Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Twenty million that are uninsured. By the time you take it down to the chronically uninsured, according to a Penn State study by a couple of professors at Penn State, that's 10.1 million chronically uninsured, and that equates to a little bit less than 4 percent of the population of the United States of America. That's what we've got.

Mr. KING of Iowa. But if the gentleman from Georgia--reclaiming my time, and I would pose the question back to the panel that's here of the experts. This was President Obama's economic development plan. This economic crisis that we're in commands that we establish a socialized medicine program. So the gentleman who's lived for that--or excuse me, the gentleman who's lived with that in Tennessee--the doctor from Tennessee, Dr. Roe, if you could tell us what you learned in Tennessee with the plan that was similar to that that Obama has proposed.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time from the gentleman from Tennessee, I am watching the gentleman from Michigan reading through his thousand-plus-pages bill here, with his exemplary model of concentration in the middle of all this. I think you could do this under fire. What have you learned since the last time you imparted some knowledge? And I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. KING of Iowa. 316 pages.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and appreciating the facile information that will, I think, rather than put a person to sleep, cause insomnia if anybody reads this, and I appreciate the effort to do so. It can be a selfless act of intellectual scholarly patriotism to read some of this, but I've heard enough of the gobbledygook that came out of it from Mr. Hoekstra's reading it, the requirement that it be and required to be in plain English catches me a little bit off balance, having heard the language that's in the bill, not having read it. And I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, when the gentleman refers to plain English principles, you aren't talking about the United Kingdom principles of a national health care act. You're talking about the things we understand in the language which we refer to as the plain English language that we all should understand, and I would yield back to the gentleman for a response to that clarification.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, there's a philosophy here again, this dividing philosophy between the people that are right on the right side of the political spectrum and the people that are wrong on the left side of the political spectrum. And I remember when the wall went down on November 9, 1989. The Iron Curtain came crashing down, and it came crashing down because free enterprise trumped central planning in the 5-year plan. And the difference is because we're in the business of seeking to enhance and improve the overall annual average productivity of every American. If we do that, our economy thrives, and when our economy thrives, our quality of life goes up in proportion to the way our economy thrives. That's the part of human nature that is at the core of the difference in this philosophy. And they, the people who don't show up down here to carry on this debate because they cannot carry out this debate in the face of the logic and the plain English that they're faced with, they believe in central planning. They believe they can put together a plan and a model and the inside that will tell everybody what to do at every moment. And there will be a rule written and a law written and some contingency plan for everything that might go wrong, and somehow they can put together the master utopian formula that's going to improve and strengthen--actually, the plan is to strength them politically, not to improve the lives in America so much. But their idea has failed because they don't believe in human nature being competitive, and they don't believe that there's goodness in the heart of all of us as well as evil in the heart of all of us. We legislate against the evil and we enhance the goodness. They just simply say the reason people don't succeed is because conservatives got in their way, and that's the cynical approach. I yield first to the gentleman from Georgia and back to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Georgia, and it references me to the health care providers that have dropped out, gone out of business or failed to expand or diminished their operations because of having to provide free health care to, let me say, free health care to illegals. And I'm thinking of the gentleman from Arizona, and I think of Arizona whenever I think of losing access to health care because of having to provide free health care to illegals. At a time that I stopped down in an unannounced surprise visit at Sasabe, Arizona, at the port of entry, and there as I was talking to the shift supervisor, whose name I remember and decline to put in the Congressional Record, he got a call on his cell phone. He said, Just a minute. I'm going to take care of something. I'll come back to you. He took care of it. He came back to me in a few minutes, and he said, Well, you're going to see a Mexican ambulance come across the border, and then I've already called U.S. ambulances to come down and do the handoff, and I've called the dust off to come--he said Life Flight--to come and pick up this patient who has been knifed in a knife fight in Mexico, and this ambulance and their care won't take care of him, so we're going to do that. So, anyway, I had a medical officer with me and I asked him to look in on this and see what you can do to save this fellow's life, and it turned out to be this. They came across the border. The ambulance had no oxygen in it, no medical equipment in it. It only had a little bit of gauze and a few surgical gloves and that was really it. So the U.S. ambulances showed up, put oxygen on him and triaged him, and we loaded him in the helicopter and flew him off. I went to visit him in the Tucson University Hospital the next day. He survived, and it cost us $30,000. But it caused me to sit down with the CFO, who told me that it costs them annually an average of $14.5 million to provide health care there for illegals and that Tucson University is the most southerly trauma center in all of Arizona, and that a bus full of illegals had been wrecked near Tucson and in it were 25. Fifteen went into intensive care. Their IC unit was tied up, and so the people from Tucson that paid their premiums were taken up to Phoenix where the family had to drive up there to visit the patient. That is what I saw. The man that represents a good chunk of Arizona knows it for a fact. I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman, Mr. Shadegg.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Arizona. I just think about when I listen to you talk, that's--I think--the most inspiring dialog that's flowed out in the last hour and a half or 2 hours. I think of hundreds of millions of individual Americans who are addressing their own individual health care issues and their health insurance issues, knowing their particular problems, knowing their cash flow, knowing what the options are and making an informed decision, each one individually as an individual or a family, working in conjunction often with an employer who has a series of policies out there that can be offered, that individual intellect that's there, and having faith in the individuals, as compared to an almost one-size- fits-all plan that competes directly against the private sector and takes away that individual initiative and put us down into this thing that they would call safety net of government, which clearly has a lot of holes in it, and has in every government that's tried to produce this plan. I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman from Tennessee, the one who's illustrated the TennCare issue and also his professional expertise as a doctor.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming, I pose this issue here, but it isn't true for all Canadians. And I say this because even though there's a law in Canada that prohibits one from jumping ahead in the line or having a policy or a plan that gives them preferential treatment, they want everybody down at the bottom. There are provinces that don't enforce it equally. So there are places where people carve out their own special privileges so that those who are better off have an avenue to better health care, even though the law says not. But that's within the Canadians. And let them do it.

Mr. KING of Iowa. But it's what happens in America. I would yield to the gentleman from Michigan. I know you're on the border.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, in the brief moment that we have left I want to make the point that if the Canadians were protected by constitutional rights that we have as Americans, they would be protected, because it's cruel and inhuman to ask the Canadians to give up on their access to good health care here in the United States of America. You can go on the Web site and you can find companies in Canada that have been formed by entrepreneurs that turnkey the package. If you need a hip replacement in Canada, you can find a tour company that will set you up and say, Here's your flight to Seattle or Detroit or wherever it might be, or maybe Houston for heart surgery. Here's the surgeon, here's the hotel, here's the transportation.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Let me conclude by simply saying that this Obama care is cruel and inhuman to Canadians. And I would yield back the balance of my time and thank my colleagues for being here.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker I appreciate the honor and privilege of addressing you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. As I gather here in my preparation for this discussion, I understood the remarks made by the gentleman from Minnesota that he would be glad if I would, perhaps, address the health insurance and the health care issue here in the country, and I would be glad to do that. And I believe also my friend from Texas would be glad to do that. What stands out in my mind is this: That the President of the United States campaigned on a promise that he wanted to deliver. It looks to me like a national health care act. It's what I would call socialized medicine. That's what we called it when it was Hillary Care, and I think that's what we will call it if it becomes Obama Care. But the American people are for the most part very satisfied with their health insurance program, and they are almost completely satisfied with the health care that they get when they do, when they do require that kind of care. The kind of care they get in clinics, the kind of care they get in hospitals, the kind of care that's provided by our doctors and our nurses and our various practitioners is number one in the world. And, for example, the Canadian people that have an Obama Care plan come to the United States when they really need medical care. And I happen to notice that the people that have a socialized medicine program in the European Union, where sometimes their queue is longer in France than it is in Italy, longer in Germany than it is in Spain. And people that need care might have to move all around the European Union and get in the shorter queue to try to get in to get their hip replacement or their surgery or whatever it might be. It's not the kind of care that I want to see in the United States of America. We don't have people waiting in line. We don't have people sitting outside the emergency room in a long queue, and we don't have people that are coming to the emergency room for care because it's more convenient to them--unless, of course, somebody else is paying the bill. Because we have at least the incentive and a component of the free market system. Even though the Federal Government pays for a large share of health care, the reason our health care system in the United States is so good, and the biggest reason that our pharmaceuticals have raced so far ahead in their research and development of the rest of the world, and the reason that we have so much technology, and such high- quality health care, one of those reasons is because of the altruism of the practitioners that are there, they are in the business for the right reason. They want to help people. They want to provide good health care services. But on top of that, there is at least an incentive for profit. And if you dial that out, if you take it away, it discourages people from going off to med school and discourages them from developing their skills and education, and it discourages the entrepreneurs and the innovators from producing more and more innovation when it comes to health care. And so the rest of the world's opportunity to benefit from the innovativeness of the United States would be diminished if we adopted socialized medicine here in the United States. And what are we trying to go fix. I would suggest this: The argument is that there are 44 to 47 million people in America that don't have health insurance. Now, no one should be very alarmed at that when they understand that everyone in America has access to health care. And, yes, it might be in the emergency room and it might not, and it's more often than not covered by somebody else's contribution, or there would be, through their workplace sometimes, or through some kind of government program or Medicare or Medicaid. But they all have access to health care. And a large percentage of us have health insurance. And the number of 44 to 47 million that are uninsured, according to those who, on this side of the aisle who never come down here to ask me to yield and rebut my arguments, they just simply, apparently, are bewildered by the truth--so I would be happy to yield if any of you have an argument that you would like to make that would add some substance to this argument, but you don't--44 to 47 million uninsured by your numbers. But when you start carving out of that those who are illegally in the United States, if ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were to deliver a voucher that were to provide for about half of these uninsured, pay for their insurance premium, they will be compelled by law to deport them rather than hand them the voucher check. So you can cut that number down substantially, you know that to be true. Then if you take out of these 44 million, the numbers of people who are in transition from one health insurance policy to another, and if you take out of that also the young people that just haven't gotten into a program yet because partly because they don't want to pay the premiums for people who have higher health care costs, that 20-to-30, early 30s area, you are down to this number. They are chronically uninsured; according to a recent study, totals about 4 percent of the population. Now, if we establish socialized medicine, we are going to maybe get covered 99 percent of the population, and we are at this point now where the chronically uninsured are only 4 percent of the population. So why would we upset and completely transform the best health care system in the world to try to narrow down the 4 percent chronically uninsured and maybe, if they would just sign up or participate, we could get them down to 1 percent. For that 3 percent, we would upset the entire system. It does not make sense to me, and you cannot, you cannot save money in this health care program by turning it all into government unless you ration. And what's happening now is Medicare is driving down the costs and pushing the costs over on the private carriers. That's the real circumstance. And I want to also say, Mr. Speaker, to you, I want to make sure the American people hear this. When President Obama says, don't worry if you like your health insurance program that you have, you get to keep it, he is only the President of the United States. He doesn't get to promise Americans they get to keep their policy. He is setting up and wants to set up a national health care act, a socialized medicine program, an insurance program that competes directly with the private sector. And when you use taxpayer dollars to subsidize funding directly against the private sector, you necessarily will shrink and outcompete the private sector because it's going to be subsidized from--without the public--the government insurance program, will be subsidized by taxpayers. And if it is, it can outcompete that of the private sector. It's just a matter of the formula. And so if you are an insurance company that has to have your costs all added in, your administrative costs added, a margin for the profit, always competing for the best kind of bargain that is out there, which adds to the efficiencies, I will add. And the government comes in, and they say we are going to take you head to head, but we are going to pump in 25 percent of our costs out of the taxpayers here to funnel this in. That means they will be able to lower the premiums down and take these private health insurers out. I can tell you what happened in Germany. Otto von Bismarck established a national health care plan there more than 100 years ago, sometime in the late 1800s. And today 90 percent of Germans are covered by the public plan, the government plan, the taxpayer subsidized plan. Everybody is required to have a plan, about 99 percent do have a plan. But about 10 percent of them are covered by private insurance. That's all that's left. They pushed out all of the private carriers except for about 10 percent. That 10 percent are for people who are self-employed who can opt into that, who want a little bit better health care program. That's what's kept that little 10 percent margin there. I don't think 10 percent is a legitimate competition. And when the government owns and runs everything in the United States, what do you think happens to your prices and your efficiencies and your service? Price goes up, service goes down. Health care gets rationed. President Obama cannot promise the American people that you get to keep your health insurance plan because they are going to drive the health insurance companies out of business. And even if they don't, the employers who control those policies and the employee providers of health insurance will be making that decision on whether they want to opt into the government plan or whether they want to maintain the same or a different private plan for their employees. Yes, you can weigh in with your employer, you can make a request with your employer, but your employer will have to make a decision on the bottom line. The bottom line will be, is it cheaper to use taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for the employees, or cheaper to provide for the unsubsidized health insurance premiums from the private insurance companies? That decision will be made on a dollar-per-dollar basis in what looks like it's the best thing for the mid term, short term and long term. And it won't be a decision made by President Obama; it will be a decision made by the employer. So if the government offers a government plan, and the government plan saves the employer money, and you are an employee that is covered by your employer-provided plan, you can kiss it goodbye. It will be a government plan. It will be a national health care plan. It will be socialized medicine, and you will have one-size-fits-all medicine in the United States of America eventually under President Obama's proposal. That's a fact. It really is logically irrefutable. No matter how many times they repeat the same mantra over and over again, it comes back to the same conclusion, which is: The American people won't get to decide that they keep their own plan. Employers, if they provide that insurance, will decide. And the government will subsidize the competition to the point where it drives out the private sector providers, and then it's all one-size-fits-all, all one government plan, all socialized medicine, all Canadian model, all United Kingdom model, all European Union model. And what a cruel thing to do to the Canadians, Mr. Speaker, what a cruel thing. A good Canadian company today will hire people and promise them this: you have to accept the Canadian one-size-fits-all plan with its rationing and its long lines and its inefficiencies and people waiting in line, dying in line. You have to accept that because it is against the law in Canada to treat somebody without an order of processing. You have to get in the queue. They enforce it differently province to province, but the law exists. So let's say you need a hip replacement. You get in line with the people who need hip replacements and there is written criteria on what the priorities are. So you are standing in line. No matter how badly you need the hip replacement, you can't cut in front of the line; you are just stuck in that line. So employers, they want to offer a good package to their employees, will package up with this a health insurance plan that flies them out of Canada into the United States so they can get American health care. Now that is a nice plum. Let's say you have two people of such tremendous skill that you want to hire them because that is what it takes to keep your company. That is what the President thought about Tim Geithner, by the way, who will be before our committee tomorrow, that he was such a valuable person, the fact that he had not paid his taxes was not a large enough factor to weigh against him. If you have those kind of people that you can hire in Canada, you offer them this nice package, which when it is convenient for you, use the Canadian plan. But when you need the health care, we will fly you to Houston and give you heart surgery. Your heart gives you trouble today, we will operate on you tomorrow. Maybe even today if it is early enough in the morning. That is what happens in Canada: people are flown to the United States of America for their health care because it is rationed in Canada. Now that is not enough, Mr. Speaker. Would anybody go out and go through the Web sites and the Yellow Pages in Canada and look at the travel companies that package up health care trips to the United States? Hip replacement is easy to figure out. Let's say you live in British Columbia. No, how about Calgary in Alberta. You have a bad hip, and you finally get into the government doctor and he looks at you and says your socket is burned out, you have to have a hip replacement. Yes, I stood in hours or days to have you tell me that. I want it fixed. Well, we have a line over here. Let's say it is 400 long; we do a couple a week. So 52 weeks in a year, about 4 years or so. And I don't know that these are real numbers or hypothetical. But you understand you are in a long queue in Canada. So you understand you can go on the Internet, do a little search and come up with a nice little travel health care company, and there are a number of them in Canada who are in the business of packaging up the health care services. They will say, you don't want to drive because we will do this surgery in Seattle. We will set this up. We will set up your transportation, fly you down to Seattle, and then here is your transportation. You can get to the airport? Yes, I will drive my car. Park your car here; get on this plane. We will fly you from Calgary down to Seattle, and you can pick up the shuttle to the hotel, the hotel is next to the hospital, check into the hotel, go over to the clinic, the doctor will look you over and schedule you for surgery, which will be the following morning at 8 a.m. You go under the knife. You get your new hip socket. They give you a day and a half of therapy. We will bring you back to the hotel, and from the hotel they will shuttle you back to the airport and you can fly back to Calgary and you can go back home. All of that for what, turn key. They will cut you a deal turn key so you know what it will cost you to pack it all up from transportation, hotel room, doctors' visits, surgery costs, all of things that you get, including the therapy, the physical therapy on the tail end, and get you back home again, write one check or put it on your credit card. There is a company for you. They are the entrepreneurs that have survived in Canada in the face of socialized medicine because it created a demand for people to come to the United States. Do we shut that all off? Would we destroy the opportunities for the entrepreneurs in Canada that have so adeptly found and met a market demand? I say, no, we should not do that in this Congress. And I don't know if there is anybody in this Congress who knows that better than Judge, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert). I would be very happy to yield to my friend from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman briefly yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. And I would point out that, yes, Federal law is that a health care provider can't deny health care to illegals in their locale, and because of that there are no trauma centers in southern Arizona south of Tucson. They have all gone broke providing free health care for illegals that are flowing across our border. But it goes beyond that. We are even providing free health care for people who get injured in Mexico and are brought into the United States for free health care services. And I point this out, it's not something that you see in any of the data that we have here in Congress, you find these things out by doing things like dropping in on a surprise visit down at Sasabe, Arizona, at the point of entry where I stopped a couple of years ago. I went in and I thought I would introduce myself, it was a surprise visit, but I said, I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa. And the first officer said, I can't talk to you. So I went to the next officer and said, I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa, just dropped in to see how things are going. Can't talk to you. Talk to Mike over there; he's the shift supervisor, and he's ready to retire and he has terminal cancer. He'll talk to you. Okay. That much fear in place about simply divulging what's going on. So I was standing there talking to Mike, whom I pray is still alive and doing well, but I'm not very confident that he is, and as he began to tell me what was going on at Sasabe at the port of entry, some of that discussion about how many illegal ports there are east and west of their crossing the border, he got a phone call and he said, Excuse me a moment. He went away for a minute or so and he came back and he said, Well, I got a call. There's been an emergency that has been created on the Mexican side of the border in this town where they stage illegals, and it looks like there was a fight there. He didn't know if it was a drug fight or a booze fight or both, but there was an individual that was knifed. So he said they'd be bringing him across the border pretty soon in a Mexican ambulance, and I have called the helicopter to come down from Tucson and U.S. ambulances to come in with oxygen because we can't really stabilize the patient with what's on a Mexican ambulance. I happened to have a paramedic with me, so I asked him, Mike, will you take a look at this man when he comes? I want you to get in there and help save his life if you can, and I also want to know what's going on. He went in and went to work. And actually the Mexican ambulance came over the border, and the paramedic with me jumped right to work to try to save the fellow who had been stabbed right underneath the ribcage, into his liver it turned out. There was no oxygen. There was nothing in the Mexican ambulance except a little bit of gauze and some surgical gloves. That was it. Nothing else. No other medical supplies. So it was an ambulance that looked like an ambulance, but on the inside it was just simply an empty chamber. So he did what he could to stabilize him until the two U.S. ambulances showed up. Then they put him on oxygen. Then they stabilized him. Then we loaded him into the helicopter, and he flew off to Tucson University Hospital. Stabbed in the liver in Mexico, brought into Mexico in a Mexican ambulance, transferred out of that onto the care of two U.S. ambulances, and then put on a Life Flight to go up to Tucson where the next morning I stopped to visit to see how our guy was doing. And, by the way, he was covered with tattoos and all kinds of signs of being a bad hombre, and he'd been in a nasty fight and stabbed with something that looked like it was a knife about 3\1/2\ inches wide, apparently, was the blade and deep enough to go into his liver. I went to the hospital and asked to visit him. And as I went up there, I found out, and here's a short version of it, the net cost to the American taxpayers was $30,000, roughly, for the helicopter, for the medical care that he got. He was on parole into the United States to get health care, and he would be escorted back to the border when he was stabilized. All of that paid for by American people, American taxpayers, or American health care, health insurance premium payers, out of those pockets. So I sat down while I was there with the chief financial officer of Tucson University Hospital. And there they rolled out some numbers where their annual cost was, and this is my recollection, around $14.5 million of health care that they provided to illegals. They told of a circumstance where there had been a bus full of illegals that had been in a wreck and about 25 in there that were injured, and 15 of them were so badly injured that they were brought into the intensive care unit. ICU was packed full of 15 illegals. No room for any people in Tucson who had been paying their health insurance premium to provide for that kind of emergency care. So they were Life Flighting the residents of Tucson up to Phoenix to go into the ICU in Phoenix, and then their families had to drive there to visit because the ICU in Tucson was full. And that is the only and the most southerly trauma center in Arizona. Another situation where there was a mother that was pregnant with multiple babies, five of them. So in order to avoid the high cost of multiple births in Tucson, and she was from Mexico, lived in Mexico, but they found out about this. They had been sending people down there to train the health care providers in Mexico. They trained them on how to deal with a multiple birth, set it all up so they didn't have this high cost of these anchor babies coming into the United States. Five new American citizens created to go on the rolls of the burden to the taxpayers.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to extend the time for the duration.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, the multiple births that were to take place in the home country of Mexico where they had sent American health care workers down to train Mexican health care workers, in spite of all of that investment to prevent the extra costs and five new anchor babies, as soon as she got ready to go into labor, she sneaked into the United States and they had her there anyway. That was $125,000 for that little turn. This is a thing that's going on because of this law, and I wanted to inject that in. We aren't just providing health care for everybody in the United States, legal or illegal. We are also providing it occasionally for people who are injured in other countries and brought into the United States because we have such a good health care system here. And our taxpayers pay for it, our rate payers pay for it, and the people in the communities pay for it. I yield back to the gentleman from Texas and ask him to carry on with the thought process that I interrupted.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and looking at the list of housekeeping that I have to do, I'd like to conclude this discussion on health care. I would just point out that Judge Gohmert from Texas anticipated the item that was on my mind and flowed into the transparency of the costs of health care. As far as I know, we're the only two people in this Congress that are talking about transparency on health care costs. How this works is this: If Medicare doesn't pay the costs of providing the services, if other providers don't pay or if other insurance companies, like the largest ones, they will drive that down, they'll track Medicare reimbursement rates down. That means that somebody else has to pay the difference. It's like pushing on a balloon one way or the other, and that's the transparency that's necessary. I keep going back to the hip replacement because that's a simple one to understand. If a hip replacement costs somebody on Medicare-- let's put a number on it just to pull it out of the air. Let's say it costs somebody on Medicare $7,500, and it costs somebody that's going to write a check out of their billfold $10,000, and somebody who is covered by a good private health insurance company maybe is going to cost them $9,000. Why is that? It's because the government has pushed down the reimbursement rates under Medicare; and because of that, the losses have to be made up somewhere else. I will go another step beyond the complete transparency that Mr. Gohmert calls for, and I will say this: If Bill Gates pulls into a gas station and the sign says $2.49 a gallon, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the other rich people in the world buy their gas at $2.49 a gallon. The poorest person in the world has a rattle-trap old car, and they went out and scraped together enough money to go buy 10 gallons of gas to put in their rattle-trap car. They are going to pay $2.49 a gallon, sitting at the pump right there with Bill Gates in his Lexus or Mercedes or whatever it might be and Warren Buffett, who probably doesn't drive that nice of a car, actually. Well, why would a gallon of gas be the same price for the poor and the rich but have a hip replacement be different prices for people, depending on whether it's paid for by the taxpayers under Medicare or a private payer who is, let's say, self-insured who has a nice big checkbook and decides not to pay that premium or somebody who has a private health insurance premium? Why three or more different prices? The reason is because the government has pushed down those costs, and they get averaged out through balanced billing and cost shifting from the health care providers. That is one of the root causes of the problems we have with our health providers today. It's kind of like the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to talk about it because it's too hard to fix. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Texas. I say, but, Mr. Speaker, we have a stimulus plan. We have a $787 billion stimulus plan that is going to jump-start this economy and get us out of the doldrums and solve this problem with unemployment and put Americans back to work and get the Dow Jones back up above 8,200 or somewhere and make America feel good again and give confidence in the venture capitalists that are out there and in the markets and in the Dow and in the entrepreneurs. Well, all of that was part of a stimulus plan. I came down on this floor while that was being debated, and I put up a poster that looks a lot like this. Only it didn't have $16.1 million on it. It had $32 million on it. And it had the quote from President Obama here rather than the quote from Speaker Pelosi. And the quote from President Obama was: ``We are not going to do earmarks. We are not going to do Member- sponsored initiatives. And I'm not going to sign any bill that has earmarks in it.'' Well, it depended on how you counted it. It seems to me that the number of earmarks in that bill came to around 9,000, maybe a little less, 8,500, depending on how you defined the earmarks. This is a picture of this cute little guy. I don't know if it is a girl or a guy. Do you see how cute he is? He is a pet project. This is Speaker Pelosi's pet project, her pet mouse project. This is the not quite yet infamous--and here is what he is. He is the salt water marsh harvest mouse. Now that is SWMHM for short. This little mouse lives out there in the marsh near San Francisco. And he has been a special project of the Speaker. For years, she has tried to get earmarks for this mouse. Now, take a close look there. You don't see it, but there is an earmark there. Even though I said that this stimulus plan had an earmark in it for the salt water marsh harvest mouse, everybody that spoke for the Speaker and the people on this side of the aisle said, oh, no, that is radical reactionism. There aren't any earmarks in this bill. And, furthermore, the salt water marsh harvest mouse is not going to be one of those earmarks, because that would be a pet project--a pet project--for the Speaker, and that would be inappropriate given that the President has ordered that there will not be pet projects. Well, this is what the Speaker said on January 25, 2009. After the beginning of this 111th Congress, 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 most to prove. 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. Well, the mouse family may need it. Maybe it is a good thing, $16.1 million for this little old mouse that couldn't quite rise high enough in the priority scale in any previous process of the United States Congress. But here in the desperate straits of 14\1/2\ million unemployed and another 5.8 or 9 million looking for a job, 20 million people out there who would like to have an opportunity to fend for themselves, we are going to drop not $32 million any longer, it has been carved down, we are going to put $16.1 million into the salt water marsh harvest mouse earmarked in this little pet project. This little pet project is earmarked now for $16.1 million. All the people over there that said, oh, Steve King is a reactionary and a radical. He is making up things that aren't in the bill. It isn't going to happen. We wouldn't do a thing like that, including the Speaker who has defined that she won't do a thing like that now has $16.1 million going into the marsh for the salt water marsh harvest mouse. His viability--I presume he is doing okay without this earmark. If we need jobs and an economy that works, we don't need to be dumping money into the salt water marsh harvest mouse. By the way, that is an earmark. It is a pet project. His ears are notched. That is what we do. And that is where the name came from. I wanted to point that out, Mr. Speaker, while this microphone is still alive here on this day, that this is the day that there was confirmation that the people who pointed this out back then in about this period in time in January or early February were right, and those who defended the Speaker and said it will never happen were wrong; $16.1 million was dropped in to the salt water marsh harvest mouse. And that should give a person a little bit of pause. Now I want to put something else into the Record here this evening, and that is you have had a couple of votes this week, one today and one the night before last, that I think are important. On the night before last, we had a vote on a resolution that would place a stone in the Capitol Visitor Center that honors the slaves that contributed to the construction of this Capitol Building. They did do that. They contributed to the construction. We ought to acknowledge that. But, you know, we had the huge room over in the Capitol Visitor Center that was designated as the Great Hall. Now the Great Hall brings to mind the Great Hall in Ellis Island. It would honor all of the immigrants that came to America, those that came voluntarily and those that came involuntarily. And it is an image that is very, very moving when you walk through the Great Hall in Ellis Island. I was very happy to name the room over in the visitor center the Great Hall. But it had to be changed because of the objections of the Congressional Black Caucus that wanted a higher acknowledgment for slavery in this country. So the Great Hall's name was changed to Emancipation Hall. Okay. No objection here. Emancipation was a big thing for the world when we put an end to slavery here in the United States. At great cost, however. A resolution to do so was traded off in a quid pro quo, and for those people who didn't go to law school like myself, I have to tell you, there was a deal made. The deal that was made was this: the Architect of the Capitol who has been trying to scrub every reference to faith from anything that's developed from this point forward around this Capitol complex and even refusing to allow when a flag is flown over this Capitol, the certificate that certifies that it was flown, if you want to say, July 10 in the year of our Lord, 2009, he wants to scrub ``the year of our Lord'' out of there because that's a reference to religion. Never mind above the Speaker's seat: it says, In God We Trust. It's been there for a long time, that is our national motto, and the Architect of the Capitol sought to block our national motto from being displayed in the Congressional Visitor Center along with the Pledge of Allegiance. So in order to require the Architect to recognize our national motto In God We Trust and ``one nation under God'' in our Pledge of Allegiance, there had to be a quid pro quo, a deal made, that in addition to Emancipation Hall, there would be an extra monument put up to recognize slavery. All right. I'm fine with recognizing slavery. I would have been an abolitionist if I had been born back in those years prior to the Civil War. It's an article of faith, it's an article of Christian fundamentalism that slavery is a sin against God. And a good thing that happened when this country put an end to it, at great cost in blood. But if it's going to be the kind of devil's bargain that if you're going to have a reference to God in the Congressional Visitor Center you first have to pass another way to recognize slavery, in order to pacify the Congressional Black Caucus, a separatist organization in this Congress, in order to get a reference to God, the quid pro quo was, pass this resolution first and then we'll bring up the resolution that lets you vote on whether there's going to be In God We Trust in our visitor center. That took place today. The vote 2 days ago was 399- 1. I voted ``no'' on the slavery marker because it was making a deal with requiring that to pass before the word God could go up in the Congressional Visitor Center, even though it's a direct replica of what's right behind me above the Speaker's chair right now. That resolution passed tonight with eight Members of Congress voting against putting our national motto up in the visitor center and against putting up the Pledge of Allegiance in the visitor center because there's a reference to God in each one. Eight voted no. Two voted present. Ten couldn't bring themselves to acknowledge that God's a great big part of what formed this country and those words will stand no matter who stands against it. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for being recognized, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 2997, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 2997, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation Operations Amount: $288,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Soybean Assn. Address of Requesting Entity: 4554 114th St., Urbandale, IA 50322 Description of Request: The public now demands from crop producers both increased production of food, fiber, fuel, and other biobased product feedstocks and increased, documented environmental performance to conserve soils, sequester carbon, improve water quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency and increase wildlife habitat. As independent business persons, farmers in the Upper Mississippi River Basin and across the country need management systems to help them incorporate the best tools of science and business to measure and improve both agronomic and environmental performance while sustaining profitability. The Iowa Soybean Association's Certified Environmental Management Systems for Agriculture (CEMSA) program has developed and piloted the basic management system and the technical assistance model producers in Iowa, the UMR Basin, and other agricultural regions need to meet these 21st Century demands. Expanding the scale of CEMSA in FY10, integrating individual planning with watershed planning, linking performance reporting to NRCS's system, and documenting and providing aggregated performance data to the soy biodiesel and corn ethanol industry on advances in agriculture's environmental performance and energy efficiency have significant implications in transferability of CEMSA throughout the UMR Basin and in the future of the farm-belt biofuels industry. It benefits farmers by preparing them for participation in USDA conservation programs, helping them improve profitability through better management, helps them effectively implement and evaluate the impact on their business of conservation strategies they hold as top priorities, and verifies their success in achieving environmental and energy efficiency performance gains. CEMSA is also providing national leadership for advancing production agriculture's environmental performance. It is one of the ISA programs recognized by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council's study on ``Mississippi River Water Quality and the Clean Water Act'' as exemplary of the performance-based, public-private partnership projects that should be expanded throughout the UMR Basin. CEMSA's private sector partnership with a public agency (USDA NRCS) has a positive impact on the agency's ability to fulfill its mission. This multi-year cooperative agreement has facilitated a strong working relationship which helps diffuse private sector innovation in the local, state, and federal offices and expands agency outreach through ISA's multi-level outreach to farmers. This public-private partnership designed specifically for ISA's programs enables flexibility the agency would not have on its own to create resource-centric planning and implementation, rather than program-centric approaches to resources. It has created an effective way to deal with institutional barriers that often hinder effective program implementation, which can best be done by the private sector working with agencies, but is not otherwise supported by the market or by program funding. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 2997, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation Operations Amount: $282,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Hungry Canyons Alliance Address of Requesting Entity: 712 S. Hwy 6 & 59, Oakland, IA 51560 Description of Request: The goals of Hungry Canyons Alliance are: 1) To provide financial and technical assistance for streambed stabilization projects to the 23 counties of the deep loess region in western Iowa, 2) To conduct research in effective methods of streambed stabilization, and 3) To provide demonstration of streambed stabilization projects for members and for the public. With an estimated construction budget of $1,243,900 for FY10, the HCA will build approximately 18 grade control structures to prevent streambed degradation in western Iowa, protecting $5.27 million in infrastructure and property value and preventing 1.2 million tons of sediment from erosion. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 2997, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation Operations Amount: $134,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Soybean Assn. Address of Requesting Entity: 4554 114th St., Urbandale, IA 50322 Description of Request: The Iowa Soybean Association's Watershed Management and Demonstration Program is a continuing project that links public and private resources and expertise to provide technical assistance to individual farmers, groups of farmers, and other stakeholders in Iowa watersheds for the purpose of improving agriculture's environmental performance and watershed health. The project design employs science-based applied evaluation tools at field, farm, and watershed level (such as water monitoring, soil sampling, and guided stalk sampling) to collect performance data that can be applied in a feedback loop to the planning process. The project supports expert staff to assist watershed organizations and groups of farmers in developing and maintaining these adaptive management plans and in measuring and reporting performance in optimizing fertilizer use efficiency, remediating agricultural pollutants, decreasing soil erosion, building soil carbon, improving on-farm energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing wildlife habitat, and maintaining or increasing yield and profitability. Private-public partnerships among agencies, private industry, producers, environmental groups, all levels of government, water utilities, and the university are fundamental to the design of this project, and those functioning partnerships to achieve the above project objectives are a measure of the project's success. This project also enables farmers to engage in watershed leadership and planning, employing their expertise and motivating more effective environmental management practices. Federal funding will be used to support integration of watershed planning and privately funded conservation practices with planning and performance reporting conducted by USDA NRCS in Iowa; integration of watershed planning with individual producers' conservation planning in targeted watersheds in 4-6 additional targeted watersheds; development and evaluation of solutions to agricultural non-point source pollution targeted to prioritized Iowa watersheds; and integration of data collection and reporting focused on soil, atmosphere, and energy conservation as indirect attributes of water quality improvement efforts in agricultural watersheds. One of the greatest challenges to achieving and documenting actual improvements in water quality and watershed health where Rapid Watershed Assessment and Watershed Planning has taken place and where significant farmer participation in conservation planning and implementation is taking place is the lack of sustained funding for planning, technical assistance to farmers and watersheds, and water monitoring implementations. Previous appropriations for this project are helping meet that challenge in at least three major agricultural watersheds in Iowa--Raccoon, Boone, and Iowa River-Upper. FY10 funding will help continue to meet that challenge for the period of time required to achieve and document results and to demonstrate a performance-based model for achieving agronomic, environmental, and economic goals in farm-belt watersheds. The planning and monitoring infrastructure and watershed partnerships developed under previous federal funding are in place, and these appropriations help ensure the necessary scope and scale of implementation and the integration of otherwise discreet programs. The work being done in these watersheds, linked to sophisticated water monitoring and analysis and other resource monitoring tools, can have a significant impact on the ability of farmers and other agricultural watershed stakeholders to achieve and document real advances in watershed health and water quality, if given time to work. This can have significant impacts on the ability of agencies to tailor their program incentives, cost share, and delivery systems to be more effective in helping groups of producers in watershed achieve success in meeting natural resource conservation goals and improving water quality. It will also demonstrate effective models for the private sector's role in working with agencies to more efficiently and effectively meet environmental performance goals. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 2997, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 Account: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Watershed/Flood Prevention Operations Amount: $1,146,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: USDA--Natural Resources Conservation Services Address of Requesting Entity: 210 Walnut Street, 693 Federal Building, Des Moines, IA 50309 Description of Request: The requested funding will be used to reduce flood damage, gully erosion damage, stream channel degradation, and to improve water quality within the Little Sioux River Watershed of western Iowa. The Little Sioux watershed in western Iowa is an area that is intensively farmed due to productive but easily erodible soils. This funding will help to provide landowners and communities much- needed assistance in installing soil and water conservation practices to slow water runoff and reduce erosion damage to agricultural land, public infrastructure including roads and bridges, and to reduce sediment and associated agricultural nutrients and pesticides being delivered to streams and rivers.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding and for managing this time. Initially I remarked that it is refreshing to at least hear from a Democrat or two who sound like they do believe and understand in business. That is refreshing. I would think that you would not be Democrats for that reason. I appreciate the dialogue, and I look forward to a lot more. Maybe we can get to the point on how this free market system really works. I'm curious about this metaphor, ``hockey puck growth curve.'' I'm looking forward to when the gentleman from Oregon can explain that. I think that is the ``Obama hockey puck growth curve,'' which is when you drop the hockey puck in the middle of the arena. That is what has happened with our growth curve since this stimulus package was passed, but I will let him explain that a little further on his own time. I wanted to raise the issue, Mr. Speaker, of two amendments that were refused by the Rules Committee that I offered in committee and in the full Small Business Committee. We should be about equal opportunity under the law and opportunities for everyone to succeed in this country in a free market economy; yet we have a situation where we are going to approve organizations to be helping out to advance the information and the grants would go to the organizations, and yet one of the organizations that could qualify is ACORN, which has produced over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations and admitted to that. They and/ or their employees are under investigation in 14 States. There is a clear consensus that they are an organization that has at least the image of a criminal organization, and there were investigations. We are in a situation where they are coming into the census as well, and this Congress can't have a voice on whether we are going to approve Federal taxpayer dollars that might go to ACORN? I just ask, eliminate ACORN from this. No. We can't have a vote on that on the floor of the House, according to the Rules Committee. By the way, we also have special preferences that are set up in this bill that I believe are unconstitutional, equal protection under the law. And these preferences go to either underserved organizations or disabled veterans or women or minorities. Now, if you're not a disabled veteran, the only way you qualify is as a woman or a minority----

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady. Now, I would ask the indulgence of this body to think about what that means. When we have equal protection under the law, a Constitution that should protect us all equally, that is our guarantee, and yet we have legislation before this Congress that defines that it will go especially to women and minorities, and if you look at the cross- section of American society, and it specifically, by definition, excludes white men, I think it is discriminatory. I think that we need to preserve these resources to go to disabled veterans and underserved areas. That was my amendment. It was turned down by the Rules Committee. And, by the way, the Chair declared my amendment to ACORN to be partisan.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. As always, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives. We have had a little bit of a break here, a hiatus to go back home and spend some time on the 4th of July to celebrate the birth of our great country--233 years of freedom. A lot of that freedom has been debated, deliberated, and argued over here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this world's greatest deliberative body. The most costly freedom was fought for and lives and blood were sacrificed for on this soil and in foreign lands as well for this Nation to emerge at what has been and had become a strong and vibrant constitutional Republic. Part of the requirements to maintain that strong and vibrant constitutional Republic are that we engage in debate here and that we bring together and aggregate the best ideas of the 300 million Americans that elect the 435 Members of the House of Representatives and the 100 Senators. It's essential that we maintain that kind of vibrant dialogue in this deliberative democracy, as some would call it. It's essential that we maintain the highest levels of integrity in order that this great Republic can continue on the path that has been charted for it by so many of our Founding Fathers and our predecessors. However difficult the process that they were in might have been, they emerged and led this Nation clearly along a path, a higher road; and that higher road has been a road that held our own Members accountable for the highest standards of ethics. We have an Ethics Committee here in the House. I recall much of the debate that took place here on the floor back during the 108th and the 109th Congresses when allegations were made about Members and their levels of integrity. I remember prior to my arrival here many charges being filed in the Ethics Committee against Members of Congress who, it seemed to be, their only transgression was that they were effective in advancing the conservative cause. I recall, Madam Speaker, that when Nancy Pelosi was the leader and not the Speaker, she gave many speeches herself and alleged over and over again, Elect us into the majority, and we will come in, and we will drain the swamp, Madam Speaker. Well, here we are now. The majority has changed. The promise apparently is drifting away, and there are questions that continue to emerge and questions about the standards that are being adhered to, or not being adhered to, by certain Members of this body. Questions that are raised by publications that have a strong affinity for the majority party in this Congress, those who made a living out of attacking and criticizing Republicans when they were in the majority and Republicans when they were in the minority now are raising ethics questions about the activities of the Members of this new Democrat majority who is now halfway through their third year. So 2\1/2\ years into this majority, we're starting to see that the allegation about draining the swamp was only an allegation about using ethics charges to attack Republicans. I'm not seeing this same level of leadership, regardless of the promise made by the Speaker, to scrutinize the Members that are under the public's scrutiny now, and some who are reportedly under investigation by the FBI. Now I'm going to be a little gentle about how I discuss some of these issues, Madam Speaker, because it is a delicate subject. But it's essential that the subject be raised and that we have this debate and this dialogue here on this floor because in the end, it's not going to be the conscience of the people that are crossing the line or allegedly crossing the line. They aren't going to wake up in the night and have an attack of conscience or an epiphany and come down here and say, I'm going to clean up my act. I've gone too far. I slipped into some things that I shouldn't have been involved in. That is not going to happen. That is not what human nature does except in very, very rare circumstances. No. What will happen is, if this is to be cleaned up, and if it's to be addressed, the ethics questions, the cloud that hangs over Member after Member after Member here, influential Members, members of the Appropriations Committee, Chairs of the Appropriations Subcommittees that exert significant influence over where taxpayer dollars go, this cloud that hangs over is only going to be cleared if the Speaker of the House follows through on her promise to drain her swamp--or if the public becomes so outraged that they demand that the situation be cleaned up. Now we have had for a long time in this House--and I can think back at least 2\1/2\ years--we've had a dysfunctional Ethics Committee, a committee that was a black hole, that if there was a charge that was filed, it went in, and it was never acted upon. And they could investigate in complete confidentiality so no one could look over their shoulder, a committee that was balanced and nonpartisan in such a way that it was immobilized and couldn't take action at all. I cannot remember the last action of the Ethics Committee that had any effect in a constructive way of providing more cleanliness here in the House of Representatives. Now if I get to these posters, I am going to go through some of the things that are constantly in the news. This summary comes out to be this: This is the ``draining the swamp'' leadership hour of the Republican leadership, and we have a pattern of ignoring the corruption. There is a pattern of practice for Speaker Pelosi. We have eight appropriators who, it's reported, are now under investigation for potential conflict of interest violations. With the Nation's spending out of control and trillions going to special interest, we have questions and challenges that are coming up, flowing throughout the media. Let me say that new allegations of these defense millions are funneled to aides and relatives; contractors are now charged with kickbacks. We have seen thousands in defense contractor dollars go through PMA, and out of there came donations to the Appropriations Chair of the Armed Services Committee. Then we've seen $250 million in earmarks go back through that lobbying firm, PMA, which, it's reported, is clearly under investigation. A lobbying firm that has been closed down because of the investigation and those activities that are the subject of FBI investigations have shut down the lobbying firm PMA, a defense contractor lobbying firm, and have implicated a significant number of Nancy Pelosi's chosen Chairs, people whom she has handed the gavel to. This list is long, and I think it's expressive of what is going on. We had one of the Appropriations Chairs step down from the Ethics Committee because of reports of an ethics investigation but found himself chairing the Justice Appropriations Committee--the people that were reportedly investigating him, holding onto the gavel in one hand to control the Appropriations and Justice approps, at the same time holding the purse strings of the FBI, who is reportedly investigating the chairman of Justice approps. This goes on in the United States Congress, and the American people are not outraged? I think they are. I think they just have so many things to be outraged about that they can't bring their focus on one subject or another because it comes at them over and over again like a trip-hammer. These allegations that are documented--the same Member, the chairman of Justice approps, received a $70,000 donation to his family's foundation. At the same time millions were earmarked to the West Virginia High Tech Consortium. That's just a touch of what's going on there, Madam Speaker. And as I've watched this for 4 to 5 years, it just gets worse. When we see a chairman of Justice approps, for example, with 50 earmarks in a bill, and the people that are on the committee are afraid to challenge him for fear that their district will be punished, a certain culture grows up within the appropriators in this Congress, when their fear that they will lose their leverage and not be considered to be a loyal member of that committee, might be considered ineffective, if they are to raise the issues that they know should be raised. What happened to the altruism that I read about in our history books, the altruism that I was convinced existed and burned within the heart of all of our predecessors as they shaped this country? Yes, they disagree on policy; but I didn't think that they disagreed on ethics. That's the chairman of the Justice approps. We know about the Appropriations Chair of Armed Services and his connection with the earmark to the unused airport. I think we ought to take a CODEL to that airport. We have here a situation that has to do with the CBC. As we call it here, the Congressional Black Caucus, Madam Speaker, for those who are not on a day-to-day basis dealing with the acronyms of this House and, let me say, a separatist group that has formed themselves in a way that if it were any other group of people, they wouldn't be allowed to have an organization like this. But it's a matter of record that the Congressional Black Caucus took some trips down into St. Martin, Antigua and Barbuda. That was in 2007. And the question is: Were there corporate funds that sponsored these trips? And if so, it would be a clear violation of House rules. There is videotape, I'm advised, that shows the banners of the corporations hung up across the area where it's presented, and Members are thanking the corporations for sponsoring their trip. And who would be dealing with the investigation? Representative G.K. Butterfield, Democrat, North Carolina, member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and one who had gone on a previous trip into that same part of the world with the same group of people. So we would ask the same people who are being, let me say, evaluated for a potential ethics violations to investigate essentially themselves. So maybe they want to get back together and have a little reunion and decide if they did anything wrong. We don't have answers to the public. We simply have a black hole of ethics that hangs over their head. They also argue that it's improper for someone--and I'll argue this. It's improper for someone who attended the Caribbean conference to lead an investigation into it as to whether it violated House rules. What a contradiction. But the same gentleman who's leading the investigation, Mr. Butterfield of North Carolina said, You cannot completely divorce yourself from relationships. Yet he would be willing to recuse himself if he got the sense that there was a contradiction. We shall see. And what do we hear from the Congressional Black Caucus when the issue was raised and the press asked them the question, Did you go on a corporate-funded trip to the Caribbean? Or was it two or three? Their response was--well, they complained about a lack of minorities in the office that was taking a look at this issue, the Office of Congressional Ethics, which was set up by Nancy Pelosi. So Speaker Pelosi's Office of Congressional Ethics is looking into the activities of the Congressional Black Caucus and their trips to the Caribbean, potentially funded by corporations. And what does the Congressional Black Caucus have to say? They don't think that the committee looking into them has enough minorities. The first question asked, and they have to play the race card. That doesn't speak to me as an issue that they have a very strong defense for. That's the knee-jerk response, Play the race card. That's why they are the Congressional Black Caucus, after all, the liberal Congressional Black Caucus. And we have Peter Flaherty, the president of a conservative watchdog group, and upon uncovering evidence of the trip's corporate sponsors, he said he was disappointed with the appointment of Mr. Butterfield to head up the investigative group. His answer was, the Congressional Black Caucus really sticks together. You can see their solidarity in the face of these ethics charges. To put one of their own members in charge of the investigation just shows that nothing has changed. The ethics process is still a complete mockery. Peter Flaherty. And Mr. McGee also questioned whether the Congressional Black Caucus members should be leading the probe. He said, In this case, this is a trip that is publicly connected to the CBC, and only CBC members were participants. To have a CBC member lead the investigation is not the best way to ensure a publicly credible and acceptable result. Mr. McGee, I agree. We could go on and on. But here is the quote from Speaker Pelosi when she said that she's making a commitment to ``draining the swamp of corruption.'' I don't see activity on that commitment, and it is time. It is time we raised the issue. It's time the American people look into these allegations. It's time that this Congress form an effective Ethics Committee, an Ethics Committee that can clean this up and drain this swamp, as defined by the Speaker, who I think eventually is going to have to respond to this. She's going to have to keep her word. She has created the organization, the evaluation organization, and now it's time to use it. And the name of the organization that she shaped escapes me for the moment, but it was formed by the Speaker of the House for the purposes of--in her words, ``draining the swamp,'' and what do we get from the Congressional Black Caucus but a complaint that there weren't enough minorities on the committee that were appointed by the Speaker. Now, I'd like to think that ethics is completely independent of ethnicity. I'd like to think that morality is independent of ethnicity or race or gender or whatever one happens to be oriented. I would like to think right is right and wrong is wrong, that truth is truth, that fiction is fiction, that the Constitution is what it is, that the Bible says what it says, that the Declaration says what it says, and that every Member here would speak the truth. I would like to think that every Member of this Congress carries with them, internally, an ethical conscience that we owe a duty to the American people, that we owe a duty to the American people to live here at the highest standards and that we will not be drawn down into the low standards, and that we owe a duty to them to stop and to evaluate ourselves. That is what the Ethics Committee is about. The working group that is designed to enhance the Ethics Committee apparently is not functioning, but we do have a Member of the Congressional Black Caucus investigating the Congressional Black Caucus under the auspices of the organization that is formed by the Speaker to do just that. I don't think it is quite the fox guarding the henhouse because I don't know what goes on in the mind of Mr. Butterfield. But I will say it raises questions. This Congress needs to raise questions. We are watching favoritism here on the floor of the House. A week ago last Friday, the cap-and-trade bill, cap-and-tax bill, I call it, passed off the floor of this House. There were dozens of Members of this Congress, Democrats in the dozens, who had made the public statement that they were opposed to this cap-and-tax bill. But what we saw happen was as they needed the votes to get it passed, Member after Member would walk down in a lineup. They would queue up back here behind the microphone. And they would have in their hand their little script. They would carry that script down to the microphone. And the chairman who was managing the time would yield to them. They would read from the script. And the script would say something to the effect of ``I took a position against the bill because I was concerned about the interests of my constituents,'' which really means ``because I know it will cost my district a lot of money, it will transfer our jobs overseas, and it is a bad idea.'' This is what they said before the bill came to the floor. An amendment was dropped in at 3 o'clock in the morning. It was 309 pages. No one had a chance to read it. But still they read from their script, and it said, on balance, I think that we have mitigated some of the disaster created by this--they wouldn't say it quite that plainly, of course--but I think we've mitigated some of the problems in this bill and I think we're working on this and we're going in the right direction. I think my constituents are going to be adequately covered. Then they would pause while the committee chairman would read from his script. And he would say, I appreciate working with the gentleman. We've made progress on this bill. And even though we haven't had a chance to change any more language in this amendment that came in, 309 pages at 3 o'clock in the morning, to accommodate for this component that this Member would like to have, still, the fact that we read this colloquy into the Record changes the meaning of the bill. And now the Member that was there and had read off the script, ``So therefore I'm going to vote for the bill because I've worked with the chairman and we each agree we've done our duty to God and country and the bill is not as bad as it would have been otherwise.'' Really? The bill changes because one Member won't vote for it unless he gets some cover? So he walks down here, reads from the script, the chairman reads from the script, the Member reads from the conclusion of the script, and now we have changed the meaning of the bill? And it is enough to turn a vote around 180 degrees and deliver to America a cap- and-tax bill by a vote of 219-212 which, by all appearances, is this: They're wrong on the science, they're wrong on the global warming argument, and the idea that you can set the Earth's thermostat simply by controlling CO2 emissions, only CO2 emissions, and by doing so from American industry is going to lower the temperature of the Earth, and that by lowering the temperature of the Earth, we are going to have a higher quality of life. That is the undercurrent of this. I will say they are wrong on the science. They can't make a scientific argument. They are completely wrong on the economics. The idea that we are going to create green jobs by taxing energy, specific kinds of energy, CO2-emitting energy, is completely wrong. What solution was the best solution if you accept the premise of Mr. Waxman? It would be a lot of nuclear-generated power, for which we have no provision that opens it up so that we can build more nuclear-generating plants. It has become virtually impossible to build new coal-fired generating plants before this bill passed the floor of the House. The development of electrical generation in America is now frozen, suspended until we can figure out what is going to take place, what the Senate will do, if they take up the bill at all, and how they might amend it. But when you take something that is bad and you amend it marginally, it is still bad. I have watched this unfold here on the floor of the House. I have watched it unfold behind the scenes. I have watched it unfold in committee. And I have yet to hear a legitimate dialogue in debate. I have yet to hear one Member of this Congress come here and raise the argument that scientifically they are right, that they can dial the temperature of the Earth down by reducing the CO2 emissions in the United States and by raising the cost of energy. This bill is an energy tax. It taxes all the energy in America. If you get in a car or on a bus and ride a half a block, you have used energy. If you throw on a light switch, you have used energy. If you pick up a cup of coffee, it took energy to heat the coffee and make it. It took energy to make the cup. Whenever you move, you are using something that took energy to produce. All of our components are intricately tied to energy. A nation that has expensive energy will be uncompetitive against the nations that have cheap energy and lots of it. One of the strengths of this Nation has been that we have had a sound and good, competitive, multi-sourced energy policy in the United States. We pioneered the oil drilling in the world. We led with this. It started in Pennsylvania. It developed in Texas and Oklahoma and other places around the country. It went up to the North Slope of Alaska. It went offshore. America has developed much of the technology that produces the oil and natural gas for the world today. That has been a core of the strength of America's vibrant and huge global economy that we drive. The percentage of it that we have is so significant. We have had almost unlimited natural resources for most of this term of 233 years. We have had a lot of cheap energy of many different varieties. We have had constitutional rights, especially property rights, the rule of law, a work ethic and a morality that has tied this country together. These are the pillars of American exceptionalism. We had ideas for energy just a year ago. A year and a month ago, some of us were here on the floor of the House, and we had been debating energy for I will say about 6 weeks, when we got up to the August break. Now as the energy debate got turned up, the Speaker of the House decided she didn't want to hear any more discussion about energy. So they abruptly adjourned and shut this process down. We kept debating anyway as the microphones were shut off and eventually the lights were shut off. We kept debating anyway. And we went out into the Capitol Building and brought people in to the seats, people off the streets, and set them in the seats here on the floor of the House of Representatives. People sat in Charlie Rangel's seat. They sat over here in Barney Frank's seat. They sat in Mr. Dingell's seat. They sat in Republican seats too. They sat this close, right here, tourists off the streets of Washington, D.C., off the Capitol Building in here on the floor of the House of Representatives so we would have somebody to talk to because the TV cameras were shut off and turned to the side. The microphones were shut off. And the lights were shut down in here because the Speaker didn't want to hear any more energy debate. But the delivery we gave then and the delivery that we continued on up until nearly the election last fall was all energy all the time, as our leader says, ``all of the above.'' I put a chart here on the floor that showed all of the sources of energy that we consume in the United States. It is a pie chart with color code, how much is coal, how much is natural gas, how much is petroleum products, gas and diesel fuel, jet fuel, heating oil, how much is ethanol, biodiesel, wind, nuclear, geothermal, solar, and coal. The list goes on. We were consuming 101.4 quadrillion Btus of energy in the United States and producing about 72 quadrillion Btus of energy. So roughly speaking, we are producing only 72 percent of the overall energy that we are consuming in the United States. And yet we are an energy-rich nation. We are an energy-rich nation that should be able to shape an energy policy, an energy policy that will keep our energy cheap so that our economy can be competitive, so that Americans can make things here in the United States, and America will be where the jobs are. Jobs are going to be where it is competitive. It is pretty obvious from looking at what is happening to General Motors and Chrysler that we have had a lot of trouble being competitive on labor. If we can't be competitive on labor, at least we can be competitive on our natural resources and at least we can be competitive on our energy prices. Instead, the Speaker of the House has embarked upon a path of making energy more expensive in this country under this viewpoint of trying to save the planet. Do you remember the quote from last year? ``I'm trying to save the planet. I'm trying to save the planet.'' She is trying to save the planet by increasing the cost of all of the energy in America and driving up the cost of electricity. We had a witness before an Energy and Commerce Subcommittee chaired by Mr. Markey. This gentleman's name is David Sokol, who is the chairman of the board at MidAmerican Energy. Mr. Sokol testified as to the costs in increased electricity, the costs to the, I think the number is 6.9 million, ratepayers that MidAmerican has. They have a balanced portfolio of energy sources. They said they can meet the carbon caps that are being imposed on them in this cap-and-tax bill. But what will happen is the customers will have to pay. They will have to pay twice, once for the cap-and-tax, and again to change, to renovate the means by which they deliver that energy. He testified that the cost, just for the additional cost annually per household, was $110 a month, which maths out to be $1,320 a year just for the electricity. Add on to that the extra cost for gas for all of the costs on consumers because of diesel fuel in trucks and the extra energy that it takes to produce anything. Let's just say you're in the business of mining iron ore and shipping that over and melting it down and turning it into steel. All of the energy that is required there to mine it, to heat it, to convert it, all of that makes it almost prohibitive when you see costs that are going up for energy costs, in many cases a doubling of certain kinds of energy costs. Also, when you look at the map of the United States, you will see that the States that have the credits, that have a surplus of hydroelectric power, a lot of the people in those States would like to put our rivers back where they were. I'm not among them. I think we can improve upon Mother Nature. I think hydroelectric power is a wonderful thing. I would be happy to have more of it. But the States that have it are the States that get carbon credits to trade back, to sell back to the States that are generating a lot of their electricity with coal. So that amounts to a transfer of wealth from the States that are short on hydroelectric and other forms of renewable energy production to those that are long on the nongreenhouse-gas-emitting-generating systems. So you would see almost all of the country transferring their wealth to the Northeast, to the full West and the entire western seaboard. South Dakota would be a recipient State because they have a series of hydroelectric dams in South Dakota and not a lot of people to use the electricity. That is what happens. It pits Americans against Americans. It punishes some, and it benefits others. It punishes all of agriculture. This is all taking place because an idea was generated 30 or so years ago and was pushed by Al Gore who received a Pulitzer Prize and made a movie. And they don't have to be factual. They don't have to prove anything. They just simply make an allegation that the Earth is getting warmer, and if the Earth is getting warmer, then we must do something because things are horrible. And so the only thing we can do is the thing that they present to us, of course. It reminds me a lot of the stimulus package. The stimulus package was put together by President Obama. He came to our conference and said it is one leg of a multilegged stool that we have to construct to get us out of this economic crisis we are in. It was all one leg at that time. It was about a $2 trillion leg. It was $787 billion, and they throw in some more from some other bailouts, and it is about $2 trillion. So we went down this path. We were all pressured to vote for that $787 billion stimulus package because, after all, we were in an economic crisis and we must do something. Those of us who opposed the stimulus package were accused of being against doing anything. They just want to do nothing, they said, as if their idea was the only thing we could do. I wrote legislation, introduced it, argued for it, and got the back of the hand from the people who thought government should own everything because they didn't want free market solutions. It looks to me like they wanted government intervention. And so we have a stimulus plan and we have the nationalization that has taken place of Bank of America, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch, is incorporated into that. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that used to be private became quasi-government, and now they are completely government, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Federal Government. And roughly, there is a $5.5 trillion outside potential liability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that is if it all melts down. General Motors and Chrysler, there are about eight huge national entities that have been nationalized, formerly private, now nationalized under President Obama, the President Obama who said: I don't want to do this. I am not interested in taking over corporations. I don't want to be involved in the day-to-day operations of these corporations. He is a reluctant nationalizer of private businesses. He didn't want to be involved in the day-to-day operations. There are other solutions out there. One would have been to take AIG, this huge insurance company which had such a large share of the market that no one could check its balance sheet, no one could evaluate the premiums they were charging because no one understood the scope of the business that they were in. And they guaranteed the return, the performance of these mortgage-backed securities, this toxic debt, this toxic paper that these investment bankers had. No one could evaluate AIG. But they could pour hundreds of millions of dollars into AIG, and we couldn't even have a discussion about splitting them up, dividing them up and throwing away the bad components and letting them compete against each other, or sending them into bankruptcy and letting them go that route and let the emerging insurance companies fill that market. That could have been a solution, too. I argued this way. Look at AIG as if it were an apple, and you take that tool off the kitchen counter and it takes the core out and slices it up into six pieces. That could have happened with AIG like it happened to Ma Bell, and they could have competed with each other. But instead, hundreds of billions of dollars poured into AIG and our investment banks, propping them up, carrying them on, and then effectively nationalizing them, refusing to allow some of the lending institutions to pay the money back so they could be out from underneath the thumb of the White House, a White House that claims to not want to operate any of these companies, a White House that fired the CEO of General Motors and hired a new CEO of General Motors and named all but two of the board members of General Motors and dictated to the bankruptcy court the terms of the Chapter 11 before the court made the decision, dictated by the White House. By the way, the White House that says, as a matter of fact a President that says I don't want to be involved in the day-to-day operations of General Motors appointed a car czar who had never sold a car nor made one, and probably never even fixed one but probably has driven several, to call the shots on General Motors and on Chrysler, a car czar who is on the phone on a regular basis at the report of Fritz Henderson, the new Obama-appointed CEO of General Motors. We are at the point where we have eight huge entities that are nationalized by the White House in a breathtaking fashion that many of us would have claimed would not have been a legal activity, or would have taken the authorization of Congress or resources that were not available to the White House to spend without congressional authorization, all happening so fast with the operation here that has shut down the kind of criticism that might have produced some free market results. So the White House is involved in day-to-day operations of General Motors. The White House dictated who would be buying up what is left of Chrysler, appointed the new CEO of General Motors and all but two of the board members, and all of this works under the auspices of the car czar, who is one of 22 czars appointed by the President. There are 22 czars; more czars than the Romanovs, as Senator McCain famously said. One of them is the payroll czar. The payroll czar looks around to determine whether the CEOs of the companies that have been nationalized or received TARP funds or Federal funds by the White House, to determine if the CEOs and their executives are making too much money performing the service that they are performing. In America? The President appoints someone to decide who is making too much money while they advocate the class envy that was part of the campaign and nationalize eight huge formerly private sector entities and invest our tax dollars in them and hold back shares now of common stock as if they were an outside investor, as if they were Warren Buffett riding to the rescue. Madam Speaker, America has gone down the line. When I take us to the point of these hugely nationalized formerly private companies, all of that can be reversed at this point. All can be overturned in a saner time by a more prudent Congress and an administration that either sees the light or is replaced by one that does. All of it can be. But this line of the cap-and-tax bill is the Rubicon. It is the stream that we have crossed here in the House that if they cross it in the Senate, it will be an irrevocable policy that forever burdens the economy of the United States of America to our detriment and hands over an advantage in global competitiveness to China and India and other emerging industrializing countries. And if that happens, there is no going back. I talked about the culture of corruption and the promise of the Speaker to drain the swamp. There is new corruption on the horizon. The cap-and-tax bill lays the foundation for a massive amount of corruption. When President Obama said look across to Spain for an example, an example of a country that gets it right, an example of a country that has already gone through the green revolution and created the green jobs and now they are in this new green economy, we can do that in the United States, too. The President and many others make the argument that taxing energy in America and trading carbon credits will create these green jobs and we will have this new green economy that will be apparently healthy and vibrant, and they guarantee that they will create green jobs. But what they don't do is talk about this in the context of, similar to the same philosophy we are going to create or save, and I don't remember the first number now, maybe 4.5 million jobs. I know it got down to 3.5 million or 3 million jobs this stimulus plan was going to create or save. Let's say 3 million jobs. That is on the low side. It has been lowered a little since then. Create or save. Now the instant I heard that, it just hit me, create or save. If it is going to be 3 million jobs that you create or save with the stimulus plan, as long as there are 3 million jobs left in the United States of America, the President can always claim those jobs were the jobs I saved. You would have lost them all if it hadn't been for the stimulus plan. That's the logic of the ``create or save'' kind of phrase. Those are slippery phrases, calculated ambiguities. They intentionally, I believe, give a dual meaning so people can listen and they hear something. What do they want to hear? They want to hear that the stimulus package is going to create 3 million jobs and so they grab ahold of that, and they are not listening to the words ``or save.'' Create or save. They are not thinking that there is no way that anyone can quantify a job that is saved. You can save a job if it is already lost and you put it back. I remember a company that was getting shut down, in the neighborhood of 40 jobs, and we engaged with the bureaucrats and entreated that they look at it more objectively and stick with their rules but not be so hasty. And out of that, those jobs remained. I would quantify we saved about 40 jobs. But you can't deal with a national policy that can take credit for creating or saving jobs in the same category. So what's the net increase or decrease in jobs? The stimulus plan hasn't created net new jobs. It has not lived up to the standards set by the White House which predicted we would see unemployment as high as 8 percent, maybe even 8.5 percent. Now it is at 9.4 or 9.5 percent, and the numbers are 14.5 million Americans unemployed and another 6 million who are looking for work. So let's just say 20 million, 20 million unemployed in the United States of America. None of those were jobs that were saved. None of those were jobs that were created, and the White House hasn't defined a single one yet of the jobs that were created, nor the ones that are saved. So cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, what does it do to the culture of corruption? What does it do to the ethics challenge that is before these many Members of Congress of which I have a list? Let me see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine that are being scrutinized and are in the public eye. Even under this environment of getting to the cap-and-tax, and I will share with you what happened in Spain as they lurched into their green economy to create their green jobs. Spain drew a conclusion 7 or 8 years ago that they wanted to be a world leader in green jobs, a world leader in this green revolution, and they wanted to reduce the amount of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere and get themselves in line with the Kyoto treaty. So they set about replacing their normal generation in Spain with a lot of wind power generators; other means, too, but wind power in particular. When you get involved in issuing permits and who gets to put up and where you are going to locate a wind generator, that means bureaucrats and politicians are involved and favorites get chosen, just like the favorite dealership in Massachusetts that lost his franchise, but at the pleadings of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee had his franchise reinstated even though others did lose their franchise. Favorites get played in politics. It happened in Spain. In the case of Spain, they were going to create these green jobs. Here is what they learned. This is the data that comes out of 7 to 8 years of experience, of going down this path that cap-and-tax takes the United States of America if the Senate passes it and the President has promised that he will veto it. They did create jobs. They created green jobs. And for every green job that they created, they had a net loss of 2.2 private sector jobs because it drew capital out of the private sector and out of the Spanish economy. They lost the two largest companies in Spain. One of them was British Petroleum, or BP as they are known now, that pulled out of Spain because their costs have gone too high. They created a new green job here and there at the cost of, for every one, 2.2 lost jobs in the private sector. It took Spain up to the highest unemployment rate in the industrialized world, 17.5 percent unemployment and rising. The cost per green job created was $770,000 per job. So they spent $770,000, created a green job and lost 2.2 jobs in the private sector. And they saw their electrical bills skyrocket. I think that was the phrase used by President Obama. You would see coal-fired generating plants, the cost of that electricity skyrocket under his cap-and-tax plan. Well, electricity skyrocketed under a very similar plan, a plan that has been identified by President Obama as a model to follow, the Spanish model. In 3 years' time, the electrical bills for the residents in Spain increased 20 percent. Now that is not quite so shocking, I don't suppose, Madam Speaker, but industrial electricity costs in the same period of time went up 100 percent. So residential electricity up 20 percent; industrial electrical costs 100 percent. Now, we already see the picture of why they've lost so many large companies out of Spain. They've driven up the electrical costs where they can't compete any longer. And with electrical costs doubling in industrial in 3 years and up 20 percent in residential, they actually just hit the political threshold. It wasn't that that covered all the additional costs of generating electricity. The real truth is, Madam Speaker, that they took the cost of electricity up to the political threshold where they couldn't sustain it any longer, held it at a 20 percent increase for residents and a doubling, a 100 percent increase in industrial, and then, to pay for the rest of the cost of the electricity, went out on the financial market and borrowed the money to pay the electrical bills, borrowed the money from the international financial markets to pay the electrical bills in Spain at costs above the doubling of industrial and the 20 percent increase in the residential. And in order to borrow the money, they had to pledge the full faith and credit of the Spanish Government, which means children yet to be born and the children and the grandchildren and likely the great-grandchildren of those using electricity in Spain today will be paying the interest and the principal on the electrical bills of their parents, their grandparents and their great-grandparents--should the economy hold together long enough that they would even have the opportunity to do that--while the competitiveness of Spain digresses in the world. And if this isn't bad enough, high electrical costs, borrowing on the international financial market to pay the electrical bill, 17.5 unemployment, $770,000 per green job created, and for every time they created a green job they lost 2.2 jobs in the private sector. All of this going on, you still had the Sicilian Mafia involved in the politics of Spain, greasing the palms, so to speak, making sure that the right people received the right cash favors in the right denominations because politicians, business people are brokering who gets to put up the wind charger, who's going to issue the permit--well, they have that determined--who gets the permit issued to put the wind charger up on which land. And the Sicilian Mafia was involved in that and remains involved in that, according to the speaker we had for a breakfast I hosted a couple months ago. Not only were they involved in the politics of the permitting process, but also involved in the politics of determining who would be the contractors, the subcontractors, and the suppliers. So add Sicilian Mafia to this web, this web of corruption, this web of political favoritism, this ethical snarl that's there in Spain that contributes to dragging down their economy--the green economy that they set up with the idea they were going to create green jobs. There is no empirical data, no quantifiable way that one can look at Spain and declare that Spain is a model that the United States should emulate, but the President has declared that we should do that and doesn't seem to be accountable for that flawed judgment. So when I asked the question, of all of these things that are wrong in the Spanish green economy--the high unemployment, the high electrical bills, borrowing money to pay your electrical bills, the Sicilian Mafia wrapped up in the politics that's contributing to political corruption--of which there are many indicators here in this swamp that the Speaker has declared she wants to drain but taken no move to do so when it's her own Democratic Members--all of this going on in Spain, and here in the House of Representatives we pass a cap- and-tax bill that is a tax on all of our energy, that sets up carbon credits that will be traded--not just in the United States, but around the world. And so somehow, with a bill in the House, we are going to pay somebody to plant trees in Brazil, thinking that that's going to sequester some carbon so we can burn some more natural gas to generate some electricity in Florida. How about that? And I would just ask the question, aside from this snarled mess and the open door for confusion and corruption and favoritism and people getting rich off of credits, aside from all of that, aside from the extra cost in electricity of $1,320 a year just for the households in my district--according to Mid-American Energy, who hasn't seen a rate increase in over 10 years--aside from all of that, where are we going? If we could take the 25 or the 50 or the 100 smartest people in America, or the world, erase from their minds any of the last 25 or 30 years of this global warming fear that has been perpetrated--and now has had to morph itself into ``climate change'' because we don't have evidence that the globe has been warming since 2002 so they had to change it to climate change--but if we could put the smartest people together, send them off on a retreat somewhere--send them down to the Caribbean where the Congressional Black Caucus had their little codel that's being looked at--set them up on an island, erase from their memory anything that they've heard about this global warming allegation or the proposed solutions, and first ask the question on the science, do you really believe that the Earth is getting warmer? Well, maybe. And there are some trend lines prior to 2002 that would indicate that. That's not so much the point, but we should ask that question. Do you believe it is? And if you conclude that it is--smartest people in the world with great training in all of the fields that they need, then the next question would be, do you believe that the emissions from the industrial era, the industrial revolution are contributing to it? How much, and what could we do about that? Now, remember that if you would take the atmosphere--and we're dealing only with CO2 emissions in the United States of America, the cumulative total--and I've got to go a little bit from memory, but I'm going to get the scale of this exactly right, and if you take the entire atmosphere of the Earth--I know all this air has a volume to it, it's measured in metric tons, and that number is 105.5 million metric tons--I believe that's the number, that's the right decimal anyway--all of that Earth's atmosphere and draw it out and represent it proportionately in a circle, let's say a circle 8 feet in diameter, two 4 by 8 sheets of drywall side to side, draw a circle 8 feet in diameter, a foot higher than my hand around, draw that circle, think of that circle in your mind's eye, Madam Speaker, and that represents all the Earth's atmosphere. Now, the cumulative total of the CO2 suspended in the Earth's atmosphere over the last 205 years, since the dawn of the industrial revolution, all of that CO2 that's gone in and that's now suspended in the atmosphere, if you would draw it on a circle, in the middle of that 8-foot circle--which is all of the Earth's atmosphere--that circle would be how big: 5 foot, 4 foot, 3 foot, 2 foot, 1 foot in diameter, perhaps, in the middle of that 8-foot circle? Or 6 inches, or 3 inches, or 1 inch--we're still going, Madam Speaker. About the diameter of my little finger; .56 inches would be all that would represent all of the CO2 that is suspended in the Earth's atmosphere that has been emitted by the United States of America in the last 205 years, the dawn of the industrial revolution. And we're talking about that half-inch diameter circle in the middle of the 8-foot circle and reducing those emissions by 17 percent in the near term, as much as 83 percent per year in the long term. Now, where does that get us? And how can anyone think that you can put a drop into an ocean and change the temperature of the ocean, or think that you could microscopically alter the dimension of that center little circle that represents all of the suspended CO2 from the United States and somehow magically that's the key to adjust the Earth's thermostat. It is utter vanity, Madam Speaker. And you can put the smartest people in the world off on an island somewhere, erase all of the things that have been pumped out in their brain, start them out with fresh data, scientific data, empirical data, put some physicists there, put some meteorologists out there, some mathematicians there while we're at it, and by the way, let all of those people churn around on this climate change model--and let's put some economists out there also to churn around on what happens--and I would just be about willing to guarantee that 50 or 100 of the smartest people in the world, if you erase their institutional memory of all of the information that has been pounded into this country over the last 30 years since we made the transition from the impending ice age--which some of us remember, and at least one scientist made the switch himself, said it was certain that there was a near-term ice age that was going to come down and freeze us off of the North American continent. Now he's a global warming enthusiast. He was right one time maybe, and he will never live to see if he was right or wrong. But all of those smart people that we could put on an island and erase their institutional memory and start them with an objective analysis, very well trained physicists, meteorologists, economists, mathematicians, chemists, put them on that island and ask them, evaluate the data that we have today and look at the science that we have, if the Earth is getting warmer and if you think that's a problem, what would you do about it, I can't imagine that 25 or 50 or 100 smartest people in the world coming up with such a concoction as a proposed solution as passed off the floor of this House in the form of the bill that's called Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax--or whatever the other acronyms are for this bill. I can't imagine that really smart people could ever cook something like that up. Because this bill that passed the House, it was never a product of, let me say, sound science, peer-reviewed analysis, sound economics. It was never a product that ever laid this thing out down through the continuum and gamed it out to the end. No, Madam Speaker. It's a political concoction that's put together in a hodgepodge. It's--what shall I call it--liberal genetic engineering of policy. And we are stuck with it coming out of this House. I think that this House made the single most colossal mistake made in the history of the United States Congress a week ago last Friday when they passed the cap-and-tax bill. I think they're wrong on the science, and I think they're really, really wrong on the economics. And if they're right on the science, they hand over the economy of the United States and put us at a disadvantage and allow India and China and other developing countries to continue to belch crud into the atmosphere and out-compete us economically. And more and more companies will be moving to those countries while those economies prosper and pollute the atmosphere, even to the extent of producing or developing an average of one new coal-fire generating plant per week without the emissions controls that we have here in the United States of America, pouring this all forth out of the smoke stacks in Asia and shipping us more and more of our goods. So what's happening is we're buying plenty from Asia already, and that contributes to our trade imbalance. And then, in order to meet these budget shortfalls that are driven by the President and the liberals in Congress--trillions of dollars, a $9.3 trillion deficit in the budget offered by President Obama on top of an $11.3 trillion existing deficit, over $20 trillion--and what do we do to deal with that? We buy everything we can that we don't want to make here in the United States anymore, and then we borrow the money from the Chinese to buy things from the Chinese. So it's the equivalent of going to the car dealer, I suppose, and borrowing the money from him to buy the car that he makes. And you keep doing that over and over again, but you've got to build something that has value. You've got to make things. You've got to provide goods and services that can be competitive. And we need to be competitive globally. The very idea that this country is a giant chain letter, a giant ATM to be cashed into and that we can create a government economy is false. It has to have value, and it has to have value in the private sector. The private sector is the productive sector of the economy; the government sector is the parasitic sector of the economy. And you cannot grow the parasitic sector of the economy at the expense of the productive sector of the economy and think that you can compete indefinitely in this world while you're borrowing money from the Chinese to pay the bills that you're creating by having the Chinese make the things that we can't be competitive anymore and buying it from them. And I get along fine with the Chinese, but you've got to build things that have value and you've got to have a sound economy. We've got to have an ethical Congress. We've got to stand on free markets. And we've got to reverse the nationalization of our privatized industries. And I urge that we do so with all haste.