Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Texas, I think it's an especially important point, and very illustrative, when you asked the question, Do you think the enemy will provide Bibles to any of our soldiers that they might one day capture as prisoners of war? It sounds even ridiculous when you say it because it's so far out of the realm. We are talking about one of the pieces that have to do with immigration, talking about renewing the religious workers visa, and we'll have about 5,000 religious workers come into the United States each year. And they should be and generally are required to, and often it doesn't work out that way, be affiliated with existing religious observations. They might well come from countries like Saudi Arabia or other countries in the Middle East, for example, those countries that aren't very tolerant of our missionaries going in there. So it occurred to me that if we really wanted to have religious workers visas here in the United States, we should turn around and require reciprocity. Just simply say to them, Fine, send your imams here to the United States, but the condition is we're going to send you some Baptist ministers and Catholic priests. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Texas, I would add to that that the representation of Gitmo is something that's created by the liberal news media and the liberal mindset and the MoveOn.org people. Name a criticism of Gitmo, and chances are that criticism is just simply untrue. One of those is that there were people waterboarded at Gitmo. Not true. It didn't happen. It didn't ever happen. But the public believes it did. So if there's a rumor out there, if there's an urban legend that exists about something, do we go eradicate it because there's a rumor? I don't understand what the criticism was of Gitmo in the first place. They had to go somewhere. It's a very humane thing to do. No, waterboarding didn't take place at Guantanamo Bay, but some really evil people reside down there. And they are not just innocent people that randomly were picked up. These are not goat herders down there. These are evil terrorists who believe their path to salvation is in killing us. And they have a command-and-control structure even to the extent they could order a simultaneous attempt at suicide that took place a couple of years ago; four that tried, three succeeded. Exactly a year to the day, there was another attempt. One succeeded. Now we have them all on a suicide watch where no one down there that's an inmate goes more than 3 minutes without eyes on from at least one of our guards. One of the other things that's happened is you think about abusive treatment of prisoners. I see nothing but a culture of--it bends over backwards. There's too much respect down there, in my view, for these evildoers that are there. But on the other side of this thing is that on an average of 20 times a day, these inmates attack our guards. Half of the time they're throwing feces in their face, and the other half of the time they're physically assaulting our guards. And the worst thing we can do to punish them is reduce their outdoor exercise time down to 2 hours a day. And this is an evil empire nation and we ought to close down Gitmo because MoveOn.org is critical and liberal socialist Western Europe is critical and the people on the other side of the great divide of Western civilization are critical? Many of them have designs on working against the United States, and I certainly don't include Western Europe in that. But I did have a conversation with the leadership of the Germans, and they said, Well, we think that you ought to close Gitmo, and they have been pushing hard for that, and that we should disperse these, at the time 241, detainees around to other countries in the world. But the Germans aren't going to take any of them as long as they might pose a threat to Germany. And how do they measure this? Well, if we're not going to bring them to the United States, then they must be dangerous for us to bring here; so why would they take them there? In other words, they put a condition on us that says they won't be accepting any; they'll just be pressing us to close Guantanamo Bay. My answer to that is if you won't take any of these inmates, then it looks to me like you don't have anything to say about Guantanamo Bay. Your opinion, I believe is invalid, along with most of the other criticism that flows out on the behavior. A nation has got to be able to stand some criticism. We didn't elect a President to run around the world and apologize to every continent and do a contrition tour of the world. That's not going to make people like us any better. And, by the way, I'm not so interested in being liked; I'm interested in being respected. And that's the thing that will bring about the right kind of results from the enemies we have. When they see us knuckle under and go wobbly because of a little criticism, and we'll close a place like Guantanamo Bay, thinking that then their criticism is going to move along because somebody said it's their best recruiting tool--who says, and why? And if that's their recruiting tool, there are many things that they can gin up over the Internet that would stimulate people to join their side. What do they say? ``Remember Guantanamo Bay''? Is that like ``Remember the Alamo,'' a recruiting tool for 140 years or whatever it is? It doesn't hold water, in my analysis, and I just believe that this backpedaling from international criticism doesn't get you anything except more international criticism in a different area, and that's something that I think that the judge and I agree on.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. We were having a lot of discussions here about some things that were heretofore unimagined just a few months ago or even just a few years ago. And as we transitioned over into this discussion about Guantanamo Bay, this discussion will go on, but the bottom line of it comes out to be this: Yes, there are a few of them that could potentially be facing a death sentence. A few. I don't know how big that number is, and I can't get a definitive response. I guess I should pass my request over to the Gitmo closing czar and ask him how many are facing a death sentence. But let's just look at it in this fashion: And that is that it looks like they are going to close Guantanamo Bay. They're going to disperse these people to places wherever they can get rid of them. Some of them are likely to be released in the free world, some into the United States of America. These are the worst of the worst. We have about a one-in-seven recidivism rate of those 558 that we'd released that were the nicest guys of the lot. The least dangerous is a more accurate way to describe them. And even out of those 558, we see a recidivism rate where they have turned around and attacked Americans and free people one out of seven that we know. And I don't know what percentage it is that we don't know. But if one out of seven will come back and attack Americans when you pick the best of the worst, what will be the attack rate on free people when you release the worst of the worst? It will be greater than one out of seven. And this number is 241. So divide your seven in there and multiply it by whatever that factor is, a two or a three or so, and you'll come up with a number. I think we're going to see 50 or more of them that will turn around and attack Americans or other free people. The bottom line of the executive order is that most or all will eventually be released and they will attack free people and innocent people will die. And among those innocent people are likely to be Americans, and that will then be the news story that will come back. And then we will replay this and unravel it all the way backwards again, and it will be, well, only one or two or three mistakes that only cost 20 or 30 or 40 lives, so that we could avoid this criticism and shut down an operation that has actually been built up to accommodate the people that are there now, including the Uyghurs, who are now wasting away in ``MargaUyghurville'' from what I understand. I can't even say it because I get Jimmy Buffett and Warren Buffett mixed up, I think.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If this subject matter has been utilized, I think, adequately, I want to take some of this discussion over, Madam Speaker, and talk a little bit about where we are with cap-and-trade and cap- and-tax. It looks like this administration and the majority in this Congress are determined to push through a Waxman-Markey bill or some version of it, probably the version that came out of committee here a few weeks ago. And I have taken this position, and I hold it, and that is that they are wrong on the science, and they're wrong on the economics. I want to address the science in a fairly short degree here, and it turns out to be this: Remember our history. This issue was brought before this Congress, I think the year was 1988, although I haven't referenced that. That's strictly from memory. It was a hearing on climate change. No, excuse me. It was a hearing on global warming. And the lead witness on that was Dr. James Hanson. By coincidence, he and I went to the same high school together. He was there ahead of me, and I don't recall him. But I understand that the testimony was midsummer. The room was not air conditioned. The humidity about matched the temperature. And as the Members of the Congress sat there and sweated, they were being told that this world was going to get warm and all kinds of calamities were going to take place. Well, 1988, that was only just a few years after we had all the interest in the ice age. There was a coming ice age that was published in some of the major national publications, and it was inevitable that the Earth was going to cool and we'd have to get ready for the glaciers to creep down from the north and push us off our cornfields, and Iowans were going to have to migrate to South Texas in order to avoid this. And that was 1970 and some of those years. And it's a fact that at least one and probably more than one of those scientists that were certain that we were going to undergo this ice age are now on the side of the argument that the Earth is going to get warmer, and it's going to get warmer fast-- perhaps as much as 4 degrees centigrade over 100 years--and that anything that's a weather anomaly is going to be the result of global warming. If you remember, a couple of years ago we had quite a few hurricanes, the result of global warming. A year ago hurricanes were way off, a result of global warming. Everything is a result of climate change, whether it's more rain or less rain or whether it's warmer temperatures or cooler temperatures. So I guess if you have a nice utility to blame it on, climate change blames everything on that's an anomaly. And you aren't going to have to be around when science actually evaluates the predictions that you make because none of us are going to live beyond 100 years. So if it doesn't get to be a 4-degree centigrade increase in the Earth's temperature 100 years from now, nobody is going to point at Dr. Jim Hanson and say, You're wrong, Doc, or to Al Gore and say, You're wrong, because they will be at the same place I will be at that point. And so it is a handy little excuse to just shift it off on to climate change and then ask for this great growth in government. Now, we had a meteorologist speak to the Conservative Opportunity Society a week ago last Wednesday morning, Dr. Roy Spencer. He is a NASA scientist. He is the one that is managing the satellite collection data that collects the Earth's temperatures from satellites. He has 25 years of data. And as he talked about this, and this was a fairly quick once-through so it wasn't like a semester course, but as he talked about this data, he explained to us that the climate change models that they are using to predict global warming, they have to have assumptions. I asked the question, why is it that physicists tend to buy into the global warming argument more so than meteorologists do? He said, well, it is logical, because meteorologists understand the ambiguities. They are trying to predict the weather for tomorrow. The climate czar, he can't predict the weather for tomorrow, but they are predicting the temperature 100 years from now. So, I posed the question, I have a son that is going to have an outdoor wedding in August and I would like to know what the weather is that day. Of course, the climate czar is not going to tell me. We can find out in a couple of months whether he is right or wrong. One hundred years from now he will make a prediction, but he won't tell you what it is going to be like next week. But the presumptions that are there, meteorologists understand the vagaries of predicting the weather even tomorrow, let alone 100 years from now. Physicists have studied the exact sciences, so when they put together a climate change model, a computer calculation that brings in a lot of factors, there always has to be assumptions. The assumptions are plugged in by the meteorologists, and the numbers are calculated by the physicists and the other exact science people. They have great confidence in their numbers. They understand the interrelationships of the factors that they put on their calculations, but it is still based on assumptions. And the assumptions fall down to this. They assume that greenhouse gasses emitted by industry in the world, a lot of it from the United States, bring about more clouds in our atmosphere. Now, I can't quite explain why that is, but they believe that is. So if it is more clouds in the atmosphere, that is one assumption. The second assumption is more clouds make the Earth warmer. Now, that seems like an odd assumption to me, and they have been telling me this for years, and it never made sense to me. Dr. Spencer explains it the other way. He says, no, his data shows that more clouds bring about a cooler Earth, and they have 25 years of satellite data that shows that. And that is what makes sense to me. If a cloud blocks out the sun, the Earth is not going to be as warm, and if the cloud goes away and the sun shines on the Earth, it absorbs the radiation from the sun and the Earth gets warmer. That is the simple part of this. So if their assumptions are CO2 gas primarily in the atmosphere increases clouds and more clouds warm the Earth, then you get one result, the Earth gets 4 degrees centigrade warmer in 100 years, or some variation of that. If you turn around and use the data and you back-feed Dr. Spencer's data into the model, then it turns this argument around on its head. But even then Dr. Spencer is very conservative and careful. He thinks maybe that data shows not a 4-degree centigrade increase, but more about half-a-degree centigrade increase, and the argument can be made that the Earth will get cooler. Plus the data we have shows that the world has gotten actually marginally cooler or else the temperature has been flat since 2002. Dr. Spencer argues or informs us that another 10 years this kind of data and it is going to be really hard for the alarmists to be able to make the argument that we are faced with this global warming that is only revokable if we follow their model. So I look at that science and I understand Dr. Spencer's presentation. I do not understand Dr. Hansen's or Al Gore's presentation. It does not make sense to me with the science I have in my background. So I simply asked the question, Madam Speaker, the foundational question: What are we trying to do here and with what? That would be the logical thing to ask. So the first thing is, how big is our atmosphere? Well, our atmosphere happens to be, and they measure this in metric tons, it is 5.150 quadrillion metric tons of atmosphere. That is the force of all the air on the planet pushing down on gravity. So that is just a lot. That is a lot of air in our atmosphere. Then, so what is the cumulative total of all of the CO2 that has gone into the atmosphere emitted by the United States of America since the dawn of the industrial revolution? About 45 percent of it goes into sinks, which means it disappears and they don't know where it went; 55 percent hangs out in the air and is accumulated. And that number sounds big, but not compared to our overall atmosphere. So let's put this in a perspective. It works like this. If you draw a circle that represented the size the atmosphere of the Earth and have that be an 8-foot circle, so roughly the size of the wall in your house, two 4-by-8 sheets of drywall, and draw a circle around that big in diameter, that would represent all the Earth's atmosphere. Then draw a circle in the middle of that to demonstrate the volume of the CO2 that has accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution emitted by the United States. Your 8-foot circle is the atmosphere. In the center of that you would draw a circle that is .56 inch in diameter, just a little over half an inch in diameter, the end of my little finger. That is all the bigger the circle would be that would be the cumulative total of all the CO2 the U.S. has emitted that is in the atmosphere today. And we are talking with Waxman-Markey about, well, that is 205 years of accumulation. So we want to take 1/205th of that and reduce that down by 20 percent a year for a little while, and then by 40, then by 60, then by 83 percent. With that tiny little bit in that 8 foot circle, we are going to set the Earth's thermostat and control the Earth's temperature? What utter vanity to think in that tiny little bit, and we can adjust that tiny little half inch bit in an 8-foot circle only by a little bit, and we are going to change the whole temperature of all the atmosphere in the Earth, in spite of looking at these climate changes that we have always had over time. We have ice ages and warming periods and sunspots and more solar activity on the sun, and sometimes you will see the Earth cool because a volcano will erupt and cloud the Earth. Why would we think that more clouds in the atmosphere would warm the Earth when more clouds in the atmosphere from a volcano cools the Earth? Each of these questions are logical questions for third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth graders to ask, and even at that level we are not getting answers from the people that advocate this. It is as ``if'' they had to create a convoluted science and back- figure it back to be able to justify their idea that they want to do this cap-and-tax model, and the cap-and-tax model is a large taxation scheme that for every $5 collected puts $1 in the Treasury and wastes the other 4. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. Watching this climate change argument unfold, and I think about this country that we are, the most successful Nation in the history of the world, strongest economic in the world, by far, strongest militarily. Our culture penetrates the rest of the world. We're kind of American-centric because we are self-sustaining for a lot of those reasons, militarily, economically, food, for example, and also culturally; and so we don't as often look at the United States from outside. But I wonder what it must look like for, let's just say, Socrates, looking out across this country today. 3,000 years ago they sat around and in places like Athens, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and they carried on these conversations and they shaped the Age of Reason, the Age of Reason, which was the foundation for science and technology, the theorem, the hypotheses, and they built it into their culture to be proud of being able to rationalize, both deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. And that rationale, and even though they didn't get their elements right, what did they have? Earth, wind and fire and maybe some other elements like that they used to argue with. They didn't have the tables to be able to put the atoms together and figure out the molecule, but they had a good rationale. The Age of Reason in Greece is the foundation of Western Civilization, and they took great pride in being able to think rationally. And if they would transpose themselves, fast forward through history, 3,000 years, race through the Age of Enlightenment in Western Europe and primarily in France, and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution here, and how technology has flourished, and we've gone from an industrial economy to an information economy, and see all the things that we've developed from a technological standpoint, but yet, if they could look inside this Chamber and see where decisions are made in a civilized country today, and see how they're made, I think they'd be astonished that we have suspended the reason that they so carefully developed 3,000 years ago. And now, we legislate by anecdote. We legislate by somebody's emotions, rather than legislate by empirical data. And Judge Carter's mentioned a few of those. Pulled DDT off the marketplace, and then watch what's happened with millions that died because of the malaria that came back during that period of time. My mother read ``Silent Spring'' by Rachel Carson, and our lawn thereafter had to be full of dandelions, thistles, plant and leaf clover and African violets, but not much blue grass because we couldn't spray that anymore because it was going to kill the birds. Mom knew, though, the names of all of birds and what their songs were, and we had a lot of birds around. We'd have had them anyway without the weeds. And the alar scare comes to mind as well, Madam Speaker, the apple issue that took a lot of apple producers out of business because there was the allegation that the spray they used on them that kept the apples looking good and staying fresh was somehow dangerous. I think a carcinogen. These are scientific Malthusians. They are just simply always another calamity around the corner. They threaten, they scare people off the safety of our food. They tell us that the planet can only sustain about so many people. And these are the people that have determined that they're going to shut down, as Judge Carter said, our energy production in this country. And we spent last August pounding away every day here on the floor of the House of Representatives, calling for an energy plan that opened up all of the above, all of the energy that we have. We're an energy-rich Nation, not an energy-poor Nation. We just do a poor job of managing the energy that we have. And to give an example about how easy it should be to take this Nation to the next level of our economic determinism, if we just look over to countries like Japan and Korea, in the last 60 years or a little more, both of those nations, or at least their major cities, were destroyed in war. They've rebuilt their cities, transportation, telecommunications, the infrastructure that's there. They are modern, they're crisp, they're sharp, they work, they function. And yet in that 60 or so years, each of those countries have imported almost 100 percent of their energy and 60 percent of their food, and they still build modern technological societies. And we are here in the United States of America, with a surplus of food, and the energy that we need, if we just manage it; and we can't discipline ourselves to utilize our own resources. And we have a Speaker of the House who's trying to ``save the planet.'' And please put that in quotes. Shut down energy production in America. There are only about two or three kinds of energy that they would accept more of. One is wind, the other was solar, and the next one may be geothermal if you didn't have to use a drill rig to get it. And by the way, wind is okay as long as you don't have to see it off of Nantucket. Teddy Kennedy's offended by looking at wind mills. And so we can only put them in places where some of the liberals aren't going to have to look at them. By the way, I can see 39 of them from my yard. And so that's all right. But we need all of the above, and there is no way to meet this model on energy demand for this country, especially with electricity, under Waxman-Markey's bill. This has already, the intimidation effect and the existing regulations, have shut down any new coal-fired generation plants in America. Now, we do have a nuclear generating plant that's under construction down in South Carolina. This plant is scheduled to come online in the year 2017. If my recollection is right, they've been working on it for 2 or more years by now, and in 2017, it will come on line. This is a beta model. This is the model of nuclear generating plants. The engineering is not a problem. It's how do you jump through all of the regulatory hoops to get there? If they can get that done, then presumably it will be the cookie cutter so we can build more, yet not under the Obama administration. The Obama administration goes over and says to Ahmadinejad--I haven't heard him say ``congratulations'' yet for his election victory, but maybe that came out today. They're relatively silent on those results. It was, Well, we can't tell a sovereign nation that they can't develop nuclear power. The United States can't do that. He essentially said to Iranians, You have the right to develop a nuclear capability even if you do announce to the world that you want to use it to annihilate Israel. So, according to President Obama, Iran has a right to nuclear, but Americans don't. We can't build a nuclear power plant here to make up for the gap that's created by the regulatory constrictions that are coming out of the Left today in this energy plan. Those of us who produce energy from coal, for example, are punished States. Those States that do not are those that are recipients. If they put this on cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, you will see a massive corruption bill within the United States as they trade the carbon credits. To give you an example of what goes on, when Speaker Pelosi received the gavel here in 2007, she decided that the Capitol complex, which we stand in the middle of right now, should be a greenhouse gas-emitting neutral facility, so she ordered that the power plant that feeds this Capitol complex, which is fired by coal and natural gas and oil, be converted from coal to natural gas. It doubled the cost of our power to come into this Capitol, but we still found out that her carbon footprint--I say hers, I wasn't calculating it as mine--of this Capitol complex was still too great. So Speaker Pelosi went on the board in Chicago, and she bought some carbon credits: $89,000 of our taxpayer dollars paid by carbon credits that were going to offset the carbon emissions here in this Capitol complex. That's designed to cause somebody to do something more to sequester this carbon that is going into the atmosphere from the natural gas that's feeding the power in the Capitol. So I thought I'd chase that $89,000 down and figure out where it went. Well, some of that money went to no-till farmers in North Dakota, to Farmers Union farmers, I believe, to people who had been no-till farmers for some time, I believe, to people whose behavior didn't change. So I don't think they went out and sequestered any more carbon. I think they just kept doing what they were doing, and they got a reward from the Speaker's checkbook--from our checkbook--for what they were doing. By the way, when you no-till, you can sequester some carbon, but if you turn around and till, that carbon is released into the atmosphere anyway, and the net gain is almost zero. So, as long as you keep up the practice of no-till and it's a plus, then that's your measure for good atmosphere. It didn't all go to the no-till farmers in North Dakota. Some of it went to a coal-fired generating plant in Chillicothe, Iowa. So I went there, and took a look at this coal-fired generating plant. What I saw was a good, well-run plant. Emissions were, I think, pretty good and were fairly modern, but they had received a government grant to set up an operation to be able to burn switchgrass and blend the switchgrass in with the coal at, I think it was, a 10 percent rate to be able to supplement the coal they were burning because switchgrass is carbon neutral. It sequesters it each year, and you burn it each year. Of course, coal is not. Well, I went in there, and they had two big sheds. They still had a lot of big, round bales--about 1,500-pound bales of switchgrass. They were stacked in those sheds. There was a big hammer mill and a conveyor and a blower system to inject that all in and blend it with the coal. The place wasn't running, and it hadn't run in a while. I could tell by looking at the hay that it was old. I asked: So how long has it been since you've burned any of the switchgrass here? Well, about 2 years. We ran our experiment. Then we shut the experiment down. So, first, they didn't have data for me for what they might have learned. The experiment hasn't yet yielded a result that we can utilize unless, maybe, they know and they haven't told us. The second thing is that this money that went to them for sequestering the carbon to give an incentive to burn switchgrass didn't change anybody's behavior. They weren't going to burn any more or any less switchgrass because they got a check from the Speaker of the House. In fact, they had shut down their switchgrass burning 2 years earlier, and this was just a check that went into the treasury of the people who had burned some switchgrass, but we didn't learn anything from it yet. Now, if that's the thing that's going to go on with cap-and-tax, cap- and-trade and Waxman-Markey, if the Speaker of the House can't get the transaction to work when you go out and buy carbon credits, how in the world are we going to do hundreds of billions of dollars of carbon credits on a massive scale and have any kind of accountability to see whether it actually brings about anything that might sequester more carbon and cause somebody to act in a more favorable way? I think it is a bureaucratic impossibility, but we can learn from the Spaniards. The Spaniards did this experiment. The Sicilian Mafia came in to manage it because they were the best at it. They were the ones who were brokering the permits to put up the wind chargers, and they were deciding who were going to be the contractors and subcontractors who built them. They decided who would be the suppliers of the materials that went into the wind chargers. So they got all wrapped up with the Sicilian Mafia. By the way, with the political favors that were being handed out, the permits would be controlled by politicians in the end. Politicians were influenced by political contributions that came from the profits that were being extracted out of the construction and out of the operations of these wind chargers by the Sicilian Mafia, and it made a huge mess out of it all. I mentioned in the previous hour that, for every green job they created, it cost 2.2 private-sector jobs because it sucked that much capital out of the economy, out of the private-sector economy. The cost per green job was $770,000. The unemployment rate in Spain is the highest in the industrialized world--17.5 percent unemployed. The largest industries in Spain have left, and the ones that are left are looking at leaving. The electrical bills for the residents have gone up 20 percent, and the electrical bills for industry have gone up 100 percent in 3 years. They hit the threshold where they couldn't demand any more for the electricity they were generating. They had raised the cost of the electricity that much. So they went out on the market to bond that, and they pledged the full faith and credit of their grandchildren--the Spanish Government: We'll pay the bills later, but we can't pay our electric bills today because the price is too high. This is an example. President Obama has said we should learn from the Spanish. I agree. We should learn from the Spanish, but the lesson that I get from them is that it's a huge boondoggle that's full of corruption. I asked them: Why don't you repeal it? Their answer was: We can't because so many people who are so influential and powerful are making a profit from it and are tied up in it. We would have to demand that our politicians would confess that they'd made a huge mistake 8 or 9 or 10 years ago. Well, a lot of them are still there, and they can't make that confession because they'll lose their jobs. So, once you get started into this, if we pass the cap-and-tax by Waxman-Markey--I'll tell you, at this point, the decisions made by this administration in this term, I believe, are reversible and are revokable by a Congress and a President who have cooler heads and a saner approach to economics. Yet, if we pass the Waxman-Markey cap-and- tax, that becomes an almost irreversible policy because then you'll have so many people who will be profiting and who will be benefiting from the trading of these things that don't have any value in a real economy. There are so many political dollars that get infused into this process that you simply can't repeal it. That's my concern. That's my fear. I believe that Waxman-Markey is an irreversible policy. So I'm here, speaking against it for two big reasons: One is they're wrong on the science. I'm happy to debate them. The other reason is they're really, really wrong on the economics. When you have the Secretary of Agriculture who testifies before the Ag Committee that somehow he believes that increasing the costs to agriculture will result in more profits for agriculture because the innovative nature of American agriculture will overcome the handicaps that government is putting on them, that is an irrational degree of optimism to be stated by a Secretary of Agriculture who finds himself at odds with Democrats and Republicans on the Ag Committee in that hearing and in disagreement with it. There is no economic model that I know of throughout the history of the free market system that would dictate or that would show a result where, if you increased the cost to a business--to any business or to a sector of the business world--that you would see profits go up. They would go down. And this Waxman-Markey legislation increases the cost to, especially, our energy users. Those who are the most energy intensive, the highest energy-using industries in America will get the highest increases in their costs. So let's just say that you're in the business of converting iron ore to iron and steel. Let's just say that you are in the business of converting natural gas to plastics or any other high energy-intensive operation, or let's just say you're a farmer and you use a lot of diesel fuel and you're looking at 88 cents a gallon added on to it by Waxman-Markey. All of these industries will see their costs go up. If you're generating electricity from burning coal, natural gas, fuel oil, for example, you'll see the cost of that electricity go up. An MIT professor did a study and calculated the overall dollars increased by Waxman-Markey, or a policy very close to that, and we simply divided the number of households into it, and the bottom line came out to be this: Increased annual average household costs for energy, $3,128 a year from Waxman-Markey's cap-and-tax bill. And as I said briefly earlier, for every $5 collected by this cap-and-tax bill, only $1 gets into the Treasury of the Federal Government. And the balance of that is consumed in the inefficiencies that are created. This is the most insidious, complicated tax. It's a tax on everything we do because energy is required in everything that we do. It will tax every gallon of gas, every gallon of diesel fuel, every kilowatt of electricity. It will tax every cup of coffee, every pair of shoes, every piece of paper, every flower on Mother's Day, and every 2 by 4 that goes into your house. And it transfers, Madam Speaker, America's industry, America's energy-intensive industry off to other countries in the world like India and China who have pledged not to participate in a cap-and-tax plan because they say that this is their century to become industrialized nations. The last century or two were our centuries to be industrialized. They say this is theirs. They're building, between India and China, one new coal-fired generating plant a week belching smoke into the atmosphere. And these coal-fired generating plants do not meet the emission standards of American coal-fired generated plants. So for each time that we push industry out of the United States, we're pushing up coal-fired generating plants in India and in China. And if you're concerned about the atmosphere, this is creating a negative effect on our atmosphere as well. But I'm concerned about the penalty to America's industry, to America's businesses adding costs to everyone burdening each one of these households and thinking somehow we can overcome that burden on our economy and prosper. It is wrong thinking; it is wrong-headed. They're wrong on the science, Madam Speaker, and they're really, really wrong on the economics. And so as this debate unfolds here on the floor of the House and throughout the committees and subcommittees and through the media and through the living rooms of Americans, the American people need to understand and remember that if they can't make the case on the science, there is no sense of talking about the economics, because it falls on its face not having the science to underpin the argument. Even if they could make the case on the science--and they haven't and can't. And 31,000 scientists have signed a petition saying they can't support the conclusions of these climate change models, and we're getting more and more that will step forward and say, I can't take you there, I can't be with you. And these are topnotch experts: meteorologists, physicists, people that really understand these issues in a scientific way. More of them are peeling off and walking away from this and saying Al Gore is wrong. But even if they were right, even if one stipulated that--and I don't for a minute--but if one stipulated that the global warming models were right, the economic calamity that comes from adding to the cost of all of America's business is intolerable. And the burden that it shifts onto future generations and what it does to our economy, our culture, and our civilization are intolerable, Madam Speaker. And so let them make the case. Once as Muhammad Ali said after he fought Joe Frazier to a tie in 15 rounds was this: Well, you tied. How come you're still the world champ? Ali said, You got to whoop the champ. Well, the champ is free enterprise. The champ is sound science. The champ is empirical data. The champ is the history of the United States succeeding by believing we can achieve and by making logical conclusions with the science we have and the economics we have. And by the way, it's free enterprise and it's not nationalization. And let's add an extra czar or two to this list of 22. Let's do the denationalization czar and the exit-strategy czar. Put those two people together, and maybe they can get to work to eliminate all of the rest of these czars and get us back to sense, Madam Speaker. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 332 I was detained in the Committee on Agriculture during a question and answer exchange with Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack and was not able to reach the floor before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, on June 9, 2009, I mistakenly cast a ``YES'' vote on H.R. 2751, the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act. I am submitting this statement for printing in the Congressional Record to clarify that I am opposed to H.R. 2751 and had intended to vote ``no.'' The bill authorizes $4 billion of new spending. This is on top of the $85 billion American taxpayers have provided to help ``restructure'' the auto industry already. Just yesterday, auto-parts suppliers asked President Obama's auto task force for an additional $8 to $10 billion in federal aid. In addition, a similar program instituted in Germany ended up costing three times more than originally anticipated. Also, the legislation requires dealers to remove ``clunkers'' from the market through salvage, reducing the amount of preowned supply. Families that still cannot afford a new automobile, even with the voucher, will face rising prices in the used car market during the current recession at a time when affordability is an even greater issue. Additionally, under the bill, the DOT is required to promulgate many of the regulations to implement the program within 30 days. This grants too much authority to the executive branch to enact a new $4 billion dollar program. For these and other reasons, I am opposed to H.R. 2751, and I intended to vote ``no'' on rollcall 314.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) for pulling this hour together. And I listened to the first flash of illumination of common sense here coming from deep within history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration, his Treasurer, Henry Morgenthau, saying that Keynesian economics does not work. And so I wanted to add to this, John Maynard Keynes' philosophy that he spoke about during that period of time of the implementation of the New Deal that was presented by FDR, and historians have taught for years that FDR's New Deal saved us from the Great Depression, although there isn't any evidence of that, especially, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury making the statement that Keynesian economics does not work. Now, Henry Morgenthau was a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes, and Keynes became prominent in the twenties and throughout the thirties and kind of wrapped up his career in the forties. But Keynes described how Keynesian economics worked. He did this himself, and his description was this. He said, I can solve all the unemployment in the United States. All we need to do is go find an abandoned coal mine and go out in that abandoned coal mine and drill a whole group of holes out there, and then take American cash, tamp it down into those holes, and then fill the abandoned coal mine up with garbage and turn the entrepreneurs loose to dig up the money. That would solve all the unemployment in the United States of America. Now, that doesn't sound very rational when I say this on the floor of the House of Representatives, but that came out the mouth of John Maynard Keynes, who inspired this Keynesian economics and Morgenthau's response. I yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa. And we didn't have EPA approval either.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri. I started business in 1975, a capital-intensive business with a negative net worth so I had to actually make everything work or it would have collapsed around myself. And I remember prior to that looking for a job. I applied for a good number of jobs. Worked for other people. They worked for me. I had to build a business up a piece at a time, a component at a time. One of the points that I think would illuminate this when I look at the numbers that are there on the chart: $700 billion on the Wall Street bailout, $787 billion in the stimulus plan. That was going to-- and I remind everybody here and including Madam Speaker--if she were paying attention--I would be reminding her that President Obama said that his stimulus plan was going to save or create 3.5 million jobs-- and that was just back a couple of months ago right there on the time line where a $787 billion. 3.5 million jobs saved or created. And I thought at the time, How do you measure a saved job? It was there when you started, it was there when you're done the. It's one that your economic plan didn't destroy, but it isn't necessarily one your economic plan saved. So now we have the White House saying they've saved or created a dinky little 100,000-150,000 little jobs when their endeavor is 3.5 million jobs. And by the way, that number is not out of thin air. That is off of the White House's Web site, WhiteHouse.gov/economy. So those numbers are real. Another image that flashes to my mind when I hear the gentleman from Georgia talk about Hugo Chavez, I had a flashback about the visitation that took place between our Commander in Chief, leader of the free world, President Obama and Hugo Chavez down in Central America. And I recall that we needed to have a strong message from the President of the United States that would embrace Colombia and ask for a vote on the floor of this House as was agreed to under those terms. We didn't get that meeting, but we got a glad-handed, big smiley happy face meeting between Hugo Chavez and President Obama. And I remember the image that flashed in my mind. One of them is Hugo Chavez could declare our President to be El Diablo at the podium of the United Nations and say, The smell of sulfur still lingers from yesterday. And those anti-American people laughed and cashed our checks. And just a few months later we have President Obama glad- handing with Hugo Chavez. And when I saw that image, I realized that the great nationalizer of the industries in Venezuela who had just nationalized a rice plant that belongs to a good Minnesota company named Cargill was standing there smiling next to President Obama who was the greatest nationalizer of all, who has since nationalized two of the three largest carmakers in the world--General Motors and Chrysler-- and we've watched the nationalization of our financial institutions, our insurance industry. The list goes on and on. The free market system from top-down is being swallowed up and nationalized instead of privatized. And I would also make this point that our President today was elected at least in part because he challenged President Bush and criticized President Bush for going into Iraq without an exit strategy. This President has declared that he doesn't want to own or manage Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the financial institutions, the insurance agencies, or the automakers of America. But he has engaged in all of that without an exit strategy. I call upon President Obama to come up with an exit strategy to divest the Federal government and the taxpayers from this private sector industry that have been so nationalized that he makes Chavez look like a piker. And I yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for yielding. There are a couple of points that linger in my mind. One of them is to add to the points that the gentlemen from Georgia and Missouri were making about Spain, and I concur. For every green job created, it cost 2.2 jobs in the private sector because it starved capital, but also each of those green jobs created cost $770,000 to generate that job. So it was a massive cost in capital. I want to throw another point into this in a brief way, a teaser in a way. The cap-and-trade component of this legislation that's impending to be driven through this House floor yet this month of June, we have experience with that here in the House of Representatives. When Speaker Pelosi was elected and received the gavel, she declared that this Capitol complex would be carbon neutral. So she ordered that the generating plant that provides the electricity that illuminates this room when she allows the lights to be on would be changed from coal generation over to natural gas under the auspices of this idea that natural gas isn't a hydrocarbon, which we know can't be upheld by an engineer or a doctor or a layperson. But in any case, she ordered the switch over to natural gas, doubled the cost of the electricity, and still found out we were not carbon neutral but we're still emitting a surplus of CO2 into the atmosphere, so went on the Board of Trade and purchased $89,000 worth of carbon credits, the very central commodity that is at the middle of the cap-and-trade discussion that's going to be presented on the floor of this House, $89,000 for carbon credits to offset the CO2 emissions that are going off into the atmosphere so we can light this Capitol complex. And I chased that back down and found out that some of that money went to no-till farmers in South Dakota. Presumably they had still been farming in South Dakota. It didn't change their behavior. And some of that money also went to a coal-fired generating plant at Chillicothe, Iowa, that had received a government grant to burn switchgrass. I went there and looked at that. They hadn't burned any switchgrass in 2 years and got a check anyway. That's how cap-and-trade will work in the United States of America. If we can't get it right in Congress, we are not going to get it right in America.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate being recognized and having the opportunity to address you here this evening from the floor of the House of Representatives. As usual, if I sit here and listen carefully to those who have addressed you just previous, I get a different viewpoint on life than the one that I happen to hold. This is what this House is about. It's about open debate, it's about the contest of ideas and, at least in theory, and I'll say historically in fact, good ideas that have come out into this arena of this debate here on the floor of this House have been challenged. Sometimes there are clashes out of that. The things that are facts should emerge and the good judgment should prevail over bad judgment. That is, I will say, a broad generalization that I give. But as I listen to the discussions on health care and the posters that go up again night after night, the blue posters that say, Progressive Caucus, check in here. We'll tell you where America needs to go, and I'm listening to this discussion about health care and the argument. Here's one that I wrote down: If you have insurance you can stay right there. Don't worry. This is not socialism. The gentleman from the State of Washington made that statement. This proposal--President Obama's proposal and the one perhaps mirrored by the Progressive Caucus, which was represented tonight, they say, This is not socialism. Don't worry. If you have insurance, you can stay right there and keep your own insurance policy. Now let's examine those two statements within the context of what we're talking about here. If you have a health insurance that's privately held--maybe it's provided out of your wages, which would be allocated from your employer. If your employer is purchasing the health care policy for you, or if you're purchasing it out of your own pocket, however you might have that health care policy, that health insurance policy, we call that a private policy. Of all of the Americans that are insured in that fashion, this proposal would offer another alternative, and that alternative would be, Well, you really don't have to keep this private health insurance policy. You can be insured off the government policy instead. Now we wonder why we have private-sector employers that believe in free enterprise and should understand the dynamics that come from capitalism that would be supporting such an idea that there would be a government-run health care program for everybody that is apparently not covered already within SCHIP and Medicare and Medicaid. Sixty-five percent of the health care dollar that is already paid by taxpayer dollars, those 35 percent that remain, why would an employer want to support a policy that would replace the policy that he is providing for his employees with a government program? Of course, if we think about that for a minute, we know the answer. An employer might support that because they see that they can get some other taxpayers to pay a bigger share of the burden of providing that health insurance. And so some employers will opt to support the proposal of the President or the Progressive Caucus because it will lower their overhead costs and, at least in theory, up their margins will come. So when you hear the gentleman say, If you have insurance, stay right there. Don't worry. There is going to be fearmongering. You are going to see a campaign of fearmongering, to quote the gentleman from Washington precisely. It's not fearmongering to realize that we would be losing the private sector-provided health care in America. Because employer after employer, when they had to pay the health insurance premiums for their employees, would look and decide, Well, I think I'm going to have to go into the government program because, after all, I can't compete with my competition that is using a government-run health insurance program. By the way, what does the government do? They take the taxpayer from the workers. All of us pay taxes. By the way, corporations do not pay taxes. Corporations collects taxes from persons, from individuals, from end users. They're an aggregator of those tax dollars. They bring them together, then they write the check and send it off to the Federal Government. But they don't pay taxes. They build that into the price of the goods and services that they are selling. That is a very simple concept that seems to not be very well understood by a lot of Americans, Mr. Speaker, and I'm not convinced that it's understood at the White House itself. So the statement, If you have insurance, you can stay right there, only means a little while, because over time the private sector has to compete with the government sector. Government can always defeat the private sector simply by shifting costs off on to some other faction or write the rules in such a way that it's to their advantage. Now here's another example. The argument that under the prescription drugs under Medicare, that negotiating for the price of those drugs should be done by the Federal Government. The leverage already that drives down those costs pushes the costs up higher in the other sectors. We have a lot of health care overhead. And when we think about what happens within this, if someone goes into the hospital, and let's just say they get a hip replacement. That hip replacement will come for a fixed price, if it's Medicare. If it's a large insurance company that has negotiated a price that lots of times tracks the Medicare reimbursement rates down below the cost of providing the service, they will also only cut a check for that negotiated amount. Sometimes it's actually less than Medicare with large insurance companies. Most of the time it's slightly more. But they track with each other. And the smaller the insurance company, the less leverage they have and the more likely it's going to cost that insurance company more for the same procedure. That's called cost shifting. Cost shifting takes place because government has already driven the reimbursement rates down so that the health care providers can't keep their doors open unless they shift costs. That is an unjust tragedy that is taking place in America because government has interfered in the pricing process. Another unjust inequity that is taking place is that back during World War II there were wage and price freezes. And when the wage and price freezes were established in order to keep our economy from having the costs skyrocket during World War II--and, by the way, I disagree with that policy--the price freezes and wage freezes kept employers from giving wages to their employees in order to compete on the labor market, which was very tight. In fact, at the end of World War II, we had the lowest unemployment rate in the history of America--1.2 percent. So employers, to be able to get around the wage and price freeze, gave health insurance benefits to their employees and paid the premium. They were able to deduct that premium as a business expense. But the employee couldn't deduct that premium themselves. So it set up an incentive, and some would say a perverse incentive, for employers to provide health insurance for their employees because they could deduct it, the employees couldn't. They needed to compete for wages and benefits, and that's how the package came together. Two large inequities, two fundamental flaws in the health care industry. One of them was: Whatever health insurance or health care costs that would be deductible for any entity in America should be deductible for every entity in America whatsoever. For the individual that is self-insured, that wants to write the check for their hip replacement, for the individual that wants to pay a low insurance premium in order to establish a high deductible and a high percentage of a copayment in order to get a low insurance premium, that person should able to deduct their costs the same as the one who has a full, full coverage policy at a relatively high premium per month, whether that's the employer that writes the check for the insurance and the health care itself, whether that's the individual, or whether it's the government. All of these entities should pay the same price. And any private sector should be able to deduct the cost the same. No corporate executive or no corporation should have a comparative advantage against an individual when it comes to health care services. Those two inequities are what is wrong with this health care industry that we have in America. It's not that we don't have enough government health care, it's that we have too much government-run health care. We need more private sector. And the way we do that is provide the incentives so that business and private-sector people can make those decisions to manage it for themselves. We have a health savings account program that allows over $5,000 to be deposited in the HSA on an annual basis by a couple. It started out $5,150. Now it has gone up with inflation every year, indexed, which is a very smart thing. A young couple that would invest those dollars at age 20 and max that out every year and still take out the current value equivalent of $2,000 a year would see about $950,000 accrue in their health savings account by the time they retired 45 years later. That's a pretty good nest egg to have. And Uncle Sam's interest in it is: Tax it. Tax it as an inheritance tax, tax it as real income. But, whatever, don't let the individual that has responsibly managed their health care for their life be able to take that money and invest it or spend it. I suggest that we should allow--I would double the health savings account maximum amount and I would encourage young people, especially, to invest in the health savings account and see them arrive at retirement with not $950,000, but maybe $1.9 million in that account. And they could then easily purchase a paid-up health insurance policy that would replace Medicare. And if they do that, then we ought to then let them keep the change, the balance, and be able to invest that or spend that or hand it off to their children, without tax. That's the best way to go at this health care--make it fully deductible; address the issue of cost shifting so they actually reflect the real costs in all of the billing; expand health savings accounts so that they can actually be retirement savings accounts with well-managed health care; encourage the insurance companies to provide premium benefits for those who have healthy lifestyles--those that don't smoke, those that maintain their weight, those that get a regular physical, those that can document that they are managing their health care in a fashion that is a responsible way of taking care of their bodies and the checkbook at the same time. All of that makes sense. But what I'm hearing over here is, We want to do socialized medicine, but don't call us socialists and don't call it socialism. It is really ironic to me to see three members of the Progressive Caucus on the floor of the House of Representatives with a big blue poster on their easel that says: Progressive Caucus. Check out our Web site. Google Progressive Caucus. Mr. Speaker, I suggest that people do that. Google Progressive Caucus. Read every word that's in there. And think about what people are saying from here, members of the Progressive Caucus. The gentleman from Washington said, This is not socialism. Well, I would ask: Do you know who was managing the Web site of the Progressive Caucus up until 1999; who hosted the Web site, who maintained it, who took care of it? Do you know? I think you know. I know. It was the socialists that managed your Web site. The Democratic Socialists of America took care of the Progressive Caucus' Web site until 1999, then they disconnected that, and the Progressive Caucus, you took care of your own Web site after that because there was a little political heat that was linking you too close to socialism. So the gentleman who is a member of the Progressive Caucus tells us that his health care proposal is not socialism, but the Progressive Caucus in the Web site that was owned, operated, managed--perhaps not owned, but operated and managed by the socialist, the Democratic Socialists of America, whose Web site is DSAUSA.org. Anybody that goes to that and Googles DSAUSA, the first hit that comes up will be the socialist Web site. And on there it will say, We're not Communists. So it's interesting to hear that Progressive Caucus members claim they are not socialists, but they're linked to the socialist Web site. The socialist Web site says, We're not Communists. Now, I don't know the distinctions between communism, socialism, and progressivism. I would think we'll get all kinds of definitions and the nuances will emerge if we can have an intense debate about this. But there are a lot of similar philosophies within those ideologies. And the distinction between the Democratic Socialists of America and the Progressive Caucus, I think, are awfully hard to identify from reading both Web sites. And I have read them both. So I would encourage people, Mr. Speaker, go to the Web site of the Progressive Caucus, Google it, read it. Go to the socialist Web site, dsausa.org, read it. Read the definition they have of communist, which they say they're not, and what their plan is. They say the distinction is that communists want to nationalize everything. They just want to nationalize the large corporations. They think that some of the small businesses could be run by, let's say, the barbers and the shopkeepers, they are actually run better by ma and pa. I agree with that. They are. But so are the big businesses better off run by the shareholders than they are the unions. But the socialist Web site calls for the nationalization of large corporations in America. They say, We don't have it do it all at once. They can do it over time. These Representatives here, the Progressive Caucus, claim that taking over the health care industry in America is not socialism because for a while, they're going to let you have your own insurance policy, the one you own today. You get to stay there. But did you hear anybody say, We're going to provide the framework so that there can be new insurance companies that spring up and new competition brought into the marketplace? Did anybody say that they expected to see the growth of new private sector companies? Of course not. Because those proposing socialized medicine are proposing socialism. They're proposing the eventual nationalization of the large corporations in America. Even if it comes out of a cassette in the head of the people talking the way they used to say it several months ago or several years ago, the real reality of today's economy is far different. We have the nationalization of large investment banking companies in the United States today. We have the nationalization of AIG Insurance Company today. We have the de facto and probably the ultimate nationalization of two of the three large automakers in America today. We have the advocacy for a national health care plan which will replace any health care plan eventually because the competition from the private sector will be dried up by the pressure from the government. When that happens, then what you'll see is what we've seen in every nation in the world that has socialized medicine. That is, lower-quality care and rationed services. I ran into a gentleman in a Menards store in Iowa some months ago who happened to be an immigrant from Germany. He told me about his hip replacement. He had waited in line for 6 to 7 months to get a hip replacement. Finally he got scheduled to get his hip replaced not in Germany but in Italy because the line was shorter. So people around the EU, they get themselves in the queue and try to get through to get this important surgery. We have people that have heart disease that need to have maybe a valve replacement or other types of surgery who lay in bed for a year in the United Kingdom because they haven't come up in the queue yet. There's only so much that can be handled. We have this large inner city government-run health care program now. We have socialized medicine in our inner cities. Now I'm thinking of some of the people I know that are involved in that who are good providers, and they're sincere about what they do. But is anybody seeking to replicate the services that we see there? Do they say so? Will they admit it? Because the policies you are advocating seek to replicate this socialized medicine that we see across the world, which rations services, lowers the quality of care, suspends the innovation, and discourages people from coming into the industry. It takes me back to those articles from the Collier's magazines that were published in 1948 and 1949. I had a World War II veteran who served out of Great Britain; and if I remember right, he flew on B-17s out of England over Europe. He brought me the originals of the Collier's magazines from 1948 and 1949, and I was able to read through them. Each magazine had stories in it about shaping the socialized medicine in the United Kingdom, which took place in 1948. Almost the immediate result, month by month you read that through until 1949 where there were pictures of people standing in long lines outside of the health care clinics and doctors that were tired and dejected because they could only spend just minutes with a patient. They had to run from patient to patient to see enough patients so they could feed their own kids because they got paid so much for a visit and the government set the price. It rationed the health care, and it narrowed the quality of the care. Today we see the same thing, only it's more stark because we are more sophisticated with the modernization of our health care. There is nothing there that I want to adopt from these foreign countries. The things that they tell us are, Well, we learned from their mistakes, and we'd never set up America to make the mistakes that were made in the foreign countries. Well, if you know the answers, gentlemen, why don't you clue them in in places like Canada, the United Kingdom, all across the European Union. Clue them in. Tell them what it is, your secret on how this is going to work, what you've learned from their mistakes. But the statement from the gentlelady from California: No one's talking about socialized medicine, close quote. Really? I think we need to define what socialized medicine is. That's when the government takes over the system and runs it. Just because you leave some insurance companies in place so you can say you have a choice until you starve them out, until they atrophy on the vine and everything becomes socialized medicine doesn't mean you're not talking about socialized medicine. You clearly are. Then also the gentleman from the State of Washington said that between 35 million to almost 50 million uninsured in America. So from 35 million and now it's gone to 50 million uninsured. The highest number I can find out there is 47 million. But there's another number out there that tells me something else. That is, of the uninsured, at least one in five are illegal immigrants that don't belong in the United States, that if we're going to provide them socialized medicine, can we at least send the Department of Homeland Security there to deliver them their little voucher or their debit card for their health insurance? Let's send ICE to deliver it to these 12 million illegals, and we can cut this number then down to 35 million just by simply letting those folks go on back to where they are legal to live, rather than the United States. The gentleman isn't very concerned about how it is that we would tax the producers in America to provide nationalized socialized medicine for people who aren't even legal here in the United States. I'm convinced that these are the gentlemen who would support such a policy to provide that health care, and they would also probably hand them citizenship papers into the bargain. Not I, Mr. Speaker. I oppose such ideas. I believe that we have to sustain ourselves as a country; and in order to do that, we have to maintain the principles that made this country great. Among them are free enterprise capitalism. That is a good word, not a bad word. They seem to know that socialism is a bad word, but they don't think progressivism is a bad word. Well, I will tell you that they are linking it together; and the link that they have severed now, that link between the Democratic Socialists of America, dsausa.org's Web site that posted for and provided and maintained the Progressive Caucus Web site, that little link isn't there anymore because they don't want to admit that it's hard to figure out the difference. But on the socialist Web site, it says, We are a political party, but we don't run candidates under our banner of socialism because--I think because the progressives know it has a bad name, so do the socialists know that socialism has a bad name still in America. They say that their legislative arm is the Progressive Caucus. You can go to dsausa.org, do a search for the Progressive Caucus, and you will come up with that link. At last count, I saw 75 names on that list that are active members of the Progressive Caucus that are alleged by the Socialist Web site of being a legislative arm of the socialists here. One over in the Senate, Bernie Sanders, self-alleged socialist, who is someplace to the right, according to his contemporary voting record in the Senate, of the President of the United States himself. And we wonder why America is taking this hard lurch to the left? Why we're looking at socialized medicine? Why we're seeing the automakers nationalized? How it is that the President of the United States can dictate down through our private sector, and we can see this sweeping expansive government into the private sector? Unimagined and unimaginable just a few months ago; but a reality today, Mr. Speaker. And it's a reality that is coming at the American people so fast that they can't sort out the targets to be able to demonstrate where it is that they want to make changes. If they want to object to the nationalization of AIG, well, too late because there were deals made with folks in the room that rolled billions, hundreds of billions in the end into those industries. So AIG is nationalized, and Citigroup is effectively nationalized, and the large investment institutions that took the TARP money are controlled by the Federal Government. And when they want to buy their way out and they offer a check to the White House so they can give the money back for TARP, the White House says, No, we won't take the check, and you can't buy your way out of this thing. We own you now. We're going to influence you, and we can't let you pay that money back. Why would they say that unless they wanted these businesses to be nationalized, unless they wanted to control the decisions that were made? It's obvious they have. The TARP money that went to the investment bankers that was invested and some of their holdings, significant holdings, billions of dollars of the holdings, were in the shares of our large automakers, Chrysler and General Motors, for example. So when the secured creditors for the large automakers, Chrysler and General Motors, held out and said, We can make a better deal for our shareholders if you just let this go into bankruptcy, and we'll let them sell off this material or sell the company off, and we'll get cash at, let's just say, 32 cents on the dollar--that's an estimate. I don't know if it's based on anything other than a small news story--32 cents on the dollar as compared to the 10 cents on the dollar that they might have gotten dealing with the White House. I'm advised--and I believe it to be true--that the car czar, appointed by the President, and the car czar's team in the White House set a limit, which is that secured creditors and the automakers are not going to get more than 10 cents on the dollar at the same time. That appears to be what happened. As the secured creditors were giving up their negotiating position one after another as the White House leveraged them and accused them of being--I have forgotten the exact language, but let's just say greedy capitalists--that wasn't the word, but it was the tone--and sought to intimidate them, as all of this was unfolding, the secured creditors were stepping back one after another after another. Finally it got down to only 5 percent of those holdings were secured creditors. They didn't have any allies anymore. They had to capitulate. They had to take those few pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers, the union, was handed controlling interest. What is this about? Why would anyone think that that is a good idea? Could you cook this up in the board room? Let's just say, could you learn this studying Econ 101 as a freshman in any college? I could have never devised this plan. But this plan unfolds in this fashion and hands over the controlling interest of Chrysler Motors, 55 percent of it, to the United Auto Workers, the union, the workers. What is it that their investment was that they're compensated for by active shares within a company? Well, that would be the health care benefits, the future benefits. It would be the benefits that are-- I would call those contingent liabilities downstream. As the United Auto Workers would get older and retire and they would put pressure on the health care system as those claims came, they thought there was as much as $10 billion in potential claims that could unfold in future years. So they gave that a present value and compensated the union for the present value of future health care liabilities by handing them a controlling interest of Chrysler Motor Company. Then while that is going on, what happens if we pass this socialized medicine that's advocated by the two gentlemen and the gentlelady tonight under the banner of the Progressive Caucus? Wouldn't that lift the burden of the health care costs, the contingent liability off of the hands of the union pension fund? Wouldn't that put that into the hands of taxpayers? So the shares of controlling interest to be handed over to the union should be at least, in an idea, compensation for future liabilities that would be removed by this socialized medicine policy that's being advocated by the people who say that they're not socialists or socialistic and their program is not socialism. But you go to the Web site, and it says, Progressive Caucus is our legislative arm. What they advocate is what we are for. They spell it out. And they say, they want to nationalize the businesses. They want to do it incrementally. This was written before President Obama figured out how to do this all in a few great big giant moves. This is a breathtaking change in the United States. The American people did not vote for these things. They did not know. They did not see it coming, and I think that we will see a reaction to this in a different fashion. Mr. Speaker, as we lay out the backdrop for the economics and health insurance and the automakers--and, by the way, one more thing about the automakers and, that is, the dealerships that have been closed with a stroke of the pen by order of the President's car czar and his car team, his White House pit crew--we can't find a single individual on that team that has ever spent 1 day in the auto dealer's business. I can't find and it was reported to me--and this one I'm not certain of-- that there is anybody on there that has been in the automaker's business. So they haven't made cars or sold cars. But they are calling the shots on all these cars. By the way, part of the deal is that the President is directing that Chrysler Motors make a nice high-mileage vehicle that suits his direction. I would submit that, other than at press conference time, the President will never ride in one of those. The Speaker of the House will never ride in one of those little electric cars. They are going to ride around in great big, bullet-proof limousines and Suburbans. And they will likely do that the rest of their lives. They won't be driving a tiny little car with a battery in it that goes slow uphill and fast downhill. That reminds me of a train car graffiti I happened to see waiting in a crossing a while back. Someone had written on the train car ``uphill slow, downhill fast, tonnage first, safety last.'' I thought that was quite an interesting little comment, by the way. So we are here with a Speaker who directs some of these things that she is not going to live under and a President that directs decisions of automakers that he is not going to live under. But they think they know what is best for the rest of us. And they have no faith in the marketplace. They apparently don't have faith in national security either, Mr. Speaker. And this is an issue of grave concern to me and grave concern to everyone who cares about the security of the United States of America. This country was severely attacked September 11, 2001. And the attacks that took place were against the Pentagon and against the Twin Towers of New York. The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, there are conflicting opinions on whether it was headed to the United States Capitol or whether it was headed to the White House itself. I don't know that we will ever know which way that it was directed. But we do know that people on the plane took that plane over. And they gave their lives. But they saved a lot of lives while they did that. And they are to be honored and respected. The intelligence that we have received since that time turned up the effort from the CIA and all 15 members of the intelligence community that have succeeded in foiling a good number of plots since September 11, 2001. And there has not been an attack on the American people, on our soil, that has been effective since that day. I don't think anyone on September 11, 2001, would have expected that we could go this long without an attack inside America. A lot of the credit goes to the intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, including the CIA. The CIA does a job and puts their lives at risk every day around the globe. And yes, they have informants. And sometimes they are working in the seedier side of life. It is the nature of their business. They have foiled plots. They have saved American lives. After the fact when there have been attacks that took place on American embassies, for example, in other places in the world, they have gone in and they have identified the culprits. And we have been able to pick up some of these culprits that have plotted against or attacked Americans to the credit of the CIA and the balance of the intelligence community. That is to their credit. But, Mr. Speaker, the Speaker of the House accused the CIA of lying to her and other highly placed people within this Congress up in the secured room of this Capitol, not very far from where I stand. And that would have taken place allegedly on the 4th of September, 2002, roughly 1 month after Zubaydah had been waterboarded. The allegation made by the Speaker was that the CIA lied to the United States Congress, misinformed the Congress of the United States of America, to be specific. And Mr. Speaker, this is untenable. This position is utterly untenable, to make such an allegation. I have with me the draft of the legislation, the draft of Federal law that prohibits lying to Congress. And I would read this, in part, into the Record so that the legal language flows with the clarity and the intent. And it is this: This is title 18, chapter 47, subchapter 1001, 18 U.S.C. 1001. And it says, in part: ``Whoever in any manner knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals or covers up by any trick, scheme or device, a material fact, whoever makes any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation shall be, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism, imprisoned not more than 8 years.'' Eight years in a Federal penitentiary for lying to Congress specifically about international or domestic terrorism. This statute is in the Code to address specifically the act and the acts that were alleged by the Speaker of the House. And so one can only draw one of two conclusions. And that is either the CIA willfully lied and misrepresented to the United States Congress, to the highest-ranking person in the United States Congress, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Of course, at the time, she was not Speaker. If the CIA lied, though, to the Speaker, this statute covers such an act. And they would be looking at 8 years in a Federal penitentiary. If the CIA did not lie to the Speaker, and she alleges that they did, then we have an untenable situation, an irreconcilable situation. It is a situation with no middle ground, Mr. Speaker, because it was a public statement. And it was a statement that was made not off the cuff. It wasn't flippant. It was something that had been prepared before it was delivered. And it appeared to be from notes that were in front of the Speaker apparently in a calculated statement that said, and when asked and clarified by the press, ``Are you telling us that the CIA lied to Congress?'' And the answer was, ``Yes, misled the Congress of the United States of America.'' Now such an allegation is a very, very serious charge. It is a charge of a felonious criminal act, misinforming the Congress of the United States. Now, if the allegation is true, an investigation needs to ensue. I have, along with the gentleman from California, asked for an FBI investigation into this matter. If the allegation is false, then the Speaker has torn asunder the relationship of trust and integrity that has to exist between the intelligence community and the United States Congress. I cannot imagine how anyone from the CIA would be willing to go into the fourth floor of the United States Capitol, into that secure room where everybody drops off their cell phones and their BlackBerrys and gives up their ability to take notes out of the room, and goes into that room to listen, to maintain that confidentiality that is necessary for the safety of all the American people. I cannot imagine the CIA, or any other member of the intelligence community, being willing to brief the Speaker of the House of Representatives until this matter is resolved. So if the Speaker didn't accurately remember what she was briefed on September 4, 2002, the easy thing to do--and it would be a very human thing to do, and all of us have sat in on briefings and hearings and we can't remember every detail, especially that many years back. The thing to do is to say, I don't remember clearly. If I have notes that are on file in the secure room, I will go back and revisit them and tell you what I can confirm that would be triggered by my memory and by my notes. One could go through and review the documents that were utilized at the time to verify what was briefed. But a statement that the CIA lied to the United States Congress, misled the Congress of the United States of America, to say it precisely, to make that statement, one has to have a definitive proof that it happened. It is part of Western Civilization that we presume the other individual is telling the truth and we can't make an allegation that they are not unless we have the evidence to the contrary. But this statement was not qualified. The question was, ``Are you saying that the CIA lied to the United States Congress?'' Answer, ``yes'' by the Speaker. Then, yes, pause, stutter, misled the Congress of the United States of America. A very serious charge addressed specifically under 18 U.S.C. 47 1001, that I have read into the Record, Mr. Speaker. This situation must be resolved. It is untenable. And it can't be reconciled with some compromise in the middle. I want a Speaker of the House that can be trusted with our national security, someone who is supportive of our national defense, our Department of Defense and our military. And during a time of war, our intelligence-gathering community has to have that level of confidence and that level of trust or the American people are at risk. The destiny of America will be changed. So, Mr. Speaker, with that in mind, I have drafted a resolution. Things being as they are today with some time to allow the Speaker to have an opportunity to address and clear up this matter, the resolution that I have I will read it into the Record at this moment. And I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that it is my intent to formally introduce it as a privileged resolution when we return in the early part of June from the Memorial break. This resolution reads: Whereas, as required by article VI of the Constitution, Members take an oath to ``support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; Whereas, in order to carry out his or her oath, a Member of Congress must have access to various kinds of sensitive and classified information regarding the national security interests of the United States; and Whereas, it is imperative that Members of Congress develop and maintain a close working relationship with the leadership and members of the United States' intelligence community to ensure that they, as the American people's elected representatives in Congress, have ready access to the kinds of sensitive and classified information often needed by legislators to make decisions about the safety and security of the American people; Whereas, the free and unimpeded flow of sensitive and classified information between our Nation's intelligence officials and Members of Congress is essential to ensure the dignity and integrity of the work and proceedings of the House of Representatives; Whereas, it is also important for all Members of Congress to support the work done by the members of our Nation's intelligence community to keep our Nation safe in order to engender the trust and respect of the American people for the work done by these individuals and their respective organizations to protect our Nation from the attacks of our enemies; Whereas, since its creation in the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has been charged with coordinating the Nation's intelligence activities and correlating and evaluating and disseminating intelligence affecting national security; Whereas, since the inception of the CIA, Members of Congress have relied upon the dedicated Americans that have filled its ranks to provide timely and accurate information about threats to America's safety and the steps being taken to address those threats; Whereas, in recent weeks, many public officials, including Members of Congress, and members of the public have called for investigations into the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, namely waterboarding, that have been used by the CIA since the attacks of September 11, 2001, to obtain information from detained terrorists for the purpose of thwarting future terrorist attacks against Americans; Whereas, on April 23, 2009, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated that she and other key Members of Congress were not told that waterboarding was used as an enhanced interrogation technique after it was first used in the interrogation of terrorist detainee Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al Qaeda operative, in August of 2002; Whereas, contrary to her claims, a report that was prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and released to Congress on Wednesday, May 6, 2009, indicated that during a September 4, 2002, meeting with intelligence officials, Speaker Pelosi, former Congressman and future CIA director, Porter Goss, and two aids were briefed on ``the particular enhanced interrogation techniques that had been employed'' by intelligence officials during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah; Whereas, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded on August of 2002, the month before Speaker Pelosi received a briefing from intelligence officials on the ``particular enhanced interrogation techniques that had been employed'' during his interrogation; Whereas, in response to questions about the May 6, 2009, report's indication that Speaker Pelosi was told by intelligence officials about the use of waterboarding as an enhanced interrogation technique during the briefing on September 4, 2002, the Speaker maintained that she had never been told that waterboarding was being used by officials. The briefers, her spokesman stated, only ``described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used''; Whereas, on May 14, 2009, in an attempt to further clarify what she was and was not told during the September 4, 2002, briefing about the waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques used by intelligence officials in their interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in August 2002, Speaker Pelosi stated ``those briefing me in September 2002 gave me inaccurate and incomplete information''; Whereas, on May 14, 2009, when it was noted by a reporter that she was ``accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002,'' Speaker Pelosi replied, ``Yes. Misleading the Congress of the United States''; Whereas, on May 15, 2009, in response to Speaker Pelosi's allegation about the CIA lying to her and ``the Congress of the United States,'' CIA director Leon Panetta sent a memo to the employees of the CIA stating, ``It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed'''; Whereas, title 18, part I, chapter 47, section 1001 of the United States Code provides that, with respect to ``any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate,'' whoever in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the government of the United States, whoever knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism, imprisoned not more than 8 years. Whereas, the relationship between Members of Congress and the intelligence community cannot be jeopardized by a distrust between Congress and the intelligence community resulting from intelligence officials lying to Congress or from Members of Congress leveling charges and allegations against intelligence officials; Whereas, the Speaker must either produce evidence providing that she was lied to in order to ensure that the ranks of our Nation's intelligence community are purged of those responsible for misleading Congress, or she must apologize to the men and women of the CIA, to the American people, and to the Members of this revered body to lift the cloud of uncertainty that has descended upon the Agency and the intelligence community since these allegations were leveled and allow the dedicated men and women who serve in its ranks to refocus their efforts and energies on keeping America safe; Whereas, if the Speaker is unable or unwilling to provide evidence to support her allegation that she and Congress have been lied to by the CIA, the American people will be left with no choice but to conclude that this allegation has no basis in fact; Whereas, if it is determined that the Speaker has indeed leveled baseless allegations against intelligence officials, she will have effectively undermined America's national security and severely damaged the integrity of this House, and she should therefore be held to account for these actions through, among other things, the withholding from her of sensitive or classified information pertaining to the national security interests of the United States; Therefore be it resolved, that the chairman and ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are directed to withhold any and all classified material from the Speaker of the House and her staff unless: Within 14 days after the date of passage of this resolution she produces evidence of the lies that she alleges were told to her by intelligence officials in September 2002, and The chairman and ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are directed to choose a suitable replacement from within the leadership ranks of the House Democrat Caucus to receive any necessary classified material and briefings in the place of the Speaker if classified material is withheld from her in accordance with this resolution. Mr. Speaker, this is a very serious, serious situation. It puts our intelligence community in a position where they have to be extraordinarily reluctant to brief the Speaker of the House, with the constitutional office of Speaker of the House, elected by the full body, not a partisan office, a nonpartisan office that's defined in our Constitution, third in line for the Presidency--only Vice President Joe Biden is ahead of the Speaker of the House in the line of ascendency to the Presidency, and our national security is at risk in a lot of ways. One of them can be because at this point, we are having difficulty, and I will make this statement. It's got be hard to recruit for the CIA or any members of the intelligence community today because they're being charged with lying to Congress. It's got to be hard to get anybody to come to this Congress to brief anyone when we have an administration and a Speaker and a network here on this Hill that's trying to find somebody in the former Bush administration that they can indict and prosecute and punish as a way of, I don't know, getting even with the previous administration, I suppose. I don't understand how this majority and this Congress can't simply just move on and provide national security. I don't understand how the Speaker of the House cannot be alarmed by being briefed about waterboarding in September of 2002, but after the information comes out to the press, then is, let me say, ex post facto alarmed, alarmed after the fact, perhaps because the political pressure comes from the left has been turned up significantly. Whatever those reasons are, the Speaker of the House cannot be leveling charges unless they are founded, and a statement should never be made by the Speaker of the House that would challenge the integrity of the CIA or any other member of our intelligence gathering community unless the evidence can be laid down on the table at the same time the statement is made. You simply do not call someone a liar in this country unless you have the evidence available to back it up. And what this resolution does, it says Madam Speaker, back it up or back up, one or the other. We cannot have this situation. I don't know anybody in this Congress that will receive a briefing that fill us in on the real facts. The CIA has got to be reluctant, and they will tell us the truth, but we're going to have ask a whole lot of the right questions to get this out at this point. This Congress has to make appropriations to the entire intelligence community and to our Department of Defense. If a hostile attitude toward them exists, there exists also the incentive for other Members of the Congress and staff members of the committee and staff members of other Members of Congress, as well as the Speaker's staff themselves, to devise ways or summarily reduce the resources going to our intelligence community or establish policy changes that make their jobs more difficult. The statement itself calls into question all activities of this Congress that would affect the activities of our entire defense network in America, Department of Defense as well as our intelligence communities. This is a very serious situation. It must be resolved. It cannot go on without having it answered. This resolution simply says that there will not be security clearance for the Speaker of the House as long as she holds the position that the CIA can't be trusted. She would have no reason to sit down and listen to them if she believes they are liars. If she thinks they are, she needs to produce the evidence. I think they are not. I think they have told the truth in these briefings, and the other people in the briefings say so, and yes, they deal in misinformation all the time. That is the nature of the CIA. But once it's down in the fourth floor, in that secured room, we've got to be able to look them in the eye and trust they are delivering to us the unvarnished information that's necessary for us to provide the resources so that they can do their job to protect all Americans, Mr. Speaker. And so as this Memorial Day break will ensue at the conclusion of my remarks this evening, as I understand it, I want to remind you and the people that are listening that we have this period of time now for the balance of the month of May, and we come back in after the Memorial Day weekend. When we do that, it is my intention to introduce this resolution that I have read into the Record and ask this Congress to withhold the security clearance of the Speaker of the House until she clears up this mess that is created by her allegations and to produce the base for the charges or withdraw them and apologize to the CIA, to this Congress, and to the American people and to admit what's really going on here. That is the core of my reason for being here tonight, Mr. Speaker. I will be back on this floor early in June to address this subject matter again. I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to keep an eye on this situation. I ask the American people to keep an eye on it, and I will also be doing the same thing, looking for resolution to this matter the sooner the better. The American people will be safer if it's sooner rather than later.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The gentleman from Iowa is pleased to be recognized to address you tonight in this 60-minute period of time. Having recognized that the gentleman from Missouri was in the middle of a statement, and having recognized that there were gentlemen here on the floor, along with the gentlewoman from Wyoming, that are still full of information that America needs to hear, Mr. Speaker, I will just simply set the stage with a very short piece of this--and that is that I think we need to have the smoothest of transitions from Special Order to Special Order, and that would require that I yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) who was in the middle of a statement when his 60-minute clock ran out.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thanking the gentleman from Missouri, and reclaiming my time, I would add to the statement he's made--and I'm quite impressed with the attention the gentleman must have paid at that presentation that morning--but to look at the situation in Spain, the highest unemployment in the industrialized world; 17\1/2\ percent, as the gentleman from Missouri has said. Over 100 percent increase in industries' electricity costs, and the idea that 20 percent of the electricity in Spain is generated by wind, which pushes up against the threshold of anybody in the country, anybody in the world that lays out these standards. If you could produce 20 percent of your electricity by wind, that's way up against the threshold because we know that wind doesn't blow all the time. It lays down often at night, it doesn't always blow when you need the electricity. You have to have backup systems, you have to have gas-fired generators that can be fired up to take care of that demand when the wind is not blowing. But, additionally, another statement that the gentleman from Missouri didn't make is how the Sicilian Mafia stepped in and was engaged in the brokering of licenses that determined who would be building the wind generation plants in Spain and the companies that would be building them and the inefficiencies that came from that, let alone the corruption that came from it. Whenever you have government involved in brokering out licenses that has to do with who's going to be providing something that's not demanded by the market, I think exposes a great flaw in this. And the government of Spain about 7 or 8 years ago decided they wanted to be the world's leader in renewable energy. They set about going down that path. Following that path to become the world's leader in renewable energy, they achieved it. But they also achieved the highest unemployment in the industrialized world--17\1/2\ half percent--a 100 percent increase in industries' electricity costs. They brought in the Mafia from Sicily, the Sicilian Mafia, that would be brokering the licensures along with some people in Spain, I'm convinced, and now they have a situation that so many people are bought into it that they can't step away and say that was a colossal mistake, and if we're going to save the economy of Spain, we have to pull the plug on this renewable energy idea. This greenest of countries in the industrialized world, Spain, has the most stressed economy in the industrialized world and, in big part, because they have bought into this vast green concept of American energy. So, as we flow with this, I see a posture of eagerness on the part of the gentlelady from Wyoming, Mrs. Lummis.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, the Rules Committee, which is up there on the third floor, meets without the benefit of television cameras and often without the benefit of the news media even reporting it. They can decide whether your idea can be heard on the floor of the House of Representatives. And often the Rules Committee decides that your idea will not be heard and it will not see the light of day. Is that correct?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentlelady yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. For snakes?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Wyoming. It occurs to me that if this Congress is to have a nuclear carbon footprint--I remember the Speaker when she was, let me say, sworn into the third-highest constitutional office in the United States of America, third in line for the presidency, she concluded that this Capitol Complex was going to be carbon neutral, which means greenhouse gas neutral, which means CO2 gas neutral. And having a look at the generating equipment that produces the lights that illuminates us tonight, Mr. Speaker, it occurred to the gentlelady, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, that she would need to make a correction that would make it consistent with her left coast constituents. So it went on the Board of Trade and carbon credits were purchased at a cost to the American taxpayers of $89,000 to buy these credits that were designed to pay people to change their behavior that was contributing to the greenhouse gas, CO2, and the atmosphere over all of God's creation. That $89,000 was invested in two areas. I checked this out, and I went to visit some of the sites. One of them was no-till farmers in South Dakota. They were no-till farmers before they got the check. They were no-till farmers after they got the check. If they actually tilled the ground afterwards, the carbon escaped anyway. So if they sell the farm, somebody comes in, puts a disk or a plow to it, it will go back into the atmosphere. So the sequestration was nillo, shall we say. That was the no-till farmers in South Dakota. There was also a nice check that was written to an electrical generating plant in Chillicothe, Iowa, that was to pay them to burn switchgrass in place of coal in order to make the CO2 emissions carbon neutral as opposed to contributing to the CO2 in the atmosphere, which would come from the net consumption of coal. Well, I don't know. This is a pretty interesting thing. So I went to Chillicothe, Iowa, and I visited the generating plant. I went into these buildings that were full of the switchgrass hay they had purchased several years earlier, at the cost to the Federal taxpayer and a government grant, the equipment to run these big round bails, 1,500-pound switchgrass bails, through a hammermill to chew them up into little itty-bitty pieces, to spit them into the incinerator and blend them with the coal dust that would come from the grinding of the coal that would allow it to combust at the most efficient rate. This switchgrass that was going to be carbon neutral had been burned to generate electricity a couple years earlier, but--here is something I know--when I'm looking at a shed full of switchgrass brown bails, and it's covered with coon manure--not cow flatulence but coon manure--they probably haven't burned much of that hay in a long time. So the conclusion that one can draw was actually, 2 years earlier was when they shut down the switchgrass burning technique, but yet they were paid to burn the switchgrass and to do this carbon-neutral approach. So we have 89,000 taxpayer dollars invested in purchasing carbon credits to provide carbon-neutral emissions for the Capitol Complex, to buy these carbon credits on the Board of Trade in Chicago, to encourage people to do more things that are more conducive to the environment and produce less CO2 than they would have otherwise. I couldn't verify that anybody changed their behavior whatsoever for $89,000. I can tell you, if somebody wrote me a check for $89,000, I would at least consume less energy, let alone produce that energy in a more environmentally friendly fashion. So that's the result of cap-and-trade that is being proposed by the Energy and Commerce Committee today and probably tomorrow and hopefully the next day and the next day and the next day ad infinitum until they decide that the science doesn't support this and the economics doesn't support it. But that comes to mind for me. And, by the way, the electricity that we consume in Iowa, a lot of it comes out of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. I have been up there to look at that, where you could put a school bus in the bucket of the drag line. I'm still a little confused about square miles versus cubic miles of coal, but I know they have a lot of it in the Powder River Basin. I'm glad to have the power, and I appreciate the rail lines that come down. I really don't want captive shipping going on, but I appreciate the connection we have along with the renewable energy that comes out of the Missouri River and the seven dams that are on the Missouri River and the hydroelectric power that comes, which is carbon neutral, Madam Speaker. Our hydroelectric is carbon neutral but it does not get credit for being renewable energy because Bobby Kennedy Jr. and others think that however the rivers were is how they ought to be reverted back to and that we can't improve upon Mother Nature. I think God gave us these natural resources, and he's given us the ability to improve upon them. We've done so in many cases, and we should do so into the future. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas, the Secretary of our conference, Judge Carter, as much time as he may consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time for a moment, I would point out that the carbon credits are the modern-day equivalent of the reason that Martin Luther came forward and nailed his positions up on the Diet of Worms which is, the church was selling indulgences. Carbon credits are indulgences that allow a company to pay for the carbon emissions that they're emitting into the atmosphere. I think that's what the judge is talking about.

Mr. KING of Iowa. For a price.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Sin tax.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. This sparks a little bit of a number of some data that I produced about not quite a week ago. I have been asking the question, How do you put this global warming in context, Mr. Speaker? And so I begin to ask these basic questions that any environmentalist that was creating the idea of limiting the amount of greenhouse gasses that could be emitted into the atmosphere, when asked this broader question of, well, how big is this atmosphere--I mean, that is like question number one: How big is the atmosphere? And I don't think anybody here knows the answer to that question, Mr. Speaker. And I would ask you this question directly, but I don't want to put you on the spot. I just want you to listen carefully. That is that our atmosphere, the total weight--this is how we measure it in metric tons--the total weight of our atmosphere is 5.150 quadrillion metric tons. That's the pressure of all of this atmosphere that's pushing down on the Earth's gravity. If you could put a scale on all of the surface of the Earth, they would say, Oh, 5.150 quadrillion metric tons. That's all the atmosphere we have. Now, that's the idea or the content of the volume of our atmosphere. Then the next question you've got to ask is, well, if you're going to set the Earth's thermostat by controlling the emissions into the atmosphere from the industry of the United States of America, wouldn't you want to know what the net cumulative total of the U.S. industry since the dawn of industrial revolution would actually be? Well, I asked the question of the energy information agency that we have--and it's their job--and of course they don't have the answer to that because they never asked the second most obvious question. The first one is how big is the atmosphere. The second one is what has the Earth done or what has America done to contribute to the greenhouse gasses, the CO2 within the atmosphere? The cumulative total contributed by the U.S. industrial giant since 1800 works out to be this: 178,792,900 metric tons of CO2. Now, what's that mean to anybody that's paying attention? I'm sure there is somebody out there that's run the calculator and already come to this conclusion. This would be .00347 percent of the overall atmosphere. Now, what does that mean in terms we can understand? This way, Mr. Speaker. If you would draw a circle that represented the entire volume of the Earth's atmosphere and do it at a 48-inch radius, 8-foot circle--so two 4-by-8 sheets of drywall side to side, circle drawn, full amount, more than my full wingspan here, that's the circle that you envision, Mr. Speaker. Now, how much of this overall volume of the U.S. atmosphere is the cumulative total of CO2 contributed by the U.S. industrial might since the dawn of the industrial revolution? That little circle in the middle of that 8-foot circle would be about like that, .56 inches. The diameter of about a buffalo bullet is about all it would be in the center of that 8-foot circle, and that's the cumulative total. And we are going to reduce the overall U.S. emissions by 20 percent for a while and then 40 percent for a while and 83 percent for a while. And sooner or later, the arrogance and the vanity of America is going to adjust the thermostat of God's green Earth with a ratio of less than half an inch on an 8-foot diameter circle. How could we possibly imagine that could work? Where is Al Gore when I need him to explain this to me? I will say this. Al Gore, you were wrong on the science. And those of you who are busily marking up in Energy and Commerce a cap-and-tax bill today, tomorrow, the next day, and for eternity, are utterly wrong on the economics. You would handicap America's economy on some myopic idea, some vanity idea that we could control the Earth's temperature, set the thermostat of America by reducing the size of this .56 circle in the middle of the 8-foot diameter. That's what we are dealing with. That's Midwestern common sense. And we're dealing with the utter arrogance of people who believe this rather than the God that created this Earth.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Passing it on to the consumer is what this is about. We have seen the numbers that show that an MIT professor has done the calculation on the costs of the proposal on this cap-and-tax that's out before this Congress and put a macronumber on the cost to our economy. Then some ingenious people who just simply took the average number of persons in a household, which is calculated to be 2.54, and divided that into the overall cost to our economy, the increased cost of energy that has to do with cap-and-tax. They concluded that each household would see their energy costs go up annually by $3,128 a year. Then the professor at MIT said, Oh, wait a minute. I'm real sorry I released the number because I don't like the result of the conclusion that came about because of the division of the numbers of persons in a household and the cost per household that would be the increase in the cost of all of our energy, electrical, our heat, our gas bill, our gasoline bill and our fuel oil and all of those things that are required to keep each household going. That's what's going on here. This is almost to the point where it's a religion that believes in something that isn't based upon a science. Now I'm great with faith, but I'm not so good with faith that's based upon pseudo- science. I would ask the Speaker, how much time do we have remaining?