Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would make my point and then yield, and that is this is a direct contradiction to what the gentleman from Missouri has said. This is the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who said-- what day is today?

Mr. KING of Iowa. So it would be today. He said, ``We rescued the economy.''

Mr. KING of Iowa. That's the gentleman I intended to yield to. If we rescue the economy, lost more jobs in 6 months than we have since the Great Depression, unemployment has 14.5 million, 14.7 million people unemployed and there are another 5.8 million people who are looking for a job that have exhausted their unemployment benefits, that no longer qualify under the definition of unemployed, which takes us up over 20 million people in America that are looking for work. According to a study that was done by one of the lead thinkers in this, they went to 25 million effectively unemployed because many have had their hours cut down so they no longer are truly a full-time employment. Rescued the economy? I don't think so. Let's hope they don't rescue health care the same way.

Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I'd like to pose a question here that is at the bottom of this. And there are a lot of different numbers out there and we know this is a moving target, so we're trying to shoot at a moving target because we know, once it's completed, it's going to come through here like a lightning bolt and it's going to be over. So I'm seeing numbers that show this as high as $2 trillion, but I can see CBO numbers that come to about $1.2 trillion and I can see tax increases that are in the area of $800 billion to $900 billion and deficits that are about $239.1 billion. Now, whatever these numbers are, we know that the calculations and predictions are different than what it's actually going to be. Programs always cost more money in reality than when they're actually estimated. But here's the point. President Obama has said we can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care. Health care is broken. Well, if you have a company that's broken, you don't go out and borrow more money and lower your revenue stream and increase your deficit. So if health care costs too much money, why do we have to add $1 trillion or $2 trillion to it to fix the program? That's the rhetorical question that I ask. It's more than rhetorical. Hopefully, we'll be able to get to that. I see the gentleman from Louisiana was leaning forward and I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Scalise).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and letting the gentleman from Missouri relax for a minute. I wanted to bring this up. We see the flow charts that are today in color, and when you look at the color flow charts, those that are in white are the old existing programs that are there; and those in color are the new programs that are laid on top of the existing bureaucracy. This is the HillaryCare flow chart from back in 1993; and this is the flow chart that is, I believe, a replica of what hung on the office in my construction office throughout that entire decade and probably past the change of the millennium. It hung there because it scared the living daylights out of me, as an employer who was providing health insurance for my employees and, of course, my family as well. When I looked at this chart--I had an aversion and anybody who has ever been in business has an aversion to redtape--this was a redtape chart. This chart being put up back in 1993 was enough, I think, that added enough weight on that it sunk HillaryCare, because the people in this country did not want to create all of this bureaucracy and give all of this control and authority over to the government. They wanted to maintain their own independence, their own freedom. In the end, it was a freedom argument that won out, that killed HillaryCare. Now we have ObamaCare. The difference is, it's in color. It probably takes not quite as much freedom as this one might have. But I would point out on the gentleman's chart that the part that concerns me the most are these two purple circles down here at the bottom. The white square is the existing private health insurance, traditional health insurance. All of those insurance policies of those 1,300 or so insurance companies that are competing right now for the dollar for health insurance would have to flow through and become qualified health insurance plans. They would only be qualified if right here the health insurance czar decided that he had written the regulations in such a way that the newly created public health benefits plan--the Federal health insurance plan that's designed to compete against the private sector--could stay in business. So they will set the regulations and establish the mandates and determine what these private health insurance policies offer. Then when they write those standards, then they'd be competing directly against the public; and at some point the public swallows up private. This is where it gobbles it up right here. This is where you lose your freedom. This is where President Obama cannot make the promise that if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it. You don't get to keep it. You don't get to keep it because the people that make the decisions, those who are employers that are providing health insurance, are going to look at the premium that's here, the rules that are set by the government; and they will decide whether you keep it. You will not, even if you're a happy employee. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia who has a statement to make.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and as the gentleman raised the issue of about who will be making the decisions on health care, whether it will be the doctor and the patient or whether it will be the bureaucrat, we have on record, before the committee in the markup 2 days ago, an amendment that was offered by Republicans--and I believe it was Dr. Gingrey from Georgia who offered the amendment. I happen to have the text of it right here handy; and it is this, Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine. That was a simple amendment that preserved the doctor-patient relationship and cut the bureaucrat out of it.

Mr. KING of Iowa. It failed. It failed on a party-line vote, save one. Only one Democrat would defend the doctor-patient relationship in the entire committee. It was shot down as a partisan vote, and that would be a clear principle that you would think Democrats and Republicans could agree upon.

Mr. KING of Iowa. That's correct.

Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman.

Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentlelady from Minnesota.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentlelady will yield to a question.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, if I could just make the point that President Obama might have told the truth tonight when he said that he wasn't going to increase the deficit with his national health care plan. We already know there are $800 billion or $900 billion in tax increases that are written into this, and they're only about, maybe, $239 billion from making their books balance. Imagine that. It's $239.1 billion by one set of measure. It might be a lot more. So all they really need to do is raise taxes another $239 billion and accept the estimates they have--and they might have already arrived--and he just simply uses his little rhetorical trick of giving you a definition. Well, he gives America the definition, and people hear what they want to hear. He speaks in a way that people hear what they want to hear. Again, I think that's the deal. I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. KING of Iowa. 9.5.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I would say to the leader, where are the jobs? I listened attentively. I pricked my ears up. I thought I was going to find out where the jobs are. I didn't hear that answer. I looked back at what happened for the 108th and 109th Congress. Members of the Democrats came down on the floor and they said, Just put us in charge and we'll solve the problem. They won the majority, and we saw a hockey stick graph going downward of industrial investment. That's what happened to our economy; it reacted to the Democrat majority. You elected President Obama. Now you don't have any excuses, and you are angry because we are asking, ``Where are the jobs?'' There are 14.5 to 14.7 million unemployed, another 6.8 million that are simply looking for a job that don't fit into that category, 21.3 million people looking for jobs in the United States, all of this under Democrat leadership. We had historically low unemployment and a growing economy because we lowered taxes, and we kept the pressure off of regulation. You are turning this into the nationalization of the private sector and the health insurance industry, and the American people don't want to live in the kind of countries that exist on the east side of the Atlantic Ocean or north of the 49th parallel. Where are the jobs?

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Indiana be allowed to address the statement that was made by the majority leader.

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

Mr. KING of Iowa. Is there a rule that prohibits this body from agreeing to a unanimous consent request to allow a Member to be recognized?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I am recognized for a parliamentary inquiry, as I understand it. My parliamentary inquiry is: Does there exist a rule that prohibits a Member from being recognized to speak under a unanimous consent request?

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

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Indiana be allowed to speak out of order.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House and in the aftermath of the previous Special Order that has discussed primarily the health care and health insurance issue here in America. I notice continually the expression ``health care'' gets substituted for the expression ``health insurance.'' There is a distinction. Everybody in America has access to health care, which means everybody in America has health care. Everybody in America does not have health insurance. When we blend our verbiage, sometimes it's intentional and sometimes it's not. I catch myself occasionally using the wrong expression because our debates here blur the two. It's comparable to the situation when people say ``immigrants.'' They sometimes mean illegal immigrants and sometimes they mean legal immigrants. Sometimes they mean legal and illegal immigrants. Well, health care and health insurance have been blended the same way, but there are distinctions. We should remember, everybody in this country has access to health care. Everybody in this country that needs service will get service. We're talking about how we address those that are uninsured, not those that don't have access to health care or that do not have health care. I thought it was interesting that the gentlelady from Texas put up the poster: Republicans' ideas on health care--or health insurance. I've forgotten which that is. I look back on last week, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) put up a poster that actually had about the same title to it. The gentlelady from Texas' poster was blank on Republican ideas and the gentleman from Ohio's poster was full of question marks on Republican ideas, but they were both generated by the same people. The Democrat majority caucus produces these posters that come here to the floor. But we are full of all kinds of ideas. I am happy to talk about those ideas, Mr. Speaker. Some will say that you can't beat something with nothing, and I would submit that you can beat bad ideas with most anything. And a really, really bad idea is socialized medicine, national health care, HillaryCare, ObamaCare, United Kingdom Care, Canadian Care, European Union Care. All of that is bad stuff. Freedom is good stuff. I am all about freedom, and these proposals that are coming from the Democrat majority are about diminishing our freedom, about taking away our rights, about taking away our responsibilities and in the process of doing so, devolving downward the American vitality, the American Dream, the American can-do spirit. What kind of American would sit around and wring their hands and say, Woe is me, I can't figure out how to take care of myself? Did anybody come to America and walk through the Great Hall at Ellis Island, thinking, I'm so glad I am here now in this welfare state where I don't have to worry about taking care of myself, woe is me no longer because the United States of America will take care of me? That kind of people didn't come through Ellis Island. Ellis Island now is a tourist center. The United States of America is a welfare state. Now they sneak into the United States, thinking, Yes, America will take care of me. They think that they have now arrived at the giant ATM of the Western Hemisphere that will provide for everyone's wants and needs. And if they aren't so sure, they just have to listen to Congress here for a while, and somebody over on this side of the aisle, as a rule, will articulate some other defined want of some people that's not a need. But even though it's just a want, not a need, it will be declared to be a right and maybe even a constitutional right. We have got to understand what we're doing here. It's real people that are working, real people that have jobs, real people that toil away to produce goods and services that have a marketable value; and they're being taxed day after day, month after month, tapping into the sweat of the brow of the salt of the Earth people in America. They're being told, Your taxes won't increase. It will just be everybody else's taxes that increase and that ObamaCare is going to be a better deal than whatever care you have. But if you like yours, then you don't have to worry because if you like the health care you have, you get to keep it. That's what the President said, correct? If you like the health care or the health insurance--I'm not sure which phrase he was actually talking about--if you like it, you get to keep it. The problem is, it's not true. The President of the United States, however powerful he is, cannot make that promise with any sense of confidence that he can keep that promise because it will not be the President that decides whether Wal-Mart, for example, keeps the health insurance programs that they have in place for their employees. That will be decided by the management of Wal-Mart who, a little over a week ago, announced that they would support an employer-mandated program that requires employers to provide health insurance for employees. Now once they made that decision, it didn't necessarily mean that they endorsed the Obama plan because it really isn't quite yet an Obama plan. There are only concepts throughout and some language that is moving through this House. But what it said was that they would endorse an employer-mandated plan. Now that opens the door for Wal-Mart to be in a position to make the decision when the public option, the Federal Government-run health insurance policy would be set up to compete directly against the many hundreds of private health insurance policies that we have. For the President to say, If you like your health insurance policy, fine, you get to keep it, you only get to keep it until there is an alternative there that might be a better alternative for your employer. Your employer, like Wal-Mart or any other proud private sector company that's there that is providing health insurance for a majority of their employees, will be making a decision on whether they want to opt into the public plan or they want to maintain the private plan; but also the newly-to-be-named health insurance czar will be writing some new rules for every single health insurance company in America. Now that lays the backdrop for what was said over this last hour and the way we need to be thinking about what transpired here within the last hour. However, I've also come here to talk about a number of different things. One of them is that if we remember correctly, Speaker Pelosi came to this Congress, and she said that she was going to drain the swamp. She was going to drain the swamp of corruption and alleged that there was corruption. Night after night a team would come down here for years--I would say 2 or 3 or 4 years--and make allegations about certain Members of Congress, allegations about the motives of certain Members of Congress. The comments about the culture of corruption was fairly baffling to me. You can point to examples on either side. But Nancy Pelosi pledged that she would produce the most open Congress in history and that there would be legitimate debate, and there wouldn't be favorites being played. Now here is an example of what Nancy Pelosi said. She said, ``I don't want to have legislation that is used as an engine for people to put on things that are not going to do what we are setting out to do, which is to turn this economy around. I have the most to prove with this package. The choices we are making are those that will work, that must work. Our economy requires it. America's families need it. This is urgent.'' That's Speaker Nancy Pelosi, January 25, 2009, this year, the end of January. That was her statement about how we were going to direct the efficiency of the stimulus plan to doing what's good for our economy. We're going to turn this economy around. Well, I came down to the floor and put up this very same picture. This very same picture is of a saltwater marsh harvest mouse. This is the saltwater marsh harvest mouse. It's a mouse that Speaker Pelosi has been trying to get special earmarks for for a long time. And as she has been resisted on that, I pointed out that in the stimulus package, there were $32 million set aside for the saltwater marsh harvest mouse. I came to the floor with a picture of this mouse and the numbers up on top. Of course, the spokespersons for the Speaker, the defenders of the status quo, and the defenders of the person that was going to come here and clean up this Congress, the one who has now established the most draconian Congress, I believe, in history, the one that is the least deliberative body in history, the one who has launched an all-out assault on this deliberative democracy and said that she didn't have an earmark in the stimulus bill for this saltwater marsh harvest mouse and others in her defense said, Steve King made it up. He just pulled a number out of the air and made an allegation that there was an earmark in there for the saltwater marsh harvest mouse. However, now here we are far enough down the road, here are the real facts: the $32 million has been reduced to $16.1 million. Now the saltwater marsh harvest mouse not only has his own special earmark of $16.1 million, it sets aside his brackish little marsh down there by San Francisco so that he can hop around in it and sets aside a marsh down there near San Francisco at the cost of $16.1 million, Madam Speaker, which is no economic stimulus plan. We're going to do the things that count. We're going to do the things that do the most for the economy. The language here: turn this economy around. We're going to do that by setting aside a hopping zone for a pet project here. This little pet, the saltwater marsh harvest mouse, he gets an earmark. You can't quite see it there, but he needs that ear notched a little bit because now he is a $16.1 million earmark. All this borrowing, expanding the debt to the American people, the American taxpayers and Americans not yet born, to where the debt for every man, woman and child in America today totals up to over $37,000 per individual. Still their hearts are hardened, and still they want to raise the debt, and still they want to spend money on frivolous projects that don't have a merit that affects the people that are paying the taxes, nor could a project like that ever gain the support of the majority of the people in this Congress. This is like the little mouse bridge to nowhere, $16.1 million for the little pet project, notched little earmark, the saltwater marsh harvest mouse, the pet project of Speaker Pelosi. She said she came here to clean up this process to make sure that there weren't favorites, and President Obama went on at great length about how he wasn't going to sign any bill that had any earmarks in it. Then he signed a bill with about 9,000 earmarks in it, and then President Obama made other remarks about the integrity of the process. Yet we've seen earmark after earmark, billions and billions of dollars that have been unfolded here going on our debt, stacking it up against the American people. We've seen a process that has been shut down where we get surprise bills that get dropped on us. The stimulus package was a last-minute drop on us, and we could count not days but hours of reading and understanding what's in a bill. Thinking in terms of 1,000 or more pages with 8 or 10 hours to read the bill and then try to analyze all that it means when bills reference other sections of existing code, they reference definitions that exist in other places; and then if you get something like that read through, you also have to figure out what's not in it, what's missing, what's been omitted and, furthermore, what are the implications of what is in it, and what are the implications of what's missing. That's why we need the public. There is no one person--in fact, all 435 Members of this House of Representatives do not have among them, even if given enough time, the ability to analyze the implications of big pieces of legislation on their own, not without our staff, not without our constituents, not without people that have a direct responsibility for the components of the legislation that affects them the most. Good legislation is written by Members of Congress that go out among the districts and among the real people that are working for a living and paying real taxes out of their income and their profits, taking a look at the circumstances of what's right and what's wrong, listening to the proposals that come from them and putting together careful legislation that brings about a right result. Once that's put together, and then you float that out to get the input from Democrats and Republicans; and it isn't just the input from the people that sit in these seats, Mr. Speaker. It's the input from the American people that talk to the people that sit in these seats who make the difference. When you short-circuit this process, when you take this process and bypass the committee process or do a mock markup, a sham markup in a committee process and pass a bill out and then do a bait-and-switch and bring a different bill to the floor than passed out of the committee--and it has happened at least three times this year, a different bill came to the floor than was passed out of the committee because they didn't like an amendment that actually passed in the committee--they don't seem to understand that the job of the Speaker or the job of the Chair of a committee is to bring out the will of the group. That's the essential responsibility of someone who is the Speaker or someone who is the Chair of a committee, bring out the will of the group. It's not to impose their will on the group but to bring out the will of the group even when the Chair of the committee recognizes that there are good ideas coming before the committee but maybe it doesn't exactly fit the politics that they've been directed to bring about out of committee, and when an amendment comes out of committee like, example for, an amendment that would have blocked all funding to ACORN to have the Chair afterwards change the language, send a different bill or a different piece of substance to the floor of the House of Representatives, and the Members here have a right to have full confidence that the bill that comes to the floor reflects the product of the committee, too often it does not. The window for reading a bill and debate and deliberation has been so short that on the cap-and-trade bill, that big bill of 1,100 pages that we had a very short time to digest, was brought to the floor, was filed, scheduled for debate; and at 3:09 a.m. there was a 316-page amendment to an 1,100 page bill that was dropped into the Record at 3:09 a.m.; and that morning we took the bill up. And we are to debate and deliberate and understand and evaluate with good judgment and due diligence the implications, ramifications and factors that come out of one of the biggest, most important bills in the history of this Congress? I believe Congress made, the House of Representatives made the most colossal mistake ever made in the history of this House. Three hundred sixteen pages at 3:09 a.m. on an 1,100- page bill. If you wanted to read it, no one had a chance to read it. No one had an opportunity to evaluate it. It was a surprise tactic. Actually, it wasn't a surprise. We have gotten to the point where we expect those kinds of tactics. But that is bad policy. If you are passing legislation that cannot withstand the light of day, it should be pretty clear that it must be bad legislation, and the American people will reject it. To read a bill and have time to read a bill, I would direct, Mr. Speaker, your attention, and the public's attention, to section 108 of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 which reads in part, A measure or matter reported by any subcommittee shall not be considered in the House unless the report of that committee, upon that Member or matter, has been available to the Members of the House for at least 3 calendar days. And that is 3 calendar days prior to the consideration of that Member or matter in the House of Representatives. We have a law, Mr. Speaker, we have a law that requires 3 calendar days to read a bill. But Mr. Speaker, the ``saltwater marsh'' Speaker, the ``personal earmark for brackish wetlands'' Speaker, insists that a bill can come to the floor, and it can be a bill that no one has seen, it can be one that is written in the Speaker's office, and it can have an amendment right behind it written also in the Speaker's office just as a surprise tactic, and before the public can understand what is going on, actually before they can even believe someone would tear asunder this deliberative body in the process, it is an act of the House of Representatives messaged over to the Senate, and on the cap- and-trade bill, the 1,100 pages sat down here, the 309 pages didn't. And when the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) asked the question, do we have a bill before us that is the subject of our debate? The answer that came from the Speaker's chair was--I don't remember exactly, but I remember the response: Well, we don't quite have it yet, but everyone knows what we are talking about. So after many exchanges, finally, we suspended the operation for about 35 minutes while we went through this exchange of trying to determine, what is the subject of our debate? Shouldn't the House of Representatives have, even if no one else can get their hands on the paperwork or the electronic version, shouldn't the United States House of Representatives have at least one copy of the subject? Have got a dictionary over here, a big unabridged dictionary. It is there if someone were to argue about what the English language is. But we are here arguing about a bill that no one can look up and read. No one can verify if we are accurate. The bill's amendment was not here. The bill was. The amendment wasn't. Later they brought the amendment down and began to integrate it. It takes a long time to integrate 316 pages into 1,100 and to get it right. And the question was asked, If this bill passes the House and it is not available for inspection by any Members of the House, is it possible for us to message over to the Senate if it doesn't exist at the time of its passage? Well, somehow, we did. But it shouldn't be possible. The process has to be right. We should follow the law. We should follow this section of the law that is section 108 of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. That is one of the laws we should follow. We should follow the law of common decency and respect for each other and respect for the process and the Founding Fathers and for the Constitution and do due diligence and not put generational legislation up and pass it because there was a political momentum to get it done before anybody can see what it is that we are actually doing here and do it sometimes in the middle of the night. I would be really happy to yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota, who I know has been very engaged in these issues and on top of helping to clean up some of the open doors that are here for the culture of corruption that exists under this leadership of the House of Representatives. I yield so much time as she may consume to the gentlelady of Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota. And I can't help but reflect that the President's earliest promise on this stimulus package was that he would create or save 3.5 million jobs and that got lowered down to 2 million jobs altogether. But the instant those words came out of his mouth, I thought, why would someone say ``create or save?'' ``Create or save,'' what does that mean? What would be the point of a promise that he would ``create or save'' 3.5 million jobs? And the answer, of course, is that if you say, I will create 3.5 million jobs, then you have to identify which jobs it is that you have created. Was it Caterpillar who he said had actually signed on with him in his stimulus plan? Was that an assumption on the part of President Obama? So where are these jobs that you would create? You would have to point to them and get a CEO that said, Yes, because of this stimulus plan, I have opened up this new production line, and here are 20,000 jobs here, and you add them all up, and you have to come up with 3.5 million. But if you say ``create or save'' jobs, you can always point to existing jobs and claim that you have saved them. So in the analysis of his rationale, if someone is going to create or save 3.5 million jobs, if they are remaining, if they haven't been laid off except for the last 3.5 million and you can say, Oh, yes, they are the ones I saved. I saved the 3.5 million that were left, even though we may have lost 137.5 million jobs in the process, and he would be telling the truth. This is a situation where we have the master of ambiguity. We do have the master of mesmerization going on at the same time. People hear what they want to hear because the language is crafted to speak to our hearts instead of our heads. When he says I'll create or save 3\1/2\ million jobs, that is mostly on the save side, not on the create side, because this has gone south in a sad way. And we've seen our unemployment go from the promise that it could go above 8 percent to 9.5 percent. How many people is that, Mr. Speaker? Well, the number is 14\1/2\ million unemployed. That's the ones on the unemployment roll. Then there's another 5.8 million people that don't qualify for unemployment that are looking for a job. So you add the total up to that, and it isn't hard to get up in that number of over 20 million. And there was an article written just the other day. I believe it was in National Review. I've forgotten the name of the author that had done the calculation of this. And the projection was that it's closer to 25 million people unemployed, especially when you account for those that are underemployed, those that have seen their hours reduced. So we have had the data that shows that unemployment, the extended period of time that people are claiming unemployment is longer than it's been. I believe the number is the longest it's been in 48 years of unemployment. And at the same time that was extended, the length of unemployment benefits, we've also seen people who are working fewer hours per week. So we have a lot of underemployed that don't qualify yet as unemployed. This economy that's here completely misunderstands what this economy is about. This is the experiment of the Keynesian economists on steroids; the people that believe that you can borrow money to no end, grow government to no end, replace private sector jobs with government jobs, and stimulate the economy with borrowed tax dollars, and buy goods that are made in China and borrow money from the Chinese to buy them. This whole circle doesn't work. You have to produce things that have value, and you have to lay out the truth when you do it. I want to go back to this statement that I made earlier, and just very briefly point out section 108 of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 that says this. And without reading all that language through, it says, 3 days to read a bill or we're not going to take it up on the floor. That's the law. That's the law, but apparently the Speaker of the House isn't bound by the law, and I hope that there was a way to enforce that. And I actually don't know how we enforce such a law. Republicans are doing all they can do, everything they can do procedurally. This is the quote, of course, from the majority leader that said, if every Member read the bill, well, there wouldn't be a bill because they would come to grips with their senses or else the public would make sure that they did. This is a list of the bills that were rushed through to the floor, and many of them were addressed by the gentlelady from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann). But here in the 111th Congress, every controversial bill passed by the House has been forced through in less than 3 days, in violation of this section of the code here. In less than 3 days. Every one has violated this section 108 of the code, every one of these controversial bills. And to take you through them, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2000, the stimulus bill. I guess I didn't really know what the real name was. The stimulus bill, $787 billion that was rammed through in less than 3 days. Violation of public law 108, section 108. Children's Health Insurance Program, SCHIP, rammed through, and this violates the very principle that SCHIP was established on in the first place, and it's designed to bring about, to close the gap so that we end up with a mandatory national health care act. It's one of the incremental changes that are there. They actually passed out of this House a bill that was 400 percent of poverty, that would have paid people's health insurance so that children in families making over $102,000 in Iowa, and some of those families would have been paying the alternative minimum tax, in fact, 70,000 families in America would have been, well actually in the end, are paying the alternative minimum tax even though their children's health insurance is paid for because SCHIP is designed to pay health insurance on children whose families can't afford it. So, $102,000. Tax them some extra in the rich man's alternative minimum tax. And we tax them so much they can't afford to provide health insurance for their children, so we buy them health insurance, and we rush the bill through. And by the way, in there it opens up the door for Medicaid to provide health care for illegals under Medicaid. That rule was also changed in this and the data that I put out holds up to be fact. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007. That was the bill where Lilly Ledbetter alleged that she was discriminated against in a job way back some years ago. There was a statute of limitations on that bill, on the legislation that she sought to sue her employers under. The statute of limitations had expired, long past. And still Democrats argued that, even though the Supreme Court upheld the statute, that they thought it just wasn't fair. The old ``it ain't fair'' brothers got at it again and decided that they wanted to change the rules after the fact. I'm okay with changing the rules after the fact, as long as it doesn't affect the people that were living under the law at the time, during the fact. But this was retroactive. This was like double jeopardy for the taxpayers. And the Lilly Ledbetter Act rammed through this Congress. The Paycheck Fairness Act, rammed through Congress. Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, rammed through. Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, the big stacked bill that runs the government when you're afraid to do appropriations in a legitimate way, rammed through. No amendments either, by the way. Then, to impose an additional tax on bonuses received from the TARP's AIG bonuses. So we had to ram through TARP, and then when the rules weren't written in TARP with any oversight, then AIG decided to pay millions of dollars of bonuses to people that worked for them, retention bonuses they were. But 11 of the people no longer worked for AIG. They got part of the millions in retention bonuses, too. That had to be rammed through because Democrats were vulnerable to public criticism because they had passed legislation that opened the door, and they rammed legislation through quickly so there wasn't an opportunity to evaluate, debate, amend or scrutinize. And the result was hundreds of millions of dollars paid off to provide retention bonuses for AIG executives, at least 11 of whom didn't work for AIG anymore. So we had to pass some legislation to take the public's pressure off of the people that opened up the door for that legislation. So that was that. The Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, rammed through. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, which, I'm sure--yeah, here we are. The cap-and-tax bill, rammed through. All of these major bills rammed through in violation of public law section 108. Three days to read the bill. That's the law. You know, they've got the votes to repeal any piece of legislation that's been passed by any previous Congress. When you've got the votes to do that, you would think you have--remember the audacity of hope that comes from the White House? You would think you'd at least have the audacity to change the law instead of violate it. That's what I'm seeing here in this Congress, and it really irks me to see people do this to our Congress and to our system. This is the President's promise. I spoke to it but not--I didn't quote it. The President said, We need sunlight before signing bills. Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the President before the public has the opportunity to review them. As President, I will not sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for 5 days. Barack Obama. Does that sound like anything we've seen him do?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I'd yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota. And as you talk about that percentage, 30 percent, the private business profits in the country, who would have been believed a year ago or 8 or 9 months ago, who would have believed that eight huge private sector entities would be nationalized by this administration? We have three large investment banks nationalized by this administration, one large company, AIG Insurance, nationalized. Fannie and Freddie used to be private, became a government-sponsored enterprise, and now they're wholly owned by the Federal Government, with about $100 billion dropped into each and about $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities wrapped up in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And of course we have General Motors, 61 percent, and Chrysler a smaller percentage. I don't remember that exact number. But then you've got, also, the Canadians that own about 12\1/2\ percent of General Motors and the unions that own 17\1/2\ percent of General Motors. There's not a lot left out there for the bondholders, the people that were the secured creditors, because they got aced out. Who would have thought eight huge entities, hundreds of billions of dollars, and taking these companies off, out of the private sector and put them into the hands of government control? And the President fires the CEO of General Motors and hires his guy, Fritz. And the President cleans out the board of directors at General Motors and appoints all but two of the board of directors of General Motors. And then he says, the President says, I'm not interested in the day- to-day operations of General Motors. I don't think we should be running the place. I don't want to do the nationalization of this. It is just something that we have to do. And here's the irony of it. President Obama was elected at least in part because he attacked George Bush for going into Iraq and not having an exit strategy. Now, President Obama has gone in and nationalized these eight huge private sector companies that I have listed here, and he says he doesn't want to be nationalizing and he doesn't want to be in the day- to-day operations, but he names the CEO, replaces the board of directors. His car czar is on the phone every day with the chairman of the board of General Motors, sometimes multiple times a day. Well, that was the former car czar. We don't know what the future car czar is going to be. We've got 32 czars. The President is in the formerly private sector. He got invested in all of that. He found a crisis, capitalized on it: nationalized. Now, I have read the Web page for the Democratic Socialists of America. That is exactly their plan. It is in print. In fact, it's more aggressive than on their own Web site. The President has nationalized proud private-sector corporations, and he has done so without an exit strategy. All at the same time, he has been critical of President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq. President Bush's exit strategy in Iraq is in print. It's called the SOFA Agreement, the Status of Forces Agreement, negotiated and agreed to by President George W. Bush. The exit strategy for Iraq was victory, victory with honor, victory and leave a legacy of a self-governing democracy of a moderate country that could govern themselves and that could control their own national destiny. All of that is in place today, and President Obama is carrying out the exit strategy of George Bush to the letter, spelled out in the Status of Forces Agreement, without a peep in the media about what's going on over there. All they talk about is we're deploying out of Iraq. No, we're deploying out of Iraq cities back to the bases because the surge worked. Now, President Bush had an exit strategy. He didn't talk about it completely because he had to be a little flexible. He carried out his exit strategy. He ordered the surge. He negotiated the SOFA Agreement. He handed over an Iraq in a war that was won. The war was won on the day that Barack Obama took the oath of office here just outside these doors, and now it needs to be sustained and maintained. Afghanistan is a lot harder, but there is an exit strategy in place set by George Bush. There is no exit strategy for these eight private companies that have been nationalized by President Obama. When I see the picture of President Obama standing next to Hugo Chavez and when they ask me what that tells me, I say, you know, the chief nationalizer is our guy, not their guy. Our guy has nationalized more companies and more billions of dollars' worth of privately held assets than Hugo Chavez ever dreamed of doing--well, at least within the last year. Chavez might have added a bit more companies over time, but so far this year, he has only taken out one Cargill rice plant, and has nationalized that in Venezuela. It is a chilling thought to think of how fast this Nation has lurched to the left. We've leaped off of the abyss, and we've got to figure out how to fly to get back to where we are in the free markets again. So I would be happy to yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota to pick up from there.