speaker of the House from San Francisco''? Well, this San Francisco agenda has been driven through this House because every single Democrat voted for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker--every one. All 34 of those Democrats who voted ``no'' on ObamaCare voted for Nancy Pelosi. So, when you think about how this fits together, if they voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker, they enabled the San Francisco agenda to be driven through this House of Representatives. That includes cap-and- tax. It includes ObamaCare. It includes Barney Frank's financial reform legislation that sets the Federal Government up to be in a position to take over our lending institutions, or at least the larger ones if they decide to do so. All of that agenda and more has been driven by the Speaker of the House--Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, a San Francisco agenda imposed upon America--because every Democrat voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. Now they'll be going back home at the end of this week, and they're going to say, I voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. It was a tough vote on cap- and-tax. I was doing something because I had a little nuance here. I know one Member of Congress, who is part of the Iowa delegation, who said, Well, I think the bill has gotten better here in the House, and I'm going to vote for cap-and-tax because I think they're going to fix it down the hall in the Senate. You'd sell out your franchise like that? If you had any leverage to fix anything, you just lost it when you voted for it and sent the bill down to the Senate. You stand here, and you hold your vote ``no.'' You don't hold your nose and vote ``yes'' and say you've done something responsible. Where we are, Mr. Speaker, is this: ObamaCare has got to be repealed. There are 34 Democrats who said they were opposed to it who will have an opportunity to prove it right here at the well by signing discharge petition No. 11. Thirty-four Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. If they are sincere, they will sign the discharge petition. They will be added to the Republicans who have signed it and to those who will. There will be more tomorrow, and there will be more the next day. I can guarantee that, Mr. Speaker. When we get to this point, we will find out the separation between the women and the girls and the men and the boys. Were they for the repeal of ObamaCare? If they opposed it in their votes, they shouldn't be for it in policy today. If they are going to duck and cover and try to have it both ways, a discharge petition will help separate that. In fact, it will separate it, and the American people will know the difference. We will gavel out of here perhaps on Thursday night, and most every Republican will have signed the discharge petition. I am hopeful there will be a handful of Democrats who will step up to it, who will take a stand and say, I really meant it when I voted ``no'' on ObamaCare, and I'm going to put my signature down here on this discharge petition, which commits them to voting for the repeal of ObamaCare if we get 218 signatures and it comes to the floor. That is being honest with America. That is sending a message out across America. It is giving the constituents in each of these congressional districts an opportunity to take a look at the real record, an opportunity to evaluate the real positions of the Members of Congress--not the smoke and mirrors version, not the duplicity, not the straddle-the-fence version, but the real version, which is, if you voted ``no'' on ObamaCare, you'd better be for the repeal of ObamaCare. If you voted ``yes'' on ObamaCare, you might want to reconsider and sign the discharge petition anyway because it is bad policy. It is lousy policy. It can't be afforded. In no way can it be calculated to fit within anything that we might be able to sustain. It is unsustainable. It is unforgivable to do this to the American people and to take away our freedom to manage our health care--to go out in the market and buy the health insurance policy that we want. There are many things we can do for reform. There are many things we have tried to do for reform. We sent some of them over to the Senate when the Republicans were in charge here in the majority, and they got locked up with the trial lawyers in the Senate. We are going to have to roll the trial lawyers. That has to happen in this next Congress and in the Congress after that, Mr. Speaker, but we cannot tolerate a Congress that drives up the spending in America, one that runs in a $1.4 trillion or $1.5 trillion deficit. That is 10 times the average deficit under George Bush. And still they stand up and say, Bush's fault, Bush's fault. Bush's fault? $140 billion deficit under Bush. Now, I'd like to have balanced the budget, and I voted for a number of balanced budgets and I'll keep doing that. And I'm an original cosponsor of the balanced budget amendment. But, Mr. Speaker, to equate a $1.4 trillion deficit and $1.8 trillion deficit coming the year behind that, and to equate that to a $140 billion deficit, it defies any rational thought, Mr. Speaker. And I hope that I have conveyed some rational thought for you tonight, and I'm glad that you paid attention.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, as always, I'm privileged and honored to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, this great deliberative body. And having come here and sat down and listened to the presentation of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the previous hour, most of what you have heard here tonight has been the regular fare that is delivered from the DCCC. Not a lot of it's been original thinking. And Mr. Speaker, I call upon the American people to use that great gift of reason and think this through. First I just go backwards. The gentleman from Florida alleges, Mr. Speaker, that Republicans have blocked the unemployment extension. Republicans have blocked the unemployment extension. The gentleman from Florida, if he knows anything, knows very well the Republicans don't have the votes to block an unemployment extension. We don't have the votes to block a declaration of war. We don't have the votes to block anything in this Congress. Anything that didn't get done that he laments should have been done lays at the feet of the Speaker of the House and the majority leader in the United States Senate and the Democrats, not Republicans. I wish we had the authority and the votes to kill some of these crazy ideas that are coming out of the progressives on the left. We don't have those votes. We can't kill crazy ideas. And now I have to sit here and listen to a crazy allegation that Republicans are to blame for blocking unemployment benefit extensions. It's an outrageous thing to say. And then to follow it up with, May God have mercy on your souls, as if the gentleman had a deep core of faith and he really was worried about the souls of Republicans. I am awfully glad he's not been appointed to be St. Peter. If he could make that call at the pearly gates, I am pretty convinced that every single Republican would be condemned to the fires of hell by his judgment. No, we've been fed a line of baloney here. Republicans do not have the votes to block an unemployment extension. If it didn't happen in the House of Representatives, it didn't happen by the will of the Speaker and the majority in this Congress, the Democrats. That is a fact, Mr. Speaker. It's not arguable. It's not even nuanced. It's clean as it can be. I wish it were not the case, but it is. Speaker Pelosi could have forced an unemployment extension off of this floor had she chosen to do so. And if she chose to send it to the floor on suspension, where it takes two-thirds to pass an unemployment extension, then clearly it's a cynical attempt to try to tell the American people the same thing that we've heard from the gentleman from Florida, blame it on the Republicans. But if Democrats cared about extending unemployment benefits, they would have brought the legislation through. This House doesn't have the votes to kill it. Remember, 34 Democrats voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. Every single Republican voted ``no'' on ObamaCare and still it's the law of the land. However temporarily, it's the law of the land. ObamaCare passed the House of Representatives with every single Republican standing in uniform saying no. And 34 Democrats joined with every single Republican and said no to ObamaCare. And still, and still their hearts were hardened, and still ObamaCare went to the White House and to the President's desk, where today it's the law of the land. So for the gentleman from Florida to stand over at that microphone and try to convince you, Mr. Speaker, who probably should have gaveled him for the audacity of that statement, and let me say the lack of accuracy, but try to convince you and the American people that it's Republicans that are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits, I don't think there is a sixth-grader out there with a rational thought in their head that would believe that if they knew the facts. Now, the gentleman from Florida, some of the members of the Democrat party, some of the people who are the spokesmen and -women for Speaker Pelosi might then deploy out and say, well, Steve King is wrong, we're really referring to the Republicans blocking unemployment benefits in the Senate. I mean I have established this, Mr. Speaker, there is no question, and if anyone challenges the veracity of my statement, stand up. I will recognize you. I will yield my time to hear, if you think you have a rebuttal to my statement. Of course you won't. You will sit there and sit on your hands because you know I am right. Your silence is a confession that what I have said is 100 percent true. Democrats haven't moved an extension of unemployment benefits because they don't have the votes to get that done. It's not the Republican resistance that stood in the way. That's a fact. It's unrebutted, which makes it a fact. It's in this Congressional Record today and tonight, Mr. Speaker. And so the deal with the House is all wrapped up. My argument stands. No one can rebut my argument. The House didn't have the votes to kill unemployment benefit extensions, and so the arguments on the part of the gentleman from Florida are specious and unfounded and false. But down the other end of this Rotunda there might be an argument, Mr. Speaker. And so perhaps we should examine that argument about whether the Republicans in the Senate have the votes to kill the extension of unemployment benefits. And let's remember this is $33 billion or $34 billion with a B, billion dollars, to extend unemployment benefits for 99 weeks. For practical purposes let's just give that in round numbers. You only have to round that up about 3 weeks to get to 2 years. Two years of unemployment extended by the United States Congress, the tab picked up by the taxpayers of America, money coming from where? Well, let's just say the Chinese, for want of a better source. As long as they keep loaning us money, we'll borrow it, and we'll borrow money to pay people not to work to the tune of 99 weeks of unemployment. Now, that's a separate argument, Mr. Speaker. But the argument made by the gentleman from Florida, the Republicans are blocking the extension of unemployment benefits and should God have mercy on our soul for doing that, it's not the Republicans. The Republicans don't have the power in the Senate either. We've established we don't have the power in the House. Republicans don't have the power in the Senate to block an extension of unemployment benefits. These Democrats know, by the way, it's coming. It's going to get done. It's going to pass the Senate. It's going to come to the House, unemployment benefits. But should every Republican in the United States Senate stand against the extension of unemployment benefits--without a paid-for, by the way; without any fiscal responsibility, 100 percent borrowed money, 100 percent racking up the national debt--the national debt that this year rings in to 1.5, or excuse me, the deficit for this year rings in to $1.5 trillion. The national debt runs to 13.18. The GDP, gross domestic product, is $13.20 trillion. So if you round that to the nearest tenth of a trillion, our national debt is equal to our gross domestic product. I don't know that that's ever happened in the history of America. But to explore the question in the United States Senate if Harry Reid, the majority leader, decides to bring an extension of unemployment benefits that cost the taxpayers $33 billion or $34 billion to the floor of the United States Senate and Republicans decide they want to block it--now, according to the filibuster rules, it might require those 60 votes, that 60-40 majority in the Senate, to break the filibuster. And they are a vote short of that. And they swore in a new Senator, I think it was today. So now they come closer and if a Republican will switch over and vote to break the filibuster, then they're ready to close the deal on $34 billion in unemployment benefits, unpaid for, fiscally irresponsible without trying to cut some government spending somewhere. Okay, we'll give you all of that, Mr. Speaker, under the filibuster rules. But let's keep in mind, let's keep in mind that we had ObamaCare come before the House and before the Senate. And is our memory so short, is Mr. Grayson's memory so short that he doesn't remember the reconciliation package that came back from the Senate here to the floor of the House? Does the gentleman from Florida and the other people who put these specious allegations out, do they forget that ObamaCare didn't pass with a 60-40 vote to break the filibuster in the United States Senate? It passed with a reconciliation package that required a simple majority in the United States Senate. So, if Harry Reid is sincere and he really thinks he wants to give unemployment benefits to the people in this country, he can wrap this up in a reconciliation package, pass it off the floor of the United States Senate with a simple majority and send it over here to the House where the Speaker almost certainly would bring unemployment benefits to the floor of the House. And the gentleman from Florida, everybody in America knows, the votes are here in the House right now to pass those extensions. But they can't do that right away. They've got to spend a day or two or three or more beating up on Republicans making false allegations to try to convince the American people that these demons that are knocking at the pearly gates--may God have mercy on your souls, according to Mr. Grayson--are somehow trying to keep those resources out of the hands of hardworking Americans. And they wonder why America is cynical, and they wonder why their credibility has gone down the drain. They wonder why the popularity of Congress is at the lowest point ever, and the popularity of the Speaker may be, at least in modern record keeping, at the lowest point ever; and the lack of confidence in government officials is just as great as it's ever been. The greatest lack of confidence we've ever had in the United States Congress. Why? Because people come here to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and make outrageous statements like that, and the American people don't always hear such a cogent rebuttal as they're hearing right now. But they have a brain, and they have the ability to think and reason, and they have a memory that let's them roll back and think well what happened here now. We weren't going to have ObamaCare unless we had 60 votes in the Senate to pass it. Remember this? Remember how because of ObamaCare, I think it was a big reason Massachusetts delivered to the United States Senate Scott Brown who said, I'm opposed to ObamaCare. I will oppose it. I will vote against it. I'll kill it if I can. And he came here to the United States Senate, was sworn in, was sworn to vote against and kill ObamaCare. That's what the people in Massachusetts wanted. That's what the people in America wanted. But, no. President Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and a small cabal of people who were meeting in back rooms decided we are going to force feed this on the American people because it matched their ideology, not because it was good policy, not because the budget would be better off. It's worse off. Not because it provides better care. It's less care. Not because it would be less costly. No, it's more costly. Not because people would have more choices, as President Obama said. No, they have less choices. Not because people would get to keep their health insurance policy if they liked it. No, they don't get to keep that policy. We know that now. We know that anybody in America that has a policy today that they think they get to keep, sorry. There isn't one, not one policy, not one American out of 306 million Americans that has a health insurance policy that the White House, President Obama, Robert Gibbs, Rahm Emanuel, name your spokesman for the White House, not one of them, including the President, can point to one single policy and say, Rest easy. It's yours. I guaranteed you you'd get to keep your policy, and no one can take it away, and no one can dramatically change the premium, and nobody can dramatically change the benefit package that you have. That's not true. It never was true. They knew it couldn't be true. But they never could have cooked up ObamaCare in the first place. But they said it. They sold the American people a bill of goods. And now I'm hearing a bill of goods delivered from this podium over here. But the bottom line is if it's unemployment benefit extensions that you seek, it can be delivered by the Democrat majority, and they should take the blame if it's not now. Not lay it off the Republicans. Republicans don't have the votes. Harry Reid can do a reconciliation package and deliver unemployment benefits just as surely as he sent us ObamaCare in a reconciliation package. Remember how that was? Well, we'll pass the bill, ObamaCare, here in the House even though the majority of the House doesn't support ObamaCare. There is a deal that there will be a reconciliation package that will come down the line through the middle of the Capitol right down that hallway, and it will arrive here, a reconciliation package, and enough people on the Democrat side of the aisle, one of the components of that, in such a way that they said, I'll vote for ObamaCare on the promise that reconciliation comes and then we'll vote for that, and then we'll send them to the White House to the President's desk, and he can sign them in just the right sequential order. So a simple majority in the House, a simple majority in the Senate can pass ObamaCare, a simple majority in the House and a simple majority in the Senate can pass reconciliation. And in the right timing and the right sequence signed in the right order by the President of the United States can impose ObamaCare on every single American even though on the day that ObamaCare passed the House, that bill standing alone did not enjoy the majority support of the Members here. No, Mr. Speaker, it enjoyed a bare majority on the promise that there would be a reconciliation package come here to the House floor. And on it were some things that didn't have anything to do with health care, including the government takeover of the student loan program in the entire United States of America. So there was a deal made, and the American people know it was a back-room deal. And it was a promise, and some didn't trust the promise. And here we stand today listening to drivel about the Republicans obstructing extension of employment benefits when every American that paid attention to the force feeding on all of us on ObamaCare understands that a simple majority in the House will pass and dominate any piece of policy if the Speaker decides it's going to go forward, if the majority leader doesn't stand in the way. The Speaker will determine what passes in the House, and the only check on the Speaker is the 218 votes over here. Well, they had 218 votes over here for ObamaCare plus a couple. And 34 votes to spare. This is the problem, Mr. Speaker. When you have massive majorities in the House and in the Senate that align themselves with the President of the United States, then you have a situation where the President wants a policy--let's just call it ObamaCare--could be extension of unemployment benefits to the tune of $34 billion. So the President says, I want this. Give me ObamaCare. By the way, I had a radio announcer talk to me today about how I had used the term ObamaCare and maybe we should call it something else. I pointed out that ObamaCare was used by the President of the United States, February 25 of this year. At Blair House he called it ObamaCare. If the President calls it ObamaCare, I think it's pretty easy shorthand for the rest of us to call it ObamaCare. And it's not pejorative unless you happen to think about what it's doing to America's liberty. In which case it is mightily pejorative. So the President can decide he wants ObamaCare, and he delivers it to the House of Representatives and says, Give me ObamaCare. So the Speaker, majority leader, the whip, and the rest of the leadership, they look around and they think, he's our leader. We better give our leader what he wants. So they will set about reconciling any tiny little differences in the back rooms of the United States Congress, and they will come out with something that complements the President's request, and now you've got the sycophantic approach that comes from the House matching up with that of the President of the United States, and then they send it over to the Senate where Harry Reid sits over there and decides: Well, let's see, I don't want to cross the President; I don't want to cross the Speaker of the House; and I don't want to cross the Democrat majority in the United States Congress, so I want to complement all the things that they do and add the bells and whistles on that his people want. So they stack that on, and now here we go. It's an upward spiral. Thinking of this in terms of policy, a liberty stealing policy, which is ObamaCare, that's easy for me to see today because I've talked about this for some time. But when we get into the spending side of this, this massive $1.5 trillion deficit that we have created here by this President, this Congress, this House and the Senate, it also is an upward spiral of spending, because even though the President--the President did present a budget. The House didn't do a budget. This House didn't do a budget. I don't know how many years it has been since the House hasn't had a budget. I think 1974 is the last time we had a rule that required a budget. We have had a House budget every year since 1974, and I may stand to be corrected on that, but I believe I'm exactly right on my year and on the functionality. The House has been required by a rule to produce a budget since 1974, and here we are, 2010, first time the House didn't produce a budget. So the President kicks one out. The House doesn't produce one. If the House doesn't produce a budget, that means Republicans don't have the opportunity to offer one. So we don't get to put a budget into the record and have a debate on both these budgets up or down, in which case I will vote for the balanced one. We produced a balanced budget within the Republican Study Committee, Mr. Speaker, and it's something that I have been engaged in, involved in, and very supportive of for a number of years. With Chairman Tom Price of the study committee and the budget chair, Jim Jordan, we produced a balanced budget, and I've, in the past, voted for a balanced budget. It took a while to get here, but this year we don't have the chance to do that because the Pelosi Congress doesn't produce a budget, even though the President does, so they don't get to plus up or plus down the spending by the White House. But when that does happen, the House here stands to plus it up because they don't want to say ``no'' to the President of the United States. So they add on; they don't subtract. They don't have a sense of fiscal responsibility. No, they have a sense of pandering to constituencies who are tax eaters on their part. Mine are taxpayers and producers, the people that I represent, and you can tell by my thought process and my tone. They wouldn't elect me if they weren't producers. So the House would normally plus up the President's budget if the House is run by Democrats, if the White House is run by Democrats, and then send that budget over there to the Senate where Harry Reid and company would plus up the budget again. They don't want to say ``no'' to the President or to the House. They just want to make sure they get their spending priorities. So they plus that up and spend that up, and we've got an upward spiral of the budgeting process going on. The President makes a request. He sends it to the House. The House says, well, we don't want to say ``no'' to your things, but we've got our things that we want, and you can watch the spirals going upwards, and the House passes or promotes a spending increase and the circle goes on. Now to the Senate and Harry Reid and company, spending, spending, spending right on to the top, out through the roof. The spending in the United States Congress goes and the deficit sails out into the stratosphere and we see numbers like this. We see a $1.5 trillion deficit. We see a national debt of $13.18 trillion compared to a gross domestic product of $13.2 trillion, Mr. Speaker. And if you hadn't done the calculation yourself, and I'm sure you're sitting there with your calculator taking a look at this, Mr. Speaker, our national debt is 99 percent of our gross domestic product, 99 percent. So all the money that gets produced, all the production in America in a year, we owe 99 percent of an equivalent amount. 2010 debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP, the debt, just the debt, not the deficit, is 63.2 percent. By 2020, given how this budget is, well, you have to project this because we don't really have a budget. Debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP will be 90 percent by 2020. By 2027, it will be 125 percent. That is the debt level at 2027. That surpasses Greece's current debt level. And when we look at the President's effort, the total cost of job saving and job creating stimulus--have to think about that one. I had a good challenge on that the other day, and I said to an economist in a national radio dialogue, made a little fun of the idea we're going to create--this is what the President said--we're going to save or create 3.6 million jobs. Save or create, Mr. Speaker. What does that mean? You save if you can point to creating a job, you can point to creating a job. You might be able to point to those jobs and say, listen, we invested this money in national defense and decided to build these tanks or these drones or these bulletproof vests or M-4s or whatever it might be, so because we've invested in this new equipment and hardware, this factory has lit up and hired people for the exclusive purpose of making tanks or drones or bulletproof vests or M- 4s. So all those jobs you might point to and say these jobs are created by government spending. I won't argue so much with that accounting; although, I want to see them in the private sector. That is government spending, however, and that's a qualifier. 3.6 million jobs saved or created. But when you get to the saved jobs category, Mr. Speaker, from the instance that came out of the mouth of the President, saved or created, I asked the question: How do you ever determine that 3.6 million jobs have been saved? What jobs haven't been saved, Mr. Speaker? What jobs? We sit here today with a workforce of around 153 million people in this country, 153 million, and I'm going to guess on the employment level. I am going to expect that it's lower than that, but the actual working workforce--actually, Mr. Speaker, I will not guess at that. I will say it is over 100 million and probably in the area of perhaps 20 million less than that. So somewhere around 132 or -3 million, but I qualify that because that's not a number that's come from the Department of Labor. So let's just say that employment in America has probably not dropped below 125 million in a long time, and if you're going to dump $1.2 trillion into saving or creating jobs--and the lowest employed that we had in America is perhaps 125 million over the last generation or so-- then as long as you had 3.6 million jobs left, you could always point to that and say, I saved those 3.6 million. The very last 3.6 million jobs in America, I saved them with my $1.2 trillion economic stimulus plan. So I asked the economist, is that a number that you use, when you are really looking at economics, do you evaluate a category called jobs saved versus jobs created? He said, yeah, we do, we talk about this in economics. Now I didn't get it sorted out on this as to whether he commingles jobs saved with jobs created. I don't think so, doesn't make sense with me. I mean, how do you save jobs? Well, if you have a stable tax base, if you have a stable economy, if you have a competitive situation where employers can hire and fire and produce and produce and sell to a marketplace, then under those circumstances, if those circumstances are static, then chances are the jobs also are static. About the same number of jobs would be there from one day to the next to the next. So the jobs saved, jobs created, would be the jobs that are added to that number because of, as you say, a tax cut policy, a regulatory improvement policy, or, the President would argue, government spending. We have had a lot of government spending all right, and there have been jobs that have been saved because of it, government jobs, mostly, not all of them. But we should understand that when the President of the United States steps up and says, I am going to spend 1.2 trillion of your dollars, your grandchildren are going to have to pay the interest and the principal. In the meantime we are going to borrow the money from the Chinese and the Saudis, and what we are going to do is, we are going to save or create 3.6 million jobs. We should say wait a minute, Mr. President. Tell us the difference, how many jobs will be created versus how many jobs will be saved. How will you define saved jobs? How will you define created jobs? What's the difference in your calculation between private-sector jobs and public-sector jobs? How many are government jobs, how many are private-sector jobs? And when we look at the jobs growth and the job loss, it makes a difference what percentage of them, what part of them are private sector versus what part are public. So, we know that the President and Democrats, Mr. Speaker, promised that if the stimulus passed, unemployment wouldn't rise above 8 percent. But we know we saw unemployment bump up against 10 percent, and it bumped there for quite a while and then it drifted down just a scosche, Mr. Speaker, it dropped to 9.5 percent. Now we hear, well, 10 percent unemployment is the new norm. Really, that's not what these Democrats were saying in the House when we had 4.6 percent unemployment. They said that unemployment is too high. That's a failure of the Bush administration, 4.6 percent unemployment. Now we are at 9.5. Well it's a lower rate than the new norm of roughly 10. That's what's going on, the redefinition of the benchmarks and the metrics to evaluate our economy. But here are the facts, Mr. Speaker. There have been 3.42 million gross jobs lost since the stimulus plan was passed--that's that $787 billion rolled around, by the time you add in the loose change, of $1.2 trillion--3.42 million gross jobs lost, and 2.53 million net jobs lost. So some jobs have been created, some jobs have been lost, but there has been a net loss of 2.53 million jobs, jobs lost, and the gross domestic product growth has averaged 1.4 percent since the stimulus was passed, 1.4. Hmm, how good is that? I mean, I listen to the talking heads that constantly are yammering about how bad it was and how many jobs were divested during the Bush administration. One would think that the Bush administration, Mr. Speaker, would be a distant memory. But it's not, because we are reminded of it every day, including today, by the President, President Obama, when he came forward to demand that the Republicans get out of the way and extend unemployment benefits. Even the President, apparently, doesn't understand how he passed ObamaCare. He passed ObamaCare without any Republican votes anywhere, not in the House, not in the Senate. Republicans don't have the votes to block any of these ideas. So if the President had enough temerity to try to figure out how to pass ObamaCare, how can he, with a straight face, have the temerity to say to the American people Republicans are blocking the extension of unemployment benefits? We don't have the votes to do that. All it takes is Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, the ruling troika, to decide they want to pass unemployment benefits and they can do that, Mr. Speaker. There is no doubt about it. They have proven it. They proved it in March of this year when they passed ObamaCare, so who could be befuddled by this? Who could be mesmerized by the false allegations that are made by people who want to demagog against Republicans when the facts are before us. So, here is what we have, 1.4 percent growth, that's the growth that we have since the stimulus plan was passed. Now, we might be in an unusual situation. This is an unusual situation where we are in a economic situation that we could clearly call a recession, and it may or may not be more serious than the recession that we had when Ronald Reagan was launched into the White House because of the abysmal economic policies of Jimmy Carter. But what we saw then, 1982, for example, Mr. Speaker, 9.3 percent growth for multiple quarters from 1982 on in the Reagan recovery. The Obama recovery is 1.4 percent growth, 9.3 percent is the Reagan recovery. So which policy worked the best? The tax cuts that Reagan brought forward? Even though he was faced with Democrat majorities, he went to the American people and said, get the load off of the private sector in America. Let them produce, let them earn their keep. Let them keep what they earn, more of what they earn, 90 percent tax rates, can't have that. Otherwise, who would go to work if the House is going to take 90 percent out of every pot? Well, that's what was going on back in 1980 when Reagan was elected President. So here is what happened. Today we have 1.4 percent growth, tiny little growth, it is growth. I grant the President that, it is growth. The Reagan recovery was 9.3 percent growth. So I just did this tricky little math thing. I took 9.3 percent Reagan growth, divided it by 1.4 percent, Obama growth, and I came up with this number, 6.64. The Reagan recovery was 6.64 times greater than what we have seen so far in the Obama recovery. So what would be the cause of that? Ronald Reagan believed the private sector was the growth engine. President Obama believes that government is the growth engine. And so, Mr. Speaker, what's going on here is this: The President is a Keynesian economist on steroids. Whenever the economy doesn't grow the plan stimulus frequency, he believes we didn't borrow enough money. He believes we didn't spend enough money. He believes we didn't put our grandchildren far enough into debt, apparently. We didn't borrow enough from the Chinese, not enough from the Saudis, not enough from the world market. Think of it. We funded our way through the Great Depression and through World War II almost exclusively with American money, and here we are financing our way through this economic situation with Saudi Arabian and Chinese money, Mr. Speaker. So as I listen to the President, as he delivered his analysis of his economic theory, before the Republicans in the House conference on February 10, 2009, what he said was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, in the era of the New Deal, lost his nerve, that he got worried about spending too much money. He got worried about running America too deeply into debt. And because he was worried about spending too much money, FDR pulled back. And as he pulled back, he didn't spend enough money, according to the President, in the second half of the 1930s, which brought about a recession within a depression. Unemployment numbers went back up again, the growth in GDP went down again and along came World War II, which was the greatest stimulus plan ever. That's the composite of the presentation made by the President, February 10, 2009. Well, Mr. Speaker, we have elected a President who looks back at the Keynesian economic theories of the 1930s and draws an entirely different lesson than I draw. He draws the lesson that government can borrow money, spend money, stimulate the economy, and somehow all of this rolls over and lifts us all up, and a rising tide floats all boats, but you can raise the tide with Federal spending on borrowed money. I don't know if he has read into detail the history of what actually took place in the thirties, nor has he perhaps read the statements made by John Maynard Keynes himself who said, Mr. Speaker, I can solve for you the problem of all of the unemployment in America, I can solve all the unemployment in America by doing this: give me an abandoned coal mine, and I'll go in there and drill holes all over that abandoned coal mine, and I will fill those holes up with American cash. And then I will backfill the holes and fill that coal mine up with garbage. And now here will be all of this American currency buried in these holes in this abandoned coal mine, a coal mine filled up with garbage. And then he says, I'll turn the entrepreneurs loose to dig up the money. If that happens, look what happens: that means that people go to work, they start digging through the garbage, they find the money, they dig the money out. And it takes all kinds of support mechanisms out there to keep them going just like it might if you find a gold mine. Somebody's going to have to move the garbage out of the way. They'll get paid to do that even though they don't get at the cash. Somebody's going to have to be a doctor there to take care of the people who get cut, injured, wounded, or sick. There's another profession that goes on. Somebody's got to be the barber, somebody's got to run the saloon, somebody's got to run the restaurant, somebody's got to be the lawyer's office, and pretty soon you've got this stimulated economy that rolls out of the money that's dug out of the ground just as if they were mining gold. In fact, Keynes said--John Maynard Keynes, the Keynesian economist, the original one, said--well, he believed, I should say, rather than I try to quote him precisely--that when government spends money, the more foolish the spending, the better because if it's foolish enough, it doesn't compete with the private sector. So if government spends money and spends it foolishly, it stimulates the economy because it circulates it back into the economy. And if you spend it really dumb, it doesn't compete with the private sector. What kind of thinking is this? This is John Maynard Keynes, who lost his faith in that economic approach during FDR, but we have a President who missed that part of the lesson. We have a President who didn't read the ``bury the cash in the abandoned coal mine and fill the coal mine up with garbage'' scenario; or if he did, he took a different lesson from it than I did. And we have a President who does not see the economic continuum from production through the expenditures that builds the way Adam Smith saw it. But here's this--and Adam Smith had a beautiful approach to this--I trust the President, if he read ``Wealth of Nations,'' he surely didn't adhere to it, but Adam Smith's book from 1776--what a glorious time that was in our history of Western Civilization. One of the foundational principles of free enterprise was articulated in such a clear way by Adam Smith in ``Wealth of Nations.'' But our economy is not based upon consumption because consumption eventually, if you have a consumption economy, it's just one, huge, big chain letter. And you know what happens if you get in a room and there are 10 of you in the room, the first one that sells the chain letter-- if you can't go outside of the room--is going to be the one that makes the money. The last one to buy the chain letter doesn't have anybody to sell it to. So you can go on up the line--it was, I believe, Sam Clemens that said a nation can't get rich doing each other's laundry, neither can we get rich if we are this giant chain letter, where we simply charge each other for doing things and echo that money up and down the economy. What's the foundation and benefit of an economy, Mr. Speaker? It is this: any economy has to be rooted in the productivity of its people. And productivity comes in varying degrees. If it's a service economy, then it has to be a necessary service economy. If it's recreation, that's recreation that's spending for the disposal income. But here's what an economy has to have--what a people have to have--those components of our survival as a species. And so we need food, we need clothing, we need shelter, we need water, at a minimum, something to drink. What produces that? I'll submit, Mr. Speaker, that it comes from the land. All new wealth comes from the land--new wealth--and we value add to that new wealth again and again and again. Now, it's true that you can go out into the ocean and seine some fish, and that's kind of outside the land. So new wealth plus what you can seine out of the ocean represents all new wealth. And you can go cut some timber. You can mine it out of the Earth. It can be gold, it can be minerals, it can be coal, it can be limestone, it can be gravel. It can be a lot of different minerals that come out of the Earth. All new wealth comes from the land out of the Earth. But primarily it's that crop that grows every year that provides the food, clothing and shelter; and the water comes from the sky. That's necessary for the survival of humanity. They're the most precious commodities we have. When the economy comes down into a crunch and we have to make our decisions on what our priorities are, first we want something to drink, then we want something to eat, then we want some shelter, a place to get out of the cold or out of the heat, and then we want to put some clothes on because that protects us from the cold, not necessarily from the heat. Those are the things that are necessary. And where do they come from? Out of the soil every year. And it can be corn; it can be wheat. That's food. You feed it to livestock, and it comes back to you in a highly concentrated protein, value-added ag product that we see, concentrated and recycled and enhanced vegetables in the form of meat. Clothing, cotton, for example, all kinds of fiber, flax, those things that we use to make--and of course the wool that comes from sheep that are grazing off of the grass that comes out of the soil. So there's your food and there's your clothing. And we build shelter out of the same thing, wood to build a home with, for example, mine some rocks out and line them all up and put them together with some water and build a building. So that's all new wealth. The things we need for survival come out of the Earth itself, and most of them are regenerated every year out of the soil. And as this economy moves forward, then we value add to those products. A bushel of corn becomes all kinds of things, becomes ethanol--300 and some other products--and it gets woven into--well, let's just say corn sweetener that goes into our soda pop, all the way to the plastic forks that we use in the cafeteria. That comes out of corn. So we keep adding value and adding value as it multiplies up through the economy. And the funds that come from that pay for the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher, the nurse, the accountant, the mayor and the city council, the State legislatures. The list goes on and on and on, but it's value-added back down to the root of our economy. And the foundation of this is free enterprise capitalism and the invisible hand that makes the decision. If you want to sell a loaf of bread, you have to figure out how to make a better loaf of bread for the price that's on the shelf today, or sell an equal loaf of bread--or maybe not quite so high a quality--for a lesser price. And as those decisions are made, you change your mix in your bread and you put it on the shelf, you might change the wrapper, you might change the quality, you might lower the price to compete against your competition, and that invisible hand will go in there and take that loaf of bread off the shelf. Well, here I've got one for $1.25, I'm going to take that one because this one that's for $1.40 I don't like it as good. Decisions get made, supply and demand. The baker who is meeting that supply, the one who has the high quality for the best price, judging by the--if you trust the judgment of the consumer--will be the one that's baking more and more loaves of bread until somebody figures out how to do it better. It's an automatic adjustment of supply and demand, Mr. Speaker, not understood, I don't think, by the President of the United States, by the people that surround him in the White House. I think they are pretty much befuddled at how this all works. They think this economy is a giant chain letter. They think that there is always another sucker out there that you can sell the idea that you can grow government. And if you grow government and increase borrowing and increase spending, somehow magically this economy will sprout and grow and there will be a wizard result of a President who is a Keynesian economist on steroids. Not to be, Mr. Speaker, because you cannot defeat the law of economic gravity, which is, if you give people an opportunity to produce and succeed, that's what they will do. If you take that opportunity away and you decide you're going to call all the shots at the government level, then people are going to do what they have to do that's ordered by the government. How many economies and how many societies have we seen collapse because they believed that central command could run the show with a bunch of intellectual elitists better than the invisible hand of the housewife, the househusband who goes in to buy that loaf of bread that I spoke about earlier? Now, there's a magic here. There's a magic in America. There's a magic that comes from our freedom, from our liberty, from having the freedom to make these decisions ourselves. And some of us have walked through the grocery store and looked and thought, I can bake that bread better than anybody there, and went home and started up a bakery, and they've competed. And some of us have gone to the gas station and decided, I don't like the service here, and I don't like the price and I think I can do a better job, and gone back and opened up a gas station. And some of us have bought a product like, let's say, a disk or a golf cart and decided, I can make this a lot better. I think I'll start making them and selling them. And pretty soon, there's somebody selling golf carts out there that weren't on the market before. This is free enterprise. This is the beauty of this system that Adam Smith so clearly articulated in Wealth of Nations that every American should understand deeply. It should be in our soul, Mr. Speaker. It should be in our soul. It's so deeply a part of the American culture and experience, that if one would go to the USCIS, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and look at the flashcards that they offer, there, in those flashcards, they show that you can study to become an American citizen for a naturalization test. And these flashcards, well, they're nice glossy things, about like that, and you can look at one side and it'll say, Who's the father of our country? Snap it over to the other side, George Washington. Another one, Who emancipated the slaves? Abraham Lincoln. Number 11, question number 11 is, What is the economic system of America? Snap that flash card over, it says, Free enterprise capitalism. Hah. How about that? The United States Citizenship Immigration Services understands this. I don't know that you can become a citizen of the United States, naturalized, and not know free enterprise capitalism is our basic economic system. We're not socialism. We're not communism. We're not Marxism. We're not managed economies. We're not the Federal Government takes over the private sector. We're not the President of the United States swallows up eight Fortune 500 companies and threatens to swallow up BP on top of it. We're not a country that swallows up--well, we are, we did, but we shouldn't--these student loans, all the students loans in America. By the way, we had a vote last week about the Federal flood insurance program. Back in the early sixties, the only flood insurance available in America was flood insurance that was offered by the private sector. The Federal Government decided to get involved, and so they offered a competing model of flood insurance. Early sixties, '63, I think. In a few short years, there were no private sector flood companies providing flood insurance anymore. If you didn't want to do business with the Federal Government buying flood insurance, if you didn't like their premiums or their coverage, you were out of luck. And if you borrowed money from a national bank, you were compelled to buy flood insurance if that bank said you have to because that was the Federal standard. And so the Federal Government took over, in the name of providing another piece of competition, another place to market, flood insurance. The Federal Government took over 100 percent of the flood insurance in America. And now they're $19.2 billion in the red, and we have to legislate here in the House of Representatives and impose flood insurance on more people and get more people to pay the premium so that flood insurance could eventually get back into the black, which there's nothing in the bill last week that gets us there. And if that pattern wasn't good enough, Mr. Speaker, about what happens when the Federal Government gets involved in the insurance business, then I'd direct your attention to the student loan program. Now, just not that many years ago, all the student loans were private, set up separate from government, and operating through the lending institutions. And we had a pretty good program, especially the Iowa student loan program, very, very good program. Their losses were minimal. They worked hard with people to make sure they got those payments coming in. They helped people get the funding to go on and get an education. They performed a service, and they minimized the losses, the student loan program, Iowa, and many other States for that matter. But George Miller of California and a number of others decided we really can't trust the private sector to provide student loans, so we'll take it over. Well, a couple, 3 years ago they took a bite out of that apple and took ahold of part of the student loan program in America and passed it here in the House and in the Senate. And then, the coup de grace came in the reconciliation package that came from the Senate. It was the one that came that had to do with the last component of ObamaCare that I spoke about about 40 minutes ago, Mr. Speaker. The reconciliation plan has in it, had in it, has in it the elimination of private sector student loans. All of them now go through the United States Department of Education. The Federal Government has taken over all of the student loans in America. Now, I don't know if anybody can give me an example of when the Federal Government got involved in a business to provide more competition and didn't end up swallowing it all up, but I can tell you two definitive answers here that I've seen in my lifetime. Flood insurance, when I entered high school, zero percent of the flood insurance in America was government; 100 percent was private. Well, about the time I got out of high school or some years after that, 100 percent of the flood insurance in America is government. There is no private sector in it at all, zero. They've wiped out the private sector competition in flood insurance. And then we see it happen with the student loan program. Again, under the same rules to provide some competition, we don't think there's a legitimate marketplace. We'll get some competition so that the government can compete against the private sector. We'll get the private sector honest. Well, no, they got the private sector to be gone. They legislated the private sector out of existence and gave over the entire student loan program to the Department of Education. And here we are with ObamaCare. ObamaCare. The President of the United States said he just wants to provide one more competitor for insurance, for health insurance for the people in America. I don't know that he would have answered the question, but the White House press corps failed us time and time again. A number of questions I would like to ask him are, Mr. President, how many insurance companies exist in the United States of America when you make the statement that we need more competition? If he knew the answer and gave an honest one, it would have been 1,300, 1,300 health insurance companies in America providing health insurance for a large percentage of Americans. Eighty-five or more percent of us are satisfied with what we had. And of those 1,300 companies, they produce, in the aggregate, 100,000 policy varieties that the health insurance consumer could evaluate in order to buy the policy of their choice. And the President wanted more competition. 1,300 companies is not enough. 1,300 companies is not enough. 100,000 policies are not enough. Let's have 1,301 companies and 100,010 or 100,012 policies available. That would keep the rest of them honest; right? Don't we know this? Haven't we seen enough of this? Haven't we seen the flood insurance program taken over by the Federal Government? Haven't we seen the Federal Government swallow up and nationalize three large investment banks, AIG, the insurance company, to the tune of $180 billion? $180 billion. Taking over the balance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and making you, the taxpayer--and you are a taxpayer, Mr. Speaker--liable for a contingent liability of $5.5 trillion. Three large investment banks: AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Now we're at General Motors and Chrysler, another couple of Fortune 500 companies swallowed up by the Federal Government. Shares ripped out of the hands of the secured creditors and handed over on a silver platter to the trade unions who had no investment, who had no risk, who made no concessions; 17\1/2\ percent of General Motors owned now by the unions. The secured creditors aced out. And the White House dictated the terms into the bankruptcy court, at least for Chrysler, and very likely General Motors, but we have sworn testimony on Chrysler that the terms going in were dictated by the Federal Government. The terms going out were exactly the terms dictated by the Federal Government. Yes, there were hearings. There were witnesses in the bankruptcy court, but not one component of the bankruptcy of Chrysler, not one piece of it, was changed as a result of the sworn testimony before the bankruptcy hearing. The Federal Government going in evaluated and assessed the asset value of Chrysler. They were the only ones that were evaluating the asset value of Chrysler going in. They took the secured creditors and ripped their assets out of their hands, handed them over to the unions. And at the tail end of the bankruptcy who's the only buyer? The Federal Government. The Federal Government appraises it going in, sets the terms of the bankruptcy, no amount of testimony changes anything, the bankruptcy court accepted the dictates of the President or his people, and on the other end the only buyer is the Federal Government, who in their magnanimity hands over shares again to the United Auto Workers. This is free enterprise capitalism? This qualifies for the flash card of what drives the economy in America? I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. And I'm not done. Three large investment banks, AIG, the insurance company, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, the student loan program. That comes to more than a third of the private-sector activity according to Professor Boyes at Arizona State University. And along comes ObamaCare. ObamaCare. The nationalization of all of these entities, all Fortune 500 companies, and now it comes to the nationalization, Mr. Speaker, of your skin. Your skin and everything inside it taken over by the Federal Government. And the very taxation of the outside started the first of July. If you walk into a tanning salon in America, 10 percent of that goes to Uncle Sam to help pay for ObamaCare, which is going to be some kind of revenue saving operation. We need to, Mr. Speaker, repeal this ObamaCare. We need to pull it out by the roots. I have, in conjunction with Michele Bachmann, worked intensively to repeal ObamaCare. She introduced a repeal on the first day. I introduced a repeal on the first week. We have a discharge petition at the well. It's discharge petition number 11. We have at least 136 signatures on it. I wouldn't be surprised if that went over 140. We are on our way to 218 signatures to repeal ObamaCare. A discharge petition can circumvent a block by the Speaker. If 218 signatures appear on discharge petition number 11, that means ObamaCare comes to the floor of the House, where it would certainly be repealed in the House, however difficult it is to get it through the Senate. We need it gone. We need to put an end to ObamaCare in America. We have to pull it out by the roots, lock, stock, and barrel, not one vestige, not one particle of DNA of ObamaCare left behind. ObamaCare has become a malignant tumor, and it threatens to metastasize on this free people, this formerly free people. And if we are to have the vitality that comes from American liberty, we can't be living with the dependency that's created by ObamaCare. And Mr. Speaker, I pledge my strongest effort to repeal ObamaCare completely and entirely, to rip it out by the roots, to quote the last few words of the repeal bill that is the discharge petition, ``as if it had never been enacted.'' So Mr. Speaker, the American people demand the repeal of ObamaCare, I demand the repeal of ObamaCare. I ask my colleagues to join in the repeal of ObamaCare and to sign onto discharge petition number 11 so we can get there, give the American people back their liberty, let us become the vital people with the vitality that we have had in the past to take us to the next level of our economic destiny. Mr. Speaker, that is our charge. That's our responsibility. And that will be the call and the cry of the American people come November.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's a privilege to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House, and a lot of subjects come up here. About every imaginable thing has been debated here on the floor. I've listened to a lot of the dialogue that's unfolded in the previous hour, and I appreciate my colleagues' presentation or discussion of especially the economic and the spending situation, the dire straits that America is in. And it seems ironic to me, Mr. Speaker, that about a year ago, in fact a little more than a year ago, I sat in the office in Berlin just outside Reichstag and had a conversation with the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, who made the argument to us that the United States is spending too much money, that the financial crisis--this, I believe, was actually February or March of 2009, and she made the argument that the solution for our economic crisis was not the Federal Government spending more money, Mr. Speaker, but it was about some targeted tax cuts that they had provided for their socialized economy. European socialized economy, government-managed business, public- private partnerships, that's been some of the problems as to why they haven't had the economic vitality that we've had in the United States, and still as this financial situation unfolded, brought to the American people's attention about September 19, 2008, before the Presidential election I might add, and these discussions were taking place in February and then again in May of 2009 with representatives of the European Union and the leadership over Western Europe, whom I've often been critical of because they didn't let free enterprise flourish, had too many government regulations, had too many taxes, and because of that their economy was bogged down. Entrepreneurs weren't allowed to have the prosperity that they would have in the United States. Our economy grew, their economy stagnated, and that's what we've seen unfold over the last generation or so in the economic comparison between Europe and the United States. But I found myself in the improbable position of listening to the leadership of the European Union and Western Europe lecture Americans that we should spend less money, not more money. Their plan, I believe, was $480 billion altogether, $400 billion in loans and $80 billion in targeted spending. And the advice was America needs to hold down the spending and we need to adopt a more fiscally responsible budget, spend less money, provide less debt, and not this pass on to the next generations. Well, that was a year and several months ago when this began, Mr. Speaker, and during the last couple of weeks, we've heard that lecture again from the same person, Angela Merkel of Germany. I'm glad she's making this case. It ought to hit home to our President of the United States. It ought to hit all of us here in this country that we in America, this Congress, over my vociferous objections and that of many of my colleagues voted ``no'' on a $700 billion TARP fund and voted ``no'' on a $787 billion economic stimulus plan, and in the middle of that, while it was framed, we watched the government takeover of the three large investment banks and AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and General Motors and Chrysler and the student loan program. We watched the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it in the form of ObamaCare, and the government has now subsequently, within that list that I've just identified, swallowed up over 50 percent of the former private sector activity of our economy and more to come. Financial services, reaching out to tap in and regulate every credit transaction in America and setting up boards and a whole new regulatory shield, another layer of regulation for our financial institutions, for our large banks, and to a lesser degree, for our independent banks and smaller banks, but not for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac where a lot of this problem came from, where the taxpayers of the United States now assumed a $7.5 trillion contingent liability if Fannie and Freddie should go under. We've dumped billions into them, $40 billion to $50 billion comes to mind perhaps for each. And if they should become insolvent, the American taxpayers have to keep dumping money into Fannie and Freddie to prop them up because they're part of the takeover where they used to be private. At one time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were private. Then they were quasi-government. Now, they're completely under the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government. All of this has taken place in the last year and half or a little more. We watched it happen. I've argued against it every step of the way, so have some of my colleagues, and quite a number of my good, reliable colleagues have come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and made this case, made it over and over and over again. But this situation that Europe has where they have loaned money to each other, the economy of Greece has gone down and been propped up by the European Union, and the economy of Spain has the highest unemployment--I think Greece might have eclipsed them, but for a long time Spain had the highest unemployment in the industrialized world. Their economy is wobbling. Ireland's economy is wobbling, and the European Union countries have loaned money to each other. It's almost like being in a poker game. And let's just say that, because of all the overhead that's taken out by government, all the regulations taken out by government, if you all sit down in a poker game and the house takes, let's say, 45 percent of every pot, sooner or later the people sitting around the table that are trying to exchange those dollars are exchanging IOUs instead because the house has taken the money. Government has swallowed up too much of the proceeds of the private sector, and then they have loaned money to each other, and the United States is borrowing money from around the world. In fact, the amount of money that is borrowed from the Chinese is now approaching $1 trillion. And, yes, Americans have invested into American debt. But this debt is too hard a burden for us to carry. I put a polling question up on my Web site. The news is full every day of the environmental calamity in the gulf and it goes on every day, and it is sad, and it is tragic, and I think we should turn all our efforts to shutting off the leak and cleaning up the mess, Mr. Speaker. But I asked in the polling question, what is the greatest threat to America, the gulf oil leak or the debt and deficit that this country is carrying? And about 80 percent of the respondents in the poll will say the debt and deficit is a greater threat to America than the gulf oil leak. That gives me encouragement. That tells me the American people are on target here; that they understand the priorities and they understand the long-term implications of the debt and the deficit that we are carrying now in this economy. But, Mr. Speaker, those are some of the issues that pick up on the previous speakers within the previous hour, and some concerns come to mind also aside from the economics. And perhaps I will come back to the economic side of this, but I think we need to talk about the rule of law for a little while here tonight. I often come here to this floor and talk about the pillars of American exceptionalism, those essential components that have made America great. And I have listed them: Freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, the right to keep and bear arms, which thankfully just this week the Supreme Court has reinforced. First the Heller case established that it is an individual right to keep and bear arms, and in the case that was settled just this week, I think just yesterday is when the news came out, is that the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, affects not just the reach of the Federal Government to diminish the gun ownership rights of its citizens, but also the Second Amendment is guaranteed to protect the citizen's right to keep and bear arms from the reach of any political subdivision in America, whether it be States, municipalities, counties, whatever the political subdivisions are. So the Second Amendment has been established and strengthened twice within this last half a decade or so, first the Heller case and now the case that came out this week. The Second Amendment is another pillar of American exceptionalism, because we know an armed population can defend itself against tyranny. So the pillars of American exceptionalism being freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances; the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and we will go right on up the line within the Bill of Rights. Some of them, including the rights to property, which have been subverted by the Kelo decision, and I hope one day that decision is overturned by a Supreme Court that is more prudent and the past Supreme Court that made that decision; the protection against double jeopardy and the right to be tried by a jury of our peers--the list goes on. But most of those pillars of American exceptionalism are within the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There are a couple of other components that are part of American exceptionalism that are not defined in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, and that is something where one of them, one of them, Mr. Speaker, is enshrined in the flashcards that are produced by USCIS, the United States Citizenship Immigration Services. These flashcards rights are little training cards, like you would imagine or see in a classroom that you can learn off of. The flashcard that says 2 plus 2, you snap it over and it says 4; 4 plus 4 is 8; and the list goes on. But the flashcards for learning to become a naturalized American citizen ask simple questions, questions that you would need to know the answer to if you were going to be a naturalized American citizen. And it would start with, who is the Father of our country? And you flip the card over, George Washington. Who emancipated the slaves? Abraham Lincoln. Question Number 11, I believe, is, what is the economic system of the United States? Flip that card over, and on the other side it says free enterprise capitalism, Mr. Speaker. The economic system of the United States. That is a pillar of American exceptionalism. If we didn't have free enterprise capitalism, we would not be a great nation. Our economy could not have competed with that of the rest of the world. We could not have built the industrial giant that supported our people and our troops and the military around the world to win World War II. We would not have emerged as victors in World War II without free enterprise being a driving force that let the industry in America fulfill and supply the demand that we had for 16 million mostly men and also women in uniform in World War II. We went all over the world with our economy, with our people. We brought American products everywhere in the world. There was a chance for profit. Our factories were running at a fever pitch day and night. We were building bombers and tanks and ships and parachutes, and we were providing supplies for a lot of the rest of the world whose industry had been destroyed. And at the end of World War II, we were the only industrialized country in the world that had an intact industry. And the dollar was golden. The greenback was strong. It was a silver certificate at the time. And we saw American culture, American values, and American products spread all throughout the world. We provided a large share of the world's manufacturing and industry, and a lot of that was driven because we maintained intact that pillar of American exceptionalism called free enterprise capitalism, that freedom to produce and earn, and, yes, get wealthy, if you can figure out how to do it, keep some of what you earn, keep a lot of what you earn. And, by the way, the unemployment rate at the end of World War II in this country was 1.2 percent. And when people argue that we have been at historically low unemployment levels and argue that 4.6 percent is that, or that that is a normal unemployment level, I point them back to the lowest level that we have seen in history, 1.2 percent at the end of World War II. And then the number went up when a lot of our soldiers came home. But free enterprise capitalism is what has driven the industrialized might of the United States. It has driven our military. It has taken our culture around the world. The desire to trade and market and profit from it has taken the American culture everywhere in the world. Free enterprise capitalism is an exceptional pillar of American exceptionalism. And another one of those pillars of American exceptionalism is a legitimate, legal immigration system. The Constitution requires that Congress establish a uniform immigration system, so Congress is to do that. And I would say we have done that. It is uniform. It is consistent with the Constitution. We have an Immigration Reform Act that was passed here in this Congress in 1996 and signed into law. We need to have an executive branch that will follow the law. But the beauty of America's immigration system has been that, up until the last generation or so, maybe the last generation-and-a-half, Mr. Speaker, it has been difficult to come to the United States of America. And the legal system that we had actually screened people out, those who came into Ellis Island, the millions that came into Ellis Island. And I can think of one day that set the record: 11,757 came through the great hall at Ellis Island on, I think I can remember the year and the date, April 15, 1907. A massive number, just like 11,757 people through there. But day by day by day they came through. About 2 percent of those who had actually been screened before they got on the ship to come to the United States, to immigrate into the United States, even though they were screened, they were screened for good health, for sanity, so-to-speak, they were screened so they had an ability to take care of themselves, they arrived here in the United States of America. America a century ago was a meritocracy. We didn't have a welfare system that had at this point evolved into a welfare state. It was a meritocracy. We wanted people that were physically healthy, mentally healthy, able to come here and get a job and go to work or start a business and sustain themselves and provide for themselves. They were screened by conditions that we had then before they got on the ship, generally in Europe at that time, and they were screened again when they arrived at Ellis Island. They were checked physically. Sometimes, yes, they were rushed through. But even though they were screened before they came, about 2 percent were sent back to their home country because they didn't meet the standards here in America. But almost all of them who came to the United States, almost all of them aspired to the American Dream. And many of them may have believed that the streets were paved in gold and gotten here and were disappointed to find out they were actually paved in dirt, dust, mud, sometimes cobblestones, sometimes horse manure. It wasn't quite the beautiful place that was advertised on the brochures in Europe, but they came. And some of them went back voluntarily because they didn't find the promise that they thought they had. But all of them had a dream--almost all of them had a dream. And they shared the American Dream. And when they came here, they brought with them the dreamer's vitality, the dreamer's energy, the dreamer's stick- to-it-ive-ness, and the conviction that they could start up a life for themselves, make a life for themselves, and leave this world a better place for their children than it was for them. It's always been an embodiment and a component of the American Dream. So the legal immigration that came to America did this, Mr. Speaker. And this is the verbal definition of one of the pillars of American exceptionalism--legal immigration skimmed the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization that sent people to the United States. When that happened, we got their vigor, we got their dreams, we got some of their capital, we got all of their work, and we've got their descendents that grew up here in America with that same dream. And even though it might have been first generation immigrants that might have lived in a shantytown and worked in a boiler factory somewhere, they worked to make life better and they pushed their children to get an education and they taught them that America has embraced us and we have our freedom, we have our liberty here. And you need to defend our country and go out and make sure that you're going to grow up in a better opportunity than the first generation had, and make sure the third generation has more opportunities than the second and the fourth generation more opportunities than the third. And so on and so on. And so it has been. It's been true with family after family, generation after generation. And it's embodied in a way in my family where I have a grandmother that came from Germany. She raised six sons and a daughter. Of those six sons, five of them put on the uniform to defend our country. Some of them went back to Germany in the Second World War. One was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. My father went to the South Pacific. They didn't hesitate. They didn't hesitate to go take on the country that their mother had come from. They knew and they believed that they owed this country a debt of gratitude, and they demonstrated it. And that's part of the greatness of America, too. But that pillar of American exceptionalism, that vitality of the Americans that come here infused with the generational tradition of that vitality, and the multiple generations, has been a significant part of American exceptionalism. And I look at the roots of these causes for American exceptionalism, and I often take this back to the Age of Reason in Greece and Roman law and how the knowledge base that was established by rational thought in the Age of Reason in Greece and the Roman law found its way through the Dark Ages and emerged in the Age of Enlightenment, the English-speaking component of the Age of Enlightenment, to be specific, Mr. Speaker. As those qualities arrived here in the New World, in America, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and a continent that had at that time conceived only unlimited natural resources, low taxation, no regulation, a concept of manifest destiny, of having been the beneficiary of the Age of Enlightenment at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and had the foundation of our Judeo-Christian values arrived here with those immigrants--most of them; that foundation of value system that comes from the birth of Christ and the redemption that comes with Christ and 1,500 years later also the Protestant reformation and Martin Luther that taught the Protestant work ethic that was picked up by the Catholics. And the Catholics did pretty good with the Protestant work ethic, is my point, Mr. Speaker. So we've seen this vitality in this giant petri dish of America every component that we can imagine that has been positive has been here in this country, put here by providence--the natural resources, the understanding of the Adam Smithian component of economic theory, the supply and demand invisible hand component of economic theory, the Age of Reason from Greece and the Roman law that found their way through the Dark Ages and emerged as the Age of Enlightenment, all here in the United States of America. It was unlimited natural resources that go along with it. Those components, driven by the vitality of the immigrants that have come here, have been essential to this Nation rising through the challenges of the ages and facing off against the world when we didn't see ourselves as a world power. We didn't see ourselves as a world power when we found ourselves in the Spanish-American War. And so we have the legacy of that that exists today. Puerto Rico is one of those components. The Philippines is another. That goes around the world pretty well. We didn't view ourselves as a global power, but we had a global reach after having had the Maine sunk in Havana Harbor. America had a global reach. Even though we didn't, again, see ourselves as a global power, we got in at the tail end of World War I and made a difference and changed the balance. And now we were a player in the world that needed to be contended with. It's not to go out and find a war to do that. They came to us because we had to defend the liberty and the freedom in the world and align ourselves with people that believed in the same values. And a generation after World War I, along came World War II. Now, that was a cataclysmic conflict where tens of millions died, and America emerged as the world power and the dominant force in the world until such time as the Cold War began. And even then, 45 years of the Cold War, a Cold War that started I think we can see it with the Berlin Airlift, which the anniversary of it just began a few days ago, but the United States stood strong and we faced off against the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and there was a game going on, a very high-stakes, life-or-death game; even a life-or-death for the planet game going on. And at the end of it, in about 1984, Jean Kirkpatrick, as Ambassador to the United Nations appointed under Reagan, had stepped down from that post, and she said as she stepped down--and this will be a paraphrase of her quote, Mr. Speaker. She said, What's going on between the United States and the Soviet Union--speaking of the Cold War--is chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the only question is: Will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before they checkmate us militarily? That race was going on and the Soviet Union was seeking to build more and more missiles to try and gain an advantage that would cause us to have to concede to them or capitulate on foreign policy, at least, at a minimum; but Ronald Reagan came in and pushed the resurgence of our national defense, built the missiles back up again, and in the process of doing so, November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. That's the power of an economy and the power of an ideology over a managed economy, a communist economy, a central command economy. That's the power of it all, Mr. Speaker. This country has been a powerfully strong superpower in the world and the only unchallenged superpower in the world in the aftermath of the Wall coming down on November 9, 1989, and subsequently the implosion of the Soviet Union. It took it about another year and a half to finally get itself wound down. But we are standing here as the unchallenged superpower in the world in significant and essential part because we have a free enterprise economy. Well, we had a free enterprise economy, and now we are getting a managed economy that's someplace over there. It looks like it's to the left of Europe. They're lecturing us, Don't spend too much money. They didn't argue we shouldn't do so much nationalization. They're guilty of that, too. But there have been a lot more dollars' worth of private sector economy nationalized by this President than by Hugo Chavez. And that's not a stretch, Mr. Speaker. It's simply a fact that as Hugo Chavez is blown away by tens of millions, hundreds of billions of dollars. And how do we get this economy back? I'll submit that it isn't going to happen under this President. President Obama is not going to let go of companies that have been taken over by this Federal Government. I asked the question of the Secretary of the Treasury, under oath, and actually I presented it in a written form because we ran out of time in the hearing. The question is, President Obama was elected at least in part because of his challenge to President Bush for President Bush allegedly not having an exit strategy in Iraq. We've all heard that. That rhetoric is old and we've forgotten about it, but it's back there, and the Record is full of it, Mr. Speaker. So my question to the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, was: If the President has been elected in part for his criticism of President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq, what is the exit policy for the Obama administration to divest themselves from the takeover of the banks, insurance companies, Fannie and Freddie, the car companies that I have listed here earlier in this dialogue, Mr. Speaker. What is their strategy for divesting themselves and giving the private sector back to the private sector? The answer that I received-- and granted, they're buried, and they're probably short staffed. They took a couple of months. I will give the Secretary of the Treasury credit. At least he answered my letter. Often I don't get letters from the other Cabinet members that we have. And the answer essentially was this--a couple of months to get the letter back, a seven-page letter, and it boils down to: He would know when the time was right to divest the Federal Government from the ownership, management or control of these entities that have been nationalized. He would know when the time was right. There is no written criteria, and he could make the decision then at the right time. In other words, it's really not your business. I'm not going to write down a formula. We may or may not have an intent to divest the Federal Government from the banks and AIG and Fannie and Freddie. They don't intend to let go of Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie have an implicit guarantee--actually, it's now a specific guarantee. The taxpayers will bail them out. They are not covered in this financial regulatory reform bill, the Barney Frank/Chris Dodd bill that's designed to solve our economic woes. I have looked down through some of these things that are not very well known about what's in the financial regulatory reform bill. Out of the House, we know it as H.R. 4173. We know that there is a conference report. They found out that even though the best judgment of the conference committee produced a result, the votes aren't there. So they're going back to change the conference report and see if they can find the votes to get it passed. I am troubled a little by the procedure, Mr. Speaker. But here are some things that are in it, and they're not likely to come out. I want to speak to the issue of the focus on special provisions for women and minorities that are in the bill. Now I point out, Mr. Speaker, that I've dealt with this for a long time, with set- asides and had to compete against provisions that are written into Federal contracts as set-asides. I have spent a lot of my life as a contractor doing site development work of all kinds, earthmoving, pipe, concrete work, underground work, demolition work. We would do some seeding, some fencing, those kinds of things, and some concrete work. I bid a lot of contracts in my professional life, and I can think of one in particular that I will use as an example. The Federal Government has set aside special components. Sometimes a contract is set aside for women or minorities, and no one else can bid it. Now, I had a small company, and I had to start from scratch. I didn't have any capital to begin with. I actually had a negative net worth of $5,000. I convinced a banker to loan me enough money to buy me an old beaten-up bulldozer, and then I started to work. So I had to build capital with sweat equity and moxie and anything else that could be done that was legal and moral and ethical. I tried to outwork my competition and outsmart my competition and slowly build up an operation where I got a second machine, a little capital, another machine, hire another man, buy another machine, hire another man, and get some capital underneath me to get to the point where I could bond these projects. And there are a lot of sad stories along the way. It's a very difficult thing to build the capital to be able to bid some of these projects. But all the way along the way, I knew that I was disadvantaged. Big money had a big advantage over on me. The people that were wired in and entrenched, they had a significant advantage over me. I was trying to crack into that without the capital, was short on equipment, short on manpower, strong on ambition, willing to work and work longer and harder hours than anybody else would. But the deck was stacked against me. That's why there aren't a lot of people in the business, because the system and the structure is set in such a way with capital requirements, it's capital intensive with equipment and meeting the regulations for employees, et cetera. So I know how hard that is. But I would need a project that fit our equipment. It needed to be smaller projects. When it got into the millions of dollars, we didn't have the ability to bond that, especially in the beginning. And so I needed those projects that were down there--$100,000 project, $3,200,000 project, maybe a $300,000 project. And so I would look for the bid notifications to pick up those projects that fit the things that we could do, that were small enough that we could bid the project. And quite often, I would draw a set of plans and there would be a provision on there that would say ``minority set-aside.'' I couldn't bid the projects because it's a project set aside for a minority or maybe a woman-owned business or sometimes either/or. And I have gotten a little sensitive to this. I recall a larger project. When I got to the point where I could bond the larger projects--and this is a lifetime of work to get to that point, by the way. And I drew a set of plans for a sewer lagoon project in a city, and I remember right where it is and a lot of the details of the specs. But I was familiar with the engineering firm, familiar with the specifications, so I sat down to put the project together. I spent 4 days getting quotes from suppliers and subcontractors, calculating the volume and the quantities that are there, putting the bid together as best I knew, looking at the project and negotiating to make sure that I drew all the best bids that I could from subcontractors, all the best bids that I could from suppliers. And when I put that together, a man has an honorable responsibility to honor the low bid. I'm bidding for a low bid. The people who bid to me as subcontractors and suppliers, I want their best bid. I want their low bid, and I will honor it, and I will keep it confidential until such time as the bids are opened. That's the standard that needs to exist in the industry. So I spent 4 days doing that. I got my numbers all together. And right before it was time to submit my bid, I gave one last read through the specifications, and in there, it said that there was a percentage of set-asides for minority contractors. I looked--and I think I could guess at the percentage, but I probably better not guess. It is not a large percentage. I will say under 20. But to find a minority contractor that would do a small part of that project--even if I handed it to him--was an impossibility. I went to the list of contractors. I worked the phones. I called other people that I knew, suppliers and contractors, and said, Where is somebody out here that can do the seeding or the fencing or the riprap work or take on any component of this job, any part of it? Is there somebody that can, somebody that will? The answer was no. There was nobody that could be found. And I had to take that 4 days' work and just toss it in the trash and forget it because it was set aside for minority contractors, the component of it was that I couldn't meet. Now, if somebody was a large construction company and they had an especially established minority contractor that they used to plug in to those circumstances, they had a bidding advantage, and those types of situations got set up. They got set up in part because the government created a false demand, and we couldn't find people that would do the job, and so there were sometimes contractors set up that didn't have a desire or a knowledge. They were just a straw man that was used to meet regulations.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, my amendment is simple in its language and is perhaps a little more complicated when one starts to understand all the freedom that would be exercised, should my amendment become law. And it simply does this: my amendment eliminates--it strikes all limitations on Federal election campaign contributions. It takes out the $2,000 limit, the $5,000 limit, all of the limits set there because it reverts us back to the constitutional principle that contributions to campaigns are free speech, funding is free speech. And to limit our ability as individual Americans with constitutional rights, to make contributions to political campaigns is an unconstitutional limitation. And by the way, to react to a Supreme Court decision by bringing a piece of legislation like this, which is an immediate and exactly a reaction to the Citizens United case, I think tells America where this Congress would like to go in limiting the constitutional rights of the people in this country. I am for reestablishing those rights to the maximum amount. That's what this allows, the individuals and the corporations that choose to donate. We don't touch anything that has to do with disclosure. I am for full disclosure. I am for sunshine. And I think the American people and the voters can discern where they want to place their vote and where they want to place their political contributions if we just allow for the disclosure. But the limitations are unconstitutional limitations, and this amendment simply strikes all of those limitations that are in statute that are unconstitutional, Mr. Chairman. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would make a point in response to the remarks of the gentlelady from California that--and of course my recollection of the Citizens United case is that they didn't challenge those constitutional limits. There may have been a comment in the decision, but I don't believe they challenged them before the Court. And I would add to this that to put arbitrary limits on PAC contributions at $5,000, and let inflation then over time render those contributions to be of minimal value, even though they've indexed individual contributions to increase supposedly with inflation, distorts the balance that they tried to create in the very legislation itself. It shows what's wrong with contribution limits. Additionally, we just need full disclosure. We have that disclosure. But what's happening is, people like George Soros are pouring money into their entities and their organizations. Their voice is heard. They're not limited. They're exactly advantaged by the current scenario that we have. If we eliminate the limits, what we're able to do then is hold the candidates accountable for the expenditure of those dollars and directly analyze the positions of the candidates and their contributors. This way it's distorted. The real sunlight is to require the candidates to report when they do that reporting. Then we'll be able to evaluate their positions rather than having that money laundered through, or I'll say diffused through, a whole series of entities that are structured out there, like 527s, for example, that have added to the acrimony of our campaigns, and they've diminished the honesty that we have in our elections. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Of course I disagree with the gentlelady from California. We need to allow these contributions to go into the campaign accounts rather than be laundered through a whole series of entities that are set up to diffuse and confuse the actual source of the voice. And the distortion that comes with this--it may be that this has been law for 41 years. But Citizens United, the ink is barely dry, and the Democrats are here on the floor seeking to gain a legislative advantage when the Supreme Court has said, Give the people an opportunity to have their voice heard in the elections. Even so far as in the underlying bill, this bill requires CEOs of organizations to appear in the ads and state their name and organization two different times. CEOs. The President of the United States himself said: I don't want to talk to the CEOs; they'll just tell me what they want me to hear. So now we are legislating, telling the CEOs what they have to say twice in an ad. I don't know how we can afford to buy commercials and ads to run in a political campaign if our CEOs have to spend all of their time in them. And especially when the President says he doesn't want to listen to the CEOs. I think it is an ironic situation that we have. I want to eliminate the limits. That is what my amendment does. It strikes all of the limits that are there in the current statute, 441(a) limitations on contributions and expenditures, a dollar limitation of the contributions, strikes them all, and it leaves all of the reporting intact so that the people in the country can make that determination that it is not constricted by amounts that are unnecessarily plugged into this legislation, and it lets people in America have a full- throated vote of liberty when they go to the polls to decide who they want to direct the destiny of the United States of America here in the United States Congress. I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren).

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it's an honor to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and picking up where my colleagues left off, they have given, I think, a good presentation over the last 60 minutes that covered a lot of important territory with regard to the budget and the spending. I think they've made the point that since the rules of the House required a budget resolution, this House has never before failed to pass a budget. There are political reasons for that. I happen to see a quote over on the wall that I hadn't picked up before, and it didn't attribute it to anyone, but I am pretty sure it wasn't a Republican, Madam Speaker. It was a quote that, generally speaking, was this, that, well, until the deficit reduction commission would meet and produce a decision, we couldn't possibly pass a budget here in the House. And that would be--oh, let me see, a week or two or so after the election in November. Imagine, Congress can't do its work unless the President appoints a deficit commission, and that deficit commission couldn't possibly return a recommendation to this Congress until after the people have spoken. It's amazing to me, Madam Speaker. The people have spoken. The people in this country have elected their Representatives that serve on this side of the aisle over here in the majority, on this side of the aisle over here in the minority. We have a responsibility to step forward and bring a budget, and that budget needs to be the reflection of spending discipline and the spending priorities of the House of Representatives. According to the Constitution, all spending starts here--not in the Senate. It starts here. And traditionally, the House has received the President's budget, his budget recommendation. We've evaluated that budget in the process of moving a budget resolution here in the House-- in a responsible fashion when Republicans were in charge at least. I think in a less responsible fashion, but at least it got done before when Democrats were in charge, until now. But the spending has been so irresponsible that even the irresponsible overspending Democrats don't have enough will to bring a budget to the floor and allow it to be debated and voted upon here on the floor of the House, where the rules require us to do so. Because why? Because the President has appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission, after spending trillions of dollars irresponsibly, and now he has put these brains to work to figure out how to solve an unsolvable problem. I know what that feels like, Madam Speaker. I remember going through the farm crisis in the eighties. I remember when asset values were going in a downward spiral and opportunities for increasing revenue were also going in a downward spiral, and the customer base that I had was doing what was happening to me. My bank was closed down by the FDIC. All accounts were frozen. Commerce came to a halt. I had two pennies in my pocket, a payroll to meet, kids to feed, a business to run, bank loans to pay even though the bank was closed by the FDIC, opened up next Monday by new owners. I know how that thing works. You set your priorities. You step up to your responsibilities. But I have sat there at my desk during those years with my legal pad and my calculator trying to figure out how to make it work. And I know what it feels like when you think that there is something wrong with your brain because you can't solve a problem. Well, there is something wrong with the people's brains that spent all this money all right. And now the problem they can't solve is how to present a budget to the Congress because they have created an intractable, unsolvable budget problem not by being caught in an economic downward spiral exclusively, but by going into a downward spiral where Federal revenues are being reduced in proportion to the downward economic spiral while they are increasing the spending like they are in an upward economic spiral. These two things are going opposite directions. Federal revenues are going down; Federal spending is going up. The divergence of these two lines, the income and the outgo, have gotten so far apart that even the people without a conscience towards balancing a budget, and I mean the Democrats in this Congress, they are having a little trouble selling the idea to the Blue Dogs. Yes, Blue Dogs have gone underground. They have been quiet. They haven't been as active as they were in the past. They are certainly not as bold as they have been when I used to stand here and take lectures from the Blue Dogs that said, We want to balance the budget. What's wrong with Republicans that they can't balance the budget? Well, nothing wrong with me, because I voted for every balanced budget that's been offered on the floor of this House since I came here. And I don't know why I wouldn't continue to do that. And we are looking for a chance to bring a balanced budget to the floor again, and we will. We will if we can break the mold here. But this House, led by the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has so kowtowed to the President's spending priorities and spent trillions unnecessarily. The number that I had added up in my head standing on the floor here a week or two ago was $2.34 trillion of unnecessary spending, $2.34 trillion. And the President's budget as he presented it, it's the only budget we've got to go with. No conscience to try to balance it. No conscience to try to limit it. Today a baby born in America, their share of the national debt--you just might say that here's the IOU that that little old baby, when their footprint goes down on the birth certificate is an acknowledgement that their share of the national debt that they owe Uncle Sam is $44,000. And we worry about that little child, all the money that it takes to provide health care and education and clothing and housing and nurture and love to bring that child up into responsible adulthood. That little old child that grows into responsible adulthood, we worry about them carrying a student loan debt that might be, oh, let's say--pick a number in the ballpark. It's not a statistical number. It's a ballpark number. Maybe $40,000 worth of student loans when they finish college. That burden of servicing the interest and the principal on a $40,000 student loan, we worry about that. Well, I would be happy to take that $40,000 loan and a guarantee of a college degree and think that child could pay that off. But for nothing. They don't get a college degree. They don't get an education. They just get access to citizenship of the United States of America for their $44,000 that's their share of the national debt, a little baby with ink on their foot stamped right there on the birth certificate. There is one in this country we haven't seen, but the footprint on those we have seen, those little babies owe Uncle Sam $44,000. And, Madam Speaker, when that little child enters into fifth grade, and I picked fifth grade because that's the budget cycle. We do 10-year budget cycles, and we calculate our revenue stream. We calculate our outgo over a 10-year period of time. We put a number figure on something like, oh, let's say ObamaCare, what does that cost? That's over a 10-year period of time. So when that little child, from 10 years to the time they are born, they will be starting fifth grade. When they start fifth grade, that little child that owes Uncle Sam $44,000 that was born today owes Uncle Sam at that point, starting in the fifth grade, $88,000 under President Obama's budget. Doubles the individual national debt share just projecting the President's budget. And that, Madam Speaker, is with the President's own numbers. It's that bad. There isn't going to be a solution coming out of the deficit commission because there is an intractable problem that's been created by irresponsible overspending and a myopic, wrongheaded view that John Maynard Keynes had the right idea when he came up with this cooked-up theory back before the Great Depression began that if you wanted to recover from an economic downward trend you would just take a lot of government money and borrow it from somewhere and dump it into the economy, give it to people, and get them to spend it. That's the Keynesian economic theory. Government would put money into the hands of people; people would go spend the money, and spending that money would stimulate the economy. That was his plan coming into the thirties. When FDR was elected, that's what they did. They overspent. They spent the country into more deficit than they had seen before, and borrowed money and put it into the economy in all kinds of programs. The WPA, the CCC come to mind as some of those programs. Now, that was nice for the people there that got the government jobs, and it was nice to have the soup lines. But here's what I know. When government is putting out borrowed money to pay people to do something else that's in competition with the private sector or pay people not to work, it's awfully hard to recover economically, because it takes the private sector to bring us out of this economy. So this White House now has taken a look at the model of the thirties, and the President of the United States, his lesson, his takeaway from the whole lesson of the Great Depression was this: FDR lost his nerve. That's what the President said, February 10, 2009, before our conference, ten feet away from me, said FDR lost his nerve. He should have spent a lot more money. If he had spent more money, the President's opinion, this country would have come out of the Great Depression almost before it--he didn't say this word--but you know, before we got into the depths of it. And he argued that FDR lost his nerve, should have spent more money. If he had done that, we would not have had the depression that lasted a full decade and more. And he argued that because FDR lost his nerve and failed to spend enough government money, what we had was--and this is according to the President's words--a recession within a depression, and unemployment numbers that went up during that period of time instead of down. And then he said along came World War II, which was the greatest economic stimulus plan ever. I would even take issue with that statement. But I am going to concede his point there and not make an argument about it, Madam Speaker, because there is some basis for that statement. It's not completely off base at all. There is just a different perspective that I would emphasize. But I would argue that sending this Nation into debt and borrowing money and putting it into the hands of people not in exchange for production, but just in exchange sometimes for make-work or doing something was not the right way to come out of a depression or a recession. What we need to do is increase productivity. We need to get the private sector more competitive. And he has done everything but let the private sector get more competitive. But this Keynesian economist on steroids, which is our President, has not made what he considered to be the same mistake that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made. Remember, Roosevelt lost his nerve. He didn't spend enough money. The President hasn't lost his nerve. He spent a lot more money than FDR would have thought of spending. He spent a lot more money than John Maynard Keynes would have thought of spending. Keynes's argument was this. He said, I will solve all the unemployment in America for you, and here is how I will do it. We will go get a whole bunch of American cash--now, I am paraphrasing here; there is an exact quote that does take this message out--a whole bunch of American cash, American dollars, and I will find an abandoned coal mine. And we will go out and we will drill holes with a drill rig all over into that abandoned coal mine, and we will stuff these holes full of cash. And then we will haul garbage in there and fill that abandoned coal mine up with garbage--this is before the EPA, you might remember--and then we will just turn the entrepreneurs loose to go in and dig up the money. We will solve all the unemployment problem. People will go in and dig up the money. There will be a whole industry involved, almost like mining it for gold. I am adding an embellishment here, because I have included Keynes's image of this and I am adding the embellishment beyond. So his idea was, though, that people would go in, dig through the garbage, dig up the money out of the holes in the abandoned coal mine, and it would become an industry. And they would probably need some equipment. They would need shovels at least, and there would be people industriously digging through garbage and pulling the cash out and taking it to town. It wouldn't even be like gold where they had to go to the assay office. Cash was just as good. It reminds me of the movie that was produced that had the Beatles in it years and years ago called ``The Magic Christian.'' And in ``The Magic Christian'' movie, they wanted to emphasize that there were a lot of greedy people in the world. And they filled this swimming pool full of all kinds of sewage and garbage and junk and things that would be revolting to jump into. And then there is a scene in the movie where doctors and lawyers and professionals and probably gangsters and every character that you can think of that they wanted to denigrate--they filled it full of garbage and junk and sewage and then dumped a bunch of cash in there. They had people diving into that, fighting over the cash. That image in ``The Magic Christian'' is the same image, a similar image that's created by John Maynard Keynes. But those things don't produce an economy. They don't produce wealth. We have to be an economy that produces goods and services that are essential first for the survival of humanity and then essential to improve the productivity of humanity. And the next level is so that there is a savings or disposable income component to this so that we can go do the things we enjoy doing. But if an economy compresses down to the essentials, it will be a survivalist economy where our effort and our industry goes towards staying alive. The next level is the level of productivity where our endeavor increases our productivity so that we can be competitive and we can compile wealth and use that wealth to increase our productivity that then increases our standard of living and our quality of life. And if the survival component of the economy and the increased productivity component of the economy gets high enough, then there is disposable wealth for us to spend to enjoy life, like go to the ball game, go on a vacation, take the kids fishing, go to Disney World, take the family out to Washington, D.C., see the monuments, go to the National Archives and to Arlington Cemetery. Those things, that's from disposable income that comes out, the recreational travel, the nonessential things that we spend money on, and that creates another industry. But as you chase those industries down, you will chase them down to those components that are essential for the survival of Homo sapiens on this planet. That's the real economy. That's the economy we've got to stimulate. That's the one we have to let grow. It's stimulated by low taxes; it's stimulated by low regulation, and it's stimulated by entrepreneurs that understand the idea that they can invest some money or create an endeavor that will produce a profit for them that feeds their family and builds up some capital that can be used to increase their productivity so that the business can grow and they can hire employees and people have jobs. That's the economy we are supposed to support. I think it's completely outside the understanding of the White House. I look around and I wonder who in the White House has actually signed the front side of the paycheck. Who's had employees? Who's started a business? Who's bought a business? Who's maintained and expanded an existing business that's in the White House circle? Who thinks like a free enterprise capitalist or like an entrepreneur? Is there anybody there that has an instinctive understanding of what it's like to start with something or maybe even start with nothing and create jobs and wealth? That's what America has done. We have had the scenario that lets us do that. We have had the entrepreneurs. We have had the people with the dream that came to the United States because they knew this was a place where they could be allowed to succeed, and no one could come and take away the fruit of their labor and their endeavor. That's been the American Dream and it's been the American guarantee. And now, now the White House can go in and order the terms of a bankruptcy for Chrysler or General Motors and direct that 17.5 percent of the shares of General Motors be handed over to the labor unions, the United Auto Workers who didn't have skin in the game except the potential for a future job. And yes, they had a benefits package out there, but their skin in the game wasn't conceded. They didn't concede a single point. Maybe some outside claims on insurance that could come in later years that all of them at the table believed was going to be replaced by ObamaCare anyway. There was no risk on UAW. They got handed 17.5 percent of the ownership of General Motors at what, the expense of the secured creditors, the stockholders, the bondholders that had the first mortgage on the asset values of General Motors taken out by the White House. Never before in America have we seen a scenario like that where it was testified under oath by the Treasurer of the State of Indiana that in the case of Chrysler, the Obama White House went into the bankruptcy court and dictated terms going in, and the terms that came out after chapter 11 were exactly the terms dictated by the White House. Of the testimony that took place in the chapter 11 bankruptcy hearings, there wasn't one jot or tittle that was changed as a result of the testimony because the White House dictated the terms. The Obama administration were the only ones that were evaluating the assets of Chrysler going into chapter 11. And who is the only buyer on the other side? Well, the White House. Never before in a bankruptcy court. That is unjust. You can't get justice out of a scenario of a chapter 11 bankruptcy court that allows the same entity that is setting the terms to be the entity that is buying. The White House is saying here is what the value of Chrysler is and here is what we are willing to pay and nobody else gets to be a bidder. And in the case of General Motors, take these shares away from the shareholders, take the assets away from the secured bond holders, push them over there and turn them over to the United Auto Workers. So what, so they can run the business of General Motors for the benefit of the people affected by it. Doesn't that sound good. Doesn't that sound great, Madam Speaker. Run a Fortune 500 company for the benefit of the people affected by it. Where have I heard that language before? Run a business for the benefit of the people affected by it. Oh, yes, I know where I have heard that language before, Madam Speaker. I read it on the Socialist Web site. You can go read it yourself, dsausa.org. They want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies which would include General Motors and Chrysler. I don't know if it includes BP, but I imagine they are in their sights today. And they say we are not Communists; we are Socialists. We don't want to nationalize every business in America; we just want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies and a few others that catch our attention. And we want to manage them for the benefit of the people affected by them. That is a quote: manage them for the benefit of the people affected by them. Dsausa.org, it is the Socialist Web site, who, by the way, tell us they don't run candidates on the Socialist ticket as if they were Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians or Communists. They run candidates on the Democrat ticket as Progressives, and they say the Progressives are the legislative arm of the Socialists. So I read this and I am thinking, all right, but why would I take that seriously? They are attaching themselves to the Progressives in Congress, so I research a little more. I find out that there is a Web site for the Progressives here in Congress. The gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva), it is a Web site that has his name on it now. It is often up here on a blue board with white letters that is presented by Keith Ellison of Minnesota. I see him constantly advertising the Progressives. So I go back and do a little research, and I find out that the Socialists were the ones that managed the Progressive Web site until 1999. Yes, they are an offshoot. They are joined together at the hip. They are Siamese twins. The Progressives here in Congress are the Siamese twin of the Socialists of America. The Socialists ran their Web site until they took a little heat in 1999, and then they decided the Socialists running the Progressive Web site was a little too obvious a link, so the Progressives took over their own Web site and started to run it from there. But the Socialists still have on their Web site the proud bond between them and the Progressives in the United States Congress. The last time I looked at the list of the Progressives on the Progressive Web site, there were 77 Members of Congress that were listed. Of these 77 Members, they would be obviously among the most liberal left wing Members of Congress. But the people in America don't think of liberal left wing Democrats as Socialists. They think of them as people who are for a little more social justice, but they don't think of them as Socialists. If they would read the Socialist Web site, I think that would be a pretty good description of what a Socialist is. When you read on the Web site that they want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies, and then you can minimize your dsausa.org Web site, and then open up the Progressive Web site and read on there what they want to do. Well, let me see. They want to nationalize the energy industry in America. They want to nationalize the oil refinery in America. Those would be statements written and said, stated by Maxine Waters of California and Maurice Hinchey of New York respectively. I read those statements through the press, and I hear them make them. I go back and look at the Progressive Web site, and it says on there: Proud Member of the Progressive Caucus, Maxine Waters, Maurice Hinchey. And then I go over to the Socialist Web site and I read on there, We want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies. We want to nationalize the energy industry. We want to nationalize the oil refinery industry. You see the pattern here, Madam Speaker. What is on the Socialist Web site is an agenda. It is on the Progressive Members of Congress caucus Web site as an agenda. And this agenda is being carried out by the White House and people are proudly advocating for these ideas while never admitting that they are a Siamese twin of the Socialists, who brought this out, and they have done this for a couple of decades or more and made this advocacy. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the one member of the Progressive Caucus, at least on the list, he is not in the House but he is in the Senate, Madam Speaker, Senator Bernie Sanders. He is a self- avowed Socialist. I know of no one who has tried to rebut his statement that he is a Socialist. He is a proud Socialist United States Senator. He remains, I believe, a member in good standing as a member of the Progressive Caucus over here. Bernie Sanders advocates many of the things that are on the Progressive Web site, and certainly they are tied together. I have explained how that works. He is the highest profile Socialist in the United States of America, and no one has challenged his position that he is a Socialist. That would be like someone saying Steve King is not a Republican, Madam Speaker. And so I take him at his word. Senator Sanders from Vermont is a Socialist. They have elected him; that is how it goes. I don't like it, but that is how it goes. I don't dislike him; I just disagree with him philosophically. But that is how it goes in America. So he is a Progressive and a Socialist, and we have 77 Progressives in this Congress. Well, are they Socialists? I think many are. I don't know if all are. But I know this: if you look at the voting records of President Obama when he was in the United States Senate serving with Bernie Sanders, it is clear that President Obama voted to the left of Socialist Senator Sanders of Vermont, consistently to the left. So, Madam Speaker, the argument is not what is the ideology of our President. It is what is to the left of a Socialist. That is the argument that is out there and what we need to consider and contemplate. I believe this, that if you want to declare something not to be Socialism, however it is Socialism, you have to figure out how to redefine something to the American people. They are smart enough to know what words mean. They know what Socialism is. They know what irresponsible overspending is. They know when a President and a Congress, led by Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, disagree with the will of the American people. They understand that it is free enterprise that has driven the economy of this Nation to success, and economically has been the component that allowed for the United States of America to be the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. They understand that the bogged down economies, managed economies, whether it was central planning in the Soviet Union that finally collapsed in 1991, or whether it is the unstimulating economy that has bogged down Western Europe for a long time, that the vitality in this American economy that keeps chugging along is rooted in the individual entrepreneurs that are the invisible hands that are making decisions every day that turns this economy and makes it move. We are not about to give up on free enterprise even though we have people that don't believe in it that own the gavels today, even though we have a President of the United States and a White House staff and a lot of the Cabinet that don't understand, nor do they appreciate or believe in free enterprise capitalism. I doubt if there is anybody out there in the White House that can say, Yes, I read ``Wealth of Nations.'' I understand it. I understand the division of labor. I understand the comparative advantage that Adam Smith wrote about. No, they understand Karl Marx, but they don't understand Adam Smith. This is where we are, and it is why we have to push the reset button in November. This Nation is resilient. We can come back from this. We have a lot of debt and deficit that we have to pay off. We have a lowering national image abroad. We have a military that took a serious reset today, and I pray that it gets turned out for the best. I think that some of our tasks are very difficult, but finding our soul is going to be the most difficult one. America will produce and bring us to a greater level of greatness yet if we find our soul, if we redefine and identify the pillars of American exceptionalism and chart ourselves down that path that goes beyond the shining city on the hill that Ronald Reagan so well spoke of and take us to the level that we can achieve, that we can see just beyond our horizons now. Truthfully, I didn't come here to speak about any of the things I have spent the last half hour discussing. I wrote a number of subject matters down on a piece of paper, and I would like to refer over. I mentioned, Madam Speaker, the ObamaCare issue. And here is where we are. Whether it was 2 months or 3 months ago today that ObamaCare passed, I think this is a monthly anniversary of that tragic day when this Congress refused to use its common sense and refused to listen to the will of the people. Somehow they seem to be shut up here in Washington, and the constituents couldn't get to them and they hammered through and force fed an ObamaCare bill on the American people that today is the law of the land. There was a cry that went out for almost a year from this country of the people that said I don't want my health care taken over and nationalized by the Federal Government. And bills that came in, 1,994 pages dropped on us near the end of October. It was a Thursday, 1,994 pages. We held a quick meeting a couple of hours after the bill was out. We didn't get a warning. Nobody is working with our side of the aisle. This is all drop the ambush on them if you can. Don't give them time to regroup their forces. We are going to bring this ObamaCare bill and try to turn it into law. Well, a couple of hours after it was electronically available, our very astute staff put together an analysis of ObamaCare. And after that 2 hours, they presented us in the period of about an hour what they thought was in it in a quick cursory example. They broke it apart in titles and went down through the titles and told us what they thought we had. I thought they did a very good job of it, and it was very accurate. I appreciate the work that was done. We understood this: we had to kill the bill. We put all kinds of effort into that. People from every State came to this city to lend their voices in trying to kill ObamaCare because they wanted to keep their freedom. I want to keep my freedom, and I joined with them. We came very, very close in November, December, right down to Christmas Eve when Harry Reid, the old scrooge, put the bitter pill out there on the floor of the Senate and America was force-fed that bitter pill that took away the liberty of the American people and nationalized our skin and everything inside it. That passed the Senate on Christmas Eve, and then it still had to face a cloture vote in the Senate. The people from Massachusetts rose up and decided they were going to do the improbable and the impossible, and they elected Scott Brown to the United States Senate, who said, I will oppose ObamaCare, and he came here to do just that. And in an unusual and in an unexpected and a unique tactic, they circumvented the vote in the Senate and shoved a vote here on the floor of the House on a promise that there would be another package passed through the Senate. So we had this scenario that happened. When ObamaCare passed--and I'm talking about the bill, not the recissions package that came along afterwards--at the moment that ObamaCare passed, it could not have passed the Senate. When it passed the House and went to the President's desk, it could not have passed the Senate. And it did not enjoy a majority support here in the House unless there was a promise that they would pass a recissions bill afterwards that would give some of the holdouts the things that they thought they needed to amend the bill. So they toyed with the idea of actually amending a bill that hadn't become law. That was the effort. There couldn't be an honest effort to put together a bill that was debated and perfected and amended in committee and on the floor so that it could become the will of the House or the will of the Senate. Neither the will of the House nor the Senate was passed that day when ObamaCare was passed. Maybe that's inside baseball, Madam Speaker, but here's where the American people are today. Wherever I go in this country I hear people say, ``I want my country back.'' They have seen this administration--and, yes, some of it started in the previous administration--but it had everything that I'm about to list, it had 100 percent support of Barack Obama whether he was a United States Senator, whether he was the President-elect, or whether he was the President of the United States, had most of it under his guidance as President of the United States. Here's what happened. This Federal Government took over, nationalized--and when I say nationalized, I mean ownership, management, or control of--three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler--where am I going? There's more to this. All the student loan programs in America, all of that swallowed up by the Obama administration. And I'm going to go through that, that's one-third of the private sector activity according to Professor Boyles at Arizona State University, one-third. And then, along came ObamaCare, which passed. The gentleman earlier talked about that being 17 percent of our economy. The number I see is 17.5 percent. Well, we're close, we're within half a percentage point, who really knows? But when I add it up, I added 18 to 31 percent, that takes us to 51 percent. The question is, whether it's 50.5 percent or 51 percent of the private sector activity taken over by this Federal Government--three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, all the student loans in America, now the nationalization of our bodies, of our health care, taking away a person's individual choices on how they will manage their health care, what insurance policies they will buy because, after all, the Health Choices Administration czar--they call him a commissioner, I call him a ``commizarissioner''--will write the rules later. There isn't a single health care policy in America that the President of the United States can say I guarantee that this policy will be available to you when ObamaCare is implemented, not one. Remember, he promised America that if you like your health insurance policy, you get to keep it. He promised that over and over again. It was no guiding light, it was no promise, except a broken one. And I began to wonder-- there's a Web site out there that's a whole list of all of the broken Obama promises. It goes on and on and on. I wonder if he doesn't have a czar that's charged with keeping track of all of the Obama promises and making sure that he can break every single one of them in his first term. He's got a great start. But I know the American people don't see a guarantee and a promise from the President anymore. If you like your health insurance policy, you get to keep it, I promise. Well, so what? Your promise means nothing because what we know today is there isn't a single policy in America that anybody believes that they get to keep on the other side of the implementation of ObamaCare. And so if I'd stitch this back together, the list that I've gone through--the banks, AIG, Fannie and Freddie, General Motors, Chrysler, student loans, all of that, a third of private sector activity-- ObamaCare, 17.5 percent of the private sector activity of the health care swallowed up, taken over by the time this is implemented in 2014. And so now we're at 51 percent of the former private sector activity now nationalized, taken over, under the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government. The gentleman earlier talked about Hugo Chavez. I remember seeing a picture of the President glad handing his handshake with Hugo Chavez almost a year ago. And I said at the time, when it comes to nationalizing companies--Hugo Chavez had just taken over a Cargill rice plant in Venezuela, but when it comes to nationalizing companies, Hugo Chavez is a piker; he cannot hold a candle to the President of the United States. And that's just a fact, Madam Speaker, it's not an embellished fact, it's just a fact. So today we've lost 51 percent of our private sector activity to the nationalization of this Federal Government. They have nationalized, under ObamaCare, our skin and everything inside it. The most sovereign thing that we have, now we can't manage it the way we managed it before. It will be that we can only manage our health care in the future under the permission of the Federal Government. And by the way, nationalize our skin and everything inside it. And let's just say that if your daughter is getting ready for the prom or a wedding and she wants to go to the tanning salon, ObamaCare taxes the outside of your skin too, to the tune of 10 percent. What is that about? Couldn't they restrain themselves? Why do something that's so blatant as that that it embellishes the argument that the nanny state is going to prevail? Are they really worried about somebody's health? They wanted to tax a non-diet pop. They want to manage behavior, they want to control diets. They're involved in an effort to take 1.5 trillion calories out of the diet of kids because one-third of our youth are obese. And Secretary Gates, I believe, has spoken about this, our Secretary of Defense, that there is a higher percentage of young people that don't qualify to go into the military because they've got too much blubber around their belt, so they can't qualify. I would say this then: If they're healthy otherwise, bring them in. If they meet all other standards but they're a little too fat, bring them into basic training, just keep them there a while longer. By the time you run them around the field in combat boots a few more times and put them on a diet and exercise plan, you'll get them where you want them to be. They're still good shells of physical specimens, they just need to be cracked into shape. It doesn't mean we have a national security problem because too many kids are fat. I think we do have a problem, though, a nanny security program if this Federal Government is going to try to control the diets of our kids in this country. Taking away our liberty, taking away our freedom, disregarding the vitality of America that comes from our individualism, from being able to make choices, being held responsible for choices. So ObamaCare has got to go, Madam Speaker. And there are those who think, oh, we can't get it done. It's hopeless now, the bill is passed, let's move on. We need to look ahead, not backwards. Well, listen, if we're going to look ahead, we have to look backwards and determine that ObamaCare is a terrible idea. It's an unconstitutional thing, it's an unconscionable thing to do to a free people. America, with its vitality, loses a chunk of its vitality when you take away our individualism and our liberty, and if people think we can't repeal ObamaCare, let me lay out this scenario. It works like this: Every single Republican voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. There were 34 Democrats who voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. There was only one thing bipartisan about ObamaCare, and that was the opposition to ObamaCare-- in the House and in the Senate. So ObamaCare is the law of the land, but the implementation of it doesn't get completed until 2014. That's when we are really saddled with the juggernaut of this ``taking our decisions away from us and creating the dependency on people so that they no longer think about the freedom and liberty of making their own choices.'' So here is how we repeal ObamaCare. First of all, there is Michele Bachmann, Parker Griffith, Bob Inglis, I believe, Jerry Moran--and there may be Todd Akin--and I. Those people I can think of have all introduced legislation to repeal ObamaCare, a standalone repeal of ObamaCare that is simply this: A 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. Pull it out by the roots. Pull it out root and branch and lock, stock and barrel so there is not one particle of ObamaCare DNA left behind. This has become a toxic stew that we have ingested now, and it is turning into a malignant tumor that will start to metastasize in 2014 when ObamaCare is fully implemented. So here is what we do: Of my bill and others' bills, we have 90-some cosponsors on this legislation. I have introduced a discharge petition. I think it's discharge petition No. 11. I'm not certain of the number. I think that's the number. I've signed it. A lot of others have signed it. A lot more need to sign it because of this: If a discharge petition gets 218 signatures on it here in the well of the House, it has to come to the floor for a vote unamended. That means we can force a vote even over the will of the Speaker of the House, who, surely, would do everything she could do to resist the repeal of ObamaCare. We could force a vote, but the process of getting to 218 signatures on a discharge petition identifies--separates, let's say--the men from the boys and the women from the girls. Now, if you really were sincerely against ObamaCare, it's one thing to vote against it, and 34 Democrats did. Nancy Pelosi let them off the hook because they were afraid they would lose their seats in their districts, but who knows how many of them were serious. When we actually had the motion to recommit on no mandates, on no Federal mandates to buy insurance, there were only 21 Democrats who voted with that as opposed to the 34 who voted ``no'' on ObamaCare. So you've seen the conviction drop by 13 just in that little exchange. How many of those 21 really have conviction? We'll find out because the discharge petition is here, and I challenge those 21. In fact, I challenge those 34--and everybody else who is opposed to ObamaCare--to sign the discharge petition. Let's bring that discharge petition to the floor and repeal ObamaCare. Let's pull it out by the roots. Let's send it over to the Senate. Let's see what Jim DeMint and others can get done over there. That's what we need to do here in the House of Representatives. Now, maybe that doesn't get itself accomplished and get ObamaCare repealed, because people in America, Mr. Speaker, can think in sequences, in logical, multiple sequences. All of the solutions are out there in America. I trust the judgment of our voters. They know this: If we are successful in getting 218 signatures on a discharge petition and if we pass the repeal of ObamaCare and if it goes down the hallway and across, through the Rotunda and over to Harry Reid, of course he'll do everything he can to kill it. Maybe they'll find a way to get that done over in the Senate. Then it would go to the President, and we know what would happen. He would veto the bill. So it would come back to the House or to the Senate for an opportunity to override the Presidential veto. It's not something you would consider to be politically possible today. Maybe there is an outside chance that it could be possible by the time we get to November. I doubt it, too--I'm skeptical about that--but we'll have put the marker down, Mr. Speaker. We will have separated the women from the girls and the men from the boys with the discharge petition. We'll have set the stage for the other side of November, the other side into the next Congress, when, I believe, the gavels will come into different hands from our side of the aisle, in which case we can move a repeal of ObamaCare as a standalone, a 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare as a standalone. We can do that. When that would happen, we would recognize President Obama would veto that, and we would have to figure out how to come up with a two-thirds majority to overturn the Presidential veto. Again, that's a very, very high bar, but this Constitution here in my jacket pocket tells me all spending has to start here in the House, Mr. Speaker. All spending has to start here in the House. So a House controlled with a gavel in the hands of Republicans would simply refuse to fund any dollars. Any American taxpayer dollars would be prohibited to be used to implement ObamaCare. That could work really well in a Republican majority in 2011 and in 2012. So ObamaCare wouldn't be implemented. It would be sitting there without implementation, and Republicans would have passed a repeal of ObamaCare at least once during that period of time, maybe more times. Then we elect a President in 2012 who takes, as a matter of his campaign and his oath, his number one priority, which is to sign the repeal of ObamaCare. Pull it out by the roots. So I have this vision of a President of the United States taking the oath of office, Mr. Speaker, with pen in hand: I swear to the best of my ability to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God. Pen in hand. Normally, the President will turn and shake hands with the Chief Justice and with the outgoing President, and there will be a great celebration up there on the west portico of the Capitol. I would like to see him interrupt that for one thing. I'd like to see that pen in his hand when he takes the oath. I'd like to see the repeal of ObamaCare right there at the podium on the west portico, right by the bible that he chooses to take the oath on, and I'd like to hear him take that oath ``so help me God'' and bring his hand right down to the document that is the repeal of ObamaCare and sign the repeal of ObamaCare right there in the first instant of the new administration that begins on January 20, 2013. Don't tell me we can't repeal ObamaCare. Yes, we can. We have to move a discharge petition now. We have to separate the women from the girls and the men from the boys on that subject. We've got to identify it so the voters know what to do when they go to the polls in November. When the time comes that the new majority is here and is being sworn in in January, probably on January 3 of 2011, we will refuse to fund ObamaCare, because the funding has to start here, and you can't get around that. No President can get around that. No Senator can get around that. The Constitution says it starts here. We control all spending in this House. There will be no funding to fund the implementation of ObamaCare. We hold the line in 2011 and 2012, and we elect a President who will sign the repeal of ObamaCare on January 20, 2013, right there on the podium at the west portico of the Capitol. It's right through those doors. Take a left. It's out on the portico where great events takes place. That's what needs to happen--the full repeal of ObamaCare. Move this discharge petition now so we can separate those who are for a standalone, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare and those who seem to lack the will to put their markers down and to be clear with the voters in America. That has got to happen. Now, I didn't leave a lot of time for some of the other subject matters that I felt the urge to address, but I'll go through a list of them. A lot of them have to do with immigration, Mr. Speaker. One of them is regarding the Secretary of Labor, who is using our tax dollars to run ads to tell people: Call this number. If you're legal or illegal, it doesn't matter. You deserve a reasonable wage, so we'll protect you with our labor laws. If you're working in the United States illegally, we're not going to ask you for your Social Security number or where you were born or what your lawful present status is or whether you are legal to work in America. If you're illegal and if your boss isn't paying you a going wage or is not treating you right under America's labor laws, call us. We'll keep you confidential, and we'll go punish the employer. They're spending--it has to be millions of dollars--out of the Department of Labor budget to tell people who have broken into this country, who have unlawfully entered the United States or who have unlawfully overstayed their visas and who cannot lawfully work in America, that they are going to use the law to punish the employers if they don't treat them right. Now, I don't say that an employer should be able to abuse their employees, but I do say the Secretary of Labor gets this way wrong if she thinks that she is going to use my tax dollars, Mr. Speaker, or is going to use your tax dollars to advertise to people working in America illegally, who are taking jobs away from Americans and from people who can work legally in this country, and reward them with the objective of their crimes by bringing the force of the Department of Labor against their employers. I tell you, I don't know where they find these people to appoint them to the Cabinet. This is one. I want to look at the full text of her remarks and come on tomorrow with a decision on what position I want to take. But this is a marker that needs to be down. We don't use American tax dollars to advertise and reward illegals for coming into this country. That is a form of amnesty being advertised in the television airwaves across America, with American tax dollars, at the direction of the Secretary of Labor; her face up there saying, Trust me. I will protect you. I won't enforce the law against you. Amnesty. To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and award them with the objective of their crimes. That's what she's saying. She's saying, We're not going to bring the law against you. We won't enforce the law. We'll keep your name confidential. Trust us. If your objective is a good job, we'll make sure we come down on your employer, not on you. But all the while she knows that anybody working in the United States illegally had to falsify their identification to get the job in the first place. And they probably did an identity theft or purchased the theft product from someone's identity in order to work in America. That is a serious crime. When someone's identity is stolen, they never get it back again. It is being implicitly encouraged by the Secretary of Labor. And that's got to stop, Mr. Speaker. Now, Arizona law. Let's just say Arizona. Fox News today ran a story--I think they started it last night in some text that I read-- about the spotters down in Arizona that occupy the mountaintops along the transportation routes coming up through Arizona. Now what is going on is drug smugglers, people smugglers, contraband smugglers, occupy these locations on top of the mountains in Arizona. A lot of mountains in Arizona are shaped like volcanoes. Some is volcanic, as I notice, anyway. They come to a point. They're a cone. And up on top of them--or whether it's a ridge--they will pick a spot where they can see an intersection of highways coming from two or three different directions or more, and the employees--these are paramilitary armed personnel that are organized as a military force taking position, strategic positions on top of mountaintops in Arizona, and they will take the stones and they'll stack them around like a gun emplacement and hunker down with optical equipment and they will watch the traffic. And they have communications equipment with scramblers and descramblers in it so they can talk to their people and we can't listen in on them. We know the frequencies. I've heard it on the radio. I've flown over there in a helicopter and listened to the excited chatter as we fly toward some of those mountaintops to try to pick those spotters off of there before they come off the mountaintop and go hide in the desert. You can hear the chatter intensify up to a fever pitch and then all of a sudden it goes dark. Silent. That's because they come off the mountain right before you get there and they go down and hide. I have pictures. I have hundreds of pictures from the top of these spotter locations. These are tactical positions in America. They're used to facilitate the smuggling of drugs and people, all kinds of contraband, and some of those people may well be terrorist suspects. They're from nations that we should be concerned about. That traffic is going on through Arizona and other States. And these locations aren't just sitting along the border. These locations go all the way up the highway. Not just to Tucson. All the way to Phoenix. They control the transportation routes there. They tell them when to go, when to stop. They run decoys with a small amount of drugs in them. When the Border Patrol and other law enforcement officers converge on a vehicle, they sacrifice one of their people for the means of bringing a truckload through while they're diverted. That happens. It happens regularly. We have a massive number of illegal border crossings. We have backpackers that are marching through the desert. We have 110-pound guys with 50-pound packs or more on their back and they march for a hundred or more miles sometimes. You look at some of those guys with calves like that on them. They're in shape because that's what they do--they walk back and forth in the desert and get paid to smuggle drugs in and out of the United States. And we sit here and we allow drug smugglers to occupy tactical positions on the tops of mountains, controlling the transportation routes in America, all the way up to Phoenix, and we're not able to go snap those people off those mountains and lock them up or put them through the shakedown and find out who they're affiliated with. And we can listen in on the radio, but we can't understand it because it's a scrambled chatter and their equipment is at least as good as ours--and maybe better. And they supply them and they bring them food and drink and other things they need, as well as weapons. And I've been there to see these locations and optical equipment. Mr. Speaker, we've got to take the spotters off the top of these lookout mountains. We cannot have the drug smugglers in tactical positions that control our transportation routes, however difficult it is. And there are tactical ways to do this. Our Special Forces know how. A lot of our law enforcement officers know how. They just need a mission. And last year I was able to get an appropriations amendment that directed a million dollars to take the spotters off of the lookouts in Arizona. And that appropriation went over to the Senate, where it was killed and died, Mr. Speaker. So we've got to wake up. We've got to defend this country. We've got to shut off this border; build a wall; build a fence; stop the bleeding at the border; take the lookouts, the spotters off the lookout mountains in Arizona; shut off the magnet on jobs; get back to the rule of law. Let's reward people that respect the law and punish the people that violate the law without regard to race, creed, color, ethnicity, or national origin. Take it right out of title 7 of the Civil Rights Act. By the way, without violating Arizona law or Arizona's Constitution or the United States Constitution or any other State Constitution, for that matter. Those are a number of the things on my mind, Mr. Speaker. And I'm very well aware that within the next 60 seconds I will have reached the balance of my time. And so I want to acknowledge and appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And I would yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, thank you. I appreciate very much the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this great deliberative body that we have. I appreciate the gentleman from Utah who so eloquently spoke in the previous period of time. I have a number of things on my mind that I came here to impart to you, Madam Speaker, and anyone that would like to overhear our conversation. Maybe this would be a good day to solve a lot of the problems that we have before us and just generally address this situation. I won't go through all the history of the world to get here, but I may have to refer once in a while back to the history of the world to make a reference point so that we can understand what we're doing now. This is an America that has been built upon the foundation of a good number of things--the pillars of American exceptionalism. Now, some of these are pretty simple. They are in the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the freedom to assemble and petition our government for redress of grievances, all in the First Amendment there. Property rights that are clearly defined in the Fifth Amendment; freedom from double jeopardy. Then we have a whole series of other rights. But there are a couple of things that we don't talk about very much in this country, and, that is, if you would go to the USCIS stack of flashcards, and these are glossies about, I suppose, 2\1/2\ inches by about 5, like a deck of them. When we have legal immigrants that come to the United States that are studying so that they can pass the citizenship test and receive their naturalization to become an American citizen, they study the flashcards, very much like students study the flashcards in, say, math: 2 plus 2 is 4, 3 plus 3 is 6. I won't go on any further, Madam Speaker, so I don't make a math error, but these cards that test the applicants for American citizenship have a series of questions on them and an answer on the other side. There will be questions such as, who is the father of our country? You snap it over and the other side of that card says George Washington. You need to know that if you're going to be a citizen of the United States of America. Who emancipated the slaves? Flip the card over, Abraham Lincoln. Next question--actually, this is question No. 11: What is the economic system of the United States? Free enterprise capitalism is on the other side of that card. I don't think it's arguable. I don't think it's refutable. But neither do I believe that the administration believes what I have just said. I don't think they have endorsed free enterprise capitalism. I don't think they've been active in it. A small, small percentage of this administration has signed the front of the paycheck and handed that payroll check over to one of their employees. I am one of the people that has done so. I have started a business and created jobs and I have met payroll for, I believe the number is 1440 consecutive weeks. You learn some things doing that, Madam Speaker. You understand and appreciate the free enterprise system. We know why people take risks. People go to work so they can make some money. They punch the time clock and they punch in and they punch out, and they get their paycheck and the benefits package that comes with that job because they want to feed their family. They want to have some walking-around money. They want to save up for the future. They want to have the flexibility to go and get some living in doing some things that cost a little money. This is taking advantage of the liberties and freedoms that we have here in the United States. That's getting a job and going to work. That's contributing generally to the free enterprise system. But when an entrepreneur comes up with an idea to start a business or buy an existing business, maybe transform that business into something different, a vehicle for them, that really launches our free enterprise system. We have seen success models of that across the history of America, across the United States of America. We might think of the Carnegies, for example, back in another era, or J.P. Morgan in another era, or we can be thinking also of some of the Rockefellers. Or in today's world, we can think of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the founders, respectively, of Microsoft and Apple. Yes, they made a lot of money, and there's not one dime of it that I begrudge them because their creativity and their discipline, their attitude, their hard work, yes, but their smart, hard work has done a lot for all of us. Our lives are far better today because we had creative people who injected ideas and stimulated this economy; Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being two of them. There are many more out there in the dot-com industry. There are also failures out there, if you define failure by starting a business and watching it go broke; although, I think there are many times there are lessons learned there that are built upon, and those heretofore failures become successes. But my point is that we are a Nation that has embraced free enterprise capitalism. It should not be arguable here in the United States. We should not have a knee-jerk reaction that we should go towards a government takeover of the private sector in order to solve a temporary economic problem. Our default mechanism should be to free enterprise, to freedom, and we have to let some entities fail if we're going to allow our economy and our Nation to succeed. That's the risk. You have to, once in a while, let the child fall off the bicycle, because when they get up, they'll be a lot better at it. And you have to, once in a while, let people achieve and be rewarded for their successes to the fullest extent, because that's what inspires more entrepreneurship, more challenges, and more success. When you think of the United States of America, and this is the historical lesson now that goes back. We look at 1776 as our year; the Fourth of July, 1776, as our year. Think of that time. What was going on in that period of history? What was going on in the culture of Western civilization? Well, let's see. Not only did the 13 original colonies declare their independence from Great Britain, from the king, but that was the year that Adam Smith published his great work called ``Wealth of Nations.'' My book, I believe, is 1,057 pages long, and you can read through there carefully and learn what it's like to make pins and nails and how to utilize the division of labor to get more efficiency, and everybody benefits. Adam Smith had the industrial revolution figured out in 1776 at the beginning of the first signs of the dawn of the industrial revolution. We had here in the United States the free enterprise capitalism, part of the culture. We had a Nation of shopkeepers and a Nation of small farmers that were free to succeed or fail on their own merits or demerits. And we know that some of our earlier Presidents had real difficulty with their finances, Thomas Jefferson among them. George Washington had some of those struggles as well. There were others that had difficulties with their finances. It wasn't something that they were handed something they didn't have to make work or something that didn't require them to be a manager. Their management of their finances and the production of their operations had a lot to do with their successes or failures. In 1776, Adam Smith touched a nerve and educated the marketplace of Western civilization, and they began to embrace the idea of free enterprise capitalism, division of the invisible hand managing our economy rather than the king ordering it to be done or, in a later century, the next century, Karl Marx directing that it all come out of central command, from top down. Adam Smith's vision was this, that if you have only one brand of bread on the shelf and you have a set price for that loaf of bread, you can take the price up well above what it's worth. If people are going to eat bread, they will have to pay more than it might be costing, if there's competition. As soon as company A is competed against by company B, what can you use to get a market share? Well, you can bake a loaf of bread that you sell a little cheaper. You can bake a loaf of bread that's a little better loaf of bread. You can package it up a little nicer or provide a little better service or provide it to be a little fresher. Some of the things, cheaper, better, better advertising, service, packaging, and maybe a little fresher. And when you do that, if you can sell at a lower price a better quality product, the invisible hand would come into that grocery store and instead of paying $1 for a loaf of bread, buy that 95 cent loaf of bread that's a little better bread than the $1 bread. Pretty soon, company B at 95 cents is outselling company A who's selling their bread for $1. And so what happens? The quality of the bread for company A goes up, the freshness goes up, the price goes down, and this competition goes on day-by-day constantly, transaction-by-transaction, the invisible hand making that selection of a brand of a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk or a can of beans or a T-shirt or a pair of sneakers or a car on the lot or a plane ticket on the Internet or any transaction that you can think of that a consumer would use if there's competition out there and the calculus of the consumer. Well, selection-by-selection, select market shares and set the prices and provide for the production, directions, and the availability of products because free enterprise capitalism reacts. They have to compete so they react to market demands. That's just a few minutes to explain what that is, and I'd like to have that time in the Oval Office to explain this also to the person that sits behind that desk because I see a lot of signs that tell me that there isn't a deep natural conviction that supports free enterprise, and this includes the nationalization of three large investment banks, AIG, the insurance company, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, the entire student loan program in America, and now the takeover of our own body, our skin, and everything inside it called ObamaCare. Then in the speech about how to deal with the gulf oil spill, which is a disaster and a tragedy that I don't think we can point our finger at an individual who's to blame at this point, we haven't found out yet what caused it, but in that speech, the President raised the issue that he would like to move forward on cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax. Now, we have a financial reform bill that is in conference right now that's being hammered out. I will add these up again, and I will take this, Madam Speaker, to a percentage so that we have an understanding of how much of the private sector of this economy has been swallowed up by decisions made, beginning in the Bush administration, all of those decisions supported wholly by candidate-then and now President Obama. Three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, now that totals to one-third of the private sector activity as described by Professor Boyle at Arizona State University some months ago. When you added to that 17\1/2\ percent of our economy, which is underneath the--now the ownership, management or control of this administration called ObamaCare, now we're up to 51 percent, rounds to 18, remember, 33 and 18, 51 percent. The financial services package, which looks like it's very difficult to block and most likely to end up on the President's desk, as much as I would like to stand in its way, represents by some accounts another 15 percent of our economy. So now we're up to 66 percent of our economy swallowed up if the financial package gets to the President's desk. Behind that, cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax, a tax on everything that moves in America. It takes energy to move anything. It takes energy for me to raise my hand, so many calories burned up per pushup. I suppose somebody knows that number, Madam Speaker. But some say that cap-and- trade is about 8 percent of our economy. I think it's larger. I think it grows into being larger. It may well start out at 8 percent. So 66 percent that we're at now, the total, and we add 8 percent, the cap- and-trade. If the President is successful in what he would like to do, we will have seen 74 percent of the private sector economy swallowed up and being under the ownership, management or control of the Federal Government, 74 percent of our economy. That leaves--bright math students--26 percent of the economy left over. The engine of our economic growth is free enterprise capitalism, this little simple thing that you can't pass the test to be naturalized as an American citizen without at least the risk of having that being one of the questions on your test. We want everybody in America to understand free enterprise capitalism is our economic system that we have here in the United States, but our free enterprise is being swallowed up. The margins that are left are 26 percent, if this falls in the way the President is driving it, and we're going to expect that 26 percent to provide the taxes and the growth and the economic foundation to support all of this government on the other side. Meanwhile, we're watching irresponsible spending out of this Congress to the tune of trillions of dollars. Let me just say that I believe I could pull out of the top of my head $2.34 trillion in irresponsible spending that's taken place in about the last year-and-a-half or a little more. That would be wrapped up in the $700 billion in TARP spending, the $787 billion in the economic stimulus plan which 6 percent of Americans think works out for the positive, 96 percent of Americans think it didn't work and better off if we hadn't done it. There are other components out there with the Fed rolling out funds, et cetera, that rolls it up to that number of $2.34 trillion. And I listened to and submitted to debate after debate that came out of this side of the aisle over the last several years of Democrats, and many of them self-professed Blue Dog Democrats, that said we've got to have PAYGO rules, we're going to be PAYGO, we're going to pay as we go. If we have to increase spending in one area, we'll have to go find someplace to pay for it by decreasing spending in another area. That's a philosophy that I agree with and I endorse. In fact, I'd go a little further than that if there's a way to do it. But the Blue Dogs have essentially dropped out of sight. They're not standing there fighting on a budget. They may be fighting behind the scenes because what we're finding out is this Speaker is not going to bring a budget to the floor of this Congress. Since we've had budget rules that began in 1974 this Congress has always passed a budget, always brought a budget to the floor. As difficult as it is to pass it, it is a framework, a spending constraint, that at least you can point to those line items in that budget and argue that an appropriations bill that spends money beyond that breaks our budget, but if you don't have a budget, any kind of irresponsible spending works just as good, and that's what's going on. There's not a conscience, there's not a challenge, there's not a means to try to figure out how to get us back to a balanced budget. There is no path to do that. In fact, the President has driven this. He's advocated for trillions of dollars of spending. He has signed trillions of dollars of spending. He has said that in order to grow out of this to solve our economic problem we need people spending money, and he is a Keynesian economist on steroids. This is a guy who didn't see it Adam Smith's way. John Maynard Keynes was the economist that believed that you could take Federal money, the greenbacks, cash, and put it into the hands of the American people and they would take it out and spend it, and that would stimulate the economy, and you could grow out of an economic crisis just by simply spending government money. Well, I've always thought that that was a ridiculous proposal. I think you have to produce things that have value and market them for a competitive price and build your efficiencies. I believe this is an economy that's built on production, not on consumption. And if that's all it was, we could embrace John Maynard Keynes' idea who actually spoke and wrote about how he would solve the economic problem in the United States this way. Keynes said, I want to find an abandoned coal mine. He said, I can solve all of the unemployment in America. I just go to an abandoned coal mine and drill a whole series of holes into the ground in that abandoned coal mine, and I would put American dollars, cash money, down the holes, fill the holes up with cash, and fill the coal mine up with garbage, garbage, fill the coal mine up with garbage, and then just turn America's entrepreneurs loose. They would go to work digging up that money through that garbage. That would give them jobs, that would keep them busy, and they would have cash to spend, and they would go out and spend it. That was Keynes. It may have been tongue-in-cheek, in all fairness. I hope it was tongue-in-cheek, but it accurately reflects Keynes' economic theory, and the President of the United States told me and others a year ago last February 10 that he believed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost his nerve and didn't spend enough money. If he had spent enough money, he would have, according to the President, spent our way out of the Great Depression and we wouldn't have had to wait for World War II to come along to be the largest stimulus plan ever. It's pretty close to verbatim. So FDR lost his nerve in spending. Today's President has not lost his nerve. He has spent money way beyond any previous President. I think that the cumulative total of it all would be more debt and deficit that has been accumulated by all the Presidents put together all the way back to George Washington. Someone said that here on the floor. I'm not going back to read the source of it. I expect it's true, and I think I should have to verify it before I tell you I know it's true. But huge debt that's been run up by this President and this Pelosi House and the Reid Senate down that hallway without regard to how we ever get back from it. And the argument was that we needed to get money spent into the economy, the stimulus plan, remember $787 billion rolled up, over $800 billion in reality. Now, they're coming back and asking for another few dozen billion dollars, whatever that might be. Two score and $10 billion perhaps is what their target money is to stimulate the economy some more. But the President said a year-and-a-half ago spend money, spend money, spend money, that's what will help the economy. People are hanging onto their dollars because they don't have confidence. You've got to spend money. Some months later, the President said, No, now we're going to have to be careful, we can't overspend. We're going to have to be frugal, as if we could--one time borrowing a lot of money and giving it to people and getting them to spend it was going to stimulate the economy and solve the problem. And then, according to who, I don't know, the navel gazers in the White House, then you shift gears, and at a certain point, you spend less. But whenever you feel the urge to spend more, go ahead. ``If it feels good do it'' seems to be what's going on with the economic strategy of the White House. So now we have these multiple trillions of dollars, the interest of which right now consumes 10 percent of our budget. The interest on these deficits that are projected today under the proposals of the President by the year 2020, 10 years from now, will not be 10 percent; it will be 20 percent of our overall budget. Now, can we understand what this means? When we start tapping into that--it's the pie chart we're talking about here. A 10 percent slice is our interest today; a 20 percent slice of the pie chart becomes the interest in 2020; and if interest rates go up and double, you will see an economic decline that's brought about because of higher interest rates, and you will see a bigger chunk right away. If interest rates double today, our 10 percent slice would be at least 20 percent, and that could happen in a matter of a few weeks or months. So this is serious business, passing this debt along to our children. We need to figure out how to recover from where we are today. All of this toothpaste can't be put back in the tube; some of it can. Many of the things that have been passed and signed into law need to be repealed right down to their roots. Much of the money that has been spent is gone, we can't get it back, but we're going to have to figure out how to service the debt; that means pay the interest and pay the principal down and pay the principal off. This Nation shouldn't be carrying debt, debt that meets or exceeds that which we see in countries like Greece or Spain or Ireland or Italy. The European Union threatens to collapse under the financial stress that they have because they have loaned money; it's almost like they're sitting at a poker table playing for chips and writing each other IOUs around the table. At some point, you have to pay for the drinks and the food that's coming along. Those chickens are coming home to roost in Europe. We don't need to be there in America. We're a different kind of people. We have a unique vitality in our character, in our soul. One of the things that is part of that vitality is that we've skimmed the cream off of the crop of every donor civilization in the world. Everybody that sent their immigrants to the United States, they didn't go out and get the people that were sitting out there on the porch that didn't go to work; these were the industrious ones. These were the entrepreneurs, the creative ones, the ones that had a dream, that were frustrated because they had the shackles of a dictator that kept them from using freedom to grow their own lifetime success. Can you imagine if you couldn't worship freely, if you couldn't go out and get a job, if you couldn't start a business, if you couldn't even put money in a bank and trust that you could go get it when you needed it? If you couldn't trust the rule of law? If you had to think that there was a different form of justice for one person because they were connected better with government than another person, wouldn't you look at America? Even though they advertise the streets are paved with gold, some of them didn't realize that that was figurative, not literal; some of them came here and were a little disappointed to find out our streets aren't paved with gold. But in a way they are, Madam Speaker, they're paved with gold because we have the rule of law. You can pretty much count on the law treating you the same regardless of who you are, what you look like, or what your particular net worth might be or who you're connected to. Lady Justice is blind. If you remember her standing there with her hands out holding the scales of justice, weighing the justice with a blindfold on. In this country, Lady Justice is blind, the rule of law has to apply, and we must defend and uphold the rule of law. You've got to give everybody an opportunity to compete in the marketplace for a job or start a business, and we need to hold them accountable to produce and earn and carry their own weight. We've drifted over into a society now where--when my grandmother came here over a century ago by now, she arrived in a meritocracy, where they rewarded smart, hard work, and people could succeed without penalty. In fact, when she walked across the floor of the great hall at Ellis Island, she would have been one of those arriving immigrants where they took a little hook and peeled her eyelids back to look and see if those little white spots were in there to indicate an eye disease. They looked people over and checked them to see if they were good physical specimens. If they had a limp or a bad arm, or even if they came in and they were obviously pregnant, they put them back on the ship and sent them back to Europe. And this isn't Steve King that is telling you these narratives, except that these came directly from the park officer at Ellis Island the day that she did the tour for us. About 2 percent of those that arrived at Ellis Island got back on the ship, and they were sent back to their home country because they didn't meet our standards. Even when they met our standards, there wasn't a welfare program for them; they either needed to have some family or some friends to take them in and get them started, or it was simply that you have to survive on your own. Go out and get a job, go to work, start a business. Offer yourself to do anything, wait tables, sweep the floors, clean out the sewers, grab a hammer, or whatever it might be, and go to work and help build America. And they did. But we got the dreamers. We got the passionate ones. We got the smart ones that could understand what America was and is and is to become yet beyond this point where we are today. And that vitality and that vigor that beat in the hearts of the willing immigrants that came here legally is a great big reason for American exceptionalism. It's almost unwritten, it's almost unspoken about, but it is a characteristic that is an essential component in American exceptionalism, coupled with free enterprise, capitalism, and the rule of law and religious freedom, and a moral society that is built on Judeo-Christian values--yes, that's our history and our culture and our heritage. It's our modern reality, too, perhaps to a smaller degree, but the core of the character of who we are is based on our religious faith. And so we have a rule of law and a people that respect God's laws, so you don't need as many law enforcement officers. We can use our labor to produce more that has value because we pay fewer people to put on a badge and a gun and go try to control folks that are not willing to abide by the law. It's another one of the reasons why America has risen up and another one of the reasons why we've been more successful. And so the vigor that we are in America is being challenged today. Two hundred years ago, you had free enterprise capitalism; you had these freedoms. And by the way, it was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. We had the transfer of the Age of Enlightenment that arrived here in the new world at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And remember that from the Greeks, we got the Age of Reason, which flowed from Europe. It had to go over to Ireland where the Irish could save civilization by being the scribes that actually copied and preserved the classics that came from Greek and Roman literature. We know something about the Greeks and the Romans because the Irish monks and scribes made sure that they gathered all of that data and reproduced it, copied it over, and stored and saved it during the Dark Ages, when nothing happened. Madam Speaker, I sometimes tease my family on the Irish side of the family--which actually seems to be my wife and my side--I ask, what is it that the Irish are so proud about? What is good about being Irish? Why is it that on St. Patrick's Day, everybody's Irish? They didn't have very many good answers for me, and so I would tease them a little bit and say, well, I know what they did. I know what the Irish did that was unique that no one else did. A people that, according to Freud, couldn't be psychoanalyzed, but the Irish did something nobody else did. They're the only ones on the globe to record history during the Dark Ages when nothing happened. Now that diminishes their contribution. Their contribution is great because we received, through their contribution of being the monks and the scribes and collecting that data and reproducing it and storing it and saving it from the barbarians who burned the books and burned the writings when they could, they saved the knowledge base that came out of Greek and Roman civilization. That knowledge base is rooted back--out of the Greeks is the Age of Reason, the foundations for our science and our technology today, the theorem, the hypothesis, the axiom, the list of those Greek foundational thoughts where Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and others sat around in the square in Athens in their togas and analyzed and used the version of knowledge that they had to test each other's ability to be logical and to be able to reason. That foundation of reasoning was preserved by the Irish. And as they deployed back across Europe with that message, they actually taught Western Civilization how to think again, how to think beyond our emotions and our reactions, and how to take empirical data and crunch that data and turn it into something that could follow a logical thought and we could act and react according to actual facts rather than the high blood of emotion. It seemed like an odd thing for the Irish to contribute, to overcome your emotions and use reason, but they did. And from the Romans--and thanks again to the Irish scribes--we had the Roman rule of law. Roman law had spread over most of Western Europe. It spread through Great Britain, through England, and it spread into Ireland. Even though the Irish had been conquered a number of times, they never really changed their character very much, but they helped preserve Roman law, which was reestablished in England as old English common law. So the common law that we use today to evaluate-- and the case law that's being decided by our courts across this land is rooted back in old English common law, which is rooted back in Roman law. And the Age of Reason from Greece arrived, coming the same way, but arrived here in the new world with the English-speaking side of the Age of Enlightenment. I also have to couple with that, in these foundations for American greatness, Madam Speaker, two more very profound things that took place: The birth of Christ, where his teachings transformed the civilized world as we knew it then. And we know that faith and those core values are in our culture and our civilization today. And the Catholic Church might not have been--the Roman and Eastern Orthodox, but the Roman Catholic Church that is today might not be and likely would not be what it is today if it had not been for the Protestant Reformation, from Martin Luther, who taught us the Protestant work ethic. And the Catholics competed very well with that in this country. So I couple the Age of Reason with the Roman law, and pass that over to Ireland and spread it back across all of Western Europe. And we have the Age of Enlightenment, which began in France, but the sister to it was the English-speaking side of it in England where free enterprise capitalism emerged and came to this country at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, arriving in a country that had low or no taxation, no regulation, unlimited natural resources as far as they could comprehend them at the time, a continent to settle from sea to shining sea, and a vision of manifest destiny for this country. And look what's been accomplished in this giant petri dish of freedom and liberty with the components in that giant petri dish that I've talked about. We have become the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world with a vigor and a vitality and a character all our own. There is something unique about being an American, we need to understand that; it's not something to apologize for. We have an extra blessing here, and that comes about because of the things that I've talked about and others that I haven't mentioned yet tonight. We have an extra blessing, an extra vigor. There is something about us. Maybe there is a little bit of an American attitude. You know, I don't know. It may be Muhammad Ali who said, If you can do it, it ain't bragging. We should be ebullient of our character and of the things that we do. We should also have confidence. I have a constituent who has since passed away, who was a man of high values and faith and character--World War II veteran Arrie Oliver. I got to know him well. I interviewed him on his World War II experience in a video that, I believe, we have now stored over at the archives in the Library of Congress. He served in Germany in World War II for the United States Army. At the end of the invasion of Berlin, he was there in the American sector where he was taken captive by the Russians. The Russians put him and three others into their Russian prisoner of war camp, American soldiers. They had to eat, and they had to peel the potatoes for the Russian soldiers. Then they got to eat the dirty potato peelings while the potatoes went to the Russian soldiers. There were some stories there that told me how poorly he was treated. I said to him, Tell me the circumstances by which you were taken captive. He said, Well, you know, the war was over. The German soldiers were gone. We were walking down the street in Berlin, and the Russians came and picked us up and arrested us. This was he and three others. As he told the story, he said that the Russians claimed that there were women in one of the adjacent houses and that no soldier was to go near the women. Well, that wouldn't be the history of the Russian soldier, or of the American for that matter, but that was the pretense for picking them up. He pointed out that they were all in civilian clothes. So I asked, How did the Russians know you were American enough to pull you over and arrest you? Now, I thought he might say it was because of our clothes. I thought he was going to say it was because of the uniform, actually, but his answer was really interesting. It was, Well, they knew us by our walk. They know American soldiers, even from a distance, because of the way we walk, the way we carry ourselves. When you think about that, you know, if you see a shadow of a bird hopping out on the grass, you know that a robin hops differently from some other kind of a bird. If you watch them in flight, you see their gait, and you know. Yet you would think that human beings would have a similar gait. Americans have a distinct gait about the way we handle ourselves and especially during that period of time when America had complete confidence in everything that we were doing. So there is something unique about being an American, and we need to keep these precious gifts that we have. We've got to do our work. We've got to take our responsibility. We've got to bring this country away from the welfare state that we have become. We've got to hold people accountable with the rule of law and apply the law equally to everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin or any other privilege that there might be--the O.J. version of justice, as we see it, if you juxtapose the criminal case versus the civil. I think most of America knows the facts of what happened; but to me, there appeared to be a different version of justice for O.J. Simpson in the criminal case than he might have gotten if he hadn't had the money, the notoriety or the fame as compared to the civil case where he pretty much lost everything that he had. I think there was justice delivered at least once there, Madam Speaker. So we want equal justice under the law. We want all of these foundations, these pillars of American exceptionalism, refurbished and built back up again because America is not done. We've not reached the apex of our flight. Even though we may have had the malaise II speech a couple of nights ago, that's not the American spirit. We don't apologize for who we are, nor do we back up from people who challenge us. We look down at the Gulf of Mexico, and we see an environmental disaster, a mess down there. It is a tragedy. It is a tragedy especially for the people who live in that gulf area and any place that that oil might drift. Boy, do we all feel bad, especially for those in Louisiana and beyond, but something went wrong 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and 18,000 feet below that which caused that well to blow out. The spill that is coming now will be stopped one day. Going into last weekend, they were down to 13,800 feet with their relief well, and if they hit the column right, they will be able to shut off the leakage in that well. They are drilling day and night. There is no question about that. I expect they're drilling two holes simultaneously with the Discovery Enterprise, which is the drill ship that is sitting there to drill the relief wells that they're doing. They'll get it shut off. There is a lot of oil out there on the surface, and a lot has drifted into the marshlands and onto the beaches. We will get it cleaned up. I don't know how long it will take, nor what it will look like. But I do know this, that in 1979 there was a massive spill of an oil well, a blow-out down off the Yucatan Peninsula. That well spilled about three- and-a-third million gallons of oil. Now, as of a few days ago, the calculus was about one-and-a-quarter million gallons of oil that had come out of this hole down off the gulf. Now we're seeing numbers that are way beyond that, and no one knows who to believe, whether it's BP or the government or somebody who is looking at those numbers. Though, I can tell you this: it has been a decade or two since people have worried about going down to the Yucatan Peninsula because of that oil leak. They've gotten it cleaned up. The impact of it has been minimized dramatically. We will get Louisiana cleaned up. We will get our coasts cleaned up. We will look back on this time. What I'm interested in is stopping the leak and, yes, in cleaning up the mess. I want to bring every ship in here that can go out there and set up a sweep system, and I don't see any reason for the President not to suspend the Jones Act and to go around and do a mea culpa to America and bring in every ship we can to recover as much oil as possible off the surface of the ocean rather than having to vacuum it up out of the wetlands and to clean it and take it out of the sand on our beaches. We need to get it while it's on the surface of the water, and that means surrounding the oil slick in the plume and starting to herd that back in. Maybe you'll remember the comedy routine that Emmett Kelly did, the circus clown, where he went out--and many of us have seen the movie-- and he didn't know what his show was going to be or what he was going to do. He walked out into the spotlight under the big top at the circus, and he took a broom, and he began to sweep the edge of the spotlight in. The person running the spotlight figured out what was going on, and he cut a cardboard cutout, and put it over the light, way up on top of the big top, and he began to shrink that light up on the inside where it was emitted, and he shrunk it as Emmett Kelly swept the circle. When it was done, they were able to coordinate where he swept the light under the rug and eliminated it. That's what we need to do with this oil spill. We need to take that oil spill and start on the outside and start bringing that together and bring enough rigs in so we can get it done and so we can recover the oil that can be recovered from the surface. We need to take it off of the surface of the ocean. If we don't have every ship there, doing that that we can do now, we need to bring them. If the Jones Act stands in the way, the White House, of course, is going to be protective. They're less inclined than President Bush to waive the Jones Act. I think there needs to be a powerful call for the President of the United States to waive the Jones Act. So we have some things to do to fix up America--free enterprise, lower taxes, lower regulations, and more inspiration for people to have opportunities to go out and earn, save, invest, and succeed. People need to be held accountable for their actions. People need to be rewarded for the things that they do well and punished for the things that they do bad. That's the America we need to be in. Today, we are in a welfare state. It is a fact. This is a report that was done by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. He studied families, families of four, that were headed by high school dropouts. This is without regard to their immigration status. So they could have been legal, illegal, natural born or naturalized; but they were high school dropouts. They would, on average, draw down $32,000 a year in public benefits--a family of four, headed by a high school dropout. They would on average pay $9,000 a year in taxes. The difference to the dollar, I remember, is $22,449 a year as the net cost to a taxpayer for a household headed by a high school dropout, because, at their skill levels, no matter how hard they work, they can't earn enough money to sustain themselves in this society. This is a society that we've built. We have poured millions of people into this country illegally who have suppressed the wages of the lower skilled so that the high school dropouts can't find places to punch the clock to earn enough money so that they don't have to go on some type of public assistance. There will be food stamps there. There will be a rent subsidy. There will be a heat subsidy. There will be at least 69 other Federal programs. We thought that we reformed welfare here in the mid-1990s. It only brought things to a plateau. Then the welfare spending started to grow again. So we are a dependency society. The President of the United States and the members of his party know full well that expanding the dependency class in America expands their political base. They are cynically growing the dependency class in America so that they have a stronger political foundation so that they can stay in power--so that the elitists can stay in power. Well, I happen to have a good friend on the floor of the House right now who is anything but an elitist, unless there happens to be some kind of company that would be made up of smart people, well-educated judges from Texas who will stand and fight, who are naturally born with a spine, who have been refurbished by education and life's experiences and, hopefully, a little bit by the friendship of mine. So I offer as much time as may be consumed by the gentleman of Texas, Judge Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. I am standing here thinking that I started down this subject matter, and a statement that I needed to make was this: I'm looking forward to the interception of the hole in the relief wells that are being drilled down almost 14,000 feet, just going into last weekend when I last went back and checked, so I presume that they are approaching their goal. But it's very difficult to thread that needle and be 4 miles away and hit that. It's a very difficult thing to do. But when they do get it done, when they cap this well off and get the relief well drilled and successfully seal this off, doing what they actually did in 1979 when they had that huge oil spill when they had the blowout in the well off the Yucatan Peninsula down in southern Mexico, when they shut that off, then I expect--and I haven't had a conversation with anybody in BP or anybody that's more knowledgeable than me, but I expect then we will be able to go down with robotics and cut the casing off and recover the blowout preventer. If that can come, if we can bring the blowout preventer up to the surface and then test that BOP, at that point we will at least be able to have a more effective theory on what went wrong. That's what I am interested in more than anything else. I want the well shut off. I want it cleaned up. But I want to know what went wrong. And the President has frozen and issued an order to stop all drilling offshore for 6 months. Even if we find out what went wrong and find out it was human error, mechanical error, they still seem to be determined that they're going to crush the economy in that part of the country. The economic damage of oil drifting to shore is a heavy load economically, and environmentally it takes a long time to recover, but also the economic damage of shutting off all of those jobs that are supported by the drilling is a painful thing to watch that kind of judgment from the President of the United States. Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge that we must have run out of time. For that cause, I will be happy to yield back.