Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Paul Broun, another one of my friends and colleagues.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would just ask: Have all of your ideas been blocked? How does this work? Can't you offer an amendment that would put up a recorded vote and tell America where you stand? What prevents you from at least telling America where you stand so that they can evaluate the votes of people on both sides of the aisle and make their decision in November of 2010? What is the obstruction there?

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman would yield, then why didn't I see that amendment on the floor of the House of Representatives and have an opportunity to send a message to my constituents about how I would like to see this economy managed? Is there a reason that blocked that from coming to the floor?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Am I hearing that the Speaker of the House of the Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is the one who has the power and does decide what will be voted on on the floor of the House of Representatives, and the people of America have no access to being able to know what your position is or what the position is of Democrats and Republicans because it is being blocked by the Speaker and by the Rules Committee? That is how I understand that. And I would yield to the gentleman from Texas to clarify that point.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would make also three additional points to this process. Mr. Speaker, the American people don't care about process. But I'm about to address process again. It has been raised by the gentleman from Georgia and addressed by the gentleman from Texas. And I will say this, that not only do we have a Rules Committee that decides what the American people get to know about the opinions by recorded vote here on the floor of the House of Representatives, because no matter what kind of logical improvement that may come to perfect legislation from the minds and hearts of the American people, as brought through the minds and hearts of their elected representatives, if the Speaker's Rules Committee doesn't think it is a good idea for that debate to take place, let alone the vote to take place, it will not happen, Mr. Speaker. That is what happens here in the House of Representatives. It is a distorted process. And the rules regulate how much, what is going to be heard, what is going to be debated and what is going to be voted on here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And so I think that that is an educational process that needs to take place. And as I have gone before the Rules Committee, and I have found out that no matter how good my idea is, I actually have come down to the floor here and into the Record, it is a matter of record, I have said that we need to get television cameras up there so at least the American people can see the behavior of the Rules Committee carte blanche wiping out good idea after good idea. Additionally, it isn't just the Rules Committee. It is the full committee process. And I can think of three occasions, Mr. Speaker, where the committee chair has either allowed his staff, or directed his staff, to change a bill after it passed out of committee to go to the floor. And I can think of the case of the stimulus package where there was a 12-hour markup in Energy and Commerce, the ranking member, former chairman, Joe Barton, was livid that they spent 12 hours marking up, writing, trying to amend and seeking to perfect legislation that was the stimulus package that was initiated at the request of the President, having seen that bill finally pass out of the Energy and Commerce Committee and come to the Rules Committee and come to this floor in a different form, the committee had no say in the end. It was a mock markup in Energy and Commerce. Subsequent to that, the bankruptcy bill came out of the Judiciary Committee, where I sit and where Judge Carter and I used to sit arm to arm. I offered an amendment that would set up special provisions for people who went bankrupt because of their house mortgages. I offered an amendment that would have exempted those who have fraudulently misrepresented their income, their assets or the appraisal of the property. It would have exempted them from relief under the bankruptcy bill. That amendment was passed in the Judiciary Committee by a vote of 21-3. After the bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee, the language was changed before it came to the floor. Then just a little over 1 week ago, on the Financial Services Committee, there was an amendment offered by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. I think she is Minnesota Number 5. And that amendment would have exempted any proceeds of the bill from going to ACORN, an organization that had been indicted and was under investigation by the Federal Government for election fraud. And that amendment passed unanimously out of the Financial Services Committee. It should have come to the floor as part of the bill. It was totally changed, I believe, at the direction of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee to limit it to only those companies that had been actually convicted of fraud, not those that had admitted to fraudulently filing over 400,000 voter registration forms. This process is corrupted, Mr. Speaker, and it is because the process doesn't work. If it can change after it comes out of the committee, if it can change out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, if it can change out of the Judiciary Committee, if it can be changed at the direction of the chairman out of the Financial Services Committee, and if the Rules Committee can decide and the Speaker can direct them to decide what comes to this floor, then the American people don't even have the benefit of the debate, let alone the opportunity to improve and perfect legislation, which is a provision by our Founding Fathers. And I would yield to the gentleman from Georgia to reiterate my point.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, the gentleman from Georgia, I thank you for your statement on this matter. And I would reiterate that each of us represents somewhere between 600 and 700,000 Americans. The franchise is this, Mr. Speaker, we owe all our constituents our best effort and our best judgment. And a lot of that best judgment comes from our constituents who are tuned into those issues who funnel those ideas to us. And we need to sort those ideas, and then we need to bring them back into the process in the hearing process in the subcommittee and in the full committee markup process and in the Rules Committee and in debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. And the vision of the Founding Fathers is this, that the best ideas of America get synthesized, they get compressed and encapsulated here through this process that I have described finally being debated and voted upon on the floor of the House of Representatives. And there the vigor of the American people can be presented to the United States Senate for them to cool the coffee in the saucer as opposed to the hotter cup that comes from the House. That is the vision of our Founding Fathers. That is the vision that is being usurped by the policies of our regal Speaker who has undermined our national security. And I would yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. The President of the United States has said, why can't you learn from Spain?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Or allow the miracle of photosynthesis to solve this problem of mothers kissing their children goodnight. I will yield to the other judge from Texas, Mr. Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield? I would ask the gentleman from Texas, can you think of some program, a tax or any other program that would more effectively transfer jobs to China, India, and developing countries other than cap-and-tax here in the United States?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. I want to pose this question, and this is the question I posed to the judge from Texas and I posed this to the other judge from Texas and the doctor from Georgia. I pose this to all of my Democrat friends over on this side of the aisle. Can you envision any program that would transfer more jobs from America to the developing countries than cap- and-tax? Is there anything out there that would be worse for our economy? If you have an idea, stand. I will yield to you. I will be very happy to yield this microphone to anybody on this side of the aisle that believes that Judge Gohmert would happen to be wrong or I happen to be wrong that there is any means that can more cripple America's industry or cost our economy more or transfer more jobs to foreign countries than cap-and-tax that's being debated right now in Energy and Commerce. I say none. You don't ask me to yield. That means you have no better idea. I will yield to the gentleman from Georgia instead.

Mr. KING of Iowa. So the gentleman agrees with my conclusion.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Let me pose a question. What would be, in the history of the United States of America, today, including potentially a cap-and-tax bill that's before the Energy and Commerce Committee today, what would be the most colossal mistake ever made in the history of the United States Congress? In your opinion. And then I want to hear the opinion from the gentleman from Texas as well.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. Is there a bigger mistake that has been made in the history of the United States Congress other than handicapping the U.S. economy by applying a cap-and-tax program? Can you think of anything, Judge Carter, that has happened in the last 200-and-some years?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Let me make this statement that Smoot-Hawley didn't put on our economy nearly as much burden as we would have with cap-and- tax. This taxation is the most inefficient taxation ever devised in the history of the United States of America. It applies about $5 worth of tax for every dollar that ends up in the Federal coffers, and otherwise it has no impact whatsoever. It is a tax. It is an 80 percent overburden for a 20 percent revenue stream. That's how bad cap-and-tax is. And I believe it's the most colossal mistake--if it's done--in the history of the United States Congress. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and presuming that we have a couple of minutes left.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the Speaker for that acknowledgment. We have watched this free enterprise system be subverted, and it's been subverted almost systematically and in a Machiavellian fashion and a fashion so much faster than I ever would have imagined it could have done. I've watched class envy be implemented as a political tool that pit Americans against Americans and say to them, You don't have to worry about your car payment, your utility bill, or your rent or house payment because sooner or later, the Federal Government is going to cover that. We're going to take from those who produce more, and we are going to give it to people who produce less. It's a matter of a political tool that says you are not really entitled to what you earn but you are entitled to what you claim you need. And so this statement was made this morning by Star Parker, who is a wonderful, wonderful American citizen. She said the policy, as exists now in America, is that if somebody has something that you want, you go hire politicians to take it from them and give it to you. That's what's going on in America today, this America that was a meritocracy, an America that when my grandmother came here from Germany a little over 100 years ago, people stood on their own two feet, provided for themselves, and reached out and helped others. Where my father and his family were raised off of the coins in the cookie jar, today it's the coins of those who are working being passed over to those who don't, Mr. Speaker. We cannot be the most successful Nation in the history of the world if we do not refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism. If we don't reestablish the merits of our free enterprise capitalistic system, if we don't refurbish the property rights that are there, if we fail to refurbish the rights that come from God, that are conferred through our Declaration and reiterated by our Founding Fathers, that these rights come from God and that they're natural rights and it falls under natural law, if we fail to refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism, we have seen the apex of our civilization. The charge is on all of us. The charge is on Democrats to wake up to this fact, and the charge is on Republicans to wake America up to this fact. And I am committed to this cause, as are my colleagues here in the House of Representatives, including the judge from Texas and the doctor from Georgia.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time from the gentlelady who has been a champion for life for a long time, here is another piece that we have heard about, Dawn Johnsen on abortion, legal but not rare. This is where she even goes in conflict with such known liberals as Hillary Clinton, for example, where Dawn Johnsen said, ``The notion of legal restrictions as some kind of reasonable `compromise,' perhaps to help make abortion `safe, legal and rare,' thus proves nonsensical.'' That is her statement of January 25, 2006, not that long ago. And here our Progressives show up again, as I spoke about earlier, Madam Speaker, ``Progressives must not portray all abortions tragedies. Absent unforeseen technological and medical changes, abortion is unlikely to become truly rare and certainly not nonexistent.'' This lady isn't happy about abortion becoming rare. She has chastised even Hillary Clinton about asking for abortion to be safe, legal and rare. This gives you an example of what Progressives are, also, Madam Speaker. Progressives fit this bill. Can you imagine a Progressive who was antislavery who believed in the value, the intrinsic value of human life, to the extent of laying down their life for their brethren who have lived in bondage, would people like that be advocating for more abortions and calling those who pray outside of abortion clinics equivalent to the KKK? I think we know what a Progressive is today. I don't think there were any Progressives that existed by any defined label that took place around the Revolutionary War time, Madam Speaker. But Dawn Johnsen does fit. She is a Progressive. I will give her that. And her name should be withdrawn by the President of the United States. In fact, the gentlelady from Ohio and I are on a letter together. We and 60 other Members of Congress issued a letter to President Obama dated March 24, 2009. It calls upon President Obama to withdraw the nomination of Dawn Johnsen as Office of Legal Counsel. And part of the language here in the second page of the letter to the President signed by 62 of us from the House says: ``Senator Hillary Clinton, in a 2005 speech commendable for setting forth a pro-choice, pro-prevention, pro- family agenda, took the aspiration a step in the wrong direction.'' This is Dawn Johnsen talking about Hillary Clinton. She said Hillary Clinton ``took the aspiration to rare abortions a step in the wrong direction when she called for policy changes so that abortion 'does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances.' '' That is a quote of Hillary Clinton. Dawn Johnsen even calls Hillary Clinton out as not progressive enough, not being enough pro-abortion that she would think that abortions should be rare. That is an affront to Dawn Johnsen's values. And Dawn Johnsen would be in a position to whisper into the ear of the President on what is legal and what isn't, what is constitutional and what isn't. But not only that, she is not just flipping a toggle switch that is a legal opinion, Madam Speaker. She is shaping legal policy and making recommendations to the President that are policy changes. Now imagine if she wasn't there. And she is formally not there because her nomination is held up by the Senate. It is held up by the Senate because they know many of the things that Mrs. Schmidt and I have talked about here tonight and we have talked about for some months now since her nomination emerged. But the Guantanamo Bay issue fits perfectly with the type of thing that I would bring to bear where an Office of Legal Counsel would be there with access to the President continually, generating an activist left-wing, yes, call it a Progressive agenda, because that is not going to be a very good word when we finish describing what it is, coming up with ideas like, Mr. President, you need to issue an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay and turn these prisoners loose. Well, Madam Speaker, I didn't make that up. I'm not being flippant. I'm simply quoting Dawn Johnsen. It says here on a list of quotes from Dawn Johnsen with regard to Guantanamo Bay under Gitmo that Dawn Johnsen posits two alternatives to deal with the Gitmo detainees, the enemy combatants, the terrorists, the vile al Qaeda terrorists, the worst of the worst that are down there, 241 of them, according to the testimony before the Judiciary Committee today by Attorney General Holder. She says we only have two choices with the Gitmo detainees: either release them or transfer them to facilities in the United States and consideration of civilian criminal prosecution in the Federal courts. An outrageous idea that seems to be under consideration by this White House at this time. And I have been down to Gitmo maybe a little over a month ago. They are living pretty good down there, Madam Speaker. No nation has ever treated prisoners of a conflict as well. I didn't say any better. I said no nation has treated them as well as we have treated these enemies at Guantanamo Bay who have a vile oath to kill Americans. And they believe it is their path to salvation. They are attacking American guards an average of 20 times a day. Half the time they are throwing feces and trying to rub it into the face of our guards. That is their own feces. The other half of the time they are physically assaulting them and trying to hurt them with whatever they might have for cuffs and shackles. They are living in climate control. They set the thermostat in the air conditioned Caribbean island vacation resort. Their limitations are they have to live within the fences that keep them from getting away. But even when they are in there, they get a little soccer field. They can go out and play soccer. They have got foosball tables. They get to choose from nine items on the menu every day and they set the thermostat between 75 and 80 degrees because they say that is their cultural temperature. So we would give them air conditioning and give them their cultural temperature while our troops are sometimes out in the sun. They stop for prayer five times a day, 100 minutes a day. Our troops stop and respectfully wait. That is all right with me. Everybody gets a Koran. No one can have a Bible. Of the 800-and-some who were there altogether, there was one who requested a Bible. And it created such belligerence and violence among other detainees that they said, no, you can't have a Bible. They have since released the individual that wanted a Bible. Everybody else gets a Koran, one that is untouched by one of these infidel guards that are getting feces thrown in their face on a regular basis, Madam Speaker. This is the kind of idea that comes from Dawn Johnsen. Let's turn these people loose or bring them to the United States. She argues that she should have habeas corpus rights. That is a radical Federal Court decision by the way. And it is radical. The Founding Fathers would have never approved such a thing. That is why they wrote the provisions in the Constitution of habeas corpus. She writes that it was there so that when we fight people around the world we can round them up and bring them back on a slow ship with a sail. They didn't have motors on their boats back then, let alone airplanes. Bring before an American court. Give them rights of habeas corpus. If they get turned loose on a technicality, turn them loose into the streets of America. I asked the Attorney General today, Can you assure us that you will not turn these Gitmo detainees loose into the United States? He could not assure of us of that. Now, I can tell you if I were the Attorney General, I would be able to find out a way. I could tell you under these conditions this is what we are trying to do. I will assure you I would do everything I can. I would at least like not to have these detainees board domestic American airliners and fly with my children or grandchildren. I would think that maybe we could put them on the no-fly list like Teddy Kennedy was. For some reason, we can't even do that. And as a temporary diversion to this diatribe, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Indiana, who might be able to flesh that story out just a little bit, such time as he may consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I appreciate being recognized and having the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. One of the things that I am able to receive as I come down here and prepare for my hour here is an opportunity to listen to my colleagues and sometimes an opportunity to get an education. And if one listens carefully, Madam Speaker, there is a lot to be learned in this Congress. In fact, I believe that this is the most amazing educational experience that one could ask for. We are the center of information here in many ways. Washington, DC, is a magnet for information. And as Members, we have staff and committee people that gather that information at our request and give it to us in a means by which we can understand it, process it, and utilize it. In this information age that we have, this electronic era that we have, the Internet is full of information. The Library of Congress is full of information. There are all kinds of links out there; many of them are very credible, some of them are not very credible. So we sort through, and we are always looking at what is the original source. How do you document the credibility? Well, you figure out who the person was that wrote it and their measure of credibility. So as I come to the floor and listen tonight, I am rather amazed at what I've learned. I saw this long list of successes of the Progressives. And I've lived through a fair amount of history by now, Madam Speaker, and I've studied a lot of history by now, and I had never equated the Revolutionary War to Progressives. That's a new thing to me. That's a revolution to me. It's a revelation to me that it was the Progressive group that decided that we should throw off the yolk of King George and grasp our freedom. It seems to me that it was the Founding Fathers and those who shaped this Nation who put down in the document of the Declaration of Independence--that inspirational document--that our rights come from God and that those rights that flow from God into man are granted willingly to the people. That's a structure that--I guess you could call it progressive, but I haven't heard anybody on this side of the aisle that calls themselves Progressive stand up and say that their rights come from God or that there are natural rights and there is a natural order of things and it's ordered by the Master of the universe. That's what our Founding Fathers believed. That was the inspiration that shaped America. It was the inspiration that brought about the Declaration, and it was the inspiration that caused the perseverance that allowed the United States to prevail over the British in the Revolutionary War. The Nation was forged on those fundamental values that haven't been openly rejected by the Progressives, but neither have they been embraced by the Progressive Caucus. But almost night after night I hear these things. The American Revolution, a success of the Progressives. That's a new one. I had not heard that one before. The emancipation of the slaves. Well, that's an idea that is related to change. The institution of slavery had existed for thousands of years. But I didn't know that Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists were considered to be Progressives. I thought they were, Madam Speaker, Republicans. In fact, I'm sure they were Republicans. I have no doubt about it. The history of my family and the history of my understanding of the Republican Party is it was forged in order to abolish slavery. That's why they came about. That's why they formed together and nominated Abraham Lincoln because he was the abolitionist candidate, the first Republican candidate, the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, emancipated the slaves. What would Abe Lincoln think if he were able to listen tonight and answer to the rhetoric that is here on the floor of the House of Representatives that claims that emancipation, the end of slavery at the loss of 600,000 free people who gave their lives in the clash to put an end to slavery and to establish the States' rights issue and to tie the Union back together, all those things tied together. All of that blood that was spilled by the sword that paid for the blood that was drawn by the lash was spilled because Republican abolitionists stepped forward and said we're going to put an end to the atrocity called slavery. They didn't think of themselves as Progressives. I don't think the word existed in politics in the fashion that we hear it today. There are a group of Progressives in this Congress today. I don't know how they associate themselves with the success of the American Revolution, inspired by the rights that come from God, or the end of slavery that was paid for in blood and inspired and led by people who formed the Republican Party for, at least in part, the specific purpose to abolish slavery. And then I go on and I see the National Park System, Teddy Roosevelt. I would call Teddy Roosevelt--not a Progressive. I would call him a populist, but not a Progressive. So he was responsible for establishing the National Park System. When I first looked at it, I thought, well, the Progressives are the ``national pork system.'' I would agree with that, Madam Speaker. But, no, the typo didn't exist. The chart said, ``National Park System.'' So let's give that to the prairie populous, or the populous, not the Progressives. Civil rights for minorities and women was another piece on this poster board; civil rights for minorities and women, passed by Republicans, majority of Republicans--more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 than did Democrats. It gets distorted if you read the history off the poster. If you go back and look at the reality and the facts of it all, it's entirely different. When I see rural electrification, it gets my attention. There have been a couple years of my life that I didn't use electricity that came from a rural electric cooperative. But almost every other year--most of the years of my life that has been our primary source of power. And I know where rural electrification came from. My families grew up on farms that didn't have electricity. They remember when the first wire got out there to the end of the line and they hung a light bulb in the barn so they could go out there and milk the cows in the dark; not by the lantern any longer, but by a 40-watt bulb that hung on a wire out of the ceiling of the barn. You pulled a little chain, turned the light on, then you could milk in the shadows of the light bulb instead of the shadows of the flickering lantern. That got there because of cooperatives. And cooperatives, I believe at the very closest you could bring them towards progressivism would be taking them towards populism. It was the people out on the prairie and in the open range, the La Grange in the West, the populism that exists today within the politics of the people from where I live and points on west, that politics that decided we're going to settle this countryside and we're not going to live out here and live in darkness without water, sewer, water, lights or roads. We're not going to try to farm this countryside and take it back from the wilderness and turn it into a productive region unless--we can do it if we can bring electricity out, if we can bring services out, if we can bring telephone out. And so they went to work and they set up cooperatives. They didn't view themselves as Progressives. They didn't even view themselves as populists. The people that established the RECs years ago, the rural electric cooperatives--and I have known many of them face to face, personally, as neighbors, most of them passed away by now. They shaped their cooperatives because it was the only way they could get electrical power out to the farms. I happened to have followed that history from the time it was shaped together when they decided to build their first power plant. The network that comes to my part of the country that flows all the way up from what was South Crawford REC, now it's Western Area Power--or connected to Western Area Power, then on up through Basin Electric all the way up into the coal mines in Wyoming--which, by the way, Wyoming is one of the most punished States under the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax piece of legislation. But they shaped this so that they could have electricity go to the farms. And they had to join together to do it. They had to have a little help because it cost a lot more money to string a wire from farm to farm a half a mile to a half a mile than it does to string it from house to house in the city or into an apartment complex or into an office complex within a city. So they shaped the cooperatives to do that. I noticed on that board that took all this credit for Progressives-- the accomplishments of creative individuals that wanted to simply operate in a free enterprise economy--that it didn't have our grain cooperatives there, but we established those, too; the grain cooperatives so that the farmer-owned cooperatives could set up a grain elevator to store and dry their grain and ship it and market it, and also mix and grind feed and sell fertilizers and chemicals and make this all work. It's the same kind of a function in the grain cooperatives as we had in our electric cooperatives. But in neither case was it Progressives that put this together, just like it wasn't the Progressives that fought and won the American Revolution or emancipated the slaves. In fact, of all these things that I've listed, it was a majority of Republicans--if you would identify their politics--that brought about these changes, most of which are good changes or they wouldn't have been listed on that poster board. But I think it's revisionist history, Madam Speaker, and I could not let that moment pass without raising that issue. I will just stick with this subject for a moment, Madam Speaker, because I know what a Progressive is and I think America needs to know what a Progressive is. Now, it is not someone who has emancipated the slaves or fought and won the American Revolution or established a rural electric cooperative, not somebody that did those things. It wasn't really somebody that--they may have played a part in, but they weren't a central part--that established the civil rights. It's people that believed in the intrinsic value of the individual, the rights that come from God regardless of what your race or ethnicity might be. That's not a Progressive thought. That's a thought of rights that come from God. So here's what a Progressive is. And, Madam Speaker, anybody that's curious about this can just simply go to their Google page--that's the one thing that hasn't been nationalized at this point--and they can just Google in there dsausa.org--that's the Democratic Socialists of America, dsausa.org--and the screen will come up, and on it will say, ``What is Democratic Socialism?'' And when you read through this Web site--which I happen to have right here, Madam Speaker, and I will enter this into the Record--and this document that is the socialist Web site, peruse through it a little bit, dsausa.org. What is Democratic Socialism? Questions and Answers From the Democratic Socialists of America Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically--to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives. Democracy and socialism go hand in hand. All over the world, wherever the idea of democracy has taken root, the vision of socialism has taken root as well--everywhere but in the United States. Because of this, many false ideas about socialism have developed in the US. With this pamphlet, we hope to answer some of your questions about socialism. Q: Doesn't socialism mean that the government will own and run everything? Democratic socialists do not want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy. But we do not want big corporate bureaucracies to control our society either. Rather, we believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect. Today, corporate executives who answer only to themselves and a few wealthy stockholders make basic economic decisions affecting millions of people. Resources are used to make money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them. Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker- owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel pay necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives. Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods. Q: Hasn't socialism been discredited by the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe? Socialists have been among the harshest critics of authoritarian Communist states. Just because their bureaucratic elites called them ``socialist'' did not make it so; they also called their regimes ``democratic.'' Democratic socialists always opposed the ruling party-states of those societies, just as we oppose the ruling classes of capitalist societies. We applaud the democratic revolutions that have transformed the former Communist bloc. However, the improvement of people's lives requires real democracy without ethnic rivalries and/or new forms of authoritarianism. Democratic socialists will continue to play a key role in that struggle throughout the world. Moreover, the fall of Communism should not blind us to injustices at home. We cannot allow all radicalism to be dismissed as ``Communist.'' That suppression of dissent and diversity undermines America's ability to live up to its promise of equality of opportunity, not to mention the freedoms of speech and assembly. Q: Private corporations seem to be a permanent fixture in the US, so why work towards socialism? In the short term we can't eliminate private corporations, but we can bring them under greater democratic control. The government could use regulations and tax incentives to encourage companies to act in the public interest and outlaw destructive activities such as exporting jobs to low-wage countries and polluting our environment. Public pressure can also have a critical role to play in the struggle to hold corporations accountable. Most of all, socialists look to unions make private business more accountable. Q: Won't socialism be impractical because people will lose their incentive to work? We don't agree with the capitalist assumption that starvation or greed are the only reasons people work. People enjoy their work if it is meaningful and enhances their lives. They work out of a sense of responsibility to their community and society. Although a long-term goal of socialism is to eliminate all but the most enjoyable kinds of labor, we recognize that unappealing jobs will long remain. These tasks would be spread among as many people as possible rather than distributed on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, as they are under capitalism. And this undesirable work should be among the best, not the least, rewarded work within the economy. For now, the burden should be placed on the employer to make work desirable by raising wages, offering benefits and improving the work environment. In short, we believe that a combination of social, economic, and moral incentives will motivate people to work. Q: Why are there no models of democratic socialism? Although no country has fully instituted democratic socialism, the socialist parties and labor movements of other countries have won many victories for their people. We can learn from the comprehensive welfare state maintained by the Swedes, from Canada's national health care system, France's nationwide childcare program, and Nicaragua's literacy programs. Lastly, we can learn from efforts initiated right here in the US, such as the community health centers created by the government in the 1960s. They provided high quality family care, with community involvement in decision-making. Q: But hasn't the European Social Democratic experiment failed? For over half a century, a number of nations in Western Europe and Scandinavia have enjoyed both tremendous prosperity and relative economic equality thanks to the policies pursued by social democratic parties. These nations used their relative wealth to insure a high standard of living for their citizens--high wages, health care and subsidized education. Most importantly, social democratic parties supported strong labor movements that became central players in economic decision-making. But with the globalization of capitalism, the old social democratic model becomes ever harder to maintain. Stiff competition from low- wage labor markets in developing countries and the constant fear that industry will move to avoid taxes and strong labor regulations has diminished (but not eliminated) the ability of nations to launch ambitious economic reform on their own. Social democratic reform must now happen at the international level. Multinational corporations must be brought under democratic controls, and workers' organizing efforts must reach across borders. Now, more than ever, socialism is an international movement. As socialists have always known, the welfare of working people in Finland or California depends largely on standards in Italy or Indonesia. As a result, we must work towards reforms that can withstand the power of multinationals and global banks, and we must fight for a world order that is not controlled by bankers and bosses. Q: Aren't you a party that's in competition with the Democratic Party for votes and support? No, we are not a separate party. Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to strengthen the party's left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The process and structure of American elections seriously hurts third party efforts. Winner-take-all elections instead of proportional representation, rigorous party qualification requirements that vary from state to state, a presidential instead of a parliamentary system, and the two-party monopoly on political power have doomed third party efforts. We hope that at some point in the future, in coalition with our allies, an alternative national party will be viable. For now, we will continue to support progressives who have a real chance at winning elections, which usually means left-wing Democrats. Q: If I am going to devote time to politics, why shouldn't I focus on something more immediate? Although capitalism will be with us for a long time, reforms we win now--raising the minimum wage, securing a national health plan, and demanding passage of right-to- strike legislation--can bring us closer to socialism. Many democratic socialists actively work in the single-issue organizations that advocate for those reforms. We are visible in the reproductive freedom movement, the fight for student aid, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered organizations, anti-racist groups, and the labor movement. It is precisely our socialist vision that informs and inspires our day-to-day activism for social justice. As socialists we bring a sense of the interdependence of all struggles for justice. No single-issue organization can truly challenge the capitalist system or adequately secure its particular demands. In fact, unless we are all collectively working to win a world without oppression, each fight for reforms will be disconnected, maybe even self-defeating. Q: What can young people do to move the US towards socialism? Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, young people have played a critical role in American politics. They have been a tremendous force for both political and cultural change in this country: in limiting the US's options in the war in Vietnam, in forcing corporations to divest from the racist South African regime, in reforming universities, and in bringing issues of sexual orientation and gender discrimination to public attention. Though none of these struggles were fought by young people alone, they all featured youth as leaders in multi-generational progressive coalitions. Young people are needed in today's struggles as well: for universal health care and stronger unions, against welfare cuts and predatory multinational corporations. Schools, colleges and universities are important to American political culture. They are the places where ideas are formulated and policy discussed and developed. Being an active part of that discussion is a critical job for young socialists. We have to work hard to change people's misconceptions about socialism, to broaden political debate, and to overcome many students' lack of interest in engaging in political action. Off-campus, too, in our daily cultural lives, young people can be turning the tide against racism, sexism and homophobia, as well as the conservative myth of the virtue of ``free'' markets. Q: If so many people misunderstand socialism, why continue to use the word? First, we call ourselves socialists because we are proud of what we are. Second, no matter what we call ourselves, conservatives will use it against us. Anti-socialism has been repeatedly used to attack reforms that shift power to working class people and away from corporate capital. In 1993, national health insurance was attacked as ``socialized medicine'' and defeated. Liberals are routinely denounced as socialists in order to discredit reform. Until we face, and beat, the stigma attached to the ``S word,'' politics in America will continue to be stifled and our options limited. We also call ourselves socialists because we are proud of the traditions upon which we are based, of the heritage of the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, and of other struggles for change that have made America more democratic and just. Finally, we call ourselves socialists to remind everyone that we have a vision of a better world. It really doesn't take a very heavy read to figure out what's going on. These are the Socialists. They say, ``We believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect.'' Huh. Sounds like a little bit of what's been going on with the major corporations in America. Sounds a little like what's happened to the auto industry. It looks like they've been taken over and nationalized by the White House and handed over to the unions for control. That would fit. ``We believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect.'' Here's another one: ``We believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.'' Exactly what's happening to the automakers today, as they pulled the plug on a good number of Chrysler auto dealers, as they threatened to pull the plug on an even greater number of General Motors auto dealers, and as the stock shares get handed over to the unions at the expense of the investors who were owners of the hard collateral of the business of Chrysler Motors, and now it looks like General Motors as well, all right off the Web page of the socialists. ``We believe that the workers and consumers that are affected by economic institutions should own and control them. ``Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives''; not managed for profit, not managed for efficiency, but nationalized businesses run and managed by workers and consumer representatives. I started a construction company in 1975. I borrowed money, invested a lot of capital, and the business is going on. It's a second- generation construction company. My older son owns it today. There were a good number of places along the way that it would have been easy to give up and just drop out of business, but I had to make it work. I was determined to make it work. And if I had handed over the management of the company to the employees at any one of those critical points, there's no way that King Construction would have survived. This is quoting from the sheet again. ``While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership''--they're talking again about nationalizing--``many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.'' So they want to nationalize large businesses where there's concentrations of capital--energy, steel, a couple of examples. Automakers fall right in that. And on here it says, Well, we're not Communists. Here's the difference. Communists are harder lined than we are, and there's a few other distinctions. I'll ask you to read that, Madam Speaker, thoroughly. I think everybody in this Congress should know what the difference is between a Communist and a Socialist. I don't like either one. I don't like either one. I like free markets. I like freedom. I like free enterprise. I like capitalism, and I like individual rights that come from God. Those are the pillars of American exceptionalism, not socialism, not Marxism, not communism. Here is another pretty frequently asked question. Private corporations seem to be a permanent fixture in the U.S., so why work towards socialism? Here is the socialist answer: In the short term, we can't eliminate private corporations. Now I think, Madam Speaker, that you've been convinced that the Democratic socialists of America want to nationalize the major corporations, and they want to run this free enterprise economy not as a free enterprise economy but as a collectivist state, operating businesses for the benefit of the workers and the customers without regard to profit or the investors. That is clear here. Also what's clear in this document, which I will submit for the Record, is that the socialists are no longer hosting the Web site of the Progressive Caucus. Because in 1999 the issue was raised and the heat got a little too high so the socialists that were managing the Web site of the Progressive Caucus, they decided, and the progressives decided they'd run their own Web site. So when you see Progressive Caucus come up on a blue board here on the floor, they're saying, go to our Web site, see what all we've got. Look at all the credit we're taking for the things we didn't do. And, by the way, they don't actually announce that they are the legislative arm of the socialists, which you will find in this document that I will introduce into the Record this evening, Madam Speaker. They say here in this document off the Web site, the socialist Web site, that they are not a political party that nominates candidates under their banner. But their legislative arm is the Progressive Caucus, an absolute undeniable link right here on the Web site, socialists tied to progressives. That's what they are, Madam Speaker. So I get a little disturbed when this Congress and the rest of the Nation tries to mess with the definitions that Noah Webster wrote into our dictionary and our understanding of the English language. We know what socialism is. If you want to find out what communism is, the socialists define it. If you want find out what a progressive is, the socialists say progressives are them, their arm. And there is a list when you go on the Web site of 72 registered progressives in this Congress that are linked to the socialists directly as their legislative arm. They are the ones advocating for the nationalization of our energy industry, for the oil refinery industry, for the nationalization of our automakers, for example, and all the way up the line. Our financial institutions, large insurance companies, the nationalization that has taken place from President Obama with the full support of the Progressive Caucus and most of the Democrats in this Congress and in the House and in the Senate, Madam Speaker. I don't think that we can hold the rose-colored glasses along any longer. We have got to understand that our freedoms are being taken from us, and it's happening right in front of our very eyes, under our very nose. And the American people don't understand it yet. When they go to the Web site and they read through this document, What is Democratic Socialism? on the Web site of dsausa.org, and look to the connection of Progressive Caucus. And then, by the way, go to the Progressive Caucus Web site. They put it up here. Just Google Progressive Caucus and up will come the Web site that takes the credit for a lot of these things that they didn't have anything to do with, they didn't have any existence then during that period of time. But also they won't take credit for the things that they advocate for that are the mirror image of what comes off the socialist Web site here. One and the same, Madam Speaker. And the American people need to know it, and they know it now. So that's a little bit of what I didn't come here to talk about, Madam Speaker. But what I did come here to talk about is the nomination of one Dawn Johnsen to the Office of Legal Counsel. Dawn Johnsen is the President's nominee. And the Office of Legal Counsel, for the sake of those who are not all wrapped up in government, is the most important nomination that you've never heard of. The Office of Legal Counsel is kind of a mini Supreme Court. They issue carefully worded opinions, and they're regarded as binding precedent, and they have the final say on what the President and all his agencies can and cannot legally do, Madam Speaker. So this is the person that has the opportunity to whisper into the ear of the President on a daily basis, on a regular basis and make recommendations such as, Mr. President, you do or you don't have the authority to issue an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay. That would be one of those whispers into the ear of the President. It might well be a written document that would be formally handed to him as well. I use that as, I'll say, an image, not so much a technicality. Dawn Johnsen is the person who has offended, I think, a greater number of Americans than any other nominee, even those that didn't pay their taxes. There is a long list of things that Dawn Johnsen has said and done. But I believe at this time it would be useful if I could have the opportunity to yield to the very vigorous and energetic gentlelady from Ohio (Mrs. Schmidt) for however much time as she may consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentlelady for coming to the floor and standing up for life and making this announcement on statement after statement, quote after quote, that has come from Dawn Johnsen, the former legal counsel for NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the one who has inflamed the profamily, prolife, pro-Constitution pro-individual rights of people in this country by making a whole series of outrageous statements. And many of them were mentioned by the gentlelady from Ohio. I put this one up on abortion protesters, this is the KKK piece, that ``the `terrorist' behavior of petitioners is remarkably similar to the conspiracy of violence and intimidation carried out by the Ku Klux Klan against which Congress intended this statute to protect.'' People that are outside of the abortion clinics praying for the innocent human life that is being exterminated inside are being described as KKK-type of intimidators. This is the person that we would have whispering into the ear of the President, the Office of Legal Counsel, issuing opinions and decisions that are de facto judgments on our Constitution and the legality. And that is one example. The gentlelady gave a number of other examples. And I would yield to the gentlelady from Ohio.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman's coming to the floor and laying out this picture in this fashion, as much as I do the gentlewoman from Ohio doing the same. As I listened to this, Dawn Johnsen's confirmation of her nomination is in trouble. Harry Reid announced that Tuesday of this week, that he had planned to bring it up for a vote. He was short a couple Democrat votes, and I think more than that. So we need to ask, I think, Madam Speaker, that everybody weigh in on this from a conscience standpoint and understand that these statements made by Dawn Johnsen are just that, an advocacy for the National Abortion Rights Action League, which she was the chief legal counsel for them. She argued a number of cases before the court. The record is replete. It does not vary. It's consistent. It's liberal. It's activist. It is a danger to life. It's a danger to every unborn child. And she is a danger to fathers. This is a quote from Dawn Johnsen: ``Our position is that there is no father and no child, just a fetus, and any move by the courts to force a woman to have a child amounts to involuntary servitude.'' But put into that context. Dangerous for babies, unborn babies, dangerous for mothers, who are disrespected. My mother a fetal container? That offends me. It should offend America. We're all children of mothers. They're not fetal containers; they're our mothers. They brought us into this world. They loved us. They nurtured us. There's no substitute for a mother, and I will never get to be one, and I'm a little jealous. I yield to the gentlewoman.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentlewoman. I'd add a piece that I want to reiterate here. Madam Speaker, if America is not moved enough at this pro-abortion activism and this legal distortion that has taken place as a matter of the professional actions and the public record of Dawn Johnsen, the President's nominee to head up the Office of Legal Counsel, they should be concerned about our national security. A national security that would say turn the Gitmo detainees loose or bring them here to the United States, put them under U.S. courts, and then, by the way, turn them loose and nurture them with our tax dollars so they can get on their feet again. All of that being part of this concept. But also Dawn Johnsen's objecting to surveillance of al Qaeda communications when it was a phone call that took place from a foreign country like, let's say, Afghanistan and ended up in Pakistan. If Osama bin Laden was calling Khalid Sheik Mohammed and if that nexus came back to the United States for the link but no one set foot in the United States, she would object to their not getting a warrant to listen in on that traffic on a telephone signal that would originate in Afghanistan and terminate in Pakistan. Here is what she said. She attributed that type of surveillance to ``an extreme and implausible Commander in Chief theory.'' Now, this is an implausible and extreme theory, Madam Speaker, but the Commander in Chief is not a theory. It's constitutional. It's strictly defined in the Constitution. The Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces is the President of the United States. And the President of the United States has nominated Dawn Johnsen, who is a radical extremist. And her nomination is in trouble, and 62 of us wrote a letter and said please pull the nomination. The President, if I were standing before him, I would make such a plea, and I would entreat the President of the United States that the juice is not worth the squeeze. There are plenty of activists that are traipsing through the White House these days. This is a lightning rod activist. Why don't you give us somebody that's not such a lightning rod, maybe somebody that's not going to be quite so radical. You're going to have to appoint somebody there to make these legal opinions, and I would like to have somebody that understands what's constitutional, at least recognize that the President of the United States is Commander in Chief, that constitutional position. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman and the gentlewoman. It sparks my memory, as I listened to the gentleman from Indiana speak. A mother is not transformed from a fetal container into a mother by the birth. A mother is a mother at conception and from that point on. And we use that language consistently. But another piece comes to mind when I think about the President of the United States and this subject matter, and that is that I look back on the Saddleback Church debate that took place there, very well handled by Reverend Rick Warren, who offered the prayer just a few feet behind me here on the west portico of the Capitol Building at the inauguration of the President of the United States. But there they sat with John McCain and President Obama, and he asked the question of then-Senator Obama, When does life begin? Senator Obama's answer was, ``That's above my pay scale.'' When life begins--when his life began--is above his own pay scale. Now, there is significant evidence that President Obama got a raise put in since August of last year because he decided right away in January that it was in his pay scale. He decided that he would rescind the Mexico City policy which prohibited our taxpayer dollars from funding abortions in foreign lands. By executive order, he wiped that out, that very conscience decision that was debated on the floor of this House over and over and over again and defended by the pro-life effort in this Congress and across the United States. And he also by executive order decided that he wants to fund with Federal tax dollars the ending of human life in the form of experimenting on embryos, little frozen embryos, little snowflake babies, some of whom I've held in my arms that were frozen for 9 years. Loving, giggling, laughing little children wiped out by executive order that now seems to have found its legs and decided life must not begin or it must not be sacred yet if it's in the early stages, when it can't scream for its own mercy. So the Mexico City policy wiped out, the embryonic stem cell prohibition of using Federal dollars to experiment on them has already been moved. And now we see the appointment of Dawn Johnsen. And we have a President that's going to be soon speaking in South Bend, Indiana, at Notre Dame University, directly in conflict with the teachings of the church. It is a hard thing for us Catholics to watch. It's a hard thing for the pro-life people in this country to watch. But I have seen hundreds of thousands of Americans come to this city to stand up for innocent unborn human life. They will come to this city in greater numbers if Dawn Johnsen is confirmed, and I think the President will keep that in mind, and I pray that he will pull her nomination.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am honored to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this Nation's most deliberative body of debate, at least it used to be, and I hope it is once again, Mr. Speaker. Having listened to my colleagues here and identified, I think, the centerpiece of this debate that's taking place in this country, I wanted to address, Mr. Speaker, this evening the idea of where we stand with the broad economic view that is what's taking place in the United States of America today, and then I'd like to take us back to where we are with the overall cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, greenhouse gas, global warming, climate change debate that's going on. The language seems to be drifting and moving a little bit, Mr. Speaker, on this. And I will go to the climate change component of this. But first, Mr. Speaker, I want to address this situation on where we are from a broad economic perspective so that there is a backdrop in order to think about how we go forward with policy and what is the right policy for the United States of America within the context of the world and the globe. We are the global economic leader. We are a large percentage of the world's economy. We have been leading this world's economy because we have, are, or were a free market economy. And the foundations for American exceptionalism should be clear to everyone on each side of the aisle. Of course that foundation is rooted back in the philosophy that is the foundation for our Constitution, which is the Declaration of Independence. It's rooted in the natural law and the natural rights that come from God and that our founders all unanimously recognized. And as they took those principles and laid them out in the Declaration of Independence and then later on, about 13 years later, were able to get that language into the Constitution and get the Constitution ratified and give birth to a nation, what made us such a great nation? Why didn't we wallow back into the problems that so many other nations have had? What distinguishes the United States of America from the other countries in the world? Now there have been powerful economies in the world. There have been powerful cultures and societies. The Founding Fathers studied a lot of those. They looked at the Greeks and the Romans, for example. They didn't have the opportunity to take a look at the former Soviet Union, but they would have taken a lesson from the former Soviet Union. It seems as though many Members in this Congress have missed that little history lesson, even though they lived it as contemporaries. But these foundations of American exceptionalism, many of them in the Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of speech, religion, expression, assembly, a right to keep and bear arms, a right to property that was diminished, I think to some degree, by the Kelo decision in the Supreme Court about 3 years ago when they struck three words from the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which says, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' The Supreme Court struck these three words ``for public use'' out of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That's the effect of their decision. And that, Mr. Speaker, isn't just me. That was my independent conclusion and analysis from reading the Supreme Court decision later on after I spoke on the floor on the issue, and as I prepared to rebut the now Chairman of the Financial Services Committee from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank). So I listened to him in preparation to--generally I would disagree with him on most everything that comes to this floor. This time he and I agreed verbatim. And I read later on Justice O'Connor's dissenting opinion, which also was right down the line with the position that Mr. Frank and myself and many others--the Supreme Court had undermined property rights by their Kelo decision. But that is one of the major keys to American exceptionalism, that right to keep and own property, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' But in New London, Connecticut, they took private property and they transferred it over to another private entity, a development corporation, for the sake of what they considered to be a better public interest because they could collect more tax dollars from the developed property rather than the lesser-developed property. It was a flawed fundamental constitutional principle that they made that decision upon, and now we're seeing an incremental encroachment upon other property rights in this country. But property rights being one of the pillars of American exceptionalism, I laid out those other points. Many of them are in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment. But there are other reasons. One is that this Nation was founded by a robust people that skimmed the cream of the crop off of the donor nations as immigrants came to the United States with a dream. It was hard to get here, and yet there was so much to be gained and achieved when they arrived here. And they didn't all make it. Some of them failed. Some of them went back to their home country. Some of them didn't make the cut at Ellis Island. About 2 percent were turned around and put back on the boat and sent back to Europe back in those days, 100 or so years ago. But those that stayed, many of them exceeded their own expectations. The success of the vitality of newly arriving immigrants in this country was another one of the foundations of American exceptionalism built upon these constitutional rights, including property rights, built upon free enterprise capitalism. That desire to succeed and that will to succeed along with a culture that celebrated success, those being some of the underpinnings of the pillars of American exceptionalism. Well, as we look at how this has unfolded, these things happened, those pillars that came together at that time flowed from Western civilization, became the embodiment of Western civilization. And while that was going on, this robust people that had these new rights that came from God and this right to property and a right to return on their investment, these new rights that were there also matched up with a continent that was almost unlimited in natural resources and a continent that was being developed by a country that kept taxes low, regulations low, and in many cases nonexistent so that the reward was there for the entrepreneur. And that culture, that tradition, and those rights that are the foundations for the success of this great country are being eroded today at a pace faster than anytime in the history of the United States of America. Now, we saw these lessons of these failed countries, and we saw Rome rot out from within and corruption that pulled it down. It couldn't hold itself together because of the corruption that was within Rome. We saw the nation states arise. They started out to be city states, and then to the limits of the languages also went the borders of the countries and the nation states of Europe over the last 250 years or so. And they fought wars that were clashes of cultures and economies to determine the boundaries and the borders of the nation states. But still over the last 200 or more years, the nation state remains as a very essential successful institution on this planet. The nation state that looked out for the interest of its citizens, the nation state that had clear borders, the borders that usually went out to the limits of the language itself because that's what defined the common interest of the common people, and to a lesser degree that does so today, but it's been a foundation of a nation state. And this nation state of the United States of America, this unique experiment that brought people from all over the world and put them in here on this country with these nearly unlimited natural resources, with the low taxes and the low or no regulation, and a culture that was rooted in religious freedom that had at its foundation Christianity and the work ethic that comes from the Protestant work ethic and the Reformation, those things that flowed within that culture, this country became a giant petri dish that was teeming with success. That's American exceptionalism. It's who we are. That's why the rest of the world has had trouble keeping up with us. That's why the rest of the world doesn't match up with us in patents or trademarks or copyrights. That's why the rest of the world hasn't matched up in the growth of their economy, they haven't matched up militarily, they haven't matched culturally, because we have this robust freedom. And sometimes there's a price to be paid for that. But we lead the world. We are a nation that leads the world with freedom. And the rest of the world looks on full of awe and respect and sometimes some trepidation because they are really not sure what's coming out of the United States of America. And, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that I'm at the point now where I am not very sure either on how this has drifted. But as I watched this economy that needed to take a correction because there was a housing bubble in this economy, Henry Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury, came to this Capitol on September 19, 2008, said, I have got to have $700 billion. I've got to have it right now, and I've got to pour it into the economy, and I'll pick up this toxic debt and we'll do what we can to stop this impending free-fall of this economy. Well, after more than a week of running around this Capitol and out to the White House and doing press conferences and pressing this Congress to appropriate the $700 billion, we sure saw the economy go into a tailspin in a hurry, and some of it accelerated by that kind of activity. And I would have preferred that that would have been back- channel discussions that could have been kept at a low key so that we didn't see this economy react the way it did. But it did. And when we saw the stock market spiral downward, a correction that at least in part needed to be made, and globally as the world lost its confidence in our financial institutions, we had the real risk of our financial institutions going under during that period of time, September, October, November, December, January of this year, and into February. As that instability hung in there, while that was going on, we were a nation that I think overreacted, Mr. Speaker. Some of the things that happened as the economy spiraled downward were people on the floor of this Congress and in our committee and back in our meetings and talking to the press beginning to tell America, Well, I guess that tells you what capitalism does for us, arguing that capitalism had failed and that's why the economy was spiraling downward. Mr. Speaker, no economy has ever matched this economy in the United States of America. We have overcome far greater burdens than this one we're under today. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a larger burden than the one we're under today, at least by any measure that we can do currently. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month. By this time next year, we'll look back and we ought to have a pretty good idea. But this free enterprise economy has recovered and bounced back in the face of difficulty after difficulty. It took us through the recessions of the 1800s. It took us through the Civil War. It brought us through the Spanish- American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cold War. In fact, Mr. Speaker, of all those things that we had been through, including the Great Depression, which I briefly mentioned, the Cold War itself is a perfect model of what this free market economy can do because Ronald Reagan looked across at the Russians, called them an ``evil empire,'' which they were and are increasingly becoming again, and he went to Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate and he said ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' We didn't know at the time how much was going on behind the scenes, how much was going on back channel. But we know, looking back in history and this being reported in the news, that in the nuclear defense negotiations that were to take place in Reykjavi, Iceland, Ronald Reagan walked out of those negotiations because he couldn't get a settlement with the Soviet Union. And the press excoriated President Reagan for being--I don't remember the exact language. Today they would say ``cowboy diplomacy,'' if they called it diplomacy at all. They believed that Ronald Reagan had put this world at risk by walking out of those negotiations. But Ronald Reagan wasn't about to give up our national security for the sake of getting along with people who had lined themselves up against us to be our opposition in the world, to challenge the United States for the title of this world superpower. And for a long time, we went along running in parallel with the Soviet Union competing against the United States for which nation would be the preeminent superpower. Jean Kirkpatrick was Ambassador to the United Nations during the early part of the Reagan administration. And I believe after 2 or 3 years, she was preparing to step down from that role. And as she retired as Ambassador to the United Nations, she explained something to America that when I read that on Page 3 or 4 of the paper that day, a tiny little clip, actually, it settled in for me the picture that Jean Kirkpatrick had drawn, Ambassador Kirkpatrick had drawn, and it was this. Now, remember we are in the middle of the Cold War. We're perhaps at the height of the Cold War with the maximum amount of tension that's being brought to bear because Ronald Reagan is doing the thing that the leader of the free world would do, and that is playing some negotiating brinksmanship but knowing the card that he holds and having a pretty good idea of the cards that the Russians are holding. But Jean Kirkpatrick described this conflict of the Cold War this way: She said, What's going on is the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board, and the only question is, will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before they checkmate the United States militarily? That was the question that she laid out as she stepped down as Ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Speaker, when you think about this and come to a realization that a country like the Soviet Union that was in an arms race, building missiles bigger, more of them, and building them faster than they ever had before, pouring a high percentage of their gross domestic product, which is an all-controlled economy in a socialist/communist economy-- I'll just call them a communist nation. Their communist economy was trying to produce enough wealth that they could match up against the United States and enter into an arms race and defeat us in an arms race so that we would be looking at so many nuclear-tipped, multiple nuclear-tipped warheads that we couldn't hope then to defend ourselves against the Soviet Union and we couldn't hope to mount enough missiles to provide a deterrent to them. Mutually assured destruction. The Soviet Union was determined that they were going to be in a position where they would assure our destruction and, with the power of that, they would then cause the United States to back down and recede diplomatically and that the Soviet Union would be able to advance themselves around the world and exert their influence into country after country and begin to dominate the world because of the military threat that they would be to the free world, particularly the United States, the military threat that they were in Europe itself, lined up, remember, with the Berlin Wall standing. It was another 5 years before the Berlin Wall came down. All of this dynamic is going on, and the Cold War is being fought, some say without firing a shot. That's really not true, but without firing a lot of shots in relation to the billions and billions that were invested. The Cold War was not a shooting war. That's why we called it the Cold War. But it was a clash of civilizations. It was a clash of cultures. It was a clash of economies, Mr. Speaker. And as the economy of the United States competed with the communist economy of the Soviet Union, and it has still a vast amount of resources and should have had enough people to produce enough wealth to be able to match up against us in an economic/military contest, the United States economy dominated that of the rest of the world and produced enough wealth that we could grow our economy and at the same time take on and compete with the Russians in the development of our military capabilities globally. And at a point the weight and the burden of trying to compete against this United States economy brought about the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, which brought about the political collapse of the Soviet Union and their satellite states, which softened and prepped the landing zone, so to speak, or softened the area so that the Soviet Union could no longer hang on in their satellite states like Germany and Poland and Romania and the Baltics. And all the way across Eastern Europe, country after country, Czechoslovakia, became free. Most of that bloodlessly. The Berlin Wall began to come down November 9, 1989, the date that the Russians stopped requiring the East Germans to defend the wall. And they started to take hammers and picks to chop that wall apart, and people climbed over the top, and they were on both sides and they were celebrating, and families were reunified. The liberal media in this country saw that as family reunification. What they didn't see, and it took them a very long time to understand it, was that the Berlin Wall represented the Iron Curtain. It was literally the Iron Curtain. It was a concrete wall that went around the people that lived in West Berlin and trapped them in, a cage, a fence around the people that lived in West Berlin. But it was literally the Iron Curtain. And when it started to come down, when the Berlin Wall crashed, so did the Iron Curtain crash. And as it came down, people realized the Soviet Union can't make East Germans shoot East Germans for crossing that line any longer. They can't enforce it themselves because they don't have the economic capability to do that. They couldn't sustain their military. Their military was rotting out from within as their economy had rotted out from within because you can't have a managed economy that can compete with a free market economy, Mr. Speaker. That's the difference, and that's the essence of the victory that the United States, with some of the help of the rest of the world, brought down the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed. The satellite states claimed their own independence, and there was some blood in a place like Romania when Ceausescu was executed, if I remember, he and his wife executed by the mobs of Romanians who desired to have their freedom, finally. But most of Eastern Europe was bloodless. It was essentially bloodless in Germany for the wall to come down and free people, to welcome people that had been in slavery, in the slavery of a Communist- controlled managed state for all those years, since the end of the 1940s, and until such time as you had the Berlin airlift. And one of the things that happened on one of my trips over there into Berlin, we had a tour guide who I will call her a young lady, younger than me. She was a young lady when the wall came down in 1989, and she told us how when they were able to go over the wall and go into West Berlin and go into the shops and stores and see what they had, see the food that they had, the clothing that was there, the appliances, so many things that they didn't have as part of their lives in East Germany or part of their lives in West Germany. And the contrast in the western part of Berlin versus the eastern part of Berlin was so stark, she told us that they went out and bought all of the wild colorful clothes that they could find, the reds, the oranges, the greens, the bright yellows, all of those bright colors, and they dressed themselves in the brightest colors possible. They didn't have access to those. They were wearing drab, bleary clothing. But all this bright clothing was available. Anybody could dress in the West any way they wanted. They could have access. You would find in the stores whatever the free market would demand, because the free- enterprise economy produced the kind of clothing people wanted to wear. And the East Germans surely were so glad to have an opportunity to go into West Berlin as the wall went down on November 9, 1989, and buy up this bright clothing and proudly wear this bright clothing wherever they went. Because it was a symbol that said, I have my freedom back, a freedom back they weren't born into. They had been born since they lost their freedom. They had their freedom back, and they gloried in the demonstration of that to be able to wear colorful clothes. Wherever they went that sent the message, I'm free, and I can dress as I like. I can do as I like. I can speak as I like. I am free to succeed. I am free to achieve, free to be educated in the way I want to be educated. You know, the people who have achieved their freedom most recently in that part of the world are the ones that love it the most. The Czechs went to the square in Prague and stood there by the tens of thousands and held their keys up and rattled their keys. Tens of thousands of them rattling their keys, Mr. Speaker. And that noise, that persistent noise, Vaclav Havel and others brought about freedom in Czechoslovakia in a bloodless fashion. They achieved that freedom later on. They separated the country in the Velvet Revolution, a bloodless revolution. And they are quite proud of being able to come to these conclusions by the voice of the people, emulating the freedom that we have had here since 1776, ratified in 1789, Mr. Speaker. So I look at that part of the world, the part of the world that has been the part that has generated the utopian philosophers, those philosophers that shaped the ideas of socialism and communism and national socialism and fascism. These utopian philosophies emerged from that part of the world, thinkers that came from there. But they believed that they could set up the perfect society and control it and manage it. And the part that's always been missing on the part of the utopianists, those managers, those elitists, they think that they know best for people and that they think that an average common person, they believe, doesn't have the capability of making decisions for their own job, their own business, their own health care, their own education. So they want to take that all out of the hands of the individuals of this country and put it into the hands of the liberal bureaucrats who know best, the nanny state managers. And the great lesson throughout history has been, even if you have smart people at the top, if you have smart people at central planning, and they come out with a 5-year plan--and in the collectivist state of the Soviet Union, they had collective farms. And so they just simply made a 5-year plan and they said, all right, here is what it's going to be, 5-year plan. This field will be wheat. This one will be barley. This one will be hay. This one lays fallow. I don't think they raise much corn over there, Mr. Speaker. I would bring that up. And they managed it with as good of a skill as they could produce. But out of the government management comes some corruption, a tremendous amount of inefficiency. And if people are not rewarded for their labor--we learned this in the first settlements of the United States--then if they are not rewarded for their labor, they are not going to work the same way they do if they get to achieve the different fruits of their labor. And so the Russians began to take their labor and let some of the crops rot in the field. Where I come from, on an October night that's clear and still, and if the humidity is right, you can drive across that flat countryside at night, 9, 10, 11, 12 o'clock, 1, 2 in the morning. And if it's the right night, the humidity will make it so the soybeans aren't too tough and you can look from horizon to horizon. And you can see the yard lights of the farms that are there, and you can see the combines that are running in the fields, with the trucks that are out on the roads taking the grain off, and the tractors with the grain carts that are shuttling those soybeans over to the trucks, sometimes in the field, sometimes in the road. But you can see they will run all night. They will run till the beans get too tough or the bin is full and their storage is full. They have got to stop and process and then go back again. But the Russians did it a different way. They didn't let the people have the fruits of their labor. And so when their 8-hour shift was up, or whatever they worked, they would park the combine, park their tractor, park their truck, and they wait until the clock ticked again. And then they would start to work again, if they showed up. And a lot of them didn't. But the inefficiencies that grow when you start guaranteeing a people a living and they are not tied into having a share of the profit are the kinds of things that we are starting to see in this country more and more and more; less accountability for production and more demands on the labor of somebody else. But the human nature component of this, the component that realizes that if you don't work, you shouldn't eat, that was how we settled our--the Pilgrims settled it here. They would have starved to death if it hadn't been for that. So they let the people keep the proceeds of their own labor. And then those that were needy lived off of the alms of those that were good producers. And they were helped in proportion to their effort by the alms of the producers, and it made this a far more productive Nation. And our job here, Mr. Speaker, needs to be, it needs to be to improve the annual average productivity of all of our citizens. If we do that, if we raise our average annual productivity of all of our citizens, we will raise the gross domestic product of the United States. If our productivity goes up, if mine goes up, if my neighbor's goes up, then that wealth is accumulated into our economy, and it spills over and it blends into other businesses, and it lifts their profitability. And if they are working and producing, they will have more opportunity at success. But if they are not, if they are hanging back, if they are not responsive, if they have a bad attitude about how they do their work, the customers will stay away from them. Their businesses will not thrive. The bosses who are able to hire good people because they want to pay good wages and good benefits to good people can go off and cherry-pick from those bosses that don't pay good wages and don't provide good benefits and don't respect their employees. I have been in this business, in the construction business, for nearly three decades writing payroll checks and investing money in heavy equipment and going out and doing jobs, and we have always looked out across the available labor pool and tried to find the best people we could find. And we wanted to pay them a good, going wage, and we wanted to give them the kinds of benefits and the package so they could have what they needed. They wanted a job that they can go to, that they can take pride in, that they can continue to develop their skills in, and they want to have the kind of environment where they can raise their family and take care of them and have some time to spend with them so that it's really worth the trouble. This is what a free enterprise economy does. If you allow the businesses to succeed, they will then take advantage of that and succeed. If this Government taxes them out of existence, that's exactly what will happen. Our businesses will diminish, and they will spiral downward out of existence. If we regulate our businesses too much, then we will diminish their effectiveness and put a burden on the overhead that is a fixed cost that weighs down everything they do and makes it harder for them to compete against their domestic competitors here in this country and harder for them to compete against foreign countries as well. And if we weigh down existing businesses with taxes and regulation, the emerging entrepreneurs, the budding businessmen and women, the people that have the idea, the people that have the dream, the people that want to someday be the one that signed the front of the paycheck instead of the back of the paycheck, create as many jobs as possible, pay as many people as possible, that group of people takes a look at the regulation and the burden of government and too often they decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze, that going to work for the government is the better choice because, after all, the government check will always be there, the benefits will always be there. The stress load there is probably not going to be as great. Probably you can't measure your achievements the same way you can measure them in the free market system, but if you want to raise your family and come back home and crack a beer and watch the news at night, maybe a government job is for you. We need good people in government, too. But when we raise the salaries and benefits package and we lower the responsibility level, and when we fail as a government to measure the productivity, the output of government employees, then we are creating a scenario by which people are not excelling to the level that they might if they were in a competitive environment. But business has to produce in a competitive environment; government does not. Government has a monopoly. Now, to thread an analogy in here, or I should say an anecdote, in a fairly recent trip down to Mexico City, and I sat with a number of government officials and business leaders there, at one point I was sitting at a diplomatic table. And as I looked around the room and each one introduced themselves, I realized that there were many representatives of the monopolies in Mexico sitting at the table. And they all wanted to make sure that they were not a political target, but the richest man's name in the world is Slim, S-l-i-m. Doesn't sound like a Mexican name to me, but he is from Mexico. The reason he is the richest man in the world is because he has a monopoly on the telecommunications in Mexico. He gets paid for every phone call that gets made in that entire country. And with the capital that he makes from that, he can invest in other telecommunications in other places around the world. So he's got a protected market that's a monopoly. And some years ago the Mexicans understood that their state-run enterprises were a burden and that they were inefficient because they were monopolies. They were government monopolies. So I would look at a situation like that, and I would follow the Margaret Thatcher model. I would take it further than she did. I think she took it as far as she could in that environment at that time. I would follow the Margaret Thatcher model, and I would start to privatize these government monopolies. Well, that first part of the equation worked for the Mexicans. They understood that. They understood that they needed to privatize the government-run monopolies like telecommunications, let's say cement manufacturing, certain retail outlets, the list goes on, utilities. I think utilities of all kinds. They came to the conclusion they wanted to privatize because government itself was inefficient, how a government monopoly was utterly inefficient, that it begged for corruption--and they had plenty of corruption, still do--but they only went half as far as they needed to go. When they privatized, they privatized the government-run monopolies into private-sector monopolies so that people like Mr. Slim could run the entire telecommunications industry in Mexico and take the capital and invest across the world. Now, the shortfall of this is that a government-run monopoly is almost the most inefficient kind of a business model that you can produce if you want to provide services to people at a competitive price so that they can live a good lifestyle and they can have some disposable income to spend somewhere else. The second to the last thing you would ever want would be a government-run monopoly, because they are inefficient, and there is not an incentive there to compete. But the Mexicans stopped short of where they needed to go, and they just transferred these government-run monopolies into private-sector monopolies, which is the only thing I can think of which is worse than a government-run monopoly. If you hand someone a monopoly in a market that is not a regulated market and he has the entire market, he has cornered everyone, and he can set the price for a phone call, or they can set the price for a cubic yard of cement, or they can set the price for the electricity that's generated without any check or balance on it. And so a privatized monopoly is worse even than a government-run monopoly because it incorporates so many of the--there are no restrictions there, and the desire for profit, actually the need for profit, gets added on to the government entity. So we are here now with an economy that is being shifted dramatically by a majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives, a majority of Democrats down this hallway in the United States Senate, and a President who was elected, I think, with having been rewarded for the most masterful skills in the history of America, of the language of ambiguities. As I listened to the President speak here in this Chamber, not that long ago, speaking before a joint session of Congress, and as I listened to him speak before our conference, I looked through the speech, and as I marked it up, sitting back here about 20 feet from where I stand right now, Mr. Speaker, I found seven or eight clear ambiguities in the President's speech--the kind of phrase that, if you believe we ought to produce energy in order to have an economy that can compete, you could hear in the President's words that's what he wants to do. But if you believe you wanted to shut down the energy production in America in order to drive the prices up so that industry would use less, the consumers would use less, so that our economy would be constricted and chase the jobs overseas and all of this fallout that some of the people on that side of the aisle don't seem to understand but cannot hardly deny, but if you're one of those environmental extremists that wanted to shut down energy production, you could find that in the President's speech, the same phrase that I could find that we need to produce more energy. Now that's just one example. There were seven or eight of those. The master of ambiguities is now the resident of the White House and the leader of the Free World and the Commander in Chief of our military and the mastermind behind the economic changes that are taking place here in the United States. The man who said that--well, he said that he wants to reach out--here's what he said, Mr. Speaker--one of the things that he said. He said, ``Under my plan of cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass that money onto consumers.'' Necessarily skyrocket, Mr. Speaker, my plan of cap-and-trade. It's the President's plan of cap-and-trade. These are exactly the words that he used back when I don't think he expected to be elected President, in January of 2008, meeting with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. Now I can imagine what that's like. You would be sitting in San Francisco, tempted to say things to the San Francisco Chronicle that you thought the people in San Francisco would agree with and probably that the Speaker of the House from San Francisco would agree with. And I'm convinced that our Speaker of the House would maybe not agree with this analysis but would agree with the plan of cap-and-trade system. But here's what's predicted: Electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket, and that will cost money. And it will be put onto the backs of consumers. Well, that wasn't an ambiguity. That was before the ambiguities had been completely mastered by the now-President of the United States. This man is driving the reaction to the economic downward spiral. This man is driving the cap-and-trade argument. This man is pushing a hardcore leftist agenda. Cap-and-trade; what is it and why do we have it, and can you find anyone on the street who can explain the science? I would like to see investigative reporters of all stripes--the San Francisco Examiner, Sean Hannity--you name them. Reporters from Chicago or L.A. or Dallas or Des Moines go out on the streets with an action cam and carry that camera around with a microphone and ask people to explain this idea of global warming. Explain the science. If you remember, sometimes they will walk along and they will interview people--often on the streets of New York City--and they will say, Who's the Vice President of the United States? And they will give every name except Joe Biden, today. He is a little hard to find. I understand why they might not know. But after 8 years of Dick Cheney, you think they would have known. A lot of them didn't. They don't have the basics there. But I'd like to go to Central Park and put the action cam out with a microphone, Mr. Speaker, and ask them, I don't understand the science around this global warming. Can you explain this to me? And I would like to know how many out of a thousand would even try, but I would be willing to lay a wager that none of them could succeed in making a scientific explanation as to why their emissions of greenhouse gases by man can be a significant contributing factor to the Earth's warming. Which, by the way, even the global warming people, even the Al Gores of the world, have changed the language now. They can't say global warming any more because the Earth's been actually cooling since 2002. So when you find yourself out there on the end of a limb and you've been saying, Global warming, global warming, global warming, and you've been doing that for 15 or 20 years, and you find out, whoops, I have been making this argument long enough; that the Earth is actually cooling, and maybe the scientists who back in about 1970 predicted there was a coming ice age that couldn't be averted, maybe they were actually right. I don't know if they were right or not, Mr. Speaker, but I know one of those expert scientists in 1970 that said an ice age is imminent is now an expert on global warming, and he is saying global warming is imminent, and it will happen. But they don't actually use the global warming argument any more. They use climate change. That's a safe term. I bet they wish they would have started out with a climate change kind of a label rather than global warming, because one thing we know about climate, it's always going to change. It's been changing for thousands of years, millions of years, and it will change again and again and again, and it will change tomorrow. But the climate change people that were former global warming people that are now climate change people are going to argue that the Earth is going to get warmer, and there's all kinds of calamities that come out of a warmer Earth. And the Earth can get--what's the most extreme--4.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer over the next 100 years. Maybe only .15 degrees or so. Depends on which model. But they didn't make a model 10 years ago that can predict where it is 10 years today or they would have never used the term global warming in the first place. If they had a model 10 years ago, if they had a model in the middle of the Al Gore era. Let me take us back to--Al Gore was competing for President in 1992. He didn't win that nomination. But when he debated as a Vice Presidential candidate, he matched up against--let me see, Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle said, You are asking for $100 billion a year to be spent on global warming, on environment, on this climate change piece. And Al Gore said, No, I didn't say that. And I don't remember the page number anymore, but I'm going to guess, Mr. Speaker, because I remember former Vice President Dan Quayle saying, Yes, you did, Mr. Gore. It's right here in your book. And he pulled the book out, ``Earth in the Balance.'' He gave a page number. I think that page number was 204. I don't remember for sure. But I went out and bought the book. And I went to the page number that was pointed out by Dan Quayle, and there was the exact language calling for $100 billion to be spent then back in that year, which I believe was 1992. So the call for this reaction to global warming in 1929 must have been modeled on something. It must have been modeled on a computer model that had checked the temperatures around the globe and made the adjustments for atmospheric and the greenhouse gases that are there. It must have had some sound science behind it. And so where is that computer model today? If that model predicted the Earth would get warmer, and we chugged along, and now we're 17 years later and the Earth has gotten cooler over the last 7 years. It was supposed to get warmer over the last 17. Got a little warmer for the first 10 or so, then it got cooler over the last 7 or 8. How does this happen? Does anybody go back to the computer model that must have been the basis for the science that was driving Al Gore at the time? I don't know that anybody did. They keep telling me they have got better and better models and they're doing a better and better job of monitoring the temperatures on the globe. I remember also another book that was published I believe that same year, and it was called ``Trashing the Planet'', written by former Governor of the State of Washington, Dixy Lee Ray. She starts her book out by saying, In the year 1900, the Earth was a very smelly and dangerous place. And she wrote about the disease and the pollution that was there, the garbage that got dumped out of the windows onto the streets, how the sewage ran in the streets, and how disease was rampant, and the water wasn't clean, the air wasn't clean, the soil wasn't clean. But as that all took place, she compared 1900 with the late 1980s or so, as the book was put together and drafted and I think published around 1990. Dixy Lee Ray. She made several statements, God rest her soul, she had a clear idea on this. And she said that technology always improves our quality of our life and our lifestyle. All the improvements that we have--we figured out how to drill for wells and purify water and put it in pipes--clean, sanitized pipes, and send it off into all of our houses. We didn't have water at the turn of the century, 109 years ago. We surely did the latter part of the 20th century. And clean water was a big thing that ensured a lot more health because people weren't drinking bacteria and nitrates and catching a disease from their drinking water. I remember going up to Fort Niagara up near Niagara Falls on one of the Great Lakes there. We were in a redoubt that had had several flags fly over it, including the British flag, and they told about how the men slept there in this redoubt, this little fort. The beds were so short. I said, How come the beds are so short? Well, they were not actually as tall as we are today, but the shorter beds were because they didn't sleep laying down. They had respiratory diseases, respiratory illnesses, so they slept kind of sitting up, propped up. Another thing they did, they had a chamber pot. And they sent the lowest-ranking troops down the hill to the lake with this chamber pot. So that was the one they used at night when they didn't want to go outside, and it was cold. So they carried the chamber pot down, dumped it out--I don't know where they dumped it out. I presume they washed it out. But they used the same pot and carried it back up and they used that for drinking water during the day. The British, nor did anybody in the world, understand about diseases back in the mid to late 1700s. But that water cleanliness was a big part. Sanitary sewers were a big part. We got rid of the outhouses and flushed it down to the sewer treatment plant. I want to thank Lady Bird Johnson. Kids my age grew up shooting rats at the dump. We don't do that any more because we have sanitary landfills and we cleaned this up. We cleaned up a lot of things. We are a lot safer and a lot more healthy because of technology, because the modern world has marched along. But the technology of calculating global warming doesn't hold itself up. There was a conclusion that was drawn by Al Gore and others--now he has a Pulitzer Prize--there was a conclusion that was drawn by him back in some year--some year perhaps in the Eighties, and I do not know, Mr. Speaker, what the catalyst was, but I do know environmental groups came quickly and strongly and financially behind Al Gore at a certain time in the late Eighties--almost overnight. And he drew a conclusion that has yet to be shaken by the temperature that's going down incrementally on this planet. Now this is always mysterious to me, Mr. Speaker. How is it that a conclusion can be drawn that the Earth is getting warmer and we must do something, cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. We can't really explain the science to you because you're just a regular old citizen and you can't comprehend this. Instead, you just have to take the word of the environmental extremists that the Earth's going to get warmer unless we follow them. Follow them down this path of shutting down our production of energy in the United States, closing down the CO2 emissions, doing the cap-and-trade that is proposed here so that it would skyrocket our electrical costs. Why is it that no amount of science has shaken them? Why is it that, of all the things that we have collected for data throughout this time, they haven't really stepped up and said, Well, here's the adjustments we have to make now because we know more than we did then. It's as if science didn't march on for the last 17 years, but the politics have marched together in a huge army of politicians and their environmentalist supporters that keep making the case we must do something. It's as if this Earth is going to keep getting warmer even though it's been getting cooler--and the only thing we can do about it is reduce the amount of CO2 emissions in the United States. Now how does this work? And so I have some new numbers that the world has never seen. They are just produced in a spreadsheet in my office indexed back to real facts. I know the doctor from Georgia is going to be very interested in these facts. And it starts out this way, when there is something going on and somebody says this is the science of it, I usually go out and I ask, what are the big questions so you can lay out the parameters for me, Mr. Speaker? The first question I would ask is, if we have global warming, and it is because the industry emissions are contributing to the atmosphere, the first question I would have is, okay, how big is our atmosphere? How do you measure all this volume of gases that have settled down to the gravitational pull, come out of outer space and settled down to the gravitational pull of Earth, all that God breathed on and those little molecules added to it, how much is that? Well they measure that in tons. So the weight, if you could put a scale on all the Earth's surface and weigh this atmosphere, you would find out--we are pretty close on this--5 quadrillion 150 trillion metric tons is the full weight of the atmosphere of the Earth, 5 quadrillion metric tons. That is all the air, the weight of all the air. Now we are measuring greenhouse gases in tons, in metric tons. So I ask the question, what is the weight of all the greenhouse gas that is in this atmosphere that is 5.15 quadrillion tons? Well, let's take it to the CO2, because that is the only thing that Waxman- Markey addresses is CO2. So the weight of all the CO2 gases in the atmosphere is 3 trillion, try that, 3 trillion metric tons. Three compared to 5.15 quadrillion. So I will tell you this. If all the atmosphere is 100 percent by weight, then the CO2 in the atmosphere is .0591. That is the CO2. Now a lot of the CO2 is there naturally. We don't charge that against industry in the world. So I take this thing down to what do we charge against this? What do we measure? So I will just take you to the net CO2 emissions in the United States. I'm sorry, I don't have the numbers from 1600 or 1700. But I do have the numbers from 1800 until 2005, two centuries plus 5 years. So that is pretty much the dawn of the industrial revolution contributed all the way up this way. The net CO2 from U.S. emissions over the last 205 years, that is hanging in the atmosphere, is 178 billion 792 million metric tons. So, Mr. Speaker, if you are listening closely, we have an atmosphere of 5.15 quadrillion metric tons, we have a total CO2 of 3 trillion, and we have the CO2 contributed by the United States of 178 billion 792 million, is all that is, so the U.S., this is the net, because 45 percent of it goes into sinks, the net greenhouse gas that is contributed in the form of CO2 contributed by the United States to this overall atmosphere, the net that is hanging out in the atmosphere today is .00347 percent of the overall atmosphere. Now here is the picture I want to draw and put in the minds of people just immediately before I intend to yield to the gentleman from Georgia, and that is this: if you lay this out in a picture form, in a poster form, and most everybody knows what a 4.8 sheet of plyboard looks like. For me, if I reach up, I reach about 7 feet, a little more, so 1 foot above my hand would be the height of a 4 x 8 sheet of drywall, let's put two of those side by side, 8 feet out this way, 8 feet this way, draw a circle the full diameter of 8 feet by 8 feet, that would be a 48-inch radius, whoop that circle around there, a great big circle would be the height of most walls in a person's living room. That would represent the full atmosphere of the Earth. It is volume measured in metric tons of all the atmosphere of the Earth. Now what are we trying to control here with Waxman-Markey? How big is this piece of the atmosphere that we are trying to affect a part of by reducing its emissions? The total accumulation from the last 205 years, the industry of the United States comes down to a radius, I will just give you the diameter, the diameter would be .56 inches, that is how big the circle is, that is all the complete contribution of U.S. CO2 emissions in the last 205 years altogether that is hanging out there in the atmosphere. You have an 8-foot circle, imagine the size of the 8-foot circle, but the little circle in the middle is the part that we can control. If you shut it all down, the entire sum total of the accumulated total is the diameter of a lug on your tire. Not the nut. Take the nut off. It is the stud that goes inside the nut. Usually those are a half inch thread. That is what we have got. The size of my little finger is the size of the circle that would represent the complete volume of the accumulated CO2 admitted by the United States inside of that, inside a circle 8 feet in diameter. And we are going to try to control the Earth's temperature over 100 years by fooling around with that tiny little circle that is a half inch in diameter? What utter arrogance. What utter vanity. I think we have gone into a new level of vanity here. I talked about the Utopian philosophers that emerged from Western Europe over the centuries that thought they could manage humanity. We have Utopian scientists here who believe they can control the Earth's temperature by fooling around with a tiny little circle that is just .56 inch in diameter. What does a 50-caliber bullet look like? Just about that. A little bit of expansion and you have got it. So we are dealing with, if you have an 8-foot circle, and you put a .45 caliber bullet into the center of that, you are going to be pretty close to the size of the hole that would represent the circle that would be all of the CO2 that the U.S. has put into the atmosphere that has accumulated in 205 years. What utter vanity, Mr. Speaker. And I will expand on this thought much more until the American people understand that we cannot be handicapping our economy based upon a science that can't be substantiated. And we can't find anybody in this Chamber that can argue the science even with that single fact that I have laid out there. And so, Mr. Speaker, I make that point. There is a whole other point to be made on the disaster that will be caused to our economy. But there is a significant point to be contributed by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun), Dr. Broun, Congressman Broun, whom I would be very happy to yield to and call my friend at the same time as much time as he might consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman. And I regretfully yield back the balance of my nonexistent time.