Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. If this is going to be the most open and ethical Congress in history, this Congress has got to have an opportunity to read the bills. This leadership team will create the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history: Nancy Pelosi, November 16, 2006. I will say this: Yes, there were bills that were hustled through this Chamber when Republicans were in the majority, but I have never seen anything quite as egregious as the cap-and-trade bill that came through this House of Representatives. That bill was presented to the floor of the House, scheduled for debate the following day, and at 3:09 a.m., a 316-page amendment--

Mr. KING of Iowa. Did I say a.m.?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I'm sorry, I meant to say 3:09 a.m. I appreciate that correction. I must have had some kind of chronological dyslexia in order to come up with such a thing. However, 3:09 a.m., 316-page amendment, and I can say with great confidence that no one read the bill. I don't have to ask anybody in this Chamber if they read the bill. I know no one read the bill. I was here on the floor engaging in the debate when Congressman Gohmert from Texas asked a parliamentary inquiry and he said, Madam Speaker, is there a copy of the enrolled bill in the Well? The answer was kind of, maybe, sort of. And we looked at the kind of, maybe, sort of stack of paper that was there, and there was a basic bill of around 1,100 pages, but the kind of, maybe, sort of didn't include the 316-page amendment. And so after a few more inquiries, they pointed to another stack of paperwork, and Congressman Gohmert went down to look at that paperwork, and he came back and said, Madam Speaker, parliamentary inquiry, that is not even the amendment. It was a different stack of paper. And so after 35 minutes of turning this thing around, the most significant question was again asked by Louie Gohmert of Texas, and there was a lot of dialogue going on. Joe Barton of Texas was engaged in this thing; I give him that. And anyway Louie Gohmert asked the question, after about 35 minutes of suspension of the debate on the cap-and-trade bill, he said, Madam Speaker, parliamentary inquiry: If the House of Representatives passes a bill that doesn't exist, is it possible to message a bill that doesn't exist to the United States Senate? Well, today we know it must be possible because we passed cap-and- trade, a bill that didn't exist, and it got messaged to the Senate, and I think it probably began to exist sometime after it was messaged to the Senate. It was an appalling thing that the American people would have to watch, and Thomas Jefferson has to be rolling over two or three times. He spoke about a lot of things, 72 hours, 3 days to read the bill. I also put out a great big pat on the back for Congressman Brian Baird for leading on this, as well as Greg Walden and John Culberson, and I have signed the discharge petition and the bill, and I'm looking for the rest of the signatures on the discharge petition so it can come to this floor. That is a piece of bipartisanship that this Congress can pass that will leave a legacy for a long time to come. And if we're so afraid of the legislation that might get passed that we can't give anybody an opportunity to read it and we wonder why people go to TEA parties in America, that's why. They're really uneasy about what they've seen: $700 billion in TARP; eight large private- sector corporations nationalized; along with then a $787 billion stimulus package rushed through Congress--it had to happen right now-- and sat on the President's desk for 5 days before he signed it, and still most of it is not spent. And with that, they watched cap-and-trade move through here in a hurry-up, rush job, when not one soul in this Congress or across this country read the bill before it passed. And then they see a hurry-up rush for a national health care act that takes away our freedom. No wonder we have TEA parties. No wonder the American people come out. It's just a wonder that they could be so peaceful, and we've ended up with almost no, let me say, almost no violence of any kind in all the TEA parties that we had. Respectful people that exercised their right to freedom of speech and assembly and a right for redress of their grievances, and they did so in the traditional fashion envisioned by Thomas Jefferson himself. So many generations have taken place since Thomas Jefferson, but his wisdom remains, and I certainly support H. Res. 554. Encourage everyone, including the Speaker, to sign that discharge petition. Let's get that thing out here on the floor, do the right thing for Democrats and Republicans.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized for the privilege and the honor to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. As we wrap up this congressional week and I listened to the gentleman from Ohio, the gentleman from Utah and the gentleman from Arizona talk about missile defense and our national security, what I have heard over this last hour is a technical, tactical, strategic explanation of why America has taken the positions that we have, the decisions that have been made in the previous administrations, and I think a clear and stark analysis of what apparently is a huge diplomatic mistake made by the President of the United States. I would make the point that those who defend him seem to always revert back to a default position of, The President must have gotten something for it. They speculate that there must be a quid pro quo to pull the rug out from underneath the Eastern Europeans--in particular, the Poles and the Czechs--who in their headlines, as I believe Mr. Franks said--the headline in one of those papers said ``Betrayed!'' To betray the Poles and the Czechs, the United States of America, the integrity of our Nation and the confidence in our national security have been diminished in a way that probably can't ever be rebuilt. But those who defend that decision will argue, Well, the President is a smart negotiator. He is a brilliant man. Therefore, we have to trust his knowledge and his judgment because he must know something that we don't. Yet I haven't heard one of these imaginative characters that can defend anything and advocate for anything come up with a single thing that would be worth doing what the President did. What could possibly be worth giving up the integrity and the credibility of the United States? What could possibly be something that could come out of any negotiations with Iran or Russia that could emerge as a plus on this side that would offset the loss of international credibility, the word of the United States and our commitment to our allies, let alone giving up the strategic position of being able to take out Iranian missiles shortly after they leave the launching pad, instead of leaving this 5- year window, as Mr. Turner just said? If your President is so much smarter than you are that he must have gotten something accomplished behind the scenes that's so valuable that even you can't conceive of what it might have been, I don't know if you call that a rational thought or a religion. But, Mr. Speaker, we're in a situation here where the United States and the world is in a very, very dangerous place. This globe is a giant chessboard; it's a giant Monopoly game, and it's a giant Risk game that's going on. It's a giant poker game that's going on. And there are some poker players, chess players, Risk and Monopoly players out there that are really good and really smart, and they spend their time trying to figure out how to outmaneuver the United States. It has taken place ever since the dawn of the Soviet Union, and the Monopoly game here in the United States broke the Soviet Union, and they imploded. Now we have Putin over there on the chessboard, at the poker table, and he is making moves on this global chessboard that seek to reconstruct what he can of the former Soviet Union. It's been in his interest to cause Iran to be a thorn in our side and for us to think that we could ask Putin to, well, be open and do us a favor and maybe he could talk real nice to the Iranians and they would stop their nuclear endeavor--after all of these years and these billions of dollars spent and the great diplomatic risks that they take? These people are not going to just simply tip over their king and walk away from this chessboard. For the President to think that dialogue is diplomacy and that you can accomplish things just because you talk about it is an inherently left-wing, myopic European view, and it's something that I've heard from their mouths in the discussions that we have over in that part of the world. We have with us Mr. Bishop from Utah who has significant insight into that part of the world, the politics of Western Europe as well as geography of that part of the world--Iran, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and also Western Europe. I have asked the gentleman if he would stick around long enough to impart some of that broader view to explain the forces that are at play in this dynamic, the forces of Russia, the forces of Iran, the Islamic effort that's there, the Israeli position that's there, the threat that comes from Iran threatening to annihilate and wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. And by the way, this move, in my view, brings it closer and closer that Israel likely will have no choice but to at least attempt to take out the nuclear capability of Iran. Their survival might very well be at stake. So this move that might look like its a move designed to pacify the Russians might well end up being something that compels the Israelis to make a military strike. And it may well be a tool that, once removed, the missiles are in the Middle East, and this is a decision that is now made that moves us to the inevitability that there will be military action take place as a result of a pacifist action on the part of the President. This is what comes when you go to--let me call it the Neville Chamberlain School of Diplomacy or capitulation, for remember when he returned from Munich waving a letter saying that he had achieved ``peace in our time.'' Well, that peace in our time didn't last long. I was thinking about the situation of how it was that Hitler actually negotiated with the Russians for a while and that ended up with Poland being divided and a global war as a result. I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Utah. I am interested in your perspective on this global chess, poker, Monopoly, Risk game that's taking place.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Briefly reclaiming my time, a question forms in my mind, and I'd like to take advantage, Mr. Speaker, of the expertise which I will assign to the gentleman from Utah in his understanding of history. And I'm looking back upon those events in the 1980s and this event that's coming up for the 20th anniversary this November 9, the fall of the Berlin Wall. When I watched that happen on television, I saw literally the Iron Curtain crashing down. Every time a hammer blow landed, every time they hit it with a chisel, every time they knocked another chink or pulled a section of the wall down, that was the Iron Curtain being deconstructed. Demolition of the Iron Curtain that took place began on November 9 of 1989. Now, at that moment the pundits in the news media didn't understand what was taking place. They didn't see that as the Iron Curtain. They saw it as the family reunification plan. And therein lies the large flaw that took place on the part of the liberals. They didn't understand the dynamic that had taken place. But Ronald Reagan understood it at that moment. I'm not convinced that his immediate successor understood it to the depth that Ronald Reagan did. But this question has always lingered in me. I thought that it proved to the world that free markets and free enterprise and freedom would always prevail over communism, socialism, despotism, totalitarianism of any kind because of the dynamics that come from the creativity and the productivity and the freedom that comes from the human spirit and the checks and balances that exist in the marketplace. Yet I didn't hear them capitulating in their argument. They just suspended their arguments for a little while. And then front-and-center, full- blown, proud, global Communists disappeared. But where did they go is the question? Did they go back and lick their wounds and change their ideology and come back as free enterprise capitalists? I don't remember their doing that. But I wonder if the gentleman from Utah has any thoughts on what happened to those front- and-center Communists from 1989. Where are they? Some have passed away but some are still with us. What are they doing today and what do they believe in, and how does this fit into the equation? I yield to the gentleman from Utah.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I very much appreciate the diplomatic gentleman from Utah for his contribution to the knowledge base and the decisionmaking process that we do here in this Congress. And I would suggest that he's a little overly humble when he says he doesn't know the answer to what happened to those Communists. When I think about the discussion that we've heard about Ukraine, Georgia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, South America, Mr. Speaker, all of these areas are discussed in a book written by Colonel Robert Chandler called ``Shadow World.'' It's 500-and-some pages long. And Mr. Chandler takes the situation of the world at the end of the Cold War, and that would be at the implosion of the Soviet Union, and he begins to identify the leading personalities in the world, those leaders and those ideologies within the countries that are, let me say, Communist interests, hardcore Communist interests. And he takes the person around the globe to every populated continent and talks about the core politics of each of those countries, including these countries that have been mentioned by Mr. Bishop of Utah and especially Venezuela and North Korea and some of the other countries in South America, also Putin in Russia and how things unfolded and Gorbachev's position as well. It is a very, very educational compilation of what happened after almost 20 years ago when the Berlin Wall went down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down, and the people who were holding up that part of the world, the left side of the world, those on the east side of the Berlin Wall, who had a managed economy, who had the central planning that set up 5-year plans for the collective farms, those that told everyone else when to go to work, what raw materials to deliver. And if you remember, Ronald Reagan and some of the others made the joke that, well, people in the Soviet Union pretended to work and the Soviet Union pretended to pay them. But eventually that house of economic cards collapsed. A question was before us as a Nation, and that question was, while the Soviet Union was developing a missile capability to eclipse our own capability here, such a devastating force of ICBMs that there was nothing the United States could do to survive such an attack, that mutually assured destruction was going down the path of a destruction that would be so bad in this country that civilization itself may not survive. The question that was before us was articulated best by the former Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who, as she stepped down from that position in the early 1980s, said this contest that's going on, this Cold War, is the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board, and the only question is will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before the Soviet Union checkmates the United States militarily? That was the most succinct example of what was taking place in that Cold War in the 1980s. We know how it played out now. We look back on that, and almost 20 years ago the Soviet Union could no longer hold their economics together. They couldn't keep their military out even in places like East Germany. So they opened up the border with Hungary. People flowed around through Austria and Hungary. And at a certain point, there wasn't any merit in guarding the Wall anymore because people were streaming around the end. And so they went over the top and began to sit up on top of the wall with hammers and chisels and saws and anything they could get their hands on. And, yes, some broke bottle of champagne, and there was family reunification. But it was the Iron Curtain crashing down nearly 20 years ago that should have been a lesson for the whole world that free enterprise always defeats a managed economy, because no matter how many smart people you put in positions of power, they can't micromanage an economy that is a combination of everybody's individual productive and economic activity every day. The invisible hand, as Adam Smith famously described, and actually didn't, about how free enterprise works with providing the incentives and managing the supply. So it works like this: If the grocery store runs out of bread, the store owner understands he has to have more bread or otherwise people will go someplace else to shop. And if there's a cheaper, better bread at the neighboring store, that store owner is not going to sell his bread. So that's how bakeries get started, how grocery stores grow and shrink, how chain stores begin, how manufacturing begins. Our control, our managed economy is this: Free enterprise drives our economy. And the buy, sell, trade, make-gain culture that we have that's part of what made America great, one of the central pillars of American exceptionalism is free enterprise. When we have that working for us in this country, Americans are more productive than anybody else in the world. Our job here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, is to get government out of the way and to provide the kind of tax and regulatory structure as minimally as we can so that the result is the individuals in this country will see our average annual productivity go up. And if people are rewarded for their productivity, they will produce more. If you tax them and punish them and regulate them, they will produce less. So in places like the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, they just simply suppressed the productivity by taking away the rewards. I can give you a simple example that stands out in a very stark way. And that is Communist China, a country of more than a billion people, about the same geographical area of the United States, having trouble in a lot of ways competing in the technological and educational side of this. But some years ago, they decided they were going to let their farmers, who are less controlled now than they were, be able to get engaged in the honey business without having government interference. So, in other words, government doesn't appoint themselves a few thousand beekeepers and have them deliver all that honey for a set price. They let them compete on the open market. And what has happened? China almost immediately began exporting honey and competing against the honey here in the United States because they had some people that could be beekeepers. That's like a little microcosm of free enterprise that sprung up out of China because they took the regulations away, took their managed economy away and let people produce all they could produce and sell all they could sell and keep a significant share of the profits. Well, here in this country, we've had that as a tradition across the breadth of this economy, and it's diminished significantly, Mr. Speaker. So the vitality of free enterprise brings about the best in us, the highest productivity, the most innovativeness in us. It gives us an incentive to extend each of our educations. It gives the inventors an incentive to invent. It gives the people that are producing and doing the experiments on pharmaceuticals an incentive to produce better medicine. And those who invent better surgery techniques get to cash a bigger check. Well, even though they are humanitarians driven by a desire to do good in their work, when you really need to reach back for that extra adrenaline when it gets late at night when the rest of the world is tired, or maybe you don't feel very good because you are exhausted, that extra incentive of profit makes a difference and a reward for it in a society that appreciates it. Around the globe, there is a line of scrimmage between freedom and the suppression from freedom. So when the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) humbly said he didn't know the answer, I think perhaps he didn't know the answer that I wanted him to give--that will happen--but he understands very thoroughly how the rearrangement that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Cold War, some countries and philosophies lined up on the side of the freedom. Those countries are among those countries where we already had the holes dug to place the missile defense shield, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Mr. Speaker, have you failed to notice that the people who have achieved their freedom most recently love it and adhere to it the most? The Poles love their freedom. The Romanians love their freedom. And the Czechs love their freedom. They remember what it is like to live under the boot heel of the Soviet Union. They remember clearly within their own families the fear of the occupation that took place before, in many cases World War II, and certainly during and after it. I recall in a trip over to that part of the world with Mr. Bishop a conversation with a man about my age whose father's first military operation he was engaged in was Auschwitz, not at Auschwitz to liberate Auschwitz, but at Auschwitz fighting for the Russians. Those things don't pop up easily in our history books, but this broad global concept of who is on what side of this line of scrimmage, who is on the side of freedom and who is on the side of suppressing freedom, we need to understand this. These forces know instinctively what is at play out here on the globe. And so we wonder, what is the chess board that Putin is playing on? The Monopoly board that Putin is playing on? He is not about advancing freedom; he is about diminishing freedom. The freedom in the Soviet Union, I should say Russia, and some of our satellite states, has diminished since Putin stepped into control. We met with significant leading personalities in Russia, and I am going to avoid saying their names because I don't need to turn more heat up on them; but you would recognize many if not all of them, Mr. Speaker, and they told us that there really no longer exists a free press in Russia, not a newspaper that they can count on that has any influence that is free to print what it wants to print. There is not a free legislature in Russia any longer either. They are the people who are controlled by Putin, and they don't have free markets. We know that the Mob has taken over a lot of that economy, and there is a payoff that goes on inside of all of that. So a Russia that had an opportunity to take a step up after the implosion of the Soviet Union now is stepping into the darkness of the left again, moving towards a communist state, taking away the freedom of its people and their ability to effectively have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom of the press and freedom of their economy. Those things have been significantly diminished under Putin, and they understand that and they see that. The leaders of freedom in Russia today would have believed that the Russian people would have stepped up by now and gone to the streets and taken their country back. It has not happened. I would encourage that they do so, that they take their country back. We thought it was happening during the days of Yeltsin when he climbed up on the tank. Good things happened there, but we should not forget that we are the vanguards of freedom here in the United States of America for the world. We are the inspiration for the world. And when it looks like the model for our diplomacy is simply capitulation to Russia, under the belief that our community organizer in chief somehow is a master of foreign policy, well, he is the manager of foreign policy and he is the Commander in Chief of our military, and certainly I stand with our military, and I want to help coach him on the foreign policy a little bit. I don't know why the press has not been more critical of the President's foreign policy. This huge plunder of just announcing that he is going to pull the missiles out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, take that shield away, and almost at the same time you notice that the information was leaked out about the nuclear capabilities of Iran, which we have just heard in the previous hour, Iran developing the capability, that they have the capability to develop a bomb now and they are in the process we know of developing the capability to deliver it. And it doesn't take very much of a missile to drop one into Israel, and it only takes one weapon dropped into Israel to annihilate the entire country. And they have said that is what they intend to do. We look at the President of the United States, his foreign policy experience seems to have, before he became the Commander in Chief and the chief architect of our foreign policy, his foreign policy experience comes to this: having been raised in part in Indonesia at a young age which would give him some sense of the culture but probably no sense of the global, military, cultural dynamics, but raised at least in part in Indonesia. A President who has once traveled to Kenya, and once traveled to Pakistan. I don't know quite how that happened, but it was announced. And beyond that, the foreign policy experience for our Commander in Chief and the chief architect of our foreign policy seems to be a trip to Germany to give a speech during the campaign. That is not anything that has ever happened before that I know of during a Presidential campaign, but it looked at the time like he wanted to be President of Europe, the United States, and the world. In any case, very, very limited on foreign policy experience. And the lessons of history, the lessons so well drilled into us by Neville Chamberlain's School of Appeasement when Chamberlain came back from the trip to Munich and waved the letter in his hand, the letter that Hitler had signed, and he said: I have guaranteed peace in our time. That was the image of Chamberlain getting off the plane from Munich. And what happened? Within weeks the Nazis invaded Poland. They carved it up with the Russians, and we were off and running in a global war that cost tens of millions of lives. They remember that in that part of the world. They are afraid of being brought back into another war. The Poles remember being run over by the Nazis and the Russians, and then occupied by the Russians for all of these years up until 1990 or so. This is a very sensitive situation that is going on. When the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) mentioned the Ukraine and Georgia, the importance of the sovereign state of Georgia should not be diminished. We should understand that this chess game that I have talked about, the central square on the chess board for Putin is Georgia. That is the nexus through which the energy flows, the energy that is produced in gas and oil wells east of Georgia, east of the Caspian Sea, roughly 1.2 million barrels of oil going through Georgia by pipeline on a daily basis, 1.2 million, a train that has constant tankers of crude oil being hauled through the nation of Georgia on their destinations to the tanker ships and the Black Sea, and the natural gas that flows in pipelines through Georgia to other places in Europe. Georgia is the nexus. Think, Mr. Speaker, of an hourglass, and on one side of that hourglass is a lot of the production of oil and natural gas that is east of the Caspian Sea, flowing through this nexus of Georgia with pipelines, rail lines, and coming out the other side at the Black Sea and going on to land-based places around Western Europe. Think of the Russians shutting off the natural gas to Germany a year ago January. Think what that meant when they did that. And to have the Germans take the position that it really didn't affect their foreign policy toward Russia because they only got 30 percent of their natural gas from Russia. Can you imagine if Hugo Chavez had 30 percent of the natural gas coming into the United States and he turned the valve down and shut off our gas in January? Our furnaces would have gone dark on us, and our houses would have gone cold. If that had happened, what would we do? Would we accept that? If we didn't have the power to do something about it, would we capitulate to the demands of Hugo Chavez? My answer, I think we would say yes. I think if we didn't have the power or another alternative, we would have to negotiate. I am going to suggest that the Germans are negotiating with the Russians because they can't do a confrontation, and Putin knows it. That's why he shut the energy off that was flowing through Georgia for 4 days. He sent a message to Europe that he can do that anytime he pleases. When he shut the gas off that was flowing through into Germany, that said clearly that Putin can do that anytime he pleases. So if someone controls your energy and they can shut the valve down anytime they please, you end up being a little nicer to those folks unless you produce another alternative. Well, the alternative that is being produced is building a new pipeline around to the North Sea. And where does it come from? Russia. That puts them in more control. My answer would be: I don't want any of that; let's develop our own energy sources and not be dependent upon those energy sources that are coming from Russia. But that has been Putin's strength. When energy prices went up, he found himself sitting on a lot of cash. That is unusual for a country whose energy falters; but because Russia has a lot of energy, they have had a significant advantage. But, Mr. Speaker, we should remember when the Berlin Wall went down in 1989 and the Soviet Union imploded within the next couple of years that the people that were Communists, Socialists, Marxists, Maoists, they didn't go away. They didn't look at the model of this dynamic vigor of the United States economy that is driven by our people and decide they wanted to be more like us. Some did; not many. Most of them went underground for a little while and then tried to get back in power. The former Communists are there seated in the legislatures across that part of Europe today. In small numbers, and in some cases they don't get to call themselves Communists because that has been stained by the history of it, but they still believe the same thing. They still want to manage. They still believe that their elitist mind-set can tell the rest of us what to do. They want to take away the freedom of individuals to make their own choices economically and militarily and politically and culturally. And, in fact, persecute the churches while they are at it. We need to understand Communists haven't changed. They might have taken on different names. They might have declared themselves Social Democrats or to be Progressives. They might just be the Democratic Socialists of America that are supporting Progressives in this Congress, but they are the same people with the same ideology. And us freedom-loving people, I should say we freedom-loving people, need to understand that there are basic principles of Americanism, and free enterprise is one of them. And those who undermine free enterprise are undergoing anti-American activities because they are undermining our vitality and our freedom and are taking away our ability to take this Nation up to another level of our destiny. That is part of this equation that is taking place here as the President of the United States--whom I happen to have this portrait of. I think it is a flattering one actually and well done as far as the artwork is concerned. The President of the United States brings an ideology to the task of community organizer in chief. With a limited foreign policy experience of having traveled, lived shortly in Indonesia and traveled to Pakistan and I understand to Kenya, and beyond that his trip to Germany to give his speech there with the Autobahn Bismarcks--I think that is the victory monument or the triumph monument that's there in Berlin--with that in the backdrop, not the Vandenberg Gate which he tried to do, that is not a lot of foreign policy experience to be playing on this global chessboard with the world's number one economy, the world's number one military, and with the destiny of the world hanging in the balance if you make a mistake. No one has a crystal ball, but this is a very high-risk endeavor taken on by our Commander in Chief. And those who are experts on the military side of this, it's not quite universal, but there has been a broad criticism that has been made. And I have no idea. My imagination cannot tell me what he could possibly have gotten for capitulating on the missiles in Poland and Czechoslovakia. And so, Madam Speaker, that brings me to the subject matter that has, I will say, riveted the American people over the last couple of weeks, and that is the issue of ACORN, ACORN being the place where the President got his start in politics, where Barack Obama first engaged in community organizing, and his community organizing being part of--the most high profile that he did was Project Vote, the get-out-the-vote effort. And Project Vote that he worked for is a very close, indistinguishable-from affiliate of ACORN. So ACORN in Chicago has always had a broad and deep connection. It has always been very active there. From the early days when ACORN originated in Arkansas and emerged across the rest of the country, ACORN has had a very solid presence in Chicago. And the President of the United States might, in his most candid moments, confess that he wouldn't be very likely to be the President of the United States if it hadn't been for ACORN, ACORN's ability to register voters and get out the vote and bring about the kind of leverage within the inner city that allows ACORN to influence votes at the inner city level. Now, ACORN is a corporation, and its structure is something that seems to be a little bit mysterious. It has been often reported that they're a 501(c)(3); that's not for profit. That means they can't engage in partisan political activities. And we have seen as a report from the Government Reform Committee that ACORN has up to 361 affiliates; in fact, they list 361 affiliates in their report. Some of those may not be active affiliates, and there may be some affiliates that didn't get picked up in the report done by the Government Reform Committee. But ACORN has turned into a spiderweb of this conglomeration of affiliates. So when I speak of ACORN, Madam Speaker, I'm speaking of ACORN and all other affiliates, think 361 corporations, a third or more of them being 501(c)(3) not for profits, some 527 organizations, and some 501(c)(4) organizations, and other corporate structures, organizations that share, in many cases, interlocking boards of directors and an interlocking mission that reaches out and has become a vacuum that sucks up taxpayer dollars in many of the States and from the Federal Government. They have received over 53 million Federal tax dollars since 1994, and I think that's a small piece of it until we examine all of the affiliates. Many of the States have contributed to ACORN in one way or another by reentering into contractual agreements with them; ACORN and ACORN Housing, for example, essentially in the business of brokering low-income housing. So these are some of the things that ACORN has done. They've contributed to the toxic mortgage situation that brought about the economic meltdown just a year ago, and they've done so by shaking down lenders, by demanding contributions from lenders. What large major investment bank has not written at least one fat check to ACORN? Madam Speaker, I'm going to suggest that they have shaken down many of the banks that have been bailed out. And we should take a look and see which banks received TARP funds and look there and see which banks also contributed money to ACORN. And we need to bring all of the finances together of the private corporations that are part of this funding for ACORN as well as government. It's not enough just to audit what government sent to ACORN. It's important that we go to the private corporations as well and see what has happened. But we know that ACORN has gone in and intimidated lenders. Lenders have written checks in order to, let me call it, ``influence'' ACORN to stop demonstrating in their banks so that they can actually do business. We know that ACORN personnel, including Maude Talbot--her first name actually escapes me, but Talbot is the last name, the head of ACORN in Chicago who has claimed Obama as her own--have bragged about going in to intimidate lenders in their offices and talked of other circumstances about shoving the lender's desk over against the wall, surrounding the loan officer, screaming and yelling and chanting at him until such time as he would get tired of that behavior and commit to loaning certain amounts of money into these areas in their neighborhoods. That's a shakedown, Madam Speaker. ACORN was involved in that. And we know while they were shaking down lenders, they also were here in Washington, D.C., convincing this Congress that we should pass legislation to lower the standards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on their secondary lending market. And when that happened, it lowered the standards that undermine the foundation of requiring credit for loans. And when that happened, it laid the foundation, in fact, it eroded the foundation for credibility and credit and it began the downward spiral of the mortgage lending crisis. And at the core of that, as you look through it, you will see ACORN there over and over again shaking down lenders, coming to Congress, undermining the underwriting requirements that Fannie and Freddie required in order for them to purchase these bundles of mortgage-backed securities that were being created by individual bad loans in bad neighborhoods that were promoted by ACORN, who was getting checks from the lending institutions and getting agreements from the lending institutions to provide blocks of money that would be loaned into neighborhoods that ended up being bad loans. ACORN is at the core of the financial meltdown. And by the way, the President of the United States was at the core of ACORN as a lot of the genesis of this was being generated; headed up Project Vote, later on hired ACORN to work for him to get out the vote during the Presidential campaign. So the President of the United States started out with ACORN. He trained their trainers. He represented them in court to undermine, by the way, the integrity of the ballot box, in my view. And that's a Motor Voter issue, which we would disagree with philosophically. Headed up Project Vote. The actions of ACORN in Chicago have been tied together integrally with the President of the United States all the way through. And here we are now with ACORN helping to, on film, apparently facilitate child pornography and being willing to work with and advocate for what to do with illegal immigrant children brought into prostitution rings in five cities in the United States at a minimum, that being Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; San Bernardino, California; and San Diego. Madam Speaker, that was appalling to this Congress. It finally got us to the point of revulsion where we could finally vote to shut off funding going to ACORN and their affiliates. And that vote was a vote of 345-75 here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Just the day before, I didn't think it was possible, but the American people saw the character and the culture of ACORN in that film, those five films that took place inside those five cities, and we understand there are more that have not been released yet. And what happens? Finally, some of us that have been calling for investigations are starting to get a little bit of movement. But what needs to happen, Madam Speaker, is an all-out full court press on ACORN and all of their affiliates. We need to have the Department of Defense unleash their investigators to trace down, through all the activities of ACORN and all of their affiliates, and work in cooperation with IRS investigations of ACORN and all their affiliates, track every dollar that comes into the affiliates and every dollar that goes out. The commingling of funds, the transfer of funds, we need to have the Department of Justice go back down into the embezzlement that took place of nearly $1 million out of ACORN by the brother of the founder of ACORN, covered up by the founder of ACORN. Brothers do that, I understand. One of them commits a crime and apparently the other one covered up the crime, which is a crime itself. And then they misappropriated funds that were pension funds in order to backfill the hole that was created in their accounting by the embezzlement of Dale Rathke, all of this covered up by his brother, Wade Rathke. And they covered it up and held it away from the functioning board of directors of ACORN at the time. We have ACORN producing over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations, complicit in the beginning, and part and parcel of the mortgage lending crisis, embezzlement/coverup by its top officers, and now we have ACORN helping to facilitate child prostitution rings and setting up houses of ill repute and helping to facilitate loans to do that, and advocating that the, let me just say, pimp and the prostitute not claim all of the 13 or 14 presumably illegal children that they were going to bring in from El Salvador into Baltimore, but just to claim three of them so it wouldn't raise the levels of suspicion. And then they could qualify for the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, child tax credit up to three children, $1,000 a year per child, and then the earned income tax credit, which would probably add another $3,000 to that, most likely, given the advice that they gave, to game the taxpayer for a check for a cumulative of about $6,000, and just as a matter of fact and a matter of course. ACORN would help with the income tax filings. They would help with gaming the taxpayer. They would help with a loan for the house of ill repute, and they would turn a blind eye, at a minimum, to illegal immigration. This is Baltimore. But in San Diego, they advocated to help with that. We have friends in Mexico. You have to trust us. We'll get this done for you. Unbelievable. No conscience. We saw the culture of it. But all the parts that we've been talking about up to the part of the prostitution, people would deny it. We had defenders over here on this side of the aisle, but now they can't deny it because once you transpose the image of facilitating child prostitution as a matter of culture within the corrupt criminal enterprise of ACORN and their affiliates, once you expose that, none of the rest of this is unbelievable. It's entirely plausible, and it is, in fact, entirely real. ACORN has created now a closed, contained economy within itself where its tentacles reach out and suck in and draw down Federal money, State money, contribution money, shakedown money from banks and other lending institutions and corporations to keep ACORN off their back, do the shakedown endeavor. And once that money gets drawn in, then it becomes something that gets commingled. And as it's commingled, then it goes out to further their political enterprise, corrupting the election process in the United States. And if there is anything that I am aggressive on defending, it is the integrity of the ballot box, and they have assaulted the integrity of the ballot box. The President of the United States grew up in ACORN. He hired ACORN. He worked for ACORN. He hired ACORN. He is a player and a coach. He wore their jersey and now he is the equivalent of the owner. And he had set them up to do the census, and twice now the Census Bureau has announced that they aren't going to use ACORN to help with the census. Why would anybody think ACORN can count people better than they can get people registered to vote? Four hundred thousand fraudulent registration forms. Can't we imagine that ACORN would pay a commission for everybody that the census workers could count? And if they paid people on commission, they would just simply fill out forms and expand the numbers, or count people two, three, four, five, six times. Even if they set up expectations and not a quota, the result ends up being the same, even though it's not as stark a violation of the law. You can't have American people counted by people that can't even handle a voter registration form with an expectation that it has an even even chance of being a legitimate voter registration form. Madam Speaker, when they take your vote, when they undermine the integrity of the ballot box, that's more important itself than the Constitution, because even though the Constitution guarantees the rights that we have, the only thing that guarantees the Constitution itself is a legitimate election process. If the American people lose their faith in a legitimate election process, the whole thing comes crashing down. If we don't believe that our vote counts, we can't accept the decisions of government. I mean, think what would happen if we elected a President of the United States, or Members of Congress, United States Senators, Governors of the States, and the American people believed that they were not the elected President, Governor, or Congressman, but they were simply those that happened to be on the side that was gaming the system. We wouldn't accept their decisions either. If we don't accept the decisions that are made by government, then the progress of civilization comes to a halt and digresses, and we fall into the depths of a totalitarian state eventually as well. Legitimate elections are the underpinnings of our Constitution, and the guarantees in the Constitution can't be sustained if we lose our faith in the election process. The worst thing that can happen in this country from a policy standpoint would be to see the integrity of our ballot box further eroded by organizations like ACORN. So this is very important. It is very important that the President of the United States stands up and takes a position on ACORN. Did you notice he was really quiet about some things? He was quiet about Van Jones. Van Jones, the former Green Jobs czar, quit on a Friday night. I guess it was a Saturday morning, at 12:01 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Curiously, the President had nothing to say about Van Jones. Curiously, the press had no questions for the President on Van Jones, and he is a self-alleged Communist. Yet Van Jones drifted from the scene because he became too toxic. There was a little incident up in Massachusetts of a professor from Harvard who was trying to break into his own house and who had a police officer called to his location. The President saw fit to engage himself in that and to hold a beer summit between Professor Gates and Officer Crowley. Now we've had the United States Senate vote to un-fund ACORN. We've had the House of Representatives vote to un-fund ACORN. We have the Treasury Department starting an investigation. At least it's implicit in their press release that's coming out. We have the Justice Department looking to see if they've written any checks to ACORN but not investigating ACORN and their affiliates thoroughly. We have a number of ranking members of full committees on this Hill who are doing what they can with the resources they have. We don't have a single full committee Chair who has announced investigations and hearings into ACORN at this point. We've got Congress doing a slow walk right now on ACORN. We have the President of the United States, who could get himself injected into a lot of different discussions but who has not yet really made much of a peep regarding ACORN. Now, if the Senate says un-fund ACORN and if the House says un-fund ACORN, why can't the President say un-fund ACORN? That's what I'd like to know. If the President of the United States would step forward and say to this Congress, Investigate at my request, and I'll turn over all the resources of the entire executive branch of government to drill down through ACORN and all of their affiliates, and will chase every dollar, every director and every employee who has committed an illegal activity and will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law and will bring about perp walks and prison time for people who are breaking the law, it would happen--it would happen overnight. But he has not. He sat in his ivory tower, and alluded a little bit to the inappropriate actions that might have taken place and about how we should, maybe, get to the bottom of it. They are not yet serious, Mr. Speaker. They are not going to be serious until the American people make it the highest priority that they have. It's hard to make it the highest priority when you're watching your health care on the chopping block in the United States Senate, when you've watched our national security be diminished significantly by pulling the missile defense shield plan from Poland and Czechoslovakia, when you're not keeping faith with the people who have most recently achieved their freedom--that's the Eastern Europeans--and when you're putting the United States at risk and are empowering Ahmadinejad and empowering Putin and are setting up a tone of going wobbly at a time when we need to be the strongest. Madam Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I very much appreciate you recognizing me to address the House of Representatives and you today. As we near the close of this week and I listened to the emphatic presentation of the gentleman from New York and the more low-key, but I think equal conviction, presentation of the gentleman from Minnesota, it caught my ear that the gentleman from New York gave us a definition of socialism. He said, Socialism is when the government controls the means of production. I'm going to tell you that I believe that is a closer definition to communism than it is socialism. Yet, I think the people who are the self-professed socialists in this country know who they are, and I think we should know who they are. They are the members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The Web site dsausa.org is the central source, the most important and influential source of socialist thinking in America. They write in there--and I have a whole series of documents since the gentleman made the statement about what socialists are. I have spent a little time probing around in this Web site location. And I find out some things in there that I think the public should know, Mr. Speaker. It tells about the organization. It says that, We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit. Socialists reject private profit. Now that didn't seem to be what I heard the gentleman from New York say. They also reject alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, which certainly I also reject, environmental destruction and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, and a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality and non-oppressive relationships, like having to work ``for the man.'' These socialists have a difference. On the Web site dsausa.org, there is a link that opens up and it says--first, it leads with, We are not Communists. Now I have always been very suspicious of any group that would start out with: I'm not a Communist. But the Democratic Socialists of America, that's how they start it. They say, We're not Communists. Communists want to control everything. They want to nationalize everything. They want to nationalize not only the major corporations, the industry refining industry, the automobile manufacturers, the banks, the insurance companies, the lending companies. The Communists want to do all that and they want to nationalize small business: the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, to keep it simple, Mr. Speaker. That's communist by the definition of the socialists on dsausa.org Web site for the Democratic Socialists of America. They also contend on those Web site links that they are a political party and they do support candidates, but they just don't actively ask them to carry around with them the socialist label. You'll find at the Web site dsausa.org that the people who are their candidates are labeled themselves and by the socialist Web site as progressives. That would be the blue posters we saw within the last hour. The Progressive Caucus. And we wonder what progressives are. Well, they are socialists. They have a far bigger influence on this Congress than the public is aware. There are 75 members of the Progressive Caucus that are listed on their Web site. Now, there was a time that you could have gone to the socialist Web site and opened up the link and read down through the list of the members of the Progressive Caucus who are, every one of them a Democrat in this Congress, and every one is claimed by the socialists as being the legislative party and arm of their political activism. You cannot disconnect progressive and socialist. You can't give them a different definition. And if you wonder about the heritage and the genesis of progressives, their Web site was hosted by the socialists up until a few years ago. And when it became known publicly that the socialist Web site was actually managing the progressives' Web site-- and you can go down the list: Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Stalinist, Communist, Socialist, Progressive. You see where I've gone. It's less egregious to be a progressive than a socialist. So they took another step away. Socialists took a step away from communism because communism had a bad name. And they stepped away from it and they defined themselves differently and put it on their Web site. They said, Well, we're not communists because we don't want to do all these things. But they also say progressives are socialists. They're our people. And they used to host their Web site. Now the Progressive Caucus does their own Web site. But they advocate directly from the legislative agenda of the social Web site. Facts easy to find at dsausa.org. Now what does a socialist do that's different than a communist? That's the question. Communists want to nationalize everything. They want to control the means of all production. They want to nationalize the corporations because the corporations aren't running consistent with their belief. And they want to also nationalize the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Small business. That's communists. Socialists, right on their Web site, speaking presumably for the progressives as well, that they're anticorporate. They don't want to go nationalized to small business because they believe that small business can actually function okay without being repressive of the worker and can produce hair cuts and set up beer upon the bar and maybe hand you a sandwich out through the deli without them having to be involved as government in any means except to oppressively tax the profits that come. And then if you set up a sandwich store and it turns out to be a sandwich chain and it gets big enough, then they're going to want to nationalize it. That's what socialists do. They want to nationalize corporations, large corporations. And it's all in the Web site. It's not a mystery. We have to do our reading. Dsausa.org. That's the socialist Web site. When the gentleman from New York says, There's a difference; they're not socialists because they're not calling for controlling the means of production, well, I have to say, gentlemen, your names are on the list. I read it in the Web site. It's there. It exists. It's a matter of fact. When you're anti-free enterprise, that puts you in the camp of the people who are on the hard core left. It's a philosophy that's been rejected by Americans. By the way, you can also go to this Web site and read in here, dsausa.org, the people who advocate and support the progressives in this Congress and have not been repudiated by any progressive that I know of. You can also go to that Web site and you can see the agenda they have about nationalizing the major corporations in America. The nationalization of the Fortune 500 companies, for example, is written about on the Web site. They say, though, that they don't have to do it all at once, not in one fell swoop, that it can happen incrementally. So you have an active political party with 75 Members in the House of Representatives and one Member in the United States Senate, a self- professed socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders, who are part of a movement to nationalize major corporations in America. And now we've elected the most liberal President in the history of the United States. And what has he done? He has in the term that he has had so far, and this is only September, he has nationalized three large investment banks: AIG, the largest insurance company in America; Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac; General Motors and Chrysler. Eight huge entities nationalized and now under the control of the White House. And how did he do that, and how was it brought about, the economic crisis, the crisis that Rahm Emanuel said we should never let go to waste? The President and others utilized the crisis to nationalize the largest entities they could get their hands on. I recall looking at a picture of President Obama standing next to Hugo Chavez, and they asked what I thought. I said, well, my reflection is that there are two huge nationalizers here. Hugo Chavez has been nationalizing right and left in Venezuela, but in the previous 30 days, he had only nationalized a Cargill rice plant, a Minnesota proud, privately held company, and nationalized that rice plant down in Venezuela. He simply said, I don't like the way you are running your rice plant; I will run it. And they will decide what the production is and what the people get paid that work there, and what they are going to pay for the product, and they will take their margin out that goes in to run the Government of Venezuela. Well, what is going on with General Motors and Chrysler and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG and the three large investment banks, what is different about that? You are paying back TARP funding. That is one thing. But you have the President of the United States involved in, or at least his direct appointees, involved in the day-to-day management, for example, of General Motors. The President fired the CEO of General Motors, don't forget. He hired his CEO of General Motors. He put in place all but two of the board members of General Motors. And then he appointed a car czar who didn't hold up to the standard, apparently, because he never made a car or sold a car. I suspect he had driven and ridden in them. But the car czar didn't quite meet the standard and so he appointed a new car czar. And the CEO of General Motors admitted he was on the phone with the car czar sometimes multiple times a day. That is not what you would call disinterested. I wish the President took as much interest in ACORN as he did in General Motors. If that would happen, maybe we could get the President to the position where he would have a public comment on ACORN, after we have watched this saga unfold from across the country. The films on ACORN have emerged in Baltimore; here in Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; San Bernardino, California; and then San Diego, California. The pattern that we have seen, people posing as a prostitute and as pimp walking into ACORN's headquarters in each of those five cities and proposing that ACORN help them set up a house of ill repute so they could funnel teenage girls, young girls into child prostitution. And what did the ACORN people do in each of those five cities? They helped facilitate this. They helped facilitate child prostitution, setting up a house of ill repute. It was a promotion of prostitution of children. The first film I saw that was in Baltimore, there were two women that were telling the young girl who was posing as a prostitute and the fella who was posing as a pimp how they could best circumvent the law in order to get it done, how they could best circumvent the tax laws, and how they could game the taxpayers, all under this process, telling them how they could qualify for the earned income tax credit. If you make $96,000 a year, just report $9,600 a year, then you will get the earned income tax credit, which is a check from the Federal Government out of the pocket of the working people in America into the pockets of somebody running a prostitution ring advocated by ACORN. And they told them, If you are going to have 13 prostitutes, you really should just claim three of them as dependents. And if you do that, then you can qualify for the child tax credit, which is a thousand dollars a year. So that counseling at ACORN that came about spontaneously after they rummaged around through their records to come up with the right kind of label for these young girl prostitutes and to call them performing artists, and that would fit, and you could game the Federal Government, circumvent, defy the law, break the law, and not only turn your house of prostitution into a profit center, but also be able to draw down funds from the Federal Government. These are some very effective people at taking our tax dollars, Mr. Speaker, when it comes from them as a matter of instinct how you game the system, how you avoid taxes and cheat the government, and how you reach into the Federal coffers, the people's money, and draw that down for your own. What a corrupt demonstration was taking place in Baltimore and in the other cities. But in Baltimore, the women who were working in there, the two women that were working at ACORN that were telling the young girl posing as a prostitute how to bring in young girls, 14-year-old girls plus or minus a year, how to bring them in, how to get this done and how to game the system, these women, I don't know if they were mothers, the ones working for ACORN, but I could hear children playing in the background in the tape as if they were right behind the wall. The door was open behind them into presumably another office, and you could hear children playing in there. Could it be in the middle of raising children we have people who are advocating for child prostitution? Could it be that the children who were making the noise that we could overhear on the tape, could they have been the actual children of the women who were advocating child prostitution as representatives of ACORN? I suspect that is the most likely scenario, although I haven't confirmed it. That is the part that bothers me perhaps as much as anything else, that a worker for ACORN that could be a mother that had children within earshot could be advocating for child prostitution. And what would be the difference between bringing a girl in from El Salvador, bringing in a baker's dozen of girls from El Salvador illegally, put them up in a house of ill repute with money borrowed by the advocacy and the brokership of ACORN housing, we presume, to help fund and set up the capital base and loan that would be a business enterprise? And what happens when those kids that we could hear playing, what happens when they get to 13 or maybe 12 or 14? Do the ACORN workers just turn around and funnel them right into that house and put them to work? The lack of outrage on the part of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the people who have for years railed against child labor and have pushed so hard for child labor laws, 75 of them voted to continue funding to ACORN. Seventy-five Members of the House of Representatives voted to continue funding for ACORN even though the tapes in five cities confirm absolutely that there is a culture of that type of corruption, child prostitution, within the doors of ACORN. Who could imagine that out of 120 cities where ACORN has a presence, that they were able to do the sting operation on all of them that were helping to facilitate child prostitution or susceptible to doing that. I can't imagine that they went to 115 other locations and the people at ACORN said, Get out. I don't want to have anything to do with illegal behavior; and, by the way, I am going to call the police. We don't have any evidence that happened anywhere except Bertha Lewis told us that, who has consistently given us misinformation over the media airwaves. Mr. Speaker, I think America needs to know that she is the CEO, in effect, of ACORN, known formally as ACORN's chief organizer. We have a great big problem in this country, and the biggest part of this problem, in my view, that undermines our country the most is not the child prostitution component. That is the most repulsive, but the biggest problem is ACORN's involvement in corrupting our election process. They have, for election cycle after election cycle, been complicit in false or fraudulent voter registrations. They bragged that they had produced 1.3 million voter registrations in the last cycle. That is on a document that they are using to raise money to go down and protest Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County. The document that they are using as a fund-raiser says we registered 1.3 million voters, and we need you to write us a check so we can continue to go in here and try to intimidate people who are standing up for the rule of law. That is how I would interpret it. They didn't produce 1.3 million registrations. On closer analysis, the number comes down to be less than half a million. But they did produce, by their own admission, over 400,000 fraudulent voter registration forms, false or fraudulent. To be more precise, voter registrations turned in. Now imagine, the integrity of our vote. The franchise that every voter has is predicated upon the integrity of the voter registration rolls. That's why we register voters. If we didn't care how many times people voted, we wouldn't register them. We would just say, Go ahead and go vote. If you think you are an adult, walk in there and do so as many times as you like. But we do care. One person, one vote, and that is all that can be allowed, and we can't allow the process to be corrupted and we can't allow people to vote in multiple jurisdictions. One person, one vote per election. That's why you have to declare your residence. That is why you have to register, and that is why we have to go through the voter registration rolls and verify that they are legitimate registrations. By the way, if you don't care about that, if you don't care about the integrity of the election process, you might be, Mr. Speaker, among those kind of people that would advocate for things like motor voter registration. Or if you go in and get a driver license's, they will say to you, Do you want to register to vote? That person might answer, No comprende. It happens thousands of times in America. People get a driver's license, whether or not that is legitimate, and they sign here, now you are registered to vote. That happens thousands of times in America. All they have to do is assent to that. Yes, there is a check box that asks if you are citizen. But if they can't understand the language, how could they possibly know that they are checking the right box and that they are guilty of perjury if they put down the wrong information? We know this happens tens of thousands of times in America. I suspect the number is a lot larger. Why would an organization promote fraudulent voter registrations--I'm talking about ACORN--and why would they brag about it? I can only come to this conclusion: If you can corrupt the voter registration rolls so badly that they didn't have any value any more, then anybody could vote and the election process would be who can herd the most people through the most polls the most times, and that is kind of the logical progression of it. Who can imagine that with over 400,000 fraudulent registrations that we didn't have a fraudulent vote take place in America? ACORN would tell you that. Well, we may have gotten a little overzealous in our voter registrations, but we didn't have any fraudulent votes. Please. With 400,000, why did you spend millions of dollars to register voters if there was no advantage, if you didn't think that you could game the system? I will submit they benefit from confusion, especially in close elections, and I believe they benefit also from fraudulent votes. And when you have a fluid registration system, then you can have people on buses that go back and forth across State lines, jurisdictional lines, county lines, and vote multiple times. Once the ballot is cast, there isn't a means by which you can go back and prove it unless you have a video camera sitting in the polling place and you can show the full act of someone walking into the polling place and acknowledging their name and address, going in and voting, and seeing the same thing take place with the same face in another place. This is almost a perfect crime. In the means of trying to actually catch them, you really need confessions. As we went through the election process in the year 2000 when there were all kinds of allegations that were made, Mr. Speaker, I sat for 37 days and drilled down into this and chased every rabbit trail I could find on the Internet. I was on the phone and I had a network of communications on my e-mail, and I found example after example of stealing elections. That happens to be the title of John Fund's book, who will be speaking in this Capitol shortly. I found example after example, 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations turned in by ACORN, and still we can't pass a law that requires the person that hands those registrations over to the voter registrar, and in my State it will be the county auditor, we can't require them to identify themselves so that at least when it turns out to be fraudulent you can go back and say, Well, that was Sally Smith or Joe Jones that did that, and here's their address and here's their identification document when they turned this in. And it's because there has been a concerted effort to undermine the integrity of the ballot box. And it isn't every Democrat, but that's where the chorus comes from, that's where the arguments come from, that's where the push comes from. Now, that's not just Motor Voter that took place under Bill Clinton back in the nineties; we've got same-day registration taking place all across America in many, many States, including mine, same-day registration. My Governor, Governor Culver, was Secretary of State; and in the middle of an election when he was Secretary of State, he advised people, If you don't know what precinct you live in, if you didn't get around to voting or changing your registration if you moved, or if you just moved in, don't worry about that, go to a polling place wherever you can, find one and go in there and vote. And we'll just call it a provisional ballot if anybody calls you on it, and we'll sort those ballots out later. Can you imagine? We have 3 million Iowans, and I don't know the total of votes, perhaps 1.5 million, thousands of them went anywhere that was convenient and asked for a provisional ballot and cast it. And the ability to sort that all out and argue over the integrity of them, it overloaded our system. Now, I come from a State that is the first-in-the-nation caucus. We have the great privilege to have the first bite of the apple to make a recommendation to the rest of America on whom we would like to see nominated for each political party, Democrats and Republicans, first- in-the-nation caucus. It's a high responsibility to maintain a high level of integrity. We were first-in-the-nation caucus, last in the Nation to certify the vote because our then-Secretary of State, now Governor, gave information to the voters all across the State that they could just go anywhere, further corrupting and confusing the system. Now, add this up; Motor Voter registers anybody that will agree when they're asked, Do you want to be registered to vote. Who's going to say no? Especially if you think you're in the country illegally, you don't want to say no--you might think it's a responsibility to assent to registration. So we've got Motor Voter registration, we've got same-day registration where somebody can just drive across the board into, name your State--Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin all come to mind--drive across the border, walk in, register to vote and vote on the spot. You don't have to prove residence to speak of. You maybe have to have somebody attest to who you are. There's a limit to the number of people that the bus driver can bring in and attest for, but it corrupts the process, Mr. Speaker. And so I'm watching this country, this country that I love, this country that I was raised from the standpoint of, Eat your cold mashed potatoes, there are people starving in China. You've been born in the greatest Nation in the world and you hit the jackpot because God chose to have you born here in the United States--and I'll say especially in Iowa, from my perspective--a Nation that had never lost a war, that stood proud, that stood for freedom, that had the blessing and the gift of the Founding Fathers and the Declaration and the Constitution and the rule of law and all the pillars of American exceptionalism. This great Nation that went through manifest destiny from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, settled a continent in the blink of a historical eye. And we did it founded upon the values that are in our Declaration and our Constitution and our values of faith and our work ethic, with these unlimited natural resources, low or no taxation, no regulation when Americans settled this continent. We built a culture and a civilization built on--I'll use the Superman term, ``Truth, justice and the American way,'' and now I am watching it corrupted in the electoral process by an organization like ACORN. Four hundred thousand fraudulent voter registrations turned in, and still they count them when they brag about how many they registered, they count the fraudulent ones too. It's like saying I made $2 million last year, but not bothering to mention that you stole $1 million from the bank. That's the equivalent of their brag. Now, we saw what ACORN did in five cities when confronted with child prostitution rings and illegal immigration. They promoted it, and they said, Game the system and you can get a check from Uncle Sam in the process. We've seen what they've done to corrupt the voter registration process and the election process. We've seen them get involved politically as a partisan organization over and over again. Nobody in this country believes that ACORN is out here to get out the vote for Republicans. They are a partisan organization that gets out the vote for Democrats. They are the machine. They are the foundational machine across the country that gets out the vote for Democrats. We all know that, but it can't really be challenged. And so as I look at their activities, and I understand that they say--well, I guess they changed their definition a little bit, 501(c)(3), that's what it says on a press release I just picked up, Mr. Speaker. There is apparently some intention that the IRS is going to take a look into ACORN. The first thing the IRS needs to do, Mr. Speaker, is take a look at ACORN's corporate filings and verify that they are a 501(c)(3). 501(c)(3) is a not-for-profit status, and if you violate that not-for-profit status, then your income becomes taxable. And so I'm suggesting--no, I'm stating flat out--ACORN is a partisan organization, a get-out-the-vote organization for Democrats. They take millions of dollars and use them for partisan purposes. They were hired--an affiliate was hired by President Obama to get out the vote for him at the cost of--if I remember the number exactly, it was close to $832,000. There is strong evidence that the President's fundraising list, once people maxed out to him, it was handed over to ACORN so they could use it to raise money. We know that they've drawn down at least $53 million in Federal tax money that will be posted on the 990 form as grants from government; $53 million since 1994. I suspect the number is a lot larger. But if anybody would like to come down and defend ACORN, I would welcome you to come down and do that. If anybody thinks anything I've said here is even marginally factual, let's fine-tune it just a little bit. But I'm standing on the solid ground of fact. And the facts are this; 501(c)(3) organization, self-professed--it's in the press release, it has to do with the IRS now talking about investigating similar organizations, not specifically ACORN. But if you're not for profit, it also means you're a nonpartisan, and you are barred by law from participating in partisan activities. Partisan activities would be, Mr. Speaker, advocating for a particular candidate or political party. So, working on a campaign, putting up yard signs, door hangers, running ads that advocate for candidates-- especially by name--would all constitute violations of the not-for- profit status and make their income taxable. Well, Mr. Speaker, I have here an interesting little picture. And the good part of this picture is that I don't have to wonder about the source; this is a picture that I took. This picture was taken in early July, before the Fourth of July. This is a picture of ACORN's national headquarters. They're at 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. I walked up to the door. The door looks like a jail cell. It's got a glass business door entry behind it, but it's black bars and welded steel with an outdoor lock on the outside. This is the most fortified building in the neighborhood. This is the second or third story where you see the bars here yet in the second or third story. Mr. Speaker, right behind the glass at the national headquarters of ACORN is a poster here and it says, ``Obama '08,'' a campaign poster for President Obama proudly displayed in the front window of ACORN's national headquarters. I don't know how you could get any more definitive evidence that it's a violation of the 501(c)(3) not-for- profit, no partisan activity if you're going to hang a partisan campaign sign in your window and leave it there, let's see--6, 7, 8 months after the election, it's still there. Does anybody imagine that it wasn't there before the election? And by the way, if anybody wonders if this is real, they can see over on the right-hand side, this hangs outside the glass, this is the ACORN banner, the ACORN logo, it's their logo on there. They fly that flag like we fly Old Glory. So here's the flag, the glory of ACORN, the ignominy of it all, and here's the Obama poster. There are other posters behind there; I can't verify that they are Obama posters; it doesn't matter. This one is in the window. They're advertising for a political candidate. It's clearly a violation of the law. And it's blatant and it's open--and curiously, it's unnecessary. How sloppy can they be? And so I think I've tied together the corrupt election process, the corrupt promotion of child prostitution rings, and also illegal immigration, which, out of the San Diego office especially, when the ACORN worker said, you've got to trust us; we have to work with Mexicans, I can bring people in through Tijuana, we'll help set this up for you. Child prostitution, violations, and then clear violations of voter laws. In fact, there have been as many as 70 convictions for voter registration violations of ACORN employees. ACORN, as an entity, is under indictment in the State of Nevada. In the last couple of weeks they have put out, in the State of Florida, 11 warrants for arrests to pick up ACORN employees for voter registration violations. They did pick up 6 of the 11; the last I saw the news there were five still on the loose. And that was before the prostitution emerged from the film that was taken by the two intrepid reporters--whom I'm quite pleased and proud that they have done what they've done. And that's not all, Mr. Speaker. If we continue on with ACORN, I would say here's another major concern of ACORN's involvement, and that is the practice of shaking down lenders, especially within the inner cities. Back in the seventies--it was either '77 or '78--Congress passed an act called the Community Reinvestment Act. It was an act that recognized a practice that I reject. It was the practice of red lining, as they called it--taking an ink pen and drawing a red line around a neighborhood in a city or several neighborhoods in the city. Banks that were loaning money for real estate, home mortgages, and commercial property identified that property that had its value going down, and they defined it. And it happened to also be inner city property. Often one could index race with that declining value of property and the red lining. If it turned out it was a racial conclusion, it was utterly wrong. If it was a business conclusion purely, then it could be justified. But Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act that set the stage so that banks were then given an incentive to make loans into those communities where they had previously not been making loans. That was a direction of Congress to try to fix an ill that I believe at least was, in significant part, a wrong that needed to be corrected. But ACORN exploited this. They were founded in 1977 or '78, as I said, and they began seeing the opportunities with the Community Reinvestment Act. And I don't know their involvement in getting the legislation passed. I suspect they were there at the table when it happened, but I don't know that. But I do know that they went in and shook down lenders and demonstrated outside the banks and intimidated the banks into giving money to ACORN. Not just in the first round of this. This wasn't, Give loans to the people in the inner city, it was, Write a check to ACORN, and we'll go away. Sometimes they would go into the lender's office, push his desk over to the wall, surround that lender and intimidate him, yell at him, shout at him and make demands, and eventually the intimidation tactics worked because banks wanted them to go away. So sometimes they wrote the check and sometimes they went away. Oftentimes they came back after a passage of time and began the process all over again. Now, one demand was the shakedown that compelled--well, gave a strong incentive for--lenders to write the check to ACORN. That helped fund ACORN. You've also heard of this taking place from other organizations--Rainbow/PUSH comes to mind. They wrote the check to get ACORN off their back and then ACORN went away. And then they came back. And they did that over and over again. At a certain point, ACORN then demanded that the banks loan money into the neighborhoods that ACORN specified. They did their own red lining. They drew their red line around and said, You loan money into these neighborhoods or we'll come back and we'll protest so your customers can't get through the door. And so banks began loaning money into those neighborhoods and showing their records to the ACORN representatives, and now they're influencing a business practice. That's stage two. Stage three is the lenders. In order to get ACORN off their back after they came back over and over again and escalated this, demanded money, demanded that loans be made into ACORN's red line district, then the next one was to grant ACORN a block of funds to be brokered into the communities of their choice, giving them more and more power. This kind of shakedown undermines the free enterprise system, and it gives power to people through intimidation rather than market principles or moral principles. In fact, it is utterly corrupting in a society, and I can't draw a moral distinction between an ACORN shakedown, a Mafia shakedown, or a shakedown that might come from Hugo Chavez or some strongman in some other country. ``You will pay the protection or you will not be in business.'' I wonder if Cargill refused to pay protection in Venezuela and that was why Hugo Chavez nationalized the rice company down there, the rice plant in Venezuela earlier this spring, in about April. So this is some of the pattern of ACORN's activity, Mr. Speaker, and it isn't, by any means, all of it. In fact, Wade Rathke, who was the founder of ACORN and was their CEO up until about a year ago, has a brother named Dale Rathke. Dale Rathke embezzled $948,000 and change from ACORN. It is a matter of public record. They found out about it within ACORN and covered it up for 8 years. They covered up a crime, a felony, for 8 years. And in order to solve the bookkeeping problem, they took money from donors and money from pension plans and backfilled the hole in the accounting which was created by the embezzlement of the brother of the CEO who helped cover up this crime. Then it erupted and finally blew up to the point where Wade Rathke was pushed out of ACORN--or I should say, off to the side of ACORN. They're still players today. He and his brother are both engaged in, let me say, community organizing. Activist community organizers, people who read the book by Saul Alinsky, people who read Cloward-Piven and now people who are writing their own book, the Rathke brothers. Mr. Speaker, we need to clean up this mess that is ACORN. This Congress has a responsibility. We know it now. I offered an amendment to unfund ACORN back in 2007. It did not have a lot of support at the time. Today we have seen this Congress vote to unfund ACORN, and we've seen 75 Members--every one a Democrat--vote against unfunding ACORN. We know what our duty is. Our duty is oversight. It's our constitutional responsibility, Mr. Speaker. And we need to use all of the tools in this Congress to drill into ACORN, to get to the bottom of it, to bring the truth and the facts out. That will require, with all of these resources we have, in the House alone--and I call upon the Senate as well to engage in this. But in the House alone, we must have a full committee investigation and hearings by the Judiciary Committee, taking a look at the voter registration fraud that we know exists and look at it on a national scale. And from this, we need to drill into ACORN and pull out all of the rotten apples that are in there and shut down everything that is questionable. If there is anything left that has any integrity, I don't know what to do in that situation because I don't know how there would be any entity within ACORN that is not stained by this. But the Judiciary Committee has an obligation to investigate where there are violations of the law and where there are violations of voter registration and election fraud. That's our responsibility in the Judiciary Committee. Government Reform--and this has been headed up very well in Government Reform by Congressman Issa of California--needs to look into this from the standpoint of: how is government tied into this; what does it do to corrupt our government; what about all the tentacles of ACORN that would reach into government; how many places are they working in cooperation with government? And let's sever all of those relationships. That's the Government Reform component of this. To the extent that we can overlap and cooperate, we should do so committee by committee. We need to go into the Financial Services Committee. Chairman Frank needs to come all the way around to cleaning up ACORN. He was not here for the vote that would have unfunded ACORN. He had a couple of different announcements. But the most recent announcement of his intentions was that he would have voted to shut off funding to ACORN. Well, we can speculate if we like. But, Mr. Speaker, to verify the position of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, we'll have to see what he does with ACORN. Will Chairman Frank investigate? Will he use the powers of the gavel and the staff that he has in Financial Services? Will he work with the ranking member of the Republicans to drill into ACORN and go back and pull out those pieces that he put in himself over the years in this Congress that set up the scenario by which ACORN still today--let me say it this way: still today, ACORN is looking at categories of as many as $8.5 billion that they could tap into of Federal tax dollars. Our tax dollars, Mr. Speaker. Altogether, $8.5 billion in categories. That is money that's within the Community Development Block Grant, a low-income housing grant, and the stimulus package. Those three add up to $8.5 billion. ACORN, as far as anything that has been signed into law today, would still qualify to go into those funds. The chairman of Financial Services, Mr. Frank, has been involved in setting up the language, setting the stage. And it's not a practice of just this year. It's a practice of each year that I have been aware since I have been in this United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. So let's see if the chairman of the Financial Services Committee uses his gavel to investigate and provide proper oversight, with all the resources that he has at his disposal, working in full cooperation with Republicans on our side of the aisle and staffs working together. Let's see if that happens. The Judiciary Committee needs to do a full investigation and hearings. Financial Services needs to do a full investigation of ACORN and hearings. By the way, when I say ACORN, that's a general term for ACORN and all of their affiliates, 361 of which have been identified by the Government Reform Committee in the report that was put out July 23 by the Government Reform Committee and Ranking Member Darrell Issa. The Judiciary Committee and the Government Reform Committee need to investigate ACORN and all of their 361 affiliates. We also need to ask the Ways and Means Committee and Chairman Rangel--who I recognize has his own problems in this Congress, but this is an opportunity for Mr. Rangel to redeem himself as chairman. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee needs to commence a full, all- out, full-court investigation of ACORN and all of their affiliates and use the tools at his disposal, the power of the gavel and the subpoena ability that that committee has to bring in ACORN and examine their taxes and also to turn the pressure up and direct the IRS to do a complete audit of ACORN and all of their affiliates. The only way to get a clean bill of health is to put them all through, let me say, the fiscal physical, that is, a complete analysis of all of the funds that come into ACORN and all of their affiliates. Chairman Rangel can bring that about, and certainly he needs to work in cooperation with the ranking member on the Ways and Means Committee. I'm pushing very hard that we get this done. I have named three committees. We have Judiciary, Ways and Means, Government Reform, all of them need to commence their investigations. We need the House Admin, who works in cooperation with the voter election laws. They're the ones that brought about the HAVA act, the Help America Vote Act. They need to be involved in this working in cooperation with the Judiciary Committee. We need to bring the Appropriations Committee into this. We need to examine every dollar that's been appropriated that may have gone into the coffers of ACORN and their affiliates. How did that money get used? Was it matching funds? And how does it go down into the States? All of this needs to happen out of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and we need the IRS doing a complete forensic audit of ACORN and all of their affiliates. And we need the Department of Justice doing more than just an Inspector General's investigation to determine if Justice has written checks to ACORN or their affiliates and whether there's justice in Justice paying ACORN and their affiliates. If the limit of Justice's scope of justice is, did they actually pay somebody that was violating the not-for-profit laws, and did they use it for partisan purposes, that's pretty narrow. ACORN wants to examine themselves and audit themselves. That's laughable that we should accept the idea that ACORN has appointed someone to audit themselves. It's a joke. But we do have the Justice Department who has said, We want to audit ourselves too with respect to what money we might have sent to ACORN, so that they find it before someone else finds it. Then they can make their press release and say they've cleaned it up and sworn off and washed their hands of ACORN-- like the Census Bureau finally did? For the second time, by the way. They put out a press release 3 months ago. After we turned up the pressure, they said, Well, we won't be hiring ACORN to do our Census. We turned up some more pressure, and when they saw the prostitution film, they put out another release that said, We have now finally--for the second and perhaps final time--severed our relationship with ACORN. Well, if you have to do something twice, who would believe you did it the first time? And then if you do something once, who is going to believe that that actually got done the first time? They will do it over and over again. Justice wants to look at it and wash their hands of ACORN, but I don't see them moving towards a complete investigation at the Department of Justice, which we must have, Mr. Speaker. The scrubbing that's taking place on the Census and now the U.S. Treasury. The Treasury has said that they no longer want to work with ACORN. ACORN was helping out with tax forms. So maybe they're going to rely on TurboTax instead. But they no longer want to have the relationship with ACORN because they're too hot a political potato. These aren't things that these departments didn't know before. I have known this for months and, much of it, years. Yet we couldn't penetrate the minds of the Census Bureau until we beat on them through the media. We couldn't penetrate into the Department of the U.S. Treasury until the prostitution films came out. And the Department of Justice only wants to examine far enough to determine if they have written checks to ACORN and then what those checks were for, if they were legitimate or not. It doesn't look to me, Mr. Speaker, like this administration is determined to do this forensic analysis. In fact, if you would draw a line down through the middle of the piece of paper--you could draw it figuratively right down this aisle, Democrats on this side, Republicans on this side--Democrats, as a party, beneficiaries of ACORN; Republicans on this side, a lot of them who are not here, are victims of ACORN's partisan activities. They've already lost their elections. They aren't here now, and many of them are not coming back. But that same line can be this: who has consistently called for the cleanup of the corrupt ACORN, the criminal enterprise ACORN and all of their affiliates? It's been people on the Republican side of the aisle who have done that, the survivors. Who has finally made some little mouse noises about cleanup of ACORN? Well, it's been Democrats. And it's been people who have redirected--it would be Chairmen Frank and Conyers who have called for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to take a look at ACORN and write a report. Well, CRS doesn't have the authority to go in and actually do a criminal investigation or a tax audit. They don't have the authority that these chairmen have themselves. If they want to get to the bottom of it, they don't have to ask anybody. They call for hearings and an investigation, and they levy their subpoena power, and they do that. But instead, they would like to redirect the American people into believing that calling for a CRS report is somehow a substitute of a congressional investigation. It's not. The Justice Department should be doing a complete, thorough criminal investigation, working hand in glove with the IRS. Instead, it simply announces that they're going to take a look to see if they've written checks to ACORN and then react accordingly. The U.S. Treasury finally takes a position that they don't want to have ACORN cooperating with them in helping out with taxes. These are all of the weak things on this side. These are redirections. These are straw men. They are red herrings. They don't have substance to accomplish what we need to get accomplished, which is clean up ACORN. On this side, we've called for substance for a long time, and we haven't cracked through because the people on this side hold the gavel, and they were determined to protect and defend ACORN until the political heat got so hot that all but 75 of them voted to stop Federal funds from coming into ACORN. That's what's taken place, Mr. Speaker. Those are the facts. They cannot be denied. By the way, we need to ask some questions about why the chief organizer of America has not had a statement to say about ACORN, except for his statement on the Sunday talk show circuit; when asked about this, he said, Well, it's really not on my radar screen. It's not the most important thing before America. So I'm not really paying attention to ACORN. Really, Mr. President? This is the star of ACORN. He is the lead chief organizer. He is the person who told the people at ACORN, I will invite you in, and we will be setting the agenda for America, even before he is inaugurated as President of the United States. This is the man who worked for ACORN. He is the man who was an attorney for ACORN. He is the man who trained ACORN's workers. Remember what he said before the election to his people: ``Get in their face. Get out, and get in their face.'' Does that sound like what was happening around the lenders' desks when they were capitulating to ACORN's intimidation of the shakedown? ACORN's activists got in the lenders' faces. The President said, Get in their face. He worked for ACORN, trained ACORN's workers, headed up Project Vote. And Project Vote is integral to ACORN. You can't separate the two, and there are people who are labeled Project Vote and ACORN who concur with that. Then on top of that, the President of the United States, as a candidate, hired ACORN to get out the vote. And then the evidence exists that his donor list was transferred over to ACORN. Once it was maxed out and they couldn't write another check in the Presidential campaign, the list went over so ACORN could raise money on that. This man's not interested in ACORN? He's ambivalent about it? That's what he told us just last Sunday. Curious. He could inject himself into police operations of a professor of Harvard, Officer Crowley and Professor Gates. He can inject himself into that and have a beer summit, but he can't pay attention to what's going on when things are melting down around him? This man stands at the top of ACORN. He's the man that directed that the Census be pulled out of the Department of Commerce and put into the White House. This is a man that hired ACORN to help hire individuals to work for the Census. And he's not paying attention? Do we think Rahm Emanuel is running this country or President Obama, or is it just Chicago politics? I think it's all of those things, actually, Mr. Speaker. But the President cannot deny knowledge of what's going on. The United States Senate voted 83-7 to shut off funding to ACORN housing, Senator Johanns from Nebraska's amendment. That sent a resounding message. It shook through all the media. I'll bet you even Charlie Gibson knows about that one. And shortly after that, the House acted; and we had a motion to recommit that, if it functions the way we'd like to have it function, would shut off funding to ACORN. 345 Members of the House of Representatives voted to shut off funding to ACORN; 75 voted to defend ACORN, but there were a couple of them that wanted to change their intentions after the fact. Chairman Frank wanted to change it. He wasn't here. He had a good excuse. He got to redefine his vote after he saw the politics of it. No allegations. Those are just the facts. Chairman Conyers said even though, let's see, whatever side he was on when he voted, he meant to vote the other way. I don't remember very many Members having to explain any votes in that fashion. I don't get to use that excuse. Maybe once in a career, not multiple times on a single issue by multiple Members of Congress. But this man, Mr. Speaker, has a deep abiding involvement in ACORN. His history goes back to it. At the genesis of President Obama's political life, there he stands with ACORN, and he walks with them all the way through. It isn't my supposition; it's his own assertion, that ACORN was with him from the beginning. He's been with ACORN all of the way through, and one of the affiliates that he headed up was Project Vote. There still are 360 other affiliates out there. We need to audit Project Vote. We need to audit the other 360 affiliates. We need all of the tools of the IRS and the Department of Justice. We don't need a lame little announcement that Justice is going to go look and see if they maybe wrote a check to some bad people and they'll correct that. We need to have them drilling into everything. And we also need every committee that has jurisdiction in the House of Representatives doing the examination of ACORN. I yield to the gentlewoman from Minnesota.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota. And I'm looking forward to some future comments with regard to this as well. The waste that's there is a significant part of all of this. But another one is just the lack of conscience and using Federal funds to do something of a partisan nature and do so with impunity in a completely cynical approach that we've known for years were designed to produce this result. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. I will introduce the DSAUSA documents into the Record. The Organization The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. DSA's members are building progressive movements for social change while establishing an openly socialist presence in American communities and politics. At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. We are activists committed not only to extending political democracy but to demanding democratic empowerment in the economy, in gender relations, and in culture. Democracy is not simply one of our political values but our means of restructuring society. Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives. We call this vision democratic socialism--a vision of a more free, democratic and humane society. In this web site you can find out about DSA, its politics, structure and program. DSA's political perspective is called Where We Stand. It says, in part: We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non- oppressive relationships. DSA has a youth section, Young Democratic Socialists (YDS). Made up of students from colleges and high schools and young people in the work force, the Youth Section works on economic justice and democracy and prison justice projects. It is a member of the International Union of Socialist Youth, an affiliate of the Socialist International. The Youth Section meets several times during the year. More information is available from YDS staff. This web site also includes an extensive set of resources, including bibliographies, pamphlets and links to information on socialism and U.S. politics in general. Please join DSA as we work to help build a better and more just world for all.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota and the gentleman from Georgia. Dr. Gingrey, I wanted to just step in and reinforce your statement in looking at your poster. As ranking member of the Immigration Subcommittee, I want to reinforce the analysis that you've laid out, especially on that first point. The President said, The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally. H.R. 3200, not only has it been the vote in your committee, a vote of 29-28 that voted down the Deal amendment, which would have required proof of citizenship, which has been a consistent standard in Federal law under Medicaid, that pattern is played out here. Democrats want to fund illegals in this program and many others. There is also a vote in the Ways and Means Committee that is consistent. That was a straight party-line vote on a very similar amendment that would have required proof of citizenship. And the third piece of proof that you were right and your critics are wrong and my critics are wrong would be the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the cost of funding illegals in this. Their estimate leaves as many as 5.6 million that would qualify under the language of H.R. 3200--5.6 million illegals. The fourth reinforcement of your statement would be Congressional Research Services, who reached a similar conclusion, although from a different approach and a little bit different language. So there's four ways that says that this bill will fund illegals. The President has denied that, and now he wants to simply legalize the illegals in order to be able to maintain his statement that he's not proposing anything that will fund illegals. That's a pretty deft maneuver, if you can get by with it. But this is a modern world, and we see it happening. Then I drop down to the statement that the President said, which is, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits. All I need to say about that is the President said he will not sign a bill that has earmarks. We know he has signed bills that had thousands of earmarks in them, so I don't make that statement at face value. And I don't make allegations about labels of the President. No Federal tax dollars will be used to fund abortions. We know historically if there is not a specific prohibition, Federal funds will be used to fund abortions, 300,000 of them in the first couple years alone after Roe v. Wade. Nothing in the plan requires you to change what you have. No, probably not specifically requiring you to change what you have, but there are certainly many threats as to the viability of the health insurance companies and the existence of the policies after the new health choices administration czar gets done writing new rules. So this is ambiguous language designed to cause people to believe what they want to hear. But upon analysis, I rise to support your analysis, Dr. Gingrey.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding. I rise in opposition to H.R. 324, the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area. This 3,300 miles shares already overlapping jurisdictions between the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, the Department of Defense, and then there are some residents of the tribes, the Pascua and the Tohono people, as well. This area is a very high traffic volume for contraband, that being illegal drugs and illegal people, coming up through this corridor. I have traveled that corridor and visited as recently as last July, a little over a month and a half ago. We know that in some cases there have been national park lands marked off limits to the people of the United States because the illegal drug traffic and the litter has gotten so bad. It is too dangerous. They wouldn't take me there. We need to enforce the laws on our border and not complicate the overlapping jurisdictions that are there. We know that the Border Patrol has enough trouble trying to get to an operational control of the border without having to deal with an additional area that would be a national heritage area added on top of it. I am not sure about the State of Tennessee, but I would wonder if the TVA didn't come in there about the time Tennessee was declared a national heritage area, and it seems to me that the private sector was nudged out with that move, if my recollection of history is accurate. But the bill still lacks sufficient protections that would allow the free flow of our U.S. border security personnel for drug interdiction and illegal immigration enforcement. I would add also on the Coronado National Forest, that is in the center of this location and that is a direct conduit of illegal traffic coming through. So we need the jurisdiction to be such that it is free- flowing, and we need to enforce our immigration laws. We need to provide operational control of the border. I would also point out that some of the difficulties we have in enforcing our immigration laws are also rooted in our inability to enforce even under current circumstances. And in this designation, I will be able to roll out my map and point to you, Mr. Speaker, the spot or locations, mountaintop after mountaintop, that are surveillance locations for the U.S. law enforcement that is trying to enforce illegal immigration and illegal drugs and the interdiction of same coming up through this corridor. This serves no real purpose to accomplish anything other than to draw down Federal moneys. And as I look through this bill, and I didn't get them all marked, but I see the word ``fund'' or ``funds'' or ``resources'' being used over and over again. The attention I would draw to page 5 of the bill, line 12, specify existing and potential sources of funding or economic development strategies to interpret, fund, manage. And the same page of the bill, line 25, recommend fund, manage. And it goes on and on. As I go through the bill, it looks to me like it is a method to figure out how to drawn down Federal funds. Page 9 of the bill, line 5, enhance, interpret, fund, manage. Federal funds implementation, on page 10.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Washington. Mr. Speaker, I would continue. On page 10, it references implementation. The local coordinating entity. It references use of Federal funds. On page 13, the amounts leveraged with Federal funds is referenced again. On page 14, lines 19, 20 and 21, ``heritage planning; obtain funds from any source, including Federal programs,'' Mr. Speaker. Page 15, line 4, ``The local coordinating entity may not use Federal funds authorized under this act.'' So there is a prohibition there in reference to funds. Then with regard to the property rights component of this, we have seen this language before. ``Nothing abridges the rights of any property owner.'' That is kind of like the bill that came to the floor that said there are no earmarks in this bill, but there were thousands of them. To define it away doesn't mean it goes away. I rise in opposition to this, and I would urge a ``no'' vote on H.R. 324.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. All those compliments some might argue are a stunning departure from rational thinking, Mr. Akin, and I am glad I came over here just to hear that exchange between you and Cynthia Lummis tonight. I am sitting here thinking this: That there is a great, huge philosophical divide going on in this Congress, and the people on the left side of the philosophical spectrum and the left side of the aisle seem to believe somehow they can generate all of this government, all of this government oversight, and take on a huge operation of the job that is being done now, a lot by the private sector, punish the health insurance companies, replace them with a Federal health insurance company, and somehow the incentive that is there today that has allowed some profit for doctors to get back their huge investment in their education and their training and their internships and nursing and all of the expenses it takes to have a front-loaded education, somehow there is going to be an incentive there to have more doctors and more nurses, when we know it is going to be less. They cut the funding to Medicare by half a trillion dollars and argue that it is waste, fraud and abuse, and somehow the President makes the argument that, let's see, he can find this savings that is there because of waste, fraud and abuse, but the quid pro quo is we don't get to save the wasted money unless we take on the socialized medicine part of his package.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman will yield, and I thank the gentleman from Missouri. There have been two flawed premises that have been under the foundation of this health care debate from the beginning. One is that we spend too much money on health care. That has not been adjusted for a number of reasons. The other is we have too many that are uninsured. The number that's the most consistent is 47 million uninsured. But when you break the number down, you start subtracting from that 47 million, those that are here illegally--which the President has decided now, he's changed his mind and now he doesn't want to fund those--those that are here legally are under the 5-year bar; those that make over $75,000 a year and presumably could pay their own premiums; those that qualify for an employer plan; and those that qualify for a government plan, like Medicaid, but don't bother to sign up. Once you take 47 million and you subtract from that universe, that list that I have given, you end up with 12.1 million who are Americans without affordable options.

Mr. KING of Iowa. To deal with less than 4 percent, which is 12.1 million.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. A number of things jump out in my mind, and that is, yes, this subject matter gets me all animated. I don't know quite how to pick that up with Midwestern vernacular. I wanted to point out the President's vernacular. We have to be very careful and listen very closely to this President because he is a master of casting ambiguities that couch things in terms where he is not confined by the definition of the language. For example, right there, ``Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage of the doctor you have.'' Remember for months he said, ``If you like your plan, you get to keep it.'' And John Shadegg said, ``If you like your plan, get ready to lose it. That's the reality of it.'' Now the President, in his address before Congress--which I will point out was I believe September 9, 2009--the President changed the language to read what's down there, ``Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,'' except you may not be able to access coverage or the doctor you had because the plan might bring about a change in premiums, it might disqualify the policies, it might disqualify the very health insurance company. And so nothing in the plan might require you to change, but you may not have the option to keep the one you have because they have eliminated the existing policies.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Again, listen carefully to the words the President says. Here is a little bit of a different subject. After the blowup on that night of September 8, which was the joint session of Congress, regarding the issue about funding illegals through this, the President then came back, and he said, ``I want to be clear: If someone is here illegally, they won't be covered under this plan.'' In other words, he is going to oppose any language that's ambiguous that might allow for illegals to be covered under H.R. 3200 or under another health care plan. However, just a few days later, the President went before an open borders organization, which I recall to be La Raza, and he said, Well, we need to move forward on legalizing the people who are here illegally. So we have this language that says, if someone is here illegally, he won't be covered under this plan; but if you legalize everybody who is here, this language here becomes moot. So listen carefully to the ambiguities that the President threads into his language, and you might find out well after the fact that it's a little late to raise the issue.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman. I think we are talking about a different amendment. The amendment with the general language that says nothing in this bill, I believe was written into the bill, may have been an amendment that was adopted. But the amendment that Mr. Gingrey referred to was the Deal amendment, which would have required proof of citizenship. It failed by a vote of 29-28, not exactly a party-line vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I thank the gentleman for yielding to me earlier in the hour. I think an open dialogue is a good thing, and I hope the gentlemen will be here to hear the rebuttals that I am about to provide to the statements that they made in the previous hour, starting with the bill that passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee and other committees, H.R. 3200, which is the foundational bill to the health care act, the national health care act that Democrats are seeking to pass. And regardless of the statement that there is general language in the bill that says nothing in this bill funds illegals, the fact remains that the amendment that was offered by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Deal), which was language that is tried and true, that existed in the Medicaid legislation that we have used for at least a decade that requires proof of citizenship, that amendment was voted down in Energy and Commerce 29-28, resulting in an open-door policy where there are no restrictions to keep the bill from providing access to benefits to illegals or to people who are here legally but are barred under the 5- year bar. In fact, the standard that exists was a standard that required proof of citizenship. Democrats first took that apart when they passed an expansion of SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. They took that from a 200 percent of poverty, and the first time it passed the House it went to 400 percent of poverty. Mr. Deal offered the same amendment in that bill to put in language that existed in law before it was struck out by the expansion of SCHIP, and it was voted down on almost a party-line effort. We know if there are not provisions which require proof of citizenship, then there aren't provisions that are going to prohibit illegals from getting benefits under the bill. The Congressional Budget Office knows that. They scored that language in SCHIP as costing $8.9 billion to fund health insurance for illegals and to provide Medicaid to illegals because it removed the citizenship standard. Removing the citizenship standard, according to the Congressional Budget Office, on H.R. 3200, the health care bill, would provide for access to those benefits under the bill for as many 5.6 million illegals. And that's the score that came out from the Congressional Budget Office. Another nonpartisan organization is the Congressional Research Services, and they also concluded there weren't restrictions in H.R. 3200, the health care bill, so that would result in those benefits going to illegals who would apply. And we know how fast the grapevine works and how effectively people can game the system, and no one should be in a position of responsibility in this Congress if they can't understand that equation, especially if they are on the committee. And it is not just Steve King making this statement. It is the Congressional Budget Office on at least two different occasions, rendering a judgment on that specific language of the Deal amendment, and it is Congressional Research Services. And by the way, it goes on down the line and a number of other entities, including the President, who finally had to address it and say we are going to have to write something in the bill to protect us so it doesn't fund illegals. And it also includes the Senate, which took the position that they would address the language. So why do you have to fix it if it doesn't fund illegals the way it is? And I believe that the President stood here and called a group of Members of Congress who were exactly right on their facts, I believe he accused them of not being honest. And directly, he said, We will call you out. Well, I'm saying this: The President got it wrong. Maybe he has it right now, but these gentlemen have it wrong, and they need to go back and check their facts. The amendment was voted down 29-28. The Deal amendment required proof of citizenship. When you remove the proof of citizenship requirement, the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Services and every nonpartisan, objective evaluation comes to the same conclusion: We will be funding illegals if we don't have the language in there. That is the only language that is going to be satisfactory. And by the way, I don't think Senator Baucus has it in his bill yet, although he has pledged to do so, and we will watch that language very carefully as it unfolds over in the Senate. So yes, illegals would get health care under this system unless we write the language in that sets the standard so that they don't. The statement that was made by the gentleman, Mr. Altmire, with the public option there would be no subsidies. The facts of the health care bill don't support that. First of all, it is going to take capital to set up the public option as a national health insurance company. If you set up a national health insurance company, it is impossible to do so without putting capital in, without injecting some billions of dollars to jump-start a national health insurance program that would compete directly with the 1,300 private health insurance companies that we have. That is not what you call a no-subsidy situation. That is called a subsidy situation. Putting capital in to compete against the private sector is subsidy. What do we suppose will happen if we put $10 billion into the front end of this national health insurance program and we find out that it becomes insolvent? Do we then let it collapse or does this Congress at a later date decide we are going to have to put some billions of dollars in there to keep the national health care plan up? Under these majorities, under this Pelosi Congress, I guarantee you they will borrow money from the Chinese, if necessary, in order to subsidize a national health care plan. It isn't going to go any other way. They have worked for 30 or 40 years to try to establish a national health care, and they are not going to allow it to go under because it falls a little short on some kind of promise that there won't be subsidies. Yes, there will be subsidies, and any rational person who understands history will know that. The argument that a national health care plan will compete on a level playing field, a level playing field with referees that will be chosen by the government, not by the private sector, and I will make a point. This, Mr. Speaker, is the formerly embargoed flowchart that actually depicts the language that exists in H.R. 3200, the national health care plan. We call it the Organizational Chart of the House Democrats' Health Plan. This is the government plan. This is the government option configuration. This creates at least 31 new agencies. Now, down here at the bottom, I just direct your attention to these two purple circles at the bottom. This is where the crux of the matter is. The gentleman, Mr. Altmire, made the statement that the public option, there wouldn't be any subsidies and they would compete on a level playing field. Well, here is how this field is regulated, and it will not be a level playing field. Oh, by the way, anything that is a white box is existing programs or agencies. There is Medicare, SCHIP, Medicaid. But the existing private insurers in this little box here, Mr. Speaker, once the bill is passed, these private insurers, this is 1,300 health insurance companies in this little box. That is how many private insurers we have. Those traditional health insurance plans, the policies, there are approximately 100,000 different varieties of policy combinations available across the United States. These policies would have to qualify to become qualified health benefits plans. Now, if there is going to be a qualification set up, I think it is not possible to presume that all 1,300 companies and all 100,000 policies will be qualified under this bill. This bill doesn't define what will be required necessarily in the health insurance policies. It gives that authority to the Health Choices Administration. The Health Choices Administration commissioner would run that shop with his commission, and they would make the decisions then on what would be the standards for the health insurance companies--these providers here--what would be the standards for the 100,000 health insurance plans which would qualify to go into this purple circle here called qualified health benefits plans. So for all of this, the rules will be set by the Health Choices Administration commissioner. The new Health Choices czar will write all of those rules. If he has to write the rules, you don't get to call it a level playing field because the rules will be written so the Federal Government can compete. That's the difference in the approach here, the idea that it is a level playing field. It's not. My question was, why are you afraid of the competition? Well, I'm not afraid of the competition. I think we have competition in our health insurance companies. I think that they're afraid of the competition or else they would support the proposal that almost every Republican supports, and that is, allow Americans to buy health insurance across State lines. That expands the competition dramatically, Mr. Speaker. So there is a fear of competition. There is a fear of letting the free market provide that competition and giving people the portability that they need. There is a real fear also of addressing lawsuit abuse. Lawsuit abuse is the medical malpractice component of these costs that the industry places between 5.5 and 16 percent of the overall health care costs. The number that comes from the person whom I trust the most is 8.5 percent. If you multiply that 8.5 percent across the costs of providing health care in America, over the space of time, it's $203 billion or $2 trillion for the sake of the budget window of 10 years that we deal with. That $2 trillion would pay for everything they wanted to do, but every one of them will stand in the way and block the lawsuit abuse that could actually fund their socialized medicine because the trial lawyers are telling them that they can't address it. So there are a lot of things that we would like to do. We would like to provide portability, and we would like to fix the lawsuit abuse problem, and we would like to be able to buy health insurance across State lines, provide full deductibility for everybody who pays a health insurance premium, provide transparency in the billing so we can actually have some real competition out there and allow people to expand the HSAs so that HSAs can transform themselves, under good management and good health, into retirement plans, pension plans when one reaches Medicare eligibility age. Those are some of the things on health care. Mr. Speaker, I feel compelled to rebut some of the statements that were made in the previous hour. And as much as I get along with the gentlemen that were making their presentation, I clearly disagree with a lot of their conclusions. But they have their talking points down pretty well, given what comes out of the DCCC. I came here tonight, though, to talk about the missile defense shield and the issue with Eastern Europe. I believe the President of the United States has bargained away a very, very important shield that was essential to the negotiations that were going on with Iran. And in their persistent and relentless effort to develop a nuclear capability, not only a nuclear weapon but a means to deliver it, and if they can develop that means to deliver it along with a nuclear weapon, they have said that they want to annihilate Israel, and they eventually want to annihilate the United States. This would put them very closely within the umbrella of being able to strike many places in Europe as well. In the chess game that is going on, in the poker game that's going on, and in the Monopoly game that's going on in the United States, it is something that is very high test. It's very high risk. We have with us tonight one of the real leaders in this issue who understands the physics, the technology, the politics, the global approach to this, Putin's involvement in this chess game, of him seeking to reconstruct the vestiges of the former Soviet Union, the dynamics of the psychology of the mullahs in Iran, the necessity for the Israelis to defend themselves, and the necessity and the constitutional responsibility for Americans to do the same. I am happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Trent Franks. Thank you for coming down, Mr. Franks.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Arizona, and I look forward to the colloquy that we will have, and I know I've asked the gentleman from Missouri to add a broad view to this. I just would recap the presentation that we've listened to here, which is precisely worded and is, I think, precisely accurate. It researches some conclusions that I don't think anyone who has followed this in a logical fashion can avoid: As I understand this, we have been setting up the nuclear shield in Poland and in Czechoslovakia. It takes about 5 years to get it set up. The anticipation was that the Iranians wouldn't be ready for about 5 years. At about the time the President capitulated on this, we had a report that was leaked that maybe Iran could be ready a lot sooner, in maybe as soon as a year. So I'll just direct your attention to The Wall Street Journal, to Mark Helprin's article. He has a unique way of observing what, I think, the gentleman from Arizona has articulated so well. Helprin writes: What we have here is an inadvertent homage to Lewis Carroll. We're going to cancel a defense that takes 5 years to mount because the threat will not materialize for 5 years, and we will not deploy land-based interceptors in Europe because our new plan is to deploy land-based interceptors in Europe later. Does the gentleman from Arizona care to comment on the accuracy of that statement?

Mr. KING of Iowa. In the gentleman's opinion, does this capitulation on the part of President Obama make it more or less likely that the Israelis will be compelled to strike at the capabilities of Iran?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, as I look at this and at the strategic location of Israel and at the 12 to 14 minutes that it takes for a missile to get from Iran to Israel and at the 12 to 14 months for Iran to have the capabilities to do so, the odds of being able to slow Iran's development down of nuclear weapons because of any diplomatic maneuverings that might come with regard to sanctions--economic sanctions, negotiations, blockades, threats of anything--have diminished dramatically because the club has been laid down by President Obama; the shield has been laid down by President Obama, and it sends the message to Iran: Accelerate your efforts on the 17 to 200 centrifuges that you have. So, from my view, it puts Israel in a position where they may have no choice. If they wait 12 to 14 months to make their decision, the decision may be coming too late at that period of time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. A third alternative, I might suggest, would be if the people in Iran could successfully rise up, could take that country over and could move towards peace. I know the gentleman from Missouri has got an opinion on this subject matter. I would be very happy to yield so much time as Todd Akin will consume in laying out the parameters of the view of this as he sees it. Mr. Akin, thank you for coming to the floor tonight.