Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for yielding to me. I rise in opposition to H. Con. Res. 248. It is not with disrespect for my colleague from Ohio, and I am confident that the gentleman from Ohio is aware of that, but I read the resolution, and to me it reads as a retreat resolution. I think about the times that America has been characterized as retreating. As I look back through the history that I have lived through and the history that I have studied, I think of a little book I have in my office that I wish I would have brought over here. It is the book, ``How We Won the War,'' by General Giap of Vietnam, North Vietnam at the time. And I ran across that book randomly, and I began to read through that, and what would be going through the mind of a Vietnamese general. First, I would make the point that we didn't lose the war tactically in Vietnam; it was lost here in the United States, and a lot of it exactly on the floor of this Congress and in debates that began and flowed through similar to these debates that we have today. As I read that, it is on page 8, it is not worth reading the book, it says that they got the inspiration because the United States had negotiated an agreement with Korea. Where did they get their inspiration to win the war against us in Vietnam? They saw that we didn't fight the Korean war through to a final victory but negotiated a settlement. And then I would fast-forward to June 11, 2004, where I was sitting waiting to go into Iraq the next day, and on the screen of Al Jazeera TV came Muqtada al-Sadr speaking in Arabic with English closed caption. He said, If we continue to attack Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. That is the inspiration not just for our enemies of al Qaeda in Iraq and in Afghanistan and around the world, it is the inspiration for all of our enemies around the world, and it was the inspiration for Osama bin Laden when he ordered the attack on the United States on September 11. We cannot lose our will. When we engage in an operation, we have to push it through to success. In fact, that legacy of Lebanon, Vietnam, and Mogadishu has been put to rest by a victory in Iraq, a victory that would not have been achieved if the people who brought these debates to the floor 44 times in the 110th Congress, resolutions that were designed to unfund, underfund, or undermine our troops, we fought off all of those resolutions. Now we have a victory in Iraq that is being claimed by this administration who opposed it back then. I don't trust the judgment of people who have always been against armed conflict. I trust the judgment of the people who fight and win wars and the people who lead us through those wars that we fight and win. This is an American destiny question that is before us. If we walk away from this conflict in Afghanistan for any reason, America's destiny will forever be diminished, and they will never take us seriously again.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Minnesota for yielding, and I appreciate the stance that he is taking on this bill, H.R. 4247. First, Mr. Speaker, I would say a couple of words about the 10th amendment and those rights that are reserved for the States or to the people respectively. What are the States doing wrong? How is it that the States, that now 31 of them have some type of controlling legislation, another 15 States are taking a look at this, that adds up to 46 States that could potentially have this resolved each in their own fashion, what is the crisis that requires Uncle Sam to step in and ignore the direct guidance in the 10th amendment of the Constitution itself? So I am going to stand on the States' rights side. And if I were in one of these States, and if this legislation were to pass, my response would be to the Federal Government, Keep your money. We don't need these strings attached, because it is one thing after another after another after another. And pretty soon it is a national curriculum with Federal mandates and imposing cultural impositions at the school level in every accredited district in the country. And one of the cases in point will be, if this is about keeping our students safe, if this is about the Keeping All Students Safe Act, which is the title of it, then we ought to take a look at the President's czar. The President has appointed a Safe and Drug-Free Schools czar. His name is Kevin Jennings. I don't know what Kevin Jennings says about this particular bill, but if he is appointed to this task, I would think he would have been the person that testified before the hearings. But I suspect that the President of the United States isn't interested in having Kevin Jennings come before the cameras here in the United States Congress because he has made a totality of his life about promoting homosexuality within the schools, and much of it at the elementary school level. He has written a foreword in a book called Queering Elementary Education in a favorable fashion, which aims to indoctrinate elementary students with homosexuality. Additionally, Kevin Jennings has written several other books. One of them is Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, where he describes his own use of illegal and illicit drugs, and written about it in a cavalier fashion. He has not retracted those statements. If he is going to be about safe and drug-free schools, there should be something he had to offer about safety for kids and drug-free for kids. That could possibly be something that we could take up in here. But the czar of Safe and Drug-Free Schools has another agenda. It is the promotion of homosexuality within our schools. Kevin Jennings has spoken in a favorable way about Harry Hay, who was on the cover of NAMBLA magazine, the North American Man/Boy Love Association magazine. Kevin Jennings said of Harry Hay that he is always inspired by Harry Hay. Additionally, some of these things, Mr. Speaker, I am just not going to say into the record. If I did so, I imagine somebody, at least on my side of the aisle, would move to take my words down. Some of it is that revolting. And this is the Safe and Drug-Free Schools czar, who has crossed the line over and over again, made a complete career about advocating for homosexuality in our schools, much of it in our elementary schools. This is the man that the President of the United States has appointed as the Safe and Drug-Free Schools czar.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's a privilege and an honor to be recognized by you to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives. Having watched the collection of colleagues from the other side of the aisle over the last 60 minutes, a lot of subjects were brought up and I think delivered in a professional fashion by my colleagues, and I hope they know I'm always open to dialogue if they have some things that they would like to exchange with me. I'm here. And I have often asked my colleagues to yield, and if they should ask me to yield, I'm happy to do so. I think it's important to have an exchange, a dialogue. First, we learned last Thursday that Republicans have a lot of good ideas. We also learned that many of those good ideas are suppressed by the iron-fisted gavel of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Also, as I looked at the event as it unfolded, Mr. Speaker, that 6\1/ 2\ hours of discussion that took place last February 25, last Thursday, at Blair House, on health care, a number of things came to me, but looking at the data was quite interesting. Just to boil it down to raw numbers and regular comparison, it was this: that for every 2 minutes that a Republican spoke, the President spoke for an additional 2 minutes and another Democrat spoke for another 2 minutes. So it was really two-to-one in the time that was used. As the President said, well, it's okay if he talks a long time, even though the time was very limited to the others that were talking because, after all, he is the President. So the time doesn't charge against him. It's an interesting concept that I think that heretofore has not been uttered by the President of the United States and in any previous administration. Another thing that struck me that appears to have not been mentioned by the pundits or the people that observed this were the number of times that the President interrupted those who were speaking. Now, I can identify with what this is like. I have a number of times in my legislative life run into the situation where there's a limited amount of time to speak and maybe the clock has 1 minute on it, 2 minutes, or 5 minutes, or, as it does right now tonight, it's got 60 minutes on it. So you watch the clock and you try to pack as much information into that period of time as you can. When something happens to break that up and change the rhythm and shorten the time that you have, you have to adjust your message to compress it down into the time that you have left. I believe that the clock that was set for the Members of Congress to speak was set at 3\1/2\ minutes. I don't know that. I believe that. I was thinking of the moment that the Republican leader in the Senate, Senator McConnell, introduced Senator Coburn for his 3\1/2\ minutes to speak. I do remember the log on the time. It's pretty close to this. Senator Coburn spoke for a minute and fourteen seconds. He was interrupted by the President of the United States for something like 4 minutes and 20 seconds. And then he came back and he spoke again for a little bit more than a minute and he was re-interrupted again by the President of the United States. That happened about one more time in that iteration. The time then that was left for Senator Coburn had expired. And it was the thought and the concept that was driven by Senator Coburn was completely split and delayed because the President interrupted and burned up the time. And even though they may have reset the stopwatch on Senator Coburn's time, it isn't the same as having 3 uninterrupted minutes. The President claimed more than that on many occasions throughout the entire day, to where it came down to this: the President spoke as much as either Republicans or Democrats, altogether, and he interrupted Members of the House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, without reservation. Apparently, he believes he's the President of the United States and he can do that. That may be true on certain occasions and to a limit. But there is a limit, Mr. Speaker. And the limit was this: the President of the United States interrupted those who were there to be heard 70 times, 70 in 6\1/2\ hours; a little more than 10 times an hour. And of all those interruptions, he interrupted Democrats 20 times, Republicans 50 times. Fifty interruptions. And the kind of way that it breaks up the rhythm and the flow of the message that's being delivered and the fashion that I've talked about with Senator Coburn whom, I have not had this discussion with, by the way. For all I know, he has no objection to the process that was there. But for me, I do, Mr. Speaker. So it was not possible for a consistent, continual flow of cogent thought to flow through with the President interrupted on 70 different occasions over the course of 6\1/2\ hours. It's hard to get to the bottom of something; it's hard to make your point when you're continually interrupted. But I listened to this last hour, and I think the gentlemen had an opportunity to make their case. And there were plenty of them. I don't know that anything was particularly stunning, except I looked at the gentleman from Wisconsin's poster that was on this easel just a few minutes ago. It showed the jobs that were either created or lost, not by the President of the United States, President Obama, or President Bush, but the jobs that were created or lost during their administration, which is a far more accurate way to discuss it. That span was over about a 2-year period of time. It would have been hard to see the poster and understand it. I had to walk up very closely and analyze it, but it flowed back through 2009 and through 2008, into December of 2007. The curious thing about that chart, which showed an upside down parabolic curve of the bar graphs of jobs lost on under those two administrations, appeared to be about equal--the last year of the Bush administration, the first year of the Obama administration. The curious part was that on the chart there was only one month where there were actually jobs that increased. That was during the Bush administration. And we all know that if you would take that month and then you would go back into 2008 and on into 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, all the Bush years, one would see that there was some up months and some down months. And an administration needs to be looked at on balance. But here is what happened. These are the real viewpoints on what happened with our economy. It seems to be ignored. Now the gentleman that stood at this particular podium had on his chart that under the Bush administration we had two wars, two tax cuts, one drug entitlement, and an asterisk for the Wall Street bailout. Well, okay. First, I will bring us up to these two wars, Mr. Speaker, and I can do it fairly briefly, and that is this: when President Bush was elected in the year 2000, after we went through all of the recounts in Florida and the Supreme Court decision and the allegations that the President was an appointed President, not an elected President, which no recount or analysis would support, all of the reviews of the elections in Florida and everywhere else in the year 2000 support that George Bush won that election. It's too bad it was so close. It was too bad we had to have such a fight. It's too bad it had to go to the Supreme Court. But in the end no one has made a legitimate case that there was anything other than a legitimate election, and every State, including Florida, in a count that was 527 or 537--I think 537--was the difference in Florida. Very, very close. And it wasn't so close, of course, in 2004. But in the year 2000, when George Bush was elected President, already we had seen the bursting of the dot.com bubble. Now this was this false sector of the economy that was created because the investors in America and around the world saw that we had developed the microchip. And with the microchip we had developed the ability to store and transfer information more effectively, more efficiently, and more quickly than ever before and more cheaply than ever before. So the investors began to bet on the dot.com companies. As they invested in the dot.com companies, there were companies out there that had capital that they could utilize. And they invested it into the new industry that was growing. It was the information age. The information revolution. As that grew, it outgrew its ability of the technology we were developing, it outgrew its ability to produce a good or a service that could improve our productivity or efficiency. So when that happened, it created a bubble. It was the investors' bubble created on the speculation that there would be a value that was inherent in our ability to store or transfer information better than ever before. There's more to be said about that, Mr. Speaker, but that was a description of the bubble. The bubble was bursting at the end of the Clinton administration. That bubble was going to burst because the markets had to adjust to the irrational exuberance of the investment in the dot-com bubble. So as that bubble was bursting and George Bush was becoming President, we saw a decline in our economy. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed, saw the bursting of the dot-com bubble and concluded that something needed to be done to shore that up, to fill that hole that was created in our economy because the bubble was collapsing and shrinking. And to fill the hole, Alan Greenspan decided, with or without the support of President Bush, that we should create a housing market that would help shore this up. So we ended up with unnaturally low interest rates. While that was going on, it played into the hands of the people that were driving for lower underwriting standards, lower standards of capital. And this was contributing to, later on, the mortgage crisis that we saw unfold about a year and a half ago. That builds us up to September 11, 2009, where I see on the gentleman from Wisconsin's chart where he said two wars. Well, we had a dot-com bubble that was bursting. We had a Chairman of the Fed and others who had decided to shore up the hole created by the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Which, by the way, that bubble was pierced by the lawsuit against Microsoft. The bubble was growing. It was big. It was fragile. It was going to burst, I believe, but the bubble was pierced by the lawsuit against Microsoft that was brought about by a collection of State attorneys general who decided to file a class action lawsuit and took Microsoft to task and took them to court, and it cost millions and millions of dollars. That accelerated the collapse of the dot-com bubble. And as that accelerated and it went down, something needed to fill that void or we would have seen a serious economic decline and a real recession. Well, we saw an economic decline. Some would argue--and honestly, if look at the numbers, it technically probably was not a recession. But to fill the hole, the effort was made to create a housing bubble to fill the void that was created by the collapse of the dot-com bubble. That's what was taking place when George Bush was being inaugurated as President of the United States. He kept Alan Greenspan on, and I don't object to that, Mr. Speaker. I just make that as a point. So as these two things are happening, the bubble was deflating. The dot-com bubble was deflating. The housing bubble was being created to fill the hole. While this was going on, along came the September 11 attack on the United States of America, the attack on what may have been this Capitol building or the White House. I think it would have been on the Capitol building. That's the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The attack on the Pentagon, where we lost our brave service personnel there, and the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, which causes us all to stop in reverent grief at the price that was paid by innocent Americans at the hands of the evil al Qaeda. But, Mr. Speaker, that happened on President Bush's watch. I don't know that one could point to any act of omission or commission that contributed to that on the part of the administration. It happened. They found a vulnerability that had always existed, and al Qaeda exploited it. So we ended up at war. As the gentleman from Wisconsin's chart says, we were involved in two wars. We went immediately into Afghanistan. We drove al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and teamed up with the Northern Alliance, and with a very minimal number of troops in U.S. uniform, liberated the country of Afghanistan and eradicated Afghanistan of al Qaeda terrorists, these al Qaeda terrorists who needed some kind of habitat if they're going to operate. It was a just thing to do. It was a decision that had to be made early. It went very well, with a minimum number of American casualties, and Afghanistan was freed and liberated. Then, because of intelligence worldwide, I found no one who disagreed with, because of a decision that was made, we went into Iraq. And not to deliberate on that, Mr. Speaker, and not to, let's say, kick that dead horse, but once we put our troops into action and asked them to put their lives on the line for us, for our liberty and for our freedom and for the destiny of America and the free world, it is our obligation to stand with them. And I have stood with our troops--not just our troops but also their mission--continually since the beginning of these operations as I came to this Congress and watched as the liberation of Iraq unfolded before our eyes on television. So the poster that was here on this easel that said, well, under George Bush we lost all these jobs--well, the chart only shows the last year of the Bush administration--and we were under two wars, and that we had had two sets of tax cuts and a drug entitlement and a Wall Street bailout. All of that blamed on George Bush. Well, I would like to think they could get over this and quit revising history, as a matter of fact. Yes, we have two wars. Which one would they have avoided? Would they have avoided them both? Would anybody say we should not have gone into Afghanistan? Would you have just walked away and shrugged your shoulders and pointed your finger and said, This is a job for the Attorney General? After all, it must be a law enforcement operation. Surely there couldn't be a war against people that would annihilate the lives of 3,000 or more Americans on a single day. The worst attack on American homeland in the history of our country, and I see it listed here on the poster as if it were something we should not have been engaged in. Mr. Speaker, it was nearly unanimous here in the House of Representatives to grant the authority for the President of the United States to engage in these operations. There was only one exception, so that's the only person that would get to come here to the floor and say, I told the you so. She'd be wrong. But there's only one person that has the credentials to even make that statement in this entire Congress. It's not the people that were down here tonight, Mr. Speaker. Yes, two wars. The war in Afghanistan was necessary and unavoidable. The war in Iraq was a decision that was made off of the intelligence that we had, and that is a separate debate. But we engaged in those operations, and once we did, I throw my lot with our troops and their mission, and I do not believe, Mr. Speaker, that you can separate the two. And I think it's hypocritical to state that you are for the troops and opposed to the mission because you find yourself in a position where you're arguing that you support the troops but you're asking them to put their lives on the line for a mission that you do not agree with. And that, Mr. Speaker, is a line of dichotomy and hypocrisy that I cannot abide. So, yes, two wars. We know the reasons for each of them. And another little bullet point on this poster that was here from the gentleman from Wisconsin is tax cuts, two tax cuts. Yes, we had them. We had an economy that needed some help. I'm not a great fan of the rebate that took place in 2001. I think it gives the economy just a little sugar high, and then it goes on the way it was. But I am a fan of the tax cuts that unfolded in 2003 that were signed into law by President Bush on May 28, 2003. Those were real tax cuts. Those were real economic stimulation tax cuts. They were the tax cuts that caused people to free up capital and reinvest it again and get this economy rolling again. Any data you look at supports that those tax cuts--those cuts in capital gains, those cuts in dividends, those cuts that let people invest money and with some confidence believe it was going to improve their return on investment--were smart, and they were prudent, and they were useful, and they worked. It is a far, far better thing to stimulate our economy with tax cuts than it is to try to stimulate our economy with debt, as this current administration is seeking to do. So the Bush administration had two series of tax cuts: 2001, which was essentially a rebate--they realized it didn't work; by 2003, they came back and asked for real stimulation tax cuts. We provided those in 2003, and they did work by any measure. So when we look at the Bush administration, that little chart that shows only the last year of the Bush administration is not indicative of the Bush administration. Look at it on the balance. I don't have those numbers in my head. I just saw the chart. But that chart is indicative of the Obama administration. That is all we have to measure. We are in March, so we have 13 months of the Obama administration. There has been negative job growth every single month during the Obama administration. Now I'm not laying that all at his feet. He inherited a situation. The cycles of the global economy are part of this. The decisions that were made in this Congress is part of this. President Bush is not wholly to blame, if he is to blame at all. But what I saw happen was the recently admonished Charlie Rangel, now chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was the anticipated chairman of the Ways and Means Committee immediately in the aftermath of the Democrat takeover of the majority of the United States House of Representatives when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker. And Charlie Rangel, the ranking member as I recall on the Ways and Means Committee, went on the national talk shows and he went over and over again. He went everywhere all the time. He talked about as much on the national talk shows as Newt Gingrich did when he became Speaker-elect of the House of Representatives. And all of America watched and listened to Charlie Rangel because they wanted to know. And the question was continually asked: Mr. Rangel, which of these Bush tax cuts would you keep and which would you want to get rid of. And I don't recall a single straight answer, but I remember by November and December and January and part of February had rolled around, it had become clear to the analysts and pundits in America there was not one single tax cut of the Bush administration that Charlie Rangel wanted to keep, not one. From that period of time in November of 2006 until December of 2006, January and February of 2007, we saw industrial investment in America drop like a rock. Mr. Speaker, it did so because capital is smart. Capital is intelligent. It will do the wise thing. When capital investment realized that the costs of investment were going to get higher and higher, then it backed away from the marketplace and slowed down dramatically in industrial investment. That industrial investment that was lacking was the precursor to this economy that we are in today. Now it is not the only factor. There are a whole series of factors. People on this side of the aisle can make their arguments, and people on this side of the aisle can make their arguments, too. But I have laid out the scenario where there is a bursting of the dot-com bubble, accelerated by the lawsuit against Microsoft organized by some of the State attorneys general that started our economy down a decline, and the chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, made a decision I believe to try to prop it up by creating a housing market to help bring this economy back up again with unnaturally low interest rates and favorable terms and lower underwriting requirements, and that I believe was a precursor to the subprime mortgage crisis that brought about this economic decline, all of the while while this was going on, we saw the majority change in the House, and then the Charlie Rangel position of not being committed to preserving a single Bush tax cut. And the result was capital left investment out of the industrial side of this marketplace. It slowed down our industrial production. Mr. Speaker, there is a person in the gallery that is making gestures up there that are inappropriate. I would like to ask him to be removed. announcement by the speaker pro tempore

Mr. KING of Iowa. I request that he be removed.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your attention to the decorum in the Chamber. I do revere this institution that we all are a part of. And to pick up where I left off if I may, there is a flow to this economy that is impossible to discern with the definitive analysis on how much of it belongs on this side of the aisle and how much belongs on this side of the aisle, and how much of it is the organism that is the free enterprise economy we have, coupled with the politics that churn back and forth. So we make our arguments. We make them in the media, and when we go home to our districts, we trust that the American people will sort this out and that they will then come to a decision that will elect the people that come back to this Congress in the next cycle of our elections and be able to make even better decisions than in the past. So when the argument here is that even though the people in this Chamber and those who happen to be watching on C-SPAN have seen these bullets, the bullet points, to make it clear, on the chart of the gentleman from Wisconsin, who is a friend and who I actually have a good personal relationship with, two wars--this side will argue that they were both necessary, and on this side they will argue only one was necessary. And the tax cuts; I have argued that one was only a sugar high and the other one was very effective and necessary. Apparently the people on this side of the aisle will argue that neither one of them was effective and necessary and we should follow the Keynesian approach. The drug entitlement language--as I recall, there were a number of Democrats who voted for that bill, and the argument was, would you actually set up a Medicare proposal that would not include prescription drugs today, as much as prescription drugs are involved in providing health care to everybody in America. You wouldn't imagine that the pharmaceuticals that are so much a part of the stability for our health care would not be part of Medicare. So that argument, I think, stands pretty clear. Then we have the other bullet point that was on the chart, Wall Street bailouts. Well, I was not a fan of Wall Street bailouts, Mr. Speaker. I, among about half of the Republicans, voted ``no'' on the $700 billion TARP legislation which, by the way, was only $350 billion worth of TARP legislation, only $350 billion, and that is a relative term, when you are looking at $750 billion, you can say that. But this $750 billion TARP proposal that came from the Secretary of Treasury, Henry Paulson, his request was for immediately $750 billion with no strings attached and he would spend the money as he saw fit, and he was the only one who could save our economy from going into a downward spiral and the global collateral and global currency from crashing. Well, this Congress pulled it back, held it to $350 billion. I voted ``no'' on each component of that because I believed that there wasn't any entity in this country that was too big to be allowed to fail, that we should simply let them fail because if we do so, it would remove the implication, the inference that the Federal Government was going to provide a guarantee. And if they believe it is implicit that the Federal Government will bail out companies that are too big to fail, then they take greater and greater risks and the markets don't work any more because they are propped up by the government. So Wall Street bailout, I stand here, Mr. Speaker, and about half of my Republican colleagues stood with me each time opposed to the $750 billion TARP fund bailout. And maybe about the same number of Democrats stood in opposition and in favor of it. So it was both parties, in roughly equal numbers-- although not precisely--that supported the Wall Street bailout. But, Mr. Speaker, then-Senator Obama--and now President Obama--did support the TARP bailout. He was in support of the $700 billion. And when it came back, as the vote of $350 billion now and $350 billion to be requested by the next administration and approved by the next Congress, President Obama--then-Senator Obama--voted for that legislation; he was in favor of it. When they went to the White House, John McCain and Senator Obama, to sit down with Speaker Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, the leader in the United States Senate, and Roy Blunt was there as well--and the list of people on the House side goes on--at that table, then-candidate Obama, Senator Obama was in agreement with the request for $700 billion and voted for it. So it doesn't work very well for a Democrat to come to the floor of the House and point his finger at George Bush when he can clearly see that his President--and, by the way, my President--was in support of TARP. I was not. I stood in opposition to TARP. The Wall Street bailout was approved by then-Senator Obama, the first half at $350 billion, and then later on the other $350 billion that was requested by the President to be elected later, which was President Obama, and approved by the Congress to be elected later, which was the Pelosi-Reid Congress, sent Henry Paulson another $350 billion to go to the new Secretary of the Treasury. That Secretary, by the way, had tax troubles of his own. So we can spin this a lot of ways, but what happened was at the end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama administration and with the cooperation, support and assent of then- Senator and later on President-elect and then President Obama, here's what we saw happen. We saw that TARP funding approved in late September, early October of 2008 with the support of Obama and McCain and President Bush--not mine. We saw three large investment banks begin to be nationalized as the flow of this election came through. We saw the huge insurance company, AIG, nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government. We saw Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government. And then, pretty soon we saw General Motors and Chrysler nationalized and taken over by the Federal Government. We saw the bankruptcy court accept the deal that was proposed by the Obama White House without one jot or tittle amended no matter what the testimony was before the bankruptcy court. A proposed package that was endorsed by--and for all I know shaped by--the White House to put these car companies through bankruptcy was, verbatim, approved by the bankruptcy court. Now, what a curious thing that the White House can write a prescription for a bankruptcy and a takeover of private sector companies, two proud American companies, and the bankruptcy court couldn't find a single flaw in that proposal, no matter what the testimony to end back up with exactly the language of the agreement that was proposed by the White House, and which, by the way, was supported by Speaker Pelosi. And the language that she used was: I am not going to allow the automakers to get bargaining leverage over the unions. And so the secured creditors and the car companies lost their investment completely--lock, stock and barrel, wiped out, Mr. Speaker. And shares of stock were handed over to the United Auto Workers Union. How could that happen in a Nation that believes in the rule of law? How could that happen in a Nation that allows for collateral to be held for secured creditors? The people that held the collateral for those companies lost their collateral, and part of the reason was because the large investment banks that had been invested in those shares had also received a bailout from TARP--the Troubled Asset Relief Program in case there is anybody that needs to know that. When that happened, then it was leveraged against these large investment banks to capitulate, give up their secured interest in that collateral for General Motors and Chrysler so that it could be transferred over to the unions, whose concession was they conceded claims, insurance claims in the future. That's it. No real-time, now transfer of anything; simply some concessions down the line that looked like--if they're able to pass socialized medicine will be irrelevant anyway. That's what I saw happen. TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, $350 billion under Bush, $350 billion under Obama, three large investment banks nationalized, AIG, the insurance company, nationalized, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, one of them lost $16 billion in the last quarter, $16 billion, Mr. Speaker, all of that out of the pockets of the taxpayers. The taxpayers are on the hook to ensure that these now wholly owned government entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose liabilities have been accepted by executive order of President Obama last December in the amount of contingent liabilities of $5.5 trillion, and still the taxpayers continue to go to work every day and send their money into the Federal Government, and still this Federal Government's heart is hardened and can't seem to come to grips with the massive responsibility that they have accepted and transferred over onto the people of America. And while all of this is going on, the Community Reinvestment Act, which was passed in the late seventies, ``modernized'' in the early nineties under Bill Clinton, that Community Reinvestment Act that was designed to put an end to redlining around districts in our inner cities--mostly inner cities, wouldn't have had to be exclusively that, Mr. Speaker--and it was an activity that I disagree with and object to, but there were lenders that could see that there were neighborhoods where the asset values were going down, inner city neighborhoods. Any of the inner city properties where the asset value was going down, they took, more or less, a red pen and drew a line around those areas in the inner city whose asset values were going down, they were redlining them. They would draw a boundary around them and then make a decision that they were not going to loan any money into that area because the collateral value was diminishing rather than appreciating. So when that happened, and it became apparent here in this Congress, the hearts of the Members of Congress went out to the people that were trying to make a living and live in those areas and passed the Community Reinvestment Act, which essentially said if you're going to make loans and if you're going to expand your operations with branches or continue to go into other neighborhoods, then you need to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act, which means, in short, that lending institutions had to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. That's the short version of what it is. There are a lot of nicer ways to say it, but that is the blunt version, Mr. Speaker. So these lending institutions were having trouble defining what that meant. Well, ACORN was there to help them. They were there to shake down these lenders and push the lenders into making more bad loans in bad neighborhoods. But the problem was that the lenders couldn't make any more loans because they were having trouble selling these mortgages off into the secondary market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because the underwriting requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not loose enough to allow those mortgages to be sold into the Fannie and Freddie secondary loan market. And so this wonderful organization called ACORN came to this Congress in the early nineties and lobbied the Congress--they weren't the only ones, but they were a very, very active and forceful organization--they lobbied the Congress to lower the underwriting and the collateral of down payment standards for the borrowers so that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could buy up these loans on the secondary market. And the loans that would be made by the lending institutions that were seeking to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act, make those loans, bad loans in bad neighborhoods, sell them off to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, shed themselves of it, take their profit and their margins out and let Fannie and Freddie worry about that as they rolled them forward. All of that was going on, and it wasn't going fast enough. But once the underwriting requirements for Fannie and Freddie were approved here in this Congress in the early nineties, then ACORN went to work and accelerated their effort to promote more and more bad loans in bad neighborhoods. While that was going on, the shakedown was being accelerated. But it wasn't enough to have a, let me say, lobbying operation here in Washington that was pushing to lower the standards for Fannie and Fred, but there was an activist shakedown operation going on out there in the neighborhoods where ACORN's people were proudly saying that they went into lending institutions and they would shove the banker's desk over against the wall and all surround the lender and chant and scream at him to intimidate him into making more and more bad loans in bad neighborhoods. So what did they do? In an attempt to please or placate, the lenders made more bad loans in more bad neighborhoods. Then ACORN found themselves in a position where they could actually score the lenders as to whether they were in compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act. Well, think about what that means--an outside organization that emerges today as a criminal enterprise, scoring lending institutions as to whether they're in compliance with the very vague language of the Community Reinvestment Act, and encouraging more and more bad loans in bad neighborhoods. Alan Greenspan is up there, lowering interest rates, extending the terms, lowering the standards for a downpayment. All of this accelerated bad loans in bad neighborhoods. Subprime mortgages made that all happen, and you had this snowball that was rolling along underneath the radar. We saw this start to break apart a year and a half or so ago, Mr. Speaker. That's when Henry Paulson came to this Capitol and did his Chicken Little routine. He said, The financial sky is falling, and I can prop it up with $700 billion. What's your guarantee? He said, I have no guarantee, but it's the only thing that has any chance of working. You'll have to give me the money, and I'll do what I can with it. That's the picture of what happened: The Community Reinvestment Act, the shakedown of lenders, ACORN engaged in the middle of this, ACORN finding themselves as the broker for bad loans and the approver of the lending institutions that are making enough bad loans that it meets their standard. That's what we saw happen, and we saw this economy start to crack apart again. When it cracked apart and when the economy started to spiral downward, yes, that was under George Bush's watch, but it was also, Mr. Speaker, under Nancy Pelosi's watch, and it was under Harry Reid's watch. I have stood here on this floor, have sat up in these seats and have listened to enough debate from this side of the aisle when, over and over again, Democrats in this Congress have said, Give us the gavels. We will make it better. We can fix this economy. We can grow this country. We will take care of our national defense. Everything will be right again. This is before President Obama was even elected to the United States Senate. There were declarations from this side of the aisle that you could fix everything if you could just get the gavels. Well, you got the gavels. You got the gavels in 2006, and we saw industrial investments spiral downwards, and we saw the subprime mortgage crisis spiral even further downwards. By the way, in 2005, I stood on this floor and I supported raising the standards of underwriting for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, requiring them to have similar, not exactly the same, capital requirements as the other lending institutions and similar regulations of the other lending institutions. What happened, Mr. Speaker, was that the now chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank, came to this floor and vigorously opposed an amendment that was offered by Mr. Leach of Iowa, on October 26, 2005, which would have fixed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Jim Leach understood what we needed to do. I understood what we needed to do. There were several dozen others who understood what we needed to do. Yet the defender of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would later on become the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and he would continue to defend Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and he would open up authorizations to fund ACORN and to accelerate the downward spiral of our economy. I come to this floor tonight, and I hear it's all George Bush's fault. Well, as you may know, Mr. Speaker, I'm having a little trouble with this logic. So I'll just fast-forward to another circumstance that took place yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before and that will be taking place tomorrow. It is the position that Senator Jim Bunning has taken with regard to the extension of unemployment benefits. He has taken the position that, if you really believe that we should pay as we go, then the people who are promoting that we should extend unemployment benefits should find a way to pay as we go. That's their pledge. They passed PAYGO here. Of course it's a sham. They just simply bypass it, ignore it, or put a little language in the bill that says PAYGO doesn't apply, and they move on. They do whatever they want to do. There is no standard anymore. The integrity has diminished substantially. Jim Bunning said, Hold it. Before we extend unemployment benefits, find a way to pay for it. This is an administration that has spent way out of proportion to any other. This is in the trillions of dollars. We have a President who is a Keynesian economist, if he is an economist at all, and he is on steroids. He has a voracious appetite to spend our grandchildren's future incomes. Today, by my numbers, a baby born in America owes Uncle Sam for the birthright of being a natural born American citizen $44,000. Somebody else's number is $46,000. I'll stick with $44,000. It's a conservative number. By the time that child starts the fifth grade, if the President's budget is approved, authorized, and appropriated, we will see that child owing the Federal Government $88,000 when he walks in to meet his fifth grade teacher. $88,000. At the same time, this same administration laments the college debt that they have. Now, if you have a student who walks out of college and who gets his degree with $88,000 worth of debt, that seems to be more than he wants to bear. The hardest thing is to come short of a degree and still have the college debt because you don't have the sheepskin to help you with the revenue stream, and you've got to find another way to do it. I will say that I empathize with those college students who have high debt, but I even greater empathize with those American babies who are born every day in this country with a huge debt over their heads that they had nothing to say about. They don't really have a means to take that and call it an investment and a return on that investment. It is unconscionable that we would put our children and grandchildren in debt in the fashion that we have, and it is trillions of dollars, Mr. Speaker. The numbers work out to be something like this: We've had something like an $11.3 trillion national debt. That national debt has now been raised to around $14 trillion. If you look at the Obama budget, when you project it out over a 10-year period of time, that takes it up to $28 trillion. Now, this is a massive burden that we have. How do we work our way out of it? We are going the wrong way--raising up mandatory wages. Let's say we raise minimum wage a high percentage, 30-some percent or so. We have got a Davis-Bacon wage scale, the federally imposed union scale on every construction project in America that has 2,000 or more Federal dollars invested in it. It unnaturally inflates the cost of every project that has Federal dollars in it someplace between 8 and 35 percent. The most recent data shows an average of a 22 percent increase because of Davis-Bacon wage scales, which truly are union wage scales. Then on top of that, while the Federal Government is managing minimum wage, managing imposing a union wage scale even on competitive contracts--and by the way, the Davis-Bacon wage scale is the last Jim Crow law in America. I know of no other Jim Crow law left in America. This is one. It is the remaining Jim Crow law. It was designed to lock African Americans out of the trade unions in New York City back in 1932. There was a Federal building contract that was let in the Depression era, and a contractor from Alabama was the low bidder on the project. He brought a lot of African American workers in from Alabama up to New York City to build that Federal building. They'd work cheaper. They came in. The unions got together and lobbied. Somebody said they were both Republicans, and if so, I don't identify with them at all. Two New York legislators--a senator and a representative--called Davis and Bacon decided that they were going to impose a prevailing wage on America, which turns out to be the union scale on America, which is an increase of 22 percent. So the decision we have is: Do we want to build 4 miles of road or 5? Do we want to build four bridges or five? Do we want to build four schools or five? Do you want to build 4 miles of bike trail or 5? Name your project. Do you want to build four buildings or five? How many shovel-ready projects do you want to go to work if they are of equal value--four or five? That's the difference between the non-Davis-Bacon merit shop and Davis-Bacon wages. I am confronted with the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, who has consistently made the argument with many of his colleagues over on this side of the aisle that the Federal Government has no business injecting themselves in between two consenting adults. The two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want to do. It doesn't hurt anybody else. That's their argument. What business is it of ours in this Congress if two consenting adults want to carry on in any fashion whatsoever, whether we can discuss it here into the Record or whether we can't, Mr. Speaker? Well, the same individuals who make that argument seem to think that the Federal Government should inject themselves into every transaction between two consenting adults, provided there are some 2,000 or more Federal dollars involved. So now we have Uncle Sam's telling David King what he has to pay his employees on a construction project in Iowa: If I want to go climb in his excavator on a project, and I say, Hey, Dave. I want to do this for nothing. I just enjoy doing this work. It takes me back to my roots, and I want to help this company, or if I say, Will you just pay me $10 an hour? That'll make it work. It'll give me a little spending money and make it work. He can't do it. It would be a violation of Federal law. I cannot enter into an agreement with my own son, two consenting adults, and work for $10 an hour or $20 an hour or nothing, because the Federal Government has decided they want to tell two consenting adults what they can do, what they will be paid for work that is done. By the way, it changes dramatically from district to district. You might go across the road, the center of the centerline of a highway, and find out there is a 20, 30, or 40 percent difference in this thing called prevailing wage, which actually is union scale. The Federal Government is messing up the works. The free enterprise system has got to be allowed to operate and flourish. There needs to be a floor that is established under labor that is supply and demand. There needs to be a wage and benefits package that is reflective of supply and demand, and the skills of the employee. That, sadly, is not the case when the Federal Government is involved. So, Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of distortions that have been taking place here, and our Keynesian economist on steroids who is in the Oval Office has further distorted this. We need to take this country back, back to our roots, back to our origins, and let the free enterprise system work. There are a series of flashcards that have been made available by the USCIS, Citizenship Immigration Services. Those flashcards are little red things about like this. They will ask you a question when you study to be a naturalized American citizen. On one side it will say, Who is the Father of our Country? Snap it over and it will say, George Washington. Who saved the Union? Snap it over, Abe Lincoln. What is the economic system of the United States? Snap it over, free enterprise capitalism. Mr. Speaker, it is hard to believe that would be a question that would be answered accurately in the White House today, given the nationalization of one-third of the private-sector profits in the country, given the effort to nationalize our bodies. Now, there is a concept, Mr. Speaker, that has some people raise their eyebrows. Now they are ready with their fingers on their keyboard, because they think that Steve King has said something that is completely outrageous. Well, it is completely thought through. Here is the point. Ever since 1973, a significant percentage of Americans, albeit today in a minority, have continually made the argument that abortion should be available electively because no one has any business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body. That is the argument. The pro-choice crowd has continually argued you can't tell a woman what she can or can't do with her body. It is her body, a decision for her and for her doctor and for her pastor, priest, or rabbi. Funny that the father is not in this equation. But that is the argument; you can't tell a woman what she can or can't do with her body. It is a decision for her, her pastor, and her doctor. Well, the same people, the same people that have been making that argument since 1973 that you can't tell a woman what she can or can't do with her body, it is her body, after all, are the ones that are now making the argument that the Federal Government should have the authority to tell everybody in America what we can or can't do with our body. This is the nationalization of everybody's body. It is Uncle Sam taking over our bodies. The most private, personal thing we have is this physical body that we should be managing, taking care of, respecting, and be grateful and reverent for. And even in the legislation we see language that would tax your pop if it is not diet, or outlaw or tax trans fats, and try to manipulate behavior so that your body treats you in a fashion that is less of a demand on health care. This is the Federal Government telling us what we can and can't do with our body. We have heard some talk about death panels, and I have not embellished that very much. But those panels would be a component of the thought process that I am discussing. You would have a Federal panel or committee that would be run by the Health Choices Administration czar who would determine when you could have tests, when you couldn't have tests; when a woman was too young for a mammogram, when a woman was too old for a mammogram, when she had had too many mammograms; tell you when you needed to be checked for colon cancer. They would put you through all these paces. It is the Federal Government managing our health care. Why would we do that? Why would we give that up? Why would we let the Federal Government nationalize our bodies and decide what we will pay for health insurance premiums, what health insurance policies will be offered to us, and by those decisions they would decide then the cost of the premiums, the benefits of the premiums, from what would be offered. The Federal Government takeover of the most personal and private thing that we have, and in fact are, would be the nationalization of everybody's body in America. Now, what does that mean? Well, it is we the people. The people get their rights from God. We take those rights and we confer them upon government and they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. But if you look back at the old monarchies that were the precursors to this country, those subjects existed for the monarch, for the king. They were the king's subjects. He controlled them. He managed them for his own benefit at his own will. Some were benevolent and some were not. We have rejected the monarchy, and that is very clear if you read our Constitution. But also the Communist state, where the individual exists for the benefit of the state and everybody's work and labor's for the benefit of the state. There isn't any system out there that respects and reveres the power of the individual and our individual rights that come from God, and how people confer, the people, confer their powers that come from God and the consent of the governed, and pass it over to our elected representatives. That is the system that we have. Why would the people of the United States of America give up their sovereign rights to control their own persons in spite of all the things that are in the Bill of Rights that define our individual rights? Why would we give that up and hand over the management of our health care to the Federal Government? Why would anybody propose such a thing? I will submit, Mr. Speaker, they would only propose such a thing if they were anti-liberty, if they were anti-freedom, if they were pro- some other form of government that didn't respect the sovereignty of the individual and the God-given liberties that are invested in all of us. So, this is an important debate that is before us. Tomorrow, President Obama will unveil, as he has announced, another series of bullet points. The last time it was 11 pages, no legislative language, of principles he thinks that we all should agree to. And he would give some opportunity for Republicans to accept a few more dictates, and he has indicated he would be interested in a couple of changes. But, in the end, they have created a toxic stew that started with that tainted old soupbone of HillaryCare of 15 years ago, and they have added bells and whistles to it that are designed to try to attract more people into this. But if you start out with something toxic, whatever you add to it, it dilutes it, but it is still toxic. This is a toxic stew, this National Health Care Act. It needs to be thrown out, and we need to start fresh. Three out of four of the American people agree with me that we can't go forward with what we have in front of us. We have got to start all over again. We need to start with tort reform and the lawsuit abuse, and allow people to really and truly and honestly and openly buy insurance across State lines. We need full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums. We need to expand Health Savings Accounts. We need to allow people to use HSAs. We need to set up a portability, so people can take their health insurance policies with them every time. And we need to address preexisting conditions in a fashion that doesn't turn out to be socialized medicine. All of that we can do, all of that we should do, but we should do it one bill at a time, standalone, very clear. Tort reform first; take this money out of the pockets of the trial lawyers, give it back to the ratepayers, and the taxpayers, and the patients. If we do that, that will be a powerful sign that this administration would finally be ready to work in a bipartisan fashion. Until I see that, Mr. Speaker, I do not believe that that is the case. I think the effort is socialized medicine. I don't think it's about the liberty of America, nor do I believe it's about the efficiency and the quality of health care. So, with that, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence, 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. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. And in the aftermath of the summit yesterday, the February 25th health care summit that took place, and over the 7-plus hours from gavel in to gavel out, the 6\1/2\ or so hours of actual dialogue that took place, I think a lot of the American people were watching. And I'd like to think also that a lot of the American people were busy at work and didn't have the opportunity to sit and watch it all in a transfixed, focused fashion, like a lot of us tried to do, and some of us actually succeeded, although I was not among them. I watched as much as I could and I had the closed caption crawler going underneath the screen while I was conducting meetings. So I tried to pay attention to the flow and look back on what happened. I listened to the dialog in here a little bit earlier with the majority leader on the Democrat side and the Whip on the Republican side going through their end-of-the-week colloquy that gives us a sense of where we're going next week and a little bit of a feel for how we work together with each other. In fact, some of those negotiations are taking place here in front of the American people in an open fashion, as we would like to think that most of our negotiations and deliberations are. I would go back through some of that discussion to put a bit of a different perspective on the situation of reconciliation, which is the nuclear option. And even though the gentleman from Maryland continually made the point that Republicans had used the reconciliation option, Democrats called it the nuclear option back then. The means of putting an end to the filibuster--you have two choices in the United States Senate: One of them is you come up with 60 votes to break the filibuster. That's called a cloture vote. And if you can't come up with the 60 votes, the other thing is, in tax or spending issues, so the government doesn't come to a grinding halt due to lack of revenue to keep the machinery of government working, they have devised a method called reconciliation. And that reconciliation will require only 51 votes, not 60 votes in the Senate to move a bill. But the point that is missed here today is that the reconciliation- nuclear option--and it depends, on the Democrats' part, on whether they're talking about Republicans implementing reconciliation or Democrats implementing reconciliation. To a Democrat, when Republicans discussed implementing reconciliation in the United States Senate, they called it the nuclear operation. But when it's Harry Reid and the Democrats seeking to implement reconciliation, they say it is reconciliation. Don't you know that's getting together to get things resolved, rather than blowing the place up. Isn't that something? That you can have two different terminologies for the same action, and they can be so far apart, 180 degrees apart from each other. Democrats committing reconciliation is reconciliation, warm, fuzzy, group hug, 51 votes. What would you have against a simple majority passing something here in the United States Congress? That's their argument. We heard it here a little bit earlier. Who would be against a simple majority? And the second part of it is the nuclear option. The last time Republicans discussed the reconciliation tactic in the Senate that Democrats continually pounded upon and called it the nuclear option was when we were seeking to confirm judges to the Federal court. And to get a vote in the Federal court, there was a filibuster in the Senate. Now, you can look through the history of this and study who said what when and all the protocol that's part of that. That's for Senate historians to know most of that. But for me, Mr. Speaker, I'll take it down to this: When I read the Constitution, it requires for confirmation of these Federal judges the advice and consent of the Senate. It doesn't say the consent of 60 votes in the Senate. It says, the advice and consent. Consent implies the majority of the Senate. And many of those Senators that were opposed to reconciliation because they were Democrats in the minority at the time also argued that the President of the United States, President Bush, didn't accept enough of their advice. Well, you can work about this term, but any time that the Constitution contemplates the consent, it never requires a super majority for the concept. It always requires a simple majority in the United States Senate for consent of the Senate, advice and consent. And so, when a confirmation, or the ratification of a treaty, or something that is in our Constitution required by the Constitution, comes up for confirmation in the Senate and it requires advice or consent in the Constitution, I believe that it is a constitutional violation for the Senate to use a filibuster, because they're denying the consent of the Senate, or they're setting an arbitrary majority after the Constitution, the fact of the Constitution, to take it up to 60 votes. So the argument that this Republican made in 2005 against a whole series of active Democrats that were for the nuclear option was, you have a constitutional obligation to provide a vote to confirm or not confirm these appointments by the President of the United States. You cannot hold them out to a cloture vote and a filibuster simply by one Senator putting a hold on an appointment to the Supreme Court, for example. So it's a constitutional restraint. I've had this debate with many of the Senators on the other side, including my junior Senator from Iowa, Tom Harkin, who disagreed with me. But in any case, that's the Republican position. We default to the Constitution. The Democrat position is Republicans use reconciliation. Well, not when it came to confirming judges, for example. That's a simple majority because that is the definition of consent in the Senate. So here we are with this large initiative called--well, I think the President used it yesterday--the term ObamaCare. Now, Thomas Jefferson once said large initiatives should not be used on slender majorities. And a slender majority could only be how this large initiative of ObamaCare--to use his term for it--has been advanced through the House by only a three-vote margin and only one Republican--and I think he would reconsider if he could do it today-- voted for that bill. Many Democrats voted against the bill. The margin was so utterly slender and narrow in its majority that it can't be defined as anything else except as exactly one of those things that Thomas Jefferson warned against doing. And when you go to the United States Senate, they wheeled and dealed in back rooms--happened here on the House side, too--until they got right down until the night before the announcement of the cloture vote, and they made their last deal with Ben Nelson to exempt Nebraska from the increases in Medicaid costs. This is a word, Mr. Speaker, that everyone should be alarmed at that when they see it show up in any legal document: in perpetuity. Exempt Nebraska from the increase in Medicaid costs in perpetuity. And that deal, along with lowering the language of the Stupak language in the House, the House language--which did a fairly effective job in preventing Federal dollars from being used for abortions should the ObamaCare pass--the Senate version of it and the language that was negotiated by Ben Nelson certainly rolled this thing back to where there would be more Federal dollars used for abortion because of the language change, even though they made the argument that there would be an accounting of those dollars. I would say that the Nelson language still set the Federal Government up to be the broker of insurance premium dollars that would be directed to insurance companies that were paying for abortions out of those premiums and to compel the American people to fund something that is, to them, fundamentally immoral is an unjust thing for this Congress to do. We did it inadvertently in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade in 1973. By 1976, we had implemented language that prevented Federal dollars from funding abortions under either the Hyde amendment or the Mexico City Policy. But this language--and the House actually allows some--the language from the Senate allows a lot more to go to abortions. And to reflect back on my position, Mr. Speaker, this would have been I believe in the 1980s or perhaps in the very early 1990s when my Congressman came to my district and we had a meeting. Just a town hall meeting in the basement of the Lutheran church, and I remember the count of the chairs that were there, and they were mostly full. In fact all, I believe, were likely full. There were 80 people in the basement of the church in a town hall meeting. Pretty good-sized meeting for a little town. Not by last August standards, Mr. Speaker, but by normal standards. And as my Congressman presented his pitch on his proposal for a national health care act that was essentially dovetailed into HillaryCare later on, he asked, How many of you in the room are employers? And that's why I remember the room. Eighty people in the room, 12 of us raised our hands that are employers. He said, Now I want to ask you how many of you provide health insurance for your employers. And 11 hands went down, and mine was the only hand that was up. So I was the only employer in that room of 80 with 12 employers, I was the only one that provided health insurance for my employees. And so my Congressman walked over to me where I was sitting in the front row--and I remember him--and he looked at me and he leaned down, folded his hands behind his back and he leaned down and said, How much would it change the way you do business if my health care bill, the way I propose it, becomes law? And I looked at him and I answered the way I usually answer, which is what's on top of my mind and tip of my tongue. And my answer to his question, How much would it change the way you do business? And I said, Probably not very much unless you're going to compel me to fund abortion. In that case, I quite likely will no longer be an employer. And those were the exact words that I used. And so it was essentially said that I don't think I can go forward and make a living and take money out of people's paychecks and contribute out of our own asset base of the company and fund a Federal machine that is funding abortions that I am compelled to pay for if I have employees. I could have laid all of my employees off. I could have gone off to operate my business alone, cut down our revenue stream substantially--and my stress load, I might add. But still under that bill, it probably would have compelled me to carry my own insurance that I would have had to fund abortion with. In any case, when I made that statement that I quite likely would no longer be an employer if they compelled me to fund abortions through the premiums that I would be compelled to pay, that brought the house down. I had no idea that the people in that church felt as strongly about that issue as I believe on that issue and believe today. But that emotion in that church was a solidly held fundamental, moral, and religious principle that remains today stronger than it was then. And this Nation operating within the House of Representatives and within the United States Senate could contemplate the idea that they could produce or approve a product called health insurance, confer everyone a new policy that they own, and among those policies set up a health insurance exchange that is going to bring dollars in and flow dollars out that would go to fund abortion clinics? With the majority of people in America opposed to abortion and a smaller percentage yet that are in favor of abortion, elective abortion, abortion on demand? That is a fundamental moral principle that would be violated. And when the Speaker of the House at the end of the meeting yesterday chastised the Republican leader and said there is no abortion coverage in this bill, it was an incorrect statement. One might make the argument that the Stupak amendment in this House reduced--and they might argue--and I think it's an uninformed argument--that the Stupak amendment in this House eliminated Federal funding for abortion. It eliminated a lot of it, and it was a significant step forward; but it didn't eliminate it all. So the Speaker's statement at the President's meeting yesterday at the Blair House was incorrect. And it was further incorrect because it seems as though as we listened to all of the dialogue that unfolded yesterday, that the President was negotiating off of the Senate version of the bill more so than he was of the House version of the bill, in which case there is no question that Federal funding would flow in and pay for abortions. And at a very minimum, no matter how you argue it, at a very minimum there would be Federal funds that would be paying for the administration of abortions and the administration of an exchange that would be brokering policies that funded abortion. That is how the language works. I have read the language carefully, and I know that some of that has been amended but not to the satisfaction of the pro-life groups in America. Not to my satisfaction either, Mr. Speaker. So we've watched as this unfolded, and we asked what about this reconciliation package that the majority leader seems to speak in support of, although he didn't answer the question directly. He accused Republicans of using reconciliation. He didn't actually call it the ``nuclear option'' this time. Of course he wouldn't because they are loading the gun getting ready to cock the hammer and pull the trigger on the nuclear option. And they can't have us calling it the nuclear option because the American people then understand it blows up the system in the United States Senate. But, truthfully, we don't have much to say about it from a formal perspective here in the House of Representatives because we do have a simple majority that controls. We have a Speaker of the House that controls the entire protocol from top to bottom right down to whether there will be amendments offered, what those amendments will be, and who will be able to offer them. And it's happened over and over and over again, and Mr. Speaker, the American people need to know this. There is a Rules Committee that meets up here on the third floor of the House. Tiny little room. It is, I believe, the smallest committee room in the House of Representatives. It's the least frequented by the press. It doesn't have cameras in it like C-SPAN cameras cover every other committee on this Hill. This is a hole in the wall on the third floor at the end of the elevator where nobody goes. It's the hole in the wall. And it's the hole in the wall gang and they're directed by the Speaker of the House. And they shut down the amendments that are offered especially by Republicans unless they deem that amendment would embarrass or divide Republicans, in which case they'll allow that to be debated so Republicans can be embarrassed, divided and have a vote here on the floor. So when I go up there, I offer amendments that I believe are constructive, that are designed to perfect legislation, designed with things in mind that the Founding Fathers had when they designed the Constitution itself. In other words, it was imagined that there would be people of open minds and differing levels of experience that would come together to have a dialogue and discussion about what's good and right for America. And then we get to the formal process of our discussion. First, we do hearings and we listen to the American people come in and tell us what we they have to say about the policy, and presumably the members sitting on the panel don't know as much about the subject as the witnesses. So we learn; then we ask questions. Then we go back and do research. Then we come back together and decide whether we want to start to move a piece of legislation, in which case in the subcommittee there is a markup process. And that is that any Member can offer an amendment; they can offer an unlimited amount of amendments. They can debate each of those amendments, 5 minutes for each member of the committee if they so choose. And they can ask for a recorded vote and vote that amendment up or down. That process does take place in the committee, and a lot of it is outside the scope of what the American people are paying attention to. And then the subcommittee product is designed to go to the full committee. And I will speak about the Judiciary Committee because we've seen the example this week where for their time in this past year, out of the Judiciary Committee, even though there is a relatively legitimate amendment process and debate process that takes place there--not on the floor; I wouldn't argue that takes place on the floor in that fashion with any regularity, but in the committee it seems to. And three times out of the Judiciary Committee there has been a Republican that has offered an amendment to an important bill, that amendment has passed with bipartisan support, and the product of the committee's work, the product that after the bills are amended and receive a final passage out of the committee, then they come over to be put on the calendar to be debated on the floor of the House. And the majority leader controls that agenda, and the Speaker's power influences it considerably. And the bill does go through the hole-in- the-wall Rules Committee to be reviewed and consider any other amendments other Members might want to offer. And in a perfect world, every bill would come to the floor under an open rule for any Member that had a good idea would have the opportunity to convince the other Members of the merits of their good idea in the form of an amendment or perhaps submit themselves to the rejection of the House if the House did not approve such an amendment. But what has happened three times just out of the Judiciary Committee and just in the last year has been a bill that was amended by a Republican in the Judiciary Committee that changed by the time it got to the hole-in-the-wall Rules Committee and was written up differently by committee staff and presented to the Rules Committee with a different bill number in it, but the substance of it changed because they amended and struck the very legitimate amendments that were voted on by Republicans and Democrats. And I will be specific about this. In the Bankruptcy Clawback Bill, I introduced an amendment in the Judiciary Committee that would have banned anyone from receiving relief under the bill for bankruptcy if they had defrauded their lender. Now, that vote on that amendment passed by a vote by 23-3 in the Judiciary Committee. And curiously when the Bankruptcy Clawback Bill came to the floor, it had been passed through the Rules Committee, given a new number and almost, but not exclusively, but I will say from my view the only substantive change was they took my language out of the bill that had been approved by Democrats and Republicans by a vote of 23-3 and inserted language that said only if you have been convicted of defrauding can you be denied the benefits under the bill. That is what took place after the fact which renders the very formerly legitimate work of the committee moot. What is the point of meeting and having this discussion and this dialogue? What's the point in hearings for information? What's the point of the subcommittee and the committee markup and all of the staff work and all of the debate work that we do and introducing the amendments and voting them up and down and building the legitimacy of a proposal to go to the Rules Committee and have the product of the Judiciary Committee pulled down, put through the shredder, so to speak, and a whole new bill manufactured with a similar, maybe even identical, bill title on it? That's what's going on in this Congress, and then the bill comes to the floor under a closed rule so that no Member can offer to put the language back in. And we call this America, the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world, and this is the draconian approach. The American public doesn't find out unless I come down here and say, Mr. Speaker, because the hole-in-the-wall gang is controlling this at the direction of the Speaker. If anyone wonders whether I am embellishing this or not, they could actually look at the records of the Rules Committee on the eve of November 7 when the health care bill finally passed here in the House of Representatives. On that morning, near 1:30 in the morning, I offered 13 separate amendments to seek to perfect--well, I couldn't have perfected that bill--improve the health care bill. Thirteen separate amendments I offered them. I argued them before the Rules Committee, and I was chastised by at least one member of the Rules Committee because I had wasted the paper and the staff time, and I should have known that the Speaker had ordered that my amendments would not be approved by the Rules Committee, so I was wasting all of their time by making my argument on how to improve the health care bill. Now, I will suggest, and I will hold firmly to this, Mr. Speaker, the franchise that I am entrusted with by the voters of the Fifth District of the State of Iowa is every bit as legitimate as the franchise of the Speaker of the House, the House majority leader, the House majority whip, any committee Chair, subcommittee Chair, let alone the Republican leaders and the ranking members. Every one of us has a franchise. We are \1/435\ of the American people, and the people in my district deserve every bit as much representation in this Congress as the people do in any district. But the structure, this iron-fisted structure in this House of Representatives, that's what breaks down deliberative democracy and it undermines our constitutional Republic and it denies the very legitimate, knowledgeable input from all across this country. Think about how this works. Each one of us, 435 of us, we go home to our respective districts. We build a network of advisers that are continually providing input for us, teams of people that are experts in their field, and it filters that information and it comes to us in a whole series of ways, town hall meetings, individual meetings, individual lobbyists, yes. Lobbyists do a very effective and useful job on this Hill, and if anyone gave me information that wasn't accurate or honest, if they found out about it, they would bring it back and correct it to me first. If I thought they were doing so intentionally, they would not come back to talk to me, ever. There's a credibility there in that arena that I think somebody needs to stand up for the lobby, and it is a matter of providing a lot of valuable information. We find that directly from our individual constituents in our town hall meetings and our professionals and all of the outside organizations that work outside and on this Hill trying to effect the change. All of that information that I have talked about, the input from 300 million people pours through to us in all of these avenues that I have described and many more--and through the media, I might add. And all of that, save what might be in the mind of the Speaker and the Speaker's staff, maybe the leader and the leader's staff, but I am not sure of that. All of that, all the rest of that is denied by the draconian approach here in the House of Representatives that shuts down the debate process, prohibits amendments, and limits an important bill to just selected amendments that help some people look good or position themselves so they will vote for the broader bill. That's what it has come down to. It has not come down to the evaluation of what's the best policy or even taking the risk of allowing someone to have their say and forcing a vote on an important issue. It was amazing to some degree that the Stupak amendment, which is the pro-life amendment in the health care bill, was even allowed to be debated here on the floor. Many people didn't think that would happen. I will suggest that it wasn't the wishes of the Speaker of the House, clearly. She seems to want to tell the Pope where the church stands on the life issue. I suggested it was the political dynamics that enough Democrats would vote against the bill if they didn't get to have their debate in the vote on the pro-life Stupak amendment, and that was the dynamic. So often the American people don't get to see what goes on behind the scenes or what's going on in the calculus. When you read your history book, it comes down to, well, the Congress evaluated this policy and that policy and some thought this, some thought that. The decision came down to a policy decision, and we had a vote and moved forward. Way too often the American people need to know it's not a policy decision; it's a political decision. When you see someone make a tough political decision, way too often they are making a decision that has more to do with their political survivability than it has to do with the policy. And statesmanship is hard to find, but thank God we still have some in this House. I am hoping we will get a lot more statesmanship coming in November when the energy of the American people will be manifested at the polls. I am very grateful that I have seen 9, 12 Tea Party, patriot, constitutional conservatives all over this country filling up the town hall meetings, doing their own rallies, packing the west side of this Capitol out here to the tune of tens of thousands of people with only a 2- or 3-day actual notice. Another 2- or 3,000 came in for a press conference the following Saturday--it was on the 5th--and the 9th of November the American people came here to have their voice heard. After this bill passed the House at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night, then the fight went over to the Senate. There in the Senate, in the Senate, there was a rally that took place with thousands of people there, in a press conference, I should probably call that, to be technically correct. As that battle went on in the Senate and they were counting votes one after another and special deals were being made--not just for the Cornhusker Kickback, but to exempt Florida from the cuts to Medicare Advantage. A lot of people look at Florida and conclude that that's the most senior State in the Union because a lot of retirees went to Florida. Well, you should look, really actually look at Iowa, and the Fifth District in Iowa is the most senior congressional district in America. Iowa has the highest percentage of its population over 85, and of the 99 counties in Iowa, I represent 10 of the 12 most senior counties in the most senior State in the Union. So I will say the Fifth District of the State of Iowa is the most senior congressional district in America. We didn't get an exemption from the cuts in Medicare Advantage. Just Florida. Why? Because Tom Harkin was already going to vote for the bill and because Chuck Grassley was going to vote ``no'' on the bill, so Iowa didn't get that particular exemption, and I am thankful we didn't. If we had, I would have liked to think that Iowans would have stood up like Nebraskans did and say, We don't want any special favors. We want to be considered in the same category as all the other Americans. In fact, it's unconstitutional to treat members--citizens of the United States and one State differently than we treat citizens or residents in another State. That is unconstitutional, and I believe the Cornhusker Kickback was unconstitutional. I believe the Florida exemption for Medicare Advantage was unconstitutional, and I believe the special clinics up in Vermont that went to Bernie Sanders to get him on board also--I don't know that I would actually say they are unconstitutional, but they are unsavory. If one looks at the bill and the language that came out from the President on last Monday at 10 a.m. exactly and, not coincidentally, 72 hours before the Blair House meeting started yesterday, that proposal, which is not a bill but only bullet points and platitudes, does include at least 11 other special treatments that look a lot like the Cornhusker Kickback or the Louisiana Purchase or the Florida Medicare Advantage exemption or all of the expensive billions of dollars for community health clinics in the State of Vermont. The list goes on and on and on, the unsavory list. A significant number of United States Senators have spoken against reconciliation. They called it the ``nuclear option.'' The quotes are there from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, name your Senator on the Democrat side. Chris Dodd is another one. There are others that have spoken, have spoken against the nuclear option because they wanted to block confirmations to the Federal court. Now they say, warm and fuzzy, we will all join hands. What do you have against a simple majority vote? Well, I have a good number of things against the way things are being done here. To think that the President of the United States is negotiating with the Senate and the House, trying to put together enough votes to pass an amendment to the Senate version of the bill-- now, remember, the Senate version of the bill passed Christmas Eve, and presumably that's the will of the United States Senate. Now they are talking about passing amendments to the Senate bill out of the Senate so that they can amend it and pass two pieces here in the House, send it to the President and the President would sign a bill, and then he would sign a reconciliation bill right behind that that would amend the first bill. All of that to avoid, what? A conference committee, a conference committee that was envisioned by the Founding Fathers that would have Democrats and Republicans sitting at the table. This is the first time in history, as far as I know, that the President of the United States has convened a conference committee from the executive branch of government. This is a legislative function, Mr. President. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I have a lot of constitutional disagreements with the President of the United States. And I will say that my chief of staff studied at the University of Chicago Law School during that period of time but was adept enough to study her constitutional law in a different classroom. I am thankful for that. That has been useful to me to have that kind of input and advice. I see my friend from Georgia, one of our outstanding Dr. Phils in the conference and one of the most knowledgeable about health care and many other things, here to join us. I would point out that the OB/GYN, Dr. Phil Gingrey, has, by my recollection, delivered about 5,200 babies in his time. That's a great gift of life that I appreciate. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the doctor, the Congressman, the gentleman from Georgia for joining us. We have about 23 minutes or so to continue the dialogue. I appreciate the intellect that has been brought to this debate. I think that there were some outspoken conservatives that would have contributed substantially to the discussion yesterday had that been the format. And perhaps this is our format to weigh in on that. So I am happy to see that also my friend from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, has arrived on the floor, and I would be happy to yield so much time as she may consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I take us to the Declaration of Health Care Independence, as has been spoken about by us, the ``New Rules of the Road.'' I wanted to point out that of these 10 provisions, first, there are six items here on what went wrong. And then I think it would be instructive to simply read, if I can, the conclusions that are drawn. First it says, of all of these things that have happened--the cavalier attitude of ignoring the Constitution, denying the interests of the people, it irreparably cripples the American economy, it creates an inescapable new tax by imposing individual and employer mandates on it--now, we go through all of these laments on what went wrong, it sounds a lot like the Declaration of Independence, where you have those laments on what went wrong. Then it says, and I'll read from it, ``We have appealed to the decency of the elected majority to respect the rights of all Americans, but their leaders have been deaf to the voice of the people. We are appalled by their cavalier disregard of the Constitution and the demands of the people. We are repulsed by their blatant political bribes and kickbacks. We, therefore, the people and Representatives of the United States of America, do solemnly publish and declare that health care reform, as a matter of principle, must''-- and we hit these 10 principles, which I will read. But I want to point out that Dr. Gingrey brought the tablets down from on high. We looked them over a little bit and said, we like these principles, we like a few other principles in addition to. And then we think that your eloquence is lacking, but your principles are very sound. And so the Gingrey tablets are into the middle of this document, and the language is something that is more to the credit of the Founding Fathers than it is the father who has delivered 5,200 babies. But the substance there is substantial, and the 10 points that remain are that we are committed to these 10 principles to go forward. ``We will preserve and protect as inviolate the doctor-patient relationship''--and I will summarize the balance rather than read them. We refuse to add to the national debt. We will enhance rather than diminish the quality of care. Our negotiations will be transparent, and there will be no favoritism. We will treat people the same. Whether they are Members of Congress, the Speaker of the House, or whether they are the poorest person in America, we are all going to have an equal opportunity here in this country--no special deals for Members of Congress. There will be no funding for abortion. There will be no new mandates for people, for employers, or for States. We will not fund illegals. We will provide equal protection under the law and the Constitution for everyone. No special treatment. And we will use the marketplace of choice as the ideas. That is the ``New Rules of the Road Going Forward'' that have these 100 or so signatures of Members of Congress on it. This is the foundational piece of work that was collaborated by many, sparked by Michele Bachmann, the tablets, many of them from Dr. Gingrey, whom I would yield to.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Georgia for his contribution to this document and the thought process that this defines. If there are those in this House of Representatives who have objections to the positions that are taken here on this road map, the ``New Rules of the Road Going Forward,'' I would like to hear them step forward and tell me what it is that they object to. Do they object to protecting the doctor-patient relationship as inviolate? Do they want the government to make those decisions out of their computer base and their committee? A lot of us have seen the flowchart, the Health Choices Administration czar. It's really interesting, when you see a piece of legislation--H.R. 3200 in this House--that says in there that there will be all of these decisions made and power invested in the Health Choices Administration Commissioner--I call him ``the commissarissioner''--and this is a person to be named later and a committee to be named later by legislation to be passed whenever they can put the votes together and get the President to sign it. And you give the power of that discretion to an individual and a commission to be appointed by the President--and yes, some of them confirmed by the Senate; I don't think all of them are confirmed by the Senate--and they take a look at all 1,300 health insurance companies in America, they take a look at all 100,000 policy varieties in America, and then they decide, what are all these companies going to have to do to amend their policies so they can be approved by the Health Choices Administration commissarissioner's judgment? And that is competition? That is top down, ends up, crams it into single payer. For the people who objected and said I wasted paper when I took 13 amendments up there to the ``hole in the wall gang'' to try to get an opportunity to have a debate here on the floor, they said I wasted paper and I wasted staff time. I would say, take that 3,200-page bill in the House and however many thousand pages you cooked up together in the Senate and all the pages that are back there in the secret staff meetings that nobody sees in those formerly smoke-filled rooms that by order of the Speaker now aren't smoke filled anymore, but they do have guards on the outside and regular people don't get in, Republicans don't get in, low-ranking Democrats don't get in. The guards are there to guard the high-ranking officials. It isn't necessarily that they're better defended than they normally are. But I want to paint the image right: Doors with lots of wood down the hallway and on the inside, and leather in the middle of that, formerly smoke-filled, big conference tables, key staff in there, key leaders of only the Democrats in there--meaning Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and whoever they approve-- doors closed, thousands of pages, decisions being made by staff because Members can't keep all this in their head either. Take all of that paper, Madam Speaker, and put that back in the tree. I think I can invent an extruder to turn that into a tree, and we could put a little bark on that and stand it up somewhere in one of those--what do we have? We've got some of those rainforests that exist in our zoos. If you put your fingernails into the bark of those trees in the rainforests, it's made out of rubber. So, on the inside, let's put that bill right back in the tree, Mr. Speaker. I've had enough of this. The American people want to wipe this bill off the board. If they do anything, they want to start over. A lot of them don't even want to do anything because they don't trust this Congress. The gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. KING of Iowa. In reclaiming my time, I thank the doctor from Georgia. I was just thinking what it would be like if you'd sit around your card club at night and you'd deal out a deck of cards, 52, and for every one of those cards, this man has delivered 100 babies. That's pretty impressive, and I can't get over that number and what that means. Some people think that Republicans don't have compassion. How could you have more compassion than Dr. Gingrey has? So, when I look at this debate that's going on, it is past the point of the nuances of what's right and what's wrong here. It's pretty simple stuff. The White House, the Speaker Pelosi majority and the Harry Reid majority, right down those doorways, have started from this beginning. The beginning that they started with was single-payer national health care, HillaryCare as referred to by Dr. Gingrey. That goes back 15 years ago. When they first put that together, I had the flowchart. In fact, I've got the replication of that flowchart in my office, the HillaryCare flowchart. That is a scary thing. It was only in black and white back in the early 1990s. The one we see today is in full color. With the next generation, when they try this again, it will be in 3-D, and you'll have automatic built-in 3-D, and you'll be able to see all of the components they put together. The more you can see, the more it scares you. That's what they started with--the single-payer National Health Care Act. It is socialized medicine. I don't know what you'd produce if it weren't. I don't know how you would devise socialized medicine to look much differently than the way they've started. Now, they did morph it along the way and move away from the more pure definition, but when you start with something--let's just say that the goal is to cook up a pot of stew. You start with a big old soup bone, a meat bone, and get as much meat as you have on that bone that hasn't been trimmed off. You toss that in a pot, and then you put a lot of water in there, and you start to simmer that. Then you look at it and you think, Well, what does this thing need? Well, it looks a little sick and gray, so you start cutting some vegetables in there, and you throw in some carrots and some celery and some potatoes, and whatever else you can find to pitch into that stew. You know, after a while, it might look pretty good. They were making it look better and better, the Democrats on the other side. By the way, it was buying votes. Yeah, I might vote for that if you put some carrots in the stew. Give me a little celery. I like the flavor of that. I like a little corn in there myself. I'm from Iowa, you know. After a little while, here is this simmering pot of stew. Then they tasted it. The American people let them know. They spit it out. They didn't want a potful. This is a toxic stew. They started with a tainted soup bone with HillaryCare in the beginning. If you start with a tainted soup bone and if you cook up a stew, no matter what you add to it, it's still going to be toxic. The American people concluded they don't want a potful of toxic socialized medicine stew. They don't want a bowlful. They don't want a cupful. They don't want a spoonful. They don't want any measure. They have spit out ObamaCare. It is a toxic stew that has been cooked up by the liberals in this Congress. Less than a fourth of the people in this country think something like that ought to be done, and they haven't tasted it yet. A lot of us have looked ahead and have a sense of what it tastes like. So I will suggest this, that we should clean the slate off, as the gentleman from Georgia has intimated and has maybe not specifically said when he said, Mr. President, you need to unclench your fist. I'd suggest the President ought to treat Republicans as good as he did Ahmadinejad when he said to our enemies in Iran who have pledged to annihilate us--the Great Satan--in a nuclear win, if they can. He said to them--dialogue, in his mind, solves it all, you might notice. He said, If you'll just unclench your fist, speaking to Ahmadinejad, we will extend our hand. We will negotiate with the Iranians without preconditions. We will just talk. We will talk it through. Did you notice, when the President met with Republicans and Democrats yesterday, President Obama insisted upon preconditions? He insisted that his bill, which was the Senate and House bill, plus the 11-page bullet point talking points with no legislative language added by the White House, would be the basis for the discussion. He refused to take the nuclear option off the table. Can you imagine negotiating with the Iranians that way? Because that's what he has initiated. They have the nuclear option on the table. They refuse to take everything off the table. The President insisted upon preconditions of starting with his bill, ObamaCare, by his own definition. I'm saying, Couldn't you at least have treated the Republicans as good as you treated the Iranians? Give us a clean slate. Start without preconditions. I'd be willing to take Republicans' comprehensive plans off the table. Let's just go ahead and take them up one at a time-- single, stand-alone pieces of legislation that we all know are good policy and that don't have to have a backroom deal. Let's end lawsuit abuse, number one; full deductibility; sell insurance across State lines; and respect the time of the Speaker's gavel. Also, we have made that part very clear, I think, in this presentation. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. I appreciate the participants in this Special Order hour here that closes out the week. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman in my hour as well.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield to correct a fact?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Is it common and normal for a Member to yield to another Member on a respectful request?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Further parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa. When a gentleman states an erroneous fact into the Record, is a Member's alternative then to move to take down the words rather than ask for a yield to correct the record?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I will concede this moment for now.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I would have a point of order if we didn't have Members in bed right now, so I will concede this point right now and yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate being recognized finally here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Frankly, it's astonishing to me that a fellow Member of Congress has so little confidence in things that he says are facts that he refuses to yield and deal with the actual facts that he knew were before him. To make the statement that Republicans did nothing on health care during those years of 2000 to 2006 is flat-out false, Mr. Speaker. It's a fact that we moved on health care. We moved some significant policy. And in particular, we passed the repair to the abuse of lawsuits, which today it was published by the Government Reform Committee--actually, was published 2 days ago--that the annual costs of lawsuit abuse and health care in America is $210 billion. That's over $2 trillion for the course of a bill, and there isn't one dime that would be taken out of the pockets of that $2 trillion--a lot of which goes to the trial lawyers--that is offered by the President or the Democrats, and certainly not the gentleman from Minnesota. And for him to stand here on the floor of the House of Representatives and very much deny the very fact that is a fact of record and then refuse to politely allow for a correction of that record so you, Mr. Speaker and, by extension, the American people have an opportunity to be honestly and truthfully informed is an affront to the dignity of the dialogue on the floor of the House. So that's just a start on my answers. And I didn't come here to provide a rebuttal for the previous hour. But the American people need to know, Mr. Speaker, that there is a Progressive Caucus here and it's 78 members strong, the last time I counted the names on the list on the Web site. The Web site was put up on a poster over here, and they're pretty proud of the policy that they have. You can go on that Web site and read and learn that. One of them is a Senator; the others are House Members. They are the most liberal Members of the House. And when you look at the history of the Progressives, you will recognize that that Web site, that now with Mr. Grijalva's name in the Web site, was the Web site managed by the Socialists. The Democratic Socialists of America managed the Web site for the Progressives. They put it up. They took care of it. They maintained it. They put the information on. They wrote some of the language that went on there--a lot of it for all I know--and carried their philosophy from the Democratic Socialists--that is the Socialists in America, by the way-- on over to the Progressives' Web site. And when that linkage was uncovered and the pressure came up, then the Progressives decided, well, we'll manage our own Web site because we really don't want to have to put up with the criticism of our brethren, the Socialists. It's completely the brethren. When you read the Socialists' Web site, it says clearly on the Democratic Socialist Web site, dsausa.org, Mr. Speaker. It says clearly on there, it starts out with, We are not Communists. I always had a little trouble trusting somebody starting out their dialogue with, well, I'm not a Communist, because you know there behind that there's a ``but.'' Democratic Socialists, the brethren of the Progressives, linked together with their Web sites until a few years ago to declare that they are not Communists but they believe in a lot of the same things that the Communists believe in. But the difference, according to the Socialist Web site linked to the Progressives' Web site--proudly by the Socialists anyway, and I think proudly by the Progressives--they say, We are not Communists. But the difference is Communists want to nationalize everything. Communists want to have the State own all property and own all of everyone's labor and everything exists for the State. And the Communists want to do central planning to manage the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, let alone labor. The Communists are the ones that want to introduce a national health care act that's completely a single-payer plan paid for by the government. Nobody has to pay for anything. And it would require that everyone working within health care in America would be a salaried employee. Oh, let me see. Where would I come up with that? Well, not necessarily on the Democratic Socialist Web site. Not necessarily on-- let me see--the CPUSA Web site. I read that in a bill that was introduced by some of the Progressives here in this Congress in 1981. They believe and still believe in single payer. They think that health care should be free, that it's a right, not a privilege--not just your own health care, but everybody's own private health insurance policy; that the government ought to run all health care; that they would set up boards as central planning management boards that would tell everything how to operate. But no one could be anything except a salaried or an hourly employee. You couldn't do fee-for-service. So if you're a super excellent brain surgeon, you get paid whatever they decide. You don't get paid for the number or the quality of the brain surgery that you perform. But I am back to Democratic Socialists of America. What are they? Well, they're not Communists. That's what they say. And the difference is they don't want to nationalize everything. The Socialists, the, slash, Progressives, don't want to nationalize the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker--not right away, anyway. But when you read their Web site, it says, we want to nationalize the major corporations in America. I take that to mean the Fortune 500 companies and probably some more, and they write that they don't have to do it all right at once, they can do it incrementally. They want to nationalize the oil refinery business so they can control the energy in America, and they want to nationalize the utilities in America so they can control the energy in America. This could happen incrementally, they don't have to do it all at once. Socialist Web site. They say we don't elect candidates on our banner. We don't send candidates and get their names on the ballot under the Socialist ballot. We advance these candidates as Progressives because Progressives doesn't have quite the harsh connotation of the hardcore left that Socialist has. So they hide under the Progressive banner and they advance the Socialist agenda, and it's on both of their Web sites. I wondered when I heard Maxine Waters from California a few years ago say, I think we should nationalize the oil refinery business. I mean, I had to take a breath, catch my breath for a minute, because nobody would say that in the society where I live. They don't want to nationalize the private sector. They believe in free enterprise and in competition. They understand the vitality, this robust economy that we have. But that was said. Where did that come from. Maurice Hinchey made a remark also about the nationalizing of the energy industry. Where did that come from? How does anyone have the chutzpah to make such a statement as a Member of Congress that they want to start taking over the private sector. This is before our economy started in this downward spiral. So I heard these words that came from them, and I am reading off the Web site, Democratic Socialist Web site, and the echo comes back to be the same. I look over at the Progressives, of which each of those Members I mentioned are listed on the Progressives Web site, and it's the same agenda. Then we have a candidate for President called Barack Obama, and he has this artful way of using ambiguities so that the left hears him say something that they want him to say, and the right doesn't hear the same thing. They might actually even hear what they want him to say. But where does the President govern? He is elected on hope and change. Well, hope and change is not working so good right now, but where does the President govern? Way over to the left. And I stand here, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of the House, after this 6\1/2\-hour health care summit today, and I am wondering, what is this about bipartisanship? What was this argument that came from the President when he heard the criticism you are not working in a bipartisan way? You need to reach out to the Republicans, this closing the door and locking Republicans out, and it happened. It's been happening here since September. They met today to talk for the first time about health care in a meaningful way since last September, when Democrats shut Republicans out of their health care negotiating rooms. And, yes, they had guards outside the doors, they were there to provide security for the leaders. But think of the image, the doors go closed behind the Democrat leaders and they sit in there in the formerly smoke-filled rooms and they negotiate what they want to do to America without any eyes or ears of the press or anybody from the opposing party or any real conscience or conservatism inside the room. So they cook up their deal. They cooked it up upstairs--well, let me say they cooked it up in the Speaker's office, and they cooked it up in Harry Reid's office, and they ran separate bills in the House and in the Senate. On November 7, here on a Saturday, the House of Representatives by the barest of margins passed a national health care act bill that takes away the liberty of the American people. Then it went over to the Senate, where even the 60 votes that they had to have in the Senate with the liberals they had over there, they couldn't get the votes to pass the House version, so they put together a Senate version and by the barest of margins, with the, let me say the most repulsive of sweetheart deals, put together barely the 60 votes they needed to break the filibuster and have it be successful on a cloture vote. On Christmas Eve, Mr. Speaker, Harry Reid's Scrooge gift to the American people was the Senate version of socialized medicine, their national health care act, complete with funding for abortion and illegals, out of the Senate. Merry Christmas, American people. Harry Reid and the 60 votes they had in the Senate at the time delivered a Christmas present to the American people with 60 votes, which pretty much demonstrated that all the demonstrations that took place since August weren't counting for much in the mind of Harry Reid and the 59 other Democrats over there in the Senate, and that was Christmas Eve. So a lot of people went home for Christmas. In fact, most of us did go home for Christmas. Over Christmas and New Year's, most of the public life goes dormant and some of the people thought that going dormant was the right thing to do, that nobody would pay any attention anyway. So why would you keep a press shop up and why would Members of Congress go out on the stump and give a lot of speeches and do town hall meetings and do a lot of press and talk about how bad the House bill is, how bad the Senate bill is, and how unbelievably bad it would be if they would do what one might have expected them to do, and that is appoint a conference committee that would try to merge the two bills and resolve their differences. But the Democrats didn't really think that the American people would be paying any attention to what they did. That's one of the reasons why they passed the bill on Christmas Eve in the United States Senate. I actually wished it would have been as late as possible on that day. I think it could have been pushed up to 9 o'clock that night when Santa was actually delivering presents, rather than when the elves were going to bed in the morning. But that's what happened, Mr. Speaker. The American people were appalled at what they saw. They were appalled at how tone deaf the majorities were in the House of Representatives and how tone deaf the majorities were in the United States Senate, and they were talking. It isn't that the American people go dormant. They go see their family, and, yes, they go to work. And they get on the phone, and they get a little time to send their email lists out. What happened was, there was a national dialogue. I can tell you what happens when our family gets together, and it takes three or four family reunions to get us all completely processed in their right, faithful way over Christmas vacation, but we will meet three or four times, and we will have other little individual meetings with friends and neighbors and do those things, there is a lot of dialogue going on between Christmas and New Year's. In my neighborhood we talk about probably four things, but three things in particular. We talk about the weather, and we talk about religion, and we talk about the markets, and we talk about politics. That's four, and politics moved up on the list. It actually sat there, number one, and it was at the dinner table, and it was in the living room, and it was all across America. People were talking about what was happening to our country. While that was going on, Scott Brown was campaigning intensively in Massachusetts. You had people waking up in Massachusetts. The polling that showed on that day, the 23rd of December, when the timing schedule for adjournment of the Senate and that final cloture vote was scheduled, on that day the poll I saw showed Scott down 20 points. There was another one that had him down 30 points. But not a single pundit before Christmas predicted that Scott Brown could be the next United States Senator from Massachusetts. That was 2 days before Christmas. No one predicted it before Christmas. It started to come out some days after Christmas, near, I think, the first of the year, if I remember correctly, when the first little hint that something might be going on in Massachusetts started to leak out to the rest of the world. But I have every confidence that the faithful people in Massachusetts were sitting around their dinner tables and their Christmas trees and they were talking about the same things that we talk about, the weather, the religion and politics, probably not the markets the same way we do. As that position was coalescing in Massachusetts, some of the people were thinking, I have had enough. They thought, some of them thought we have our version of health care here, and it's not our job or our business to impose another version of a government-run health care on everybody else in America. Some of them thought enough money had been spent, that this $700 billion in TARP, and all of these companies that have been nationalized, much of it by this administration, and the $787 billion stimulus plan, that made everybody really nervous to see trillions of dollars, at least $1.6 trillion, moving on up to $2-plus trillion dollars when you look at all the money the Fed has advanced. They saw that happening, Mr. Speaker, and every increment of nationalization made the American people more nervous indeed, having less confidence in the government that they had elected and the decisions that were made by their elected representatives. And as we march down through the murderous row of the nationalization of three large investment banks and AIG, the insurance company, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, where it took on $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities with Fannie and Freddie, for the taxpayers to take on that contingent kind of a risk, then the Federal Government turned to the car companies and decided, the White House, the Obama White House could run General Motors and Chrysler better than General Motors and Chrysler could be run by those who are approved by the shareholders. And so the President fired the CEO of General Motors and cleaned out the board of directors. He replaced himself all but two of the board members of General Motors and replaced the CEO of General Motors, put in place a car czar, a 31-year-old car czar that had never made a car and never sold a car; as far as I can determine never fixed a car. We don't even know if he owned a car. And if he did, the question I would ask him is, well, was it an American-made car or a foreign car? All of this was undermining the confidence of the American people as we race toward this political climax that after we saw socialized medicine pass in the House on November 7 and after we saw it pass on Christmas Eve in the United States Senate--unprecedented to be in the session on Christmas Eve doing something that had never been done before in the history of this country, trying to set a new standard of the socialization, the nationalization of our bodies--all of that going on, and the American people were repulsed that all of their voices, all that they had to say, everything that they weighed in with hit only just the deafness of the leaders in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. And so they went to work. They went to work in Massachusetts. They went out into the streets and put up signs and walked the streets and knocked on doors. As I went down through Massachusetts, I recall being in the Vietnamese section in Boston, and as I went down through that section--it's really a small business section of Boston--window after window had Scott Brown signs in the Vietnamese section of Boston, and certainly did many of the residential areas. There was a tremendous outpouring for Scott Brown. As I went into the call centers, I had people come up to me and say, I'm a union member and my husband is a union member. We've always walked the streets for the Democrats, but this time we're here to work for Scott Brown. We've had enough. The irresponsible overspending is at its core and the taking over private business is a big part of this, and trying to push a national health care act down our throats like you give a pill to a horse is more than they could tolerate. And so in that sea change from 21 percent down to 5 percent up--it actually was a 24, 25 percent turnaround that took place in an unpredicted way in Massachusetts--Scott Brown rose forward to a victory in Massachusetts and had a lead that was about the same for the last, I'm going to say in the polls that I saw the last 4 or 5 days at least in the race. So I don't think that there was more than about 20 days for him to close the gap of 21 points. And he will know that a lot better than me, Mr. Speaker. But that message that came from the election of Scott Brown, that resounding noise out of Massachusetts-- and there were a lot of people that went to Massachusetts to help. Tea party patriots went. Also people from many of the States in the Union went up to see what they could do because that's where the fight was, that's where people could preserve their liberty and they were committed to that cause. That election result came out, and it shifted the dynamics in the United States Senate, because Scott Brown promised to deliver the vote against cloture that would change the dynamics. And so the President of the United States, who has not done very well in some of his endeavors--let me see. What did he do? He went to Virginia to engage in the Governor's race in Virginia and he went 0- for-1 in Virginia. He went to New Jersey and did several appearances in New Jersey, as I recall, to reelect John Corzine in New Jersey. Chris Christie won in New Jersey, Bob McDonnell won in Virginia. So President Obama went 0-for-1 in Virginia. He went 0-for-1 in New Jersey. He went to Copenhagen twice, once to win the Olympics for Chicago and another time to see if he could seek some kind of a global green agreement on climate change. Now, they came out of Copenhagen with something they pointed to that said was a victory, but not much of anybody thought so. It is a mild little fig leaf of a victory. So I'm going to describe it this way: President 0-for-1 in Virginia, 0-for-1 in New Jersey, 0-for-2 in Copenhagen, and--completely a goose egg--0-for-1 in Massachusetts. And now the ``Scott heard around the world'' has echoed through this place. The White House, after that election, had to pull back. They had to stop and see if they could get a lay of the land and figure out what to do. Senator Harkin said within a few days of that election that they had an agreement that they had negotiated with the House, and they had an agreement that would bring reconciliation through. It is a bit convoluted and I won't explain it in detail here tonight, Mr. Speaker, but that was the first we heard that they were meeting behind closed doors to put together a reconciliation package. I know it had been rumored out there since September, but that was the first I recall of a legislator saying, Oh, yeah, we have that deal put together. That was Senator Tom Harkin from my State, my junior Senator that said that. So they moved on looking to see what they could do. In normal circumstances, you would take the differences, the Senate bill and the House bill, and appoint a conference committee that would have Democrats and Republicans on it. What would happen would be the Democrats who were in the majority--Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and their people--would go behind closed doors--even with a conference committee--and they would make their deal behind closed doors. They would negotiate their package behind closed doors. Once they decided they could get the votes in the House and in the Senate to pass their package, their socialized medicine version of what they want to do to America's freedom today when it comes to health care, then they would have announced the conference committee. The members of the conference committee on their side would have been committed to voting for the package that was already pre-negotiated. The Republicans would then appoint their conference committee, and at an appointed date and time they would all file out into the room, sit down in their chairs, call the conference committee to order, and then they would go through the charade of debating the different changes, somebody would offer a change here and offer a change there and they would vote it up or down. After a while, they would have it ratified-- the very deal that was put together behind closed doors--and pushed a conference committee report out here that would have gone then to the House and Senate, one side taking it up first and then over to the other side. The last one to pass the identical piece of legislation that was negotiated behind closed doors would go to the President, where he would have already pre-agreed to sign the bill. He would have been in the room, too, or he and his representatives, doing those negotiations. So, Mr. Speaker, what I have put together here is a description of what actually happens and the functionality if they had gone to the conference committee instead of this reconciliation nuclear option. But they didn't want the conference committee because they would have to then put up with Republican criticism, Republican motions, Republican efforts to at least let the world know that there are many logical alternatives. And so they circumvented the conference committee. I believe, Mr. Speaker, that this is the first time in the history of this country, at least on a major bill, that the White House has stepped in to put together a negotiation that has-- it's a de facto conference committee. The White House has replaced them, and they're the de facto conference committee. They've put this together and tried to propose something. What was interesting was the White House planned and announced that they would release a bill on Monday of this week. The White House also said that any bill, we would have 72 hours to examine it. So they called a meeting for today that was scheduled for 6 hours, started at 10 o'clock this morning and, interestingly, the time that they released their document--that a lot of us thought was going to be a health care bill, a third bill, a Reid bill, a Pelosi bill, and an Obama bill, it only turned out to be 12 pages or so of bullet points--all of this time and the White House can't produce a bill, but they at least filed the bullet points of what they thought should be in a bill at 10 o'clock on Monday, so exactly 72 hours before the meeting was to convene and did convene at the Blair House today in this town. So they timed it to have their 72 hours as they promised. It just wasn't a bill. The President didn't present a bill, Mr. Speaker. But they negotiated today and they had a discussion, and it went on about 6\1/2\ hours of discussion altogether. How do you analyze that? Well, did anybody take anything off the table? Did anybody offer anything? Were there any changes? Were there any agreements? Was there any proposal, any amendment, any specific language, or even a concept that was agreed to by either side? I am hard-pressed to say that there was, Mr. Speaker. We can, perhaps, get into some of those things a little bit, but I have several of these pieces of data here. This is the health care fact check. It doesn't quite match my numbers, but it's pretty close to what I have. As I watched this happen, as soon as the meeting opened up, it appeared to me that if a Republican would speak, the President would interrupt him. And then that individual might reclaim their time and try to speak again and the President would interrupt him again. Then that individual would make a quick statement and yield the floor, in which case the President would speak, a Democrat would speak--generally uninterrupted--and then the President would take the time back and speak, then a Republican would speak and get interrupted again. And so what is this? Give me the count on this, will you? I have them here, and I don't think anybody else has counted them--I have not heard that they have. Six and a half hours of meeting, we have the President interrupting speakers 70 times in 6\1/2\ hours. Seventy interruptions. And out of those 70 interruptions, he was rude to the Democrats 20 times. He wasn't always rude, actually. Sometimes it needed to be said also with Republicans. But you would think it would be equal or proportional. And you would think it would be respectful of people that care a lot about policy and know a lot of this policy. And presumably, according to the White House and the Democrats in leadership here and in the Senate, this would have been the first time they had heard Republican ideas because they said we didn't have any. Well, we had plenty and they knew it, but they repeated that we didn't have any ideas. So you would think they wouldn't have interrupted. You would think, if they were actually telling the truth when they said Republicans didn't have ideas, that they would have leaned forward in a very interested fashion and listened carefully to the proposals that at least they would like to convince the American people it was the first time they had heard such things. Well, in fact, they'd heard it all before, because we'd produced those bills all before. We'd introduced them all before. They were introduced, many of them as amendments in the markups of the bills that came through the House in the Ways and Means Committee and in the Energy and Commerce Committee. They were just all voted down on a party line vote with very few exceptions. So the President interrupted Democrats 20 times. He interrupted Republicans 50 times. That's 2\1/2\ times more. I have here that President Obama alone was 1 minute short of 2 hours on his own. It was a 6\1/2\-hour meeting. He claimed essentially a third of the talking time. The Democrats, including President Obama, burned not quite 4 hours. The Republicans altogether used up 1 hour and 50 minutes. So that's at least 2-1. Actually, when you add it up, it comes to 3.5-1 or so. My numbers come to actually 3.5-1 when I look at the time the Democrats spoke compared to Republicans speaking. It's about--oh, it's a number that originally was about 25 percent. It's probably a little more than that, Mr. Speaker. We have a number here that shows that 52 percent of the American people don't think that they should go forward with a reconciliation. Now, that's one of the things that should have been a deal breaker. If the President of the United States takes the position that he wants to invite people to negotiate on health care in a bipartisan fashion and if he is sensitive to the criticism that we haven't had negotiations on C-SPAN and that they haven't been bipartisan, then that's what this was designed to do. It was to send a message to the American people that the President was on C-SPAN and that they were bipartisan. Well, that's all true, but the President has intimated and has directly said that the Republicans don't have open minds and that he has already accepted our good ideas and has incorporated them into the legislation that was written this past November and December. I recall the President standing in Baltimore before us when he said, ``I am not an ideologue. I am not. I am a centrist.'' You have to put a couple of ellipses in there, but that is a contextual statement. It is the message he intended to deliver. It is the message he did deliver. I don't know anybody who thinks the President is not an ideologue nor do I know anybody who thinks the President is a centrist. He is, by record, in fact, the most liberal President we have ever elected in the history of this country. He has the largest liberal majority, Progressive majority--the people who build common cause with the Democratic Socialists of America majority--that I have seen in my lifetime. The political center of this Congress is way to the left. I don't know when they've had a filibuster-proof majority in the United States Senate, which just disappeared last month; but of all the tools they had to work with to pass their agenda, they pointed their bony fingers at the Republicans and said, You are obstructionists. You are just the Party of No. You are standing in the way of progress. If you could just see the rationale for us and go with us so that we could have some Republican votes, we could actually pass this legislation and give Americans socialized medicine. Well, the problem is Democrats can't agree among themselves. Nancy Pelosi--the Speaker--Mr. Speaker, has 40 votes to burn. That is four- zero. That is three dozen plus four votes to burn. She can give them all up and still pass a health care bill in their own conference, in their own caucus. Yet they point their fingers at Republicans and say, You're obstructionists. You're only the Party of No. Well, we're the Party of No--``no'' to socialized medicine, ``no'' to breaking the budget, ``no'' to taking away the liberty of our children, grandchildren and of every succeeding generation in America, and ``no'' to passing the debt along and the interest along to those same people. Yes, we say ``no'' to such things. The American people said ``no,'' and they want help saying ``no'' in this Congress. It's not a function of the Republicans' failure to help Democrats with a bad idea that should be criticized. If they can't agree among themselves, then could it just be they have a bad bill? Could it be that the bill has been rejected by enough of the constituents of the Democrats? How about the Blue Dogs? Where are the Blue Dogs on this? They seem to have gone underground on me this time, and I wonder if they haven't become groundhogs and seen their shadows instead of Blue Dogs who used to be for balanced budget, fiscal responsibility and for excoriating anybody who didn't produce the same. Now that they have a President of their very own, it's a different equation for the Blue Dogs. They aren't nearly as vocal. This reconciliation package, this idea to put together a bill that would circumvent the very rules of the Senate which require a 60-vote majority to break a filibuster and a vote of cloture, is something that has been rejected by many of the Senators who would be making the decision to go forward with this. This reconciliation, this ``nuclear option'' that it used to be called by Democrats when it was contemplated by Republicans, was opposed by Democrat after Democrat back in those years, mostly in 2005, when we needed to confirm some judges. By the way, Senator Reid said today that nobody was talking about reconciliation. Huh. Yes, they were. Ben Cardin was talking about it while Harry Reid was talking about it. Only he was saying they need to go forward with reconciliation. So that's been going on for some time. As I said, that argument has been going on since September--the nuclear option, as Democrats called it. Now they call it reconciliation--nice, warm, and fuzzy. The President had an opportunity to take the reconciliation/nuclear option off the table. He did not do so today. It would have been an extension of an open handshake to at least say, We aren't going to blow this thing through over the filibuster rules of the United States Senate, but the President didn't do that. It must mean he is still for the nuclear option. Even though Harry Reid said they weren't talking about it, they are. The American people know that. The people in this House know this-- Democrats and Republicans--even though it has been rejected by the President, then-Senator Obama, Senator Schumer, Senator Reid, then- Senator Biden and now Vice President, Senator Dodd, Senator Feinstein, then-Senator Clinton, and Senator Max Baucus. All of them have rejected the idea of reconciliation. They called it a ``nuclear option'' when Republicans were contemplating the same. This is on a video, but I happen to have the text. So we should know what the President said about this plan that, I think, comes to this House and that, I think, comes to the Senate. I think they're going to try the tactic, and it will blow the place up in the Senate, and it will bring the people to the streets in America. I think they're going to try it because it appears to me it is their last option to push this on us. In 2005, then-Senator Obama said of reconciliation, A change in the Senate rules that really, I think, would change the character of the Senate forever. He often pauses for a long time. He picks up and he says, And what I worry about would be you essentially still have two Chambers--the House and the Senate--but you would have simply majoritarian absolute power on either side. No check and balance on the majority power is what the President is saying there. Only he was a Senator at the time. He concludes with, And that's just not what the Founders intended. President Obama was opposed to reconciliation as a Senator. It was a philosophical position for him, presumably, and now it looks like he is salivating over knowing his agenda might fail if they can't violate a principle that he believes he stood on then, which I disagreed with, by the way. Senator Schumer, who was in the discussions today, said, We are on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis. This is of reconciliation, Mr. Speaker. The checks and balances which have been at the core of the Republic are about to be evaporated, the checks and balances which say, if you get 51 percent of the vote, you don't get your way 100 percent of the time. ``It is amazing. It's almost a temper tantrum. They want their way every single time, and they will change the rules, break the rules, misread the Constitution so that they will get their way.'' Senator Schumer of the nuclear option that is being contemplated by this White House and the leadership in the Senate and in the House in order to force-feed socialized medicine on America. Well, the majority leader in the United States Senate had some things to say also about the nuclear option back in those years, which I believe was still 2005, when Harry Reid said, ``The right to extend debate is never more important than when one party controls Congress and the White House. In these cases a filibuster serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government.'' Harry Reid. What did he think? He thought they shouldn't use the nuclear option, the reconciliation package, because the filibuster is necessary as a check on power and it preserves our limited government. Now, Mr. Speaker, it brings me to then-Senator, now Vice President Joe Biden, who said of the reconciliation-nuclear option: ``Ultimately an example of the arrogance of power, it is a fundamental power grab. I pray God when the Democrats take back control, we don't make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.'' Vice President Joe Biden. Presumably that's also a philosophical conviction. He's praying to God that they don't do the same thing that he alleged Republicans were about to do--and did not, by the way, at least on that occasion. Now I have on reconciliation Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat from Connecticut, who said, ``I've never passed a single bill worth talking about that didn't have as a lead cosponsor a Republican, and I don't know of a single piece of legislation that's ever been adopted here that didn't have a Republican and a Democrat in the lead. That's because we need to sit down and work with each other. The rules of this institution have required that. That's why they exist. Why have a bicameral legislative body? Why have two Chambers? What were the Framers thinking about? They understood, Mr. President, that there is a tyranny of the majority.'' Senator Chris Dodd speaking of reconciliation. Now, that's a list of some of them, but I think it would be instructive to go the rest of the way through, Mr. Speaker, and go to Senator Dianne Feinstein and what she had to say of reconciliation, which was: ``The Senate becomes ipso-facto the House of Representatives, where the majority rules supreme and the party in power can dominate and control the agenda with absolute power. `` Senator Dianne Feinstein. And that is an accurate analysis of the function of what's going on right now. We will see if she'll participate in this and go back on her position. But at least then-Senator and now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won't have to be engaged in this because she happens to be now the Secretary of State and out of this loop. But Hillary Clinton said of reconciliation: ``You've got majority rule, and then you've got this Senate here where people can slow things down, where they can debate, where they have something called the filibuster. You know, it seems like a little less than efficient. Well, that's right it is and deliberately designed to be so. The Senate is being asked to turn itself inside out. Ignore the precedent to ignore the way our system has worked. The delicate balance that we have obtained that has kept this constitutional system going for immediate gratification of the present President.'' Hillary Clinton, opposed to the nuclear option- reconciliation. Now, the last quote that I have in front of me is Senator Max Bachus, who was actively engaged in the negotiations on this bill for a time with my senior Senator Chuck Grassley, who essentially was shut out of these negotiations last September. Max Bachus said of the nuclear option-reconciliation: ``This is the way democracy ends, not with a bomb but with a gavel.'' That's what we're looking at, Mr. Speaker. But all of these people are in a position to flip around and change their position. I'd remind the American people that Thomas Jefferson once said that large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities. And that's an important point, and I don't know that Jefferson was talking about bipartisan majorities being broader than slender, but he surely would have rejected the idea that very slender, exclusively partisan majorities are not conducive to the good future of our country. And then I would make another point with regard to these negotiations and discussions, Mr. Speaker, and that is the President of the United States has had kind words to say to some of the people that we've viewed as our enemies. One of them would be Ahmadinejad, who is the President of Iran. And he said in his State of the Union address--this is an interesting thing to come from the President. This is speaking almost directly to Ahmadinejad in Iran, standing back where you are, very close in front of where you are, Mr. Speaker. President Obama said this: ``To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.'' That was the President's statement in the State of the Union address, and no doubt he's speaking to Ahmadinejad, someone who has sworn that he is an enemy of the United States and wants to annihilate the ``Great Satan.'' And he defines Ahmadinejad as one who is clinging to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent. It sounds a lot like what we're going through here in this Congress. It sounds a lot like the silencing of dissent that's taking place in the House of Representatives, with no amendments allowed unless they make Republicans look bad, a shutdown of the open rules process, a shutdown of the debates process, and a driving through of legislation in a partisan way. So I'm going to suggest this, Mr. Speaker, that I would appreciate it if the President today would offer the Republicans the same thing that he offered Ahmadinejad, and that would be that we would extend our hand if he would have just unclenched his fist. We would have been happy to meet with the President without preconditions, but the President insisted on preconditions. So did Ahmadinejad. He insisted on preconditions, and the President said, I don't insist on any. I offer my hand. Here is a blank piece of paper. Let's negotiate regardless of what your conditions are. But instead the President on health care said to Republicans, I'm going to hang on to my ObamaCare bills, House and Senate. I'll pick my choice because I couldn't write a bill of my own, and I'm going to hang on to the reconciliation-nuclear option because that's the gun to the head of Republicans, and you can figure out if you're going to blink and concede something to us today and bring some votes over to our side of the aisle so we can claim that this albatross is something that belongs to Democrats and Republicans. And when we rightfully refuse, they will pull the trigger on reconciliation, the nuclear option. And it won't be because we didn't offer an open hand. It will be because their clenched fist squeezed the trigger of the round of the nuclear option and sets off a food fight in America that will be ugly in the streets if they force this thing on this country. I have been joined by the gentleman and my very good and close friend from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), whom I would be very happy to yield to.