Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Of marijuana. And I happen to know that the value of those drugs coming across our southern border are $65 billion worth of illegal drugs. That is with a B. To try to get one's mind around $65 billion; what is that? Well, for example, PEMEX, Mexican nationalized oil company, produces about $28 billion worth of oil pumped out of Mexico and along the Gulf; $28 billion. This is about 2\1/2\ times the value of all the illegal drugs coming into the United States. The 250,000 criminal illegal aliens that are incarcerated in the United States amounts to 27 percent of the criminal population, the inmate population in our Federal penitentiaries, and there is a report that came out in April of 2005 that shows that we are funding about one out of every four prisoners that apply. And you do the math on that, and it comes out to about 25 percent of our State and local prisons are criminal inmates there as well. So when I look at what happens in places like Israel, where they have built a fence that has been almost 100 percent effective, you can't make the argument, I don't believe, that it's not effective when you put up a barrier to keep people out. It's a lot different than building a Berlin Wall, for example, to keep people in. This is a barrier to keep people out. And with those that do come in, the crime that comes in with that, as the gentleman from California said, a reduction of 56.3 percent in the Smugglers Gulch area. There are Americans that are dying every day in this country at the hands of people that if they were simply kept in the country where they are citizens, their crimes would be perpetrated someplace else. The measure of that is far greater than our casualties in the Middle East. I don't think there's any way to calculate it otherwise. As I add to this argument, I ought to point out also that the news I saw showed that in Tijuana over the weekend there was a running drug gang fight where they were driving through the streets, shooting at each other, with tourists around and residents around, and the number that I saw was 13 killed, and those that were killed, the way I understood it, were all criminal drug gangs.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, Madam Speaker, I very much appreciate the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) for coming to the floor and filling us all in on this report. I look at the statistics, and absolutely I support the mandate of Congress. You say 700 miles, but when you calculate curves in the border, it comes out to 854 miles, as the gentleman has said. The 22 metric tons of drugs and you add to that the 368 tons of----

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it's an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I listened to my colleagues with great interest, and I appreciate the constitutional acumen that they bring to the floor. I honor their work and support their statements, and do through a rather unsmooth segue into the issue that I believe needs to be addressed here, Madam Speaker, so that there can be a greater depth of knowledge about the subject of energy in this country. First of all, there is a certain idea that somehow we can talk about energy conservation and we can pass legislation to require automobiles to get 75 miles to the gallon and somehow that's not going to cost a price in quality of life or in engineering costs. And some people believe that that can actually happen. And I know that if we go so far as to mandate such a thing, you would have to park your Harley today because it wouldn't get that kind of mileage. And if that's going to happen with a family automobile, I would like to know how that is designed to be done without putting us in a very flexible and crashable vehicle that doesn't provide very much safety for the people that are inside. I'm concerned about that approach, Madam Speaker, and I'm concerned about an approach that believes that there is maybe only one or two things we can do with energy, and maybe there is a silver bullet here to solve all of this. Madam Speaker, there is no silver bullet on energy. It is a cost of everything that we do. A cup of coffee, a pair of shoes, a suit, a ticket to the ball game, a television set, everything that we might buy or consume, including all of our food, the price of it is wrapped up in energy. And inflation of energy is inflation of everything. And as we watched gas prices go up since the beginning of this Congress, this 110th Congress, when Speaker Pelosi took the gavel, gas prices have gone up over 50 percent in that period of time. And the promise was, well, there was going to be a commonsense approach to energy. Madam Speaker, I'm still waiting for that commonsense approach. I've seen pieces of legislation come across this floor a number of times in this 110th Congress, and every piece of legislation that addressed energy raised the cost of energy, and no piece of legislation increased the supply of energy, which would reduce the cost. The law of supply and demand is that if you have more supply than you have demand, prices fall because the sellers have to discount in order to turn their product into cash. And if you have a demand that's higher than the supply, the price goes up because the buyers are willing to pay more because they want it; so they compete for the product. Just the same way as if you're a great athlete, Madam Speaker, and maybe only a few people can sky walk above the hoop and slam the ball down through in a basketball court, and only a few of those people get offered the millions of dollars because it's a rare talent. There's a lot of demand for that kind of talent and only a little bit of supply. So the price for a very highly talented basketball player goes up and up. The same goes for all of our sports. We can see that easily. If you're a clutch pitcher and you can step into a baseball game with the bases loaded and nobody out and are ahead by one run and take them down three at a time and you can do that consistently and perform well under pressure, if you've got that kind of control, you're worth a lot of money in that arena because the supply is low and the demand is high. Well, with energy the supply is low and the demand is high, just like it is for a very talented basketball player or a very talented attorney or a very talented actress or a very talented CEO. So how do you reverse this when you're dealing with the American people, whose standard of living and quality of life is wrapped up in this cost of energy? And, Madam Speaker, I will submit that we must increase the supply of energy, in every category that we intend to use energy, we need to increase the supply. Now, if you'll imagine, Madam Speaker, in your mind's eye, a pie chart, a 360-degree pie chart of all the components of our sources of energy, and that would include gasoline and diesel fuel and natural gas and clean burning coal. It would include wind energy, solar energy, ethanol, biodiesel and biomass, hydroelectric, and it would include nuclear. And also on that pie chart, we need to add a slice in there for energy conservation because energy conservation is--on this, Madam Speaker, I agree with the majority party. Energy conservation is an important component of our overall energy solution. But there is no energy solution that has been offered by the leadership here. We do not have a commonsense solution that's been offered by the leadership. We have pieces of legislation that raise the cost of energy, blocking certain parts of the publicly owned lands from drilling. And the places where we could drill, there has already been a blockage of being able to transport natural gas or oil through those public lands. So we have taken millions of acres of oil-producing lands off-limits, off-limits to the American people, while we are dependent on foreign oil. The exact opposite that I believe that we should do. And we're not drilling in ANWR. Now, ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whoever named that was really thinking ahead if they thought that they wanted to lock up a lot of energy underneath the frozen tundra. But I went up there to look at that land. I really thought that if I would get up there, I would find ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--I believed I would get there and it would be teeming with wildlife. I thought caribou would be running all over the place and there would be some wolves there picking off the strays, and I thought there would be some musk-oxen and maybe some Arctic fox, and I thought I would see an alpine forest because I had seen that in one of the commercials that said ``Don't drill ANWR.'' Well, I went up there, and I did actually do the research to find out where the furthest-most northerly tree is. If you remember, Madam Speaker, I think you and I learned this in eighth grade science class that the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle are lines around the globe--on the northern hemisphere, the Arctic Circle is a line around the globe, north of which trees don't grow. So it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody to find out there are no trees in ANWR. And it was a surprise to me to find out that there is no resident caribou herd there. I did see four musk-oxen as we flew all over ANWR looking for some wildlife. We saw that and two white birds, and that was the extent of it, although there are some whales that get harvested as they swim along the shoreline and there are some polar bears that live up there along the shore. So it's not without wildlife. But we drilled in the North Slope of Alaska back in 1973--1972 and 1973 was when it began. There was a great concern about disturbing the natural regions up there and a concern that we would tear up the natural tundra and it could never be replaced again and that there would be oil spills that soaked up that couldn't be cleaned up. And, Madam Speaker, I went up there and found out that we have drilled in the North Slope, and we have done it well. And if we fly across that North Slope and look around, I couldn't identify a single oil well, not one. They are all submersible pumps set down below the ground level. And the pads that are there for workover are places that they drive to on ice. So when the ice melts in the summer, there's no sign that anybody approached the well. And the caribou herd went from 7,000 head in 1972 to 28,000 head as of a couple, 3 years ago. That's a fourfold increase in caribou herd in the North Slope in Alaska, in a region that was alleged to have been poised before it was drilled to having the wildlife and the natural environment there damaged significantly. It has not been, and there is no example that it was. The only example that we can find is that caribou like to get up on the higher ground where the wind blows the flies off of them and they like to have their calves up there out of the water; so their population has increased. But those are the caribou herds that are resident to the North Slope of Alaska, but there are no caribou herds that are residents in ANWR. So the natural animal life there won't benefit quite as much except the caribou do migrate into ANWR to have their calves in the spring starting about mid-May, early to mid-May, and then along about mid-June or the latter part of June when the calves are strong enough, they walk back over to Canada, where they actually do live. But in that whole region in the North Slope, no spills, no measurable impact on the environment. And we can do the same thing, only better, in ANWR. We can do it with about a 2,000-acre footprint, and we can drill directionally, and we can open that up and we can bring that oil over to the Alaska pipeline, pump it down to Valdez, and put it on tankers and ship it like we have done out of Alaska for years and years successfully. That oil needs to come out. It needs to come out of the ground. It needs to go into the marketplace. You cannot defy the law of supply and demand. If you shut down the supply and the demand remains the same, the price goes up. If you increase the demand and you keep the supply the same, the price goes up. We have both of those things happening. We have a demand increase, and we have a supply growth that's being shut down. And not only that, Madam Speaker, but instead of voting down drilling on publicly owned land, and I will say nonnational park public lands, we need to open up our nonnational park public lands for drilling. We need to do that. We need to drill in the Outer Continental Shelf, primarily offshore Florida, where we know there are at least 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And where the people who are sitting on the beach, there's a concern that if they have information that there's a drill rig out there at 199 miles, though you can't see it much beyond about 12 miles, but if there's a drill rig out there offshore at 199 miles, some folks are afraid that people won't go sit on the beach if they hear a rumor that there's a drill rig out there. So we shut off a 200-mile limit for exploration when a country like this needs the natural gas and a country like this needs the oil. We need to drill the Outer Continental Shelf all the way up and down our coast off of California, all the way north as far as there is energy. We need to tap into it. We need to tap into it all, Madam Speaker, and put it all on the market. And we need to add into that the alternative energy uses that we have. We have developed a tremendous industry in renewable fuels. And I speak from a base of, I will say, experience, and I represent the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. There are 435 congressional districts in Iowa, and of the 435 districts, there's only one that produces the most renewable energy, and that's the Fifth District of Iowa, when you count ethanol, biodiesel, and wind. But I see my good friend from California, former chairman, now ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Duncan Hunter, to whom I'd be so happy to yield. And I appreciate your being down here, Duncan.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California. Mr. Speaker, I just hope that we all recognize that it is getting towards evening here in Washington, D.C., and there are some folks that do go off and go to bed or call it a day. The gentleman from California has worked diligently in this Congress for more than 20 years, and I recognize that and appreciate it. As I move forward here on the energy policy, I wanted to reiterate this equation so that the point on ethanol efficiency, Mr. Speaker, does come home in a clear way. It is this: We have more corn available to us domestically now than we had as an average over any time in the last 20 years that I can come up with for records. It works like this: In 2007, we produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn. I believe that is the largest crop ever. Out of that, we exported more corn than we had ever exported before, to foreign countries, just shipped it off in the form of grain. We exported 2.5 billion bushels of corn. That left us 10.6 billion bushels left, and out of that we took 3.2 billion bushels and produced ethanol with it, around 9 billion gallons of ethanol. And, we get to add back in--that left 7.4 billion bushels for domestic consumption, which is real close to the average available for domestic consumption over the last 6 to 7 years, but half of the corn that went off to be produced into the 9 billion gallons of ethanol gets added back into the formula because it goes back into high-quality animal feed. So, we end up with an effective remaining amount of 9 billion bushels of corn into the domestic market here in the United States where the average previous years in the same decade comes to about 7.6 billion bushels of corn available for domestic consumption here in the United States. So, we increase the supply of corn for domestic consumption even though we exported more corn than we had ever exported before, even though we produced 9 billion gallons of ethanol. And all of that, and we get the allegation made by the slightly informed that food prices are up because we have turned more corn into ethanol and that has hurt us. It has actually been a big help. And what we can do is we can take that number and try to be logical about it and realize that the high price for food comes from two things. One is the cheap dollar; the cheap dollar that if we would take the price of energy up--if we would uphold the value of our dollar, shore up the value of our dollar, we could take perhaps one-third of that cost out. And so the gasoline that we are paying $3.50 for today would be worth maybe about $2.15 if we could shore up the value of the dollar. Corn that sold cash in Iowa last week for $6 a bushel would be around $4 a bushel. Say it is 55 or 60 cash today, it would take it down to below $4 a bushel if we could take one-third of that out by shoring up the dollar. It would slow down some of our exports and it would change some of the equations, but it would add more stability into overall markets, and we should do that. But there is a great big future for corn-based ethanol. And it is not a full solution by any means; and in fact, if I look at our corn production and look at our gasoline consumption, I have to think that somewhere in that 13 or 14 percent category is about where we end up, Mr. Speaker, of how much of the gasoline in this country we can substitute ethanol for. But that is a part of it. And if we can get 13 or 14 percent, it surely was worth it to start building wind chargers to produce electricity when we thought we would have to cap that off at about 15 percent because it is not a stable enough supply to produce all of the energy that we could have. And that is a tremendous capital investment, Mr. Speaker. So, this corn does have a future. And it has got a future in ethanol, and it is a future that needs to be sustained and maintained by this Congress. The blenders credits have got to stay in place, and we have got to maintain the import duty on Brazilian ethanol, because if we take that off, we will be building infrastructure to produce more ethanol in a place like Brazil. They can produce, they can build their own infrastructure with their own capital. We need to put capital back into the corn belt and into the ag areas of the United States so that we can build out this renewable energy infrastructure. If we do that, we will have an industry there that will provide renewable fuels over and over again. And the people that argue that corn ethanol has a carbon footprint know the worst that you can say for it is it is carbon neutral, because the carbon that is sequestered by the photosynthesis is released, some of it, back in the atmosphere in the form of CO2. But we can convert that CO2 into a useful byproduct. We are in the process of developing it. I believe we have the science to do that. We don't have it up to the industrial proven model yet. But I would argue this, Mr. Speaker: That about $5.50 bushel a corn, by the time we process not quite 3 gallons a bushel out of that corn into ethanol we get about $7 worth of ethanol out of that bushel of corn. And then when we add to that where through the fractionization process we crack out the germ, and out of the germ we take the oil. And the oil, some of it is there, it is for food grade consumption high quality oil that is worth about 85 cents a pound now. And then we get a lower grade oil that goes into biodiesel. And so we could take the corn oil, some goes to human consumption, some goes into biodiesel. That taking the corn oil out allows then the remaining grain to leave a residue for a dried distiller's grain that can then be digested by hogs and poultry because the oil is out. It is the oil that gives them a problem. So if we do the fractionization process of the corn and take the germ out and take the oil out of the germ, when we are done, this is a more useful feed than what it is today, it is more versatile, because it can go to a lot of different livestock where right today cattle have an advantage. $7 worth of ethanol and a bushel of corn. By the time you add up the dried distiller grain feed amount, and by the time we take the CO2 and convert that into a useful byproduct by using photosynthesis and converting it into biodiesel and the residue of that going back as a feed grain, we capture it all. We capture it all and roll it into something useful. And the short back- of-the-envelope calculation comes to about $7 worth of ethanol in a bushel of corn that is worth about $5.50 and another $7 worth of high- value product that we used to call byproduct. When the byproduct gets to be worth more than the primary product, then the byproduct is no longer a byproduct. We could actually get that point. And, I had better not utter those words into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, but we have made significant progress. And the value added on this bushel of corn at about $5.50 turns into about $14 if we do this right, with no carbon footprint, a carbon plus instead of a carbon neutral. No downside on this. And it takes half the energy to produce a Btu in the form of ethanol out of the corn as compared to gasoline out of crude oil. It takes a lot less water. And, by the way, the water that it takes to grow the crop, the folks that are critical, they will say they will charge all the water off as if we irrigated that corn. About 12 percent of the corn in America is irrigated; the balance of it is just God's watering it for us. And so it is going to rain anyway. If it is going to rain anyway on that field, you can't charge that water usage against ethanol production, Mr. Speaker. It defies common sense to see such logical contortionisms going on on the parts of the critics that will not stand down here and lay out fact against fact against fact. Facts are, we have more corn available for domestic consumption than ever before. We have exported more corn than ever before. And, we have produced, we have turned more corn into ethanol than ever before. We have done all of those things all in the same year, and the inflated costs of food has not related in a significant way to the overall cost of grain. It is more related to the cheaper dollar than it is the supply and demand of the commodity corn. And so, Mr. Speaker, I submit that we are on the right path, and we need to put more into the infrastructure and we need to produce more ethanol. And, if we can do that, we are helping to solve this problem. And, by the way, food prices appreciated by about 4.9 percent over the last year. Energy prices, Mr. Speaker, appreciated 18 percent over the last year. And a significant portion of the food price appreciation, the increase came because of energy price increases. The cost of energy has a lot more to do with the cost of food than the supply and demand of that food does, because an energy component goes into everything, the distribution and the processing of it, as well as the raising of it. And so how high would gas be today if you took 9 billion gallons off the market as we put 9 billion of ethanol in? If you took that 9 billion gallons off the market, how much more costly would gasoline be today and how might it change the equation? I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that food is cheaper today because of corn-based ethanol. And I would submit that the energy we have today is cheaper because of corn-based ethanol; and, that this equation works out very good for the farm bill, too, because, for example, in 2005, there is a government program, a subsidy that has been there since the 1930s, it paid out in 2005 $6.8 billion in counter-cyclical and loan deficiency payments. The counter-cyclical and LDPs paid out a total of $6.5 billion in 2005. By 2006, the subsequent year, commodity prices were up high enough that that zeroed out. There was no $6.8 billion going into counter-cyclicals and LDPs. And if you charge that all to ethanol demand--and I have already made the argument you don't. But if you do, if you sustain and you are on the side of this argument, Mr. Speaker, that it really was the consumption of corn through ethanol that drove up the price, then you have to also argue that the $6.8 billion in farm subsidies disappeared because of ethanol. So, at no cost to the taxpayer and a program that had been there in some form or another since the 1930s, we did pay back in that same year $3 billion in blenders credit. So there was a net savings to the taxpayers of $3.8 billion out of the $6.8 billion that was subsidized the year before. That is pretty good, too. I don't know of a way that we can do this calculation in a macro national perspective and not come up with corn-based ethanol as a great big plus for the country. It is more energy. It doesn't reduce our food supply, at least by the numbers that we have. Now, if we go overboard, it can. And it doesn't taken away from our export of corn. We still exported more corn than ever before. We have more corn available on the market. It takes about half as much energy to produce a Btu out of corn at the ethanol plant as it does to produce a Btu of energy in the form of gasoline at a refinery out of crude oil. All of these numbers that I produced here are based in fact, and I can anchor the foundation numbers down by laboratory numbers, Mr. Speaker. This is a picture of the real facts, and I challenge those folks who disagree to come up with something that is solid, a calculation. Give me something that is empirical. Don't give me your feelings, don't give me your senses. Don't say, gee, I just feel this or I feel that. Look at the whole picture, look at the big picture, but look at the composition of the numbers, build a formula there, and see what it does for America. We are on the right track, not the wrong track. I recognize that the gentleman is here from Maryland who has the next special order. In that case, and out of deference to him, I would, Mr. Speaker, thank you for your attention here tonight and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. As the gentleman knows, my view on this, and I think we would concur, is that I always say grow the size of the energy pie. Take every slice of that pie. Let's produce more domestic gas, more domestic diesel fuel and more cleaning burning coal. Let's keep wind energy going, and whatever we can do economically with solar, and expand the nuclear. I would expand the hydroelectric if I could do it and add the ethanol and biodiesel to it. I am sure I am leaving somebody out. But if you can find a way to produce energy and get it into the marketplace, biomass is another one. We have got some closed systems coming now where we can take an ethanol plant and ship corn in there, feed the corn; the glutton or the dried distiller grain comes out and gets fed to cattle in the feedlot; it is converted to beef; and then the manure goes into biomass and creates the energy that drives the ethanol plant. It is a closed system. We are developing systems now where we can take the byproduct and convert that into a high concentrated CO2 environment and produce photosynthesis which traps the carbon gas out and turns it into cellulose and energy. We are only in the first phase of renewable energy production, and, as the technology develops, each piece of it as it comes forward to me is just fascinating how far we will be able to go.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California for bringing his background and expertise to this. Sometimes there is a different view on things between California and Iowa, and I don't find that to be the case when it comes to common sense, particularly when it has to do with energy production and when it has to do with the immigration issues that are there. I have, of course, traveled to ANWR and seen the situation up there. I would add also that the people that believe that we are going to run out of energy supply here in the world and so somehow we should not tap into the known energy, what would be a better time to go where we know we have a lot of energy than right now, get up to Alaska and drill that? We are hearing also announcements of huge energy finds around the globe. For example, we know that there are tremendous reserves of oil off the West Coast of Africa, and offshore is a good thing in that part of the world because it is actually easier to provide security offshore than onshore in some of those areas. Brazil has announced two huge crude oil finds, oil fields, there. And with the Chevron find in the Gulf of Mexico a year-and-a-half or so, it was another huge find. And they announced the other day there are 3.4 billion barrels of oil in the North Dakota and Montana area, in that overthrust area they were drilling in 20 or 25 years ago. Now they go down about 10,000 feet and they have to drill then from there horizontally with new technology, and they can draw the oil out. There are 3.4 billion barrels of oil up there, along with one of the world's largest oil supplies, the oil sands area in northern Alberta, which we hope to build a pipeline down and tap that in and refine it here in the United States. We have got that going on. We have a nuclear power plant under construction in South Carolina today. So we are taking some steps. But the barrier here in this Congress, the leadership that is provided currently with the people that hold the gavels, it is all about cutting down on the supply of energy and raising the price, because I think that they believe, and maybe the gentleman from California is better tuned into this myopic belief, but I think they believe that if they can raise the cost of energy and take supply down, people will ride bicycles and park their car. And that doesn't help grandma very much in January in Iowa when she is 10 miles away from town. But if they ride bicycles more and then drive up the cost of everything we do, somehow that saves the environment and saves the planet. That is what I hear coming out of the voices in Congress. I would ask for the judgment of the gentleman from California.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California. There's a lot more to be taken up on that. As a matter of transition on the cost of this border, we are spending $8 billion on our southern border. When you calculate the cost of funding Border Patrol and all their equipment and all of the costs that are associated with that, as well as the costs of ICE and the enforcement that we have along on the border, about $8 billion a year. That is $4 million a mile. Now we can build interstate for that kind of money. Instead, we just simply want to build a couple of fences with some sensors on it and invest that money and get the return back in the first year. As we recruit Border Patrol that come to work, I ask them to keep your spirits up and get tied into the mission. Often there is a loss of notion on that lack of mission if it's not clearly articulated. There isn't a place to compromise the law. When someone violates it, we must enforce it and follow through with prosecution. We need to put the resources in your hands so you can do that. You are brave Americans serving this country, serving us well. I go down along that part of the border and sit down in nice quiet meetings with brave Americans that are serving this country and I hear your stories. I hear them anonymously sometimes. And I sit along the border in the dark at night and watch and listen as the infiltration comes through. I have got a sense of what you're up against. I'm sure I don't appreciate it the way you do, being faced against it every day. I appreciate the work, as this Congress does, and I appreciate the gentleman from California coming to the floor. I wanted to swing back to the energy piece of this, Mr. Speaker, and as I talked about the different components of the energy pie, the overall pie chart, our sources of energy, and I listed a whole series of them: Gas, diesel, biodiesel, and nuclear, wind. The list goes on. Not necessarily to repeat them all, but just to refresh in our eye the things we are talking about here from the sources of energy that we have. I was in the process of making the statement that of all 435 congressional districts in America, there is one congressional district that produces more renewable energy than any other congressional district. That is the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. We are in the top three in ethanol production of all the congressional districts. We are the top biodiesel-producing district of all of the congressional districts. We are in the top one to four on wind. Perhaps today we are third or maybe second on wind generation of electricity. If you add up the Btu's we are converting into renewable energy sources, the Fifth District produces more than anybody else. So we ought to know a little more about it. First of all, and I need to debunk some of the myths that are out there. One of them is a myth, it is a myth that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of the ethanol. That is a myth. There was a college professor that did a study that went back and added up all the energy it would take to produce the tractor and smelt the steel and produce the rubber for the tires and transport the tractor and the combine and the cultivator and the application equipment all the way to the farm field. They calculated all of the energy that it took to do that, as well as the energy it took to make seven passes over the field, if I remember that number correctly. It didn't add up quite good enough yet so they charged against the energy consumption to produce ethanol, this is to raise a crop of corn, by the way, 4,000 calories a day for the farm workers because it takes energy to keep them going. When you get to that point, Mr. Speaker, you have to know that they are grasping at straws, they are reaching pretty hard to try to pull in as many ways that they can describe that there's energy consumption in ethanol production through corn. Well, let me submit, Mr. Speaker, that first of all, if you add all that up, then you can make anything so inefficient, we couldn't possibly do it. But the corn is going to be raised anyway. So that description isn't valid and it's not a rational way to compare how much energy that we are getting out of corn versus how much energy it takes to produce the equipment that raises the farm crop. If we are going to measure the amount of energy used to produce tractors and combines that are used in the field, along with the diesel fuel or the gas that is in the tractor and in the combine and in the trucks that haul the grain away, then by the same comparison we have got to look at the energy that is consumed when we produce gasoline out of crude oil. It isn't just an inequation of a barrel sitting at the refinery of Texas. It is all of the military that has to go over to defend the oil fields. It's the anchor, all the energy it takes to cast the anchor for the battleship and all the energy it takes to produce weaponry of all kinds, and the F-16s that have to fly in the air and the bullet proof vests and armored Humvees. How much energy does it take to drive an army? Are they consuming 4,000 calories a day? Perhaps they are. In fact, I'd submit more than that, as much as they are up against. If you add all that up, you can compare that to the energy it takes to produce tractors and combines and energy in the form of ethanol out of corn. But I will submit that that is a ridiculous path to go down to try to prove something. I think that the study that said that it took more energy to produce ethanol, the specious one about measuring the energy it took to produce the tractor to farm the corn is a specious study and it is invalid and it was grasping at straws. When the same people go back and calculate what it takes to put an army in the field and a navy in the sea and an air force in the air and how much fuel to drive all of that, compare that and the energy you get out of the crude oil versus the energy you get out of corn, we are still going to look really good, although neither comparison is valid. So what is valid is this. We are going to raise the corn anyway. We have the oil out there coming out of the ground anyway. So what is valid is each one of them has a commodity price, and as Adam Smith said, the value of anything in the marketplace is the sum total of the capital that it takes to produce it and the labor that it takes to produce it. So when you add up the capital and the labor, and you look at the price, the market price, you will have those two things together. For example, crude oil has gone up by the barrel from, not that long ago, $50 a barrel, to $118 or $119 a barrel. That more than doubled over the last year and 15 months or so. Why is that? Because of supply and demand. Because it has gotten more scarce, because there is more demand on the oil, and because the cost of capital and production and labor have gone up. So we measure the value of the commodity in the marketplace. What does it command when it is marketed as a commodity? What is corn worth by the bushel, what is crude oil worth by the barrel? That is how we determine what it is worth. I will submit this, Mr. Speaker, and that is that if we put a barrel of crude oil sitting outside the gates of the refinery, let's just say in Texas, and we are going to have to refine that crude oil and do what we call crack gas out of that crude oil, that takes energy to do that. And the energy that it takes to crack one Btu out of gasoline out of crude oil is 1.3 Btus of energy to do so. If you put a bushel of corn sitting outside the gates of an ethanol plant in Iowa, for example, anyplace in the corn belt, and you are going to produce one Btu out of that corn in the form of ethanol, it will take .67 Btus of energy input to get one Btu out in ethanol in the form of corn. If you do that in gasoline coming out of crude oil at the refinery in Texas, you will use up 1.3 Btus to get one Btu back. It is almost, by modern numbers, actually, twice as much energy consumed to produce gasoline from crude oil as it takes to get ethanol out of corn. That is a laboratory fact. It is not a negotiable one, it is not an opinion, it is a laboratory fact. And they worry about water consumption, how much water does it take to produce ethanol for the amount of water that it takes to produce gasoline. Cracking gasoline takes significantly, multiple times more water than producing ethanol out of corn. Cracking gas out of crude oil, a lot more water than ethanol out of corn. So we take care of those two arguments. Those things stand up with laboratories tests. Those are finite numbers. They are not negotiable. They are a matter of scientific fact. It isn't even ``settled science,'' in the way Al Gore would say his opinion is. It is laboratory facts. So, now we have this ethanol, and we have put it into the marketplace and we have produced upwards perhaps in the last year somewhere near 9 billion gallons of ethanol. And that is putting a dent into the overall supply. We are burning about 142 billion gallons of gasoline in a year, so the 9 million gallons of ethanol is approaching that level where it is significant in its contribution in keeping the cost of energy down. But the argument comes back then to me and across the airwaves of this country, Mr. Speaker, that we have high food prices because the production of ethanol has taken corn off the marketplace and made food prices higher. Now, why is it that people that don't understand the law of supply and demand when it comes to the cost of energy can all of a sudden discover the law of supply and demand when it comes to food prices, and then misinform themselves for the suitability of their own argument? So it works like this: We don't consume a lot of field corn for human consumption. Most of it, if it is not processed into some 300-some different products, but most of the field corn is used in livestock feed and it does get converted into food that way. But here is how this works. In 2007 we produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn. Of that, we exported 2.5 billion bushels of corn. That left 10.6 billion bushels back for us, 10.6 billion to use here domestically. Of that, we converted 3.2 billion into ethanol, a little over 9 billion gallons of ethanol. That left 7.4 bushels of corn for domestic production. That 7.4 billion gets added back to it at least half of the corn that we use for ethanol, because there is a high grade animal feed product that is a by-product of ethanol production. That would be about 1.6 billion bushel equivalent added back in. So we end up with exactly, by my calculation here, 9.0 billion bushels of corn to be used here domestically for animal feed, for processing into the things that we process it into. And so the argument would be, well is that 9.0 billion bushel, is that more or less corn than we normally have for domestic production? We pushed our production up, and over the last 6 years we have produced an average of only 10.3 billion bushels of corn, and we have exported about 2 billion. So that takes us down to 8.3 billion bushels of corn available in an average year. Last year there was 9 billion bushels available. And yet the people who don't understand the law of supply and demand when it comes to energy seem to think that even though we have more domestic corn available on the market here in the United States, even after we exported more corn than ever before, somehow they think that is what is driving up food prices. Mr. Speaker, I submit food prices are driven up because of energy costs, not because of the supply and demand on corn, because we have more corn. And so all we have to do is look at the numbers to understand this and realize the cheap dollar has been driving up commodity prices for food, it has been driving up gas prices, it has been driving up the cost of defense. I would be happy to yield to my friend from California.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California, who has been the leader on this fence and made sure the first got built and is here making sure that we get the last of it built. I just submit we don't have to build exactly 2,000 miles of fence to get this all done. I submit we build the Duncan Hunter 700/854 miles of fence and then we will just keep right on building as long as they keep going around the end. If they stop going around the end, we can stop building fence. If they start going around the end, we'll start building some more.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I am quite pleased to come to the floor and be recognized to address you. I am especially honored to be the first Member of Congress to address this Congress after Dean Popps has been appointed, as has just been read into the Record. I want to talk about two patriotic Americans this evening, and then transition to some other subject matter. Dean Popps is one of those who has served his country, and done it very well. He was one of the first people to go into Iraq as part of the team with Paul Bremer, a person who gave up a pretty easy path here in the United States that he had earned for himself to take on a very difficult and challenging path to serve his country. I have seen him stand as we loaded wounded on to planes at Landstuhl, his hand over his heart and a tear in his eye. And he will serve this country very well on the appointment that has just been read into the Record. And I look forward to the results of that service as I have seen the results of his past service. It is a matter of coincidence that I arrive here to hear the reading, and I can't pass up the opportunity to say a few kind words about the most qualified individual that could possibly come forward to serve on the commission. I look forward to that service, Madam Speaker. Then, I also have come to the floor to convey a message, that conveys a message to you, Madam Speaker, that reflects across the United States Congress in listening to the remarks that were made by the previous speakers, including the gentleman from Florida, about our operations in this global war on terror; and global war on Islamic Jihadists is a more appropriate way to address our enemy. Our enemy has a global presence, and they are attacking us globally and they have been doing that for 20 or more years, perhaps more than 25 years, in the modern era here, and we need to recognize who they are. Our soldiers and our troops recognize who they are, but there seems to be a myopic vision on the part of a lot of Members of Congress that happen to be right now in the majority. And I regret that I have seen this war turned into a political tug-of-war rather than a policy that we are committed to, and we are committed to in large numbers, to grant the authority to engage in the liberation of the Iraqi people. And now that this has gone on for a while, and even though the casualties in the beginning were far, far less than those predicted by the very detractors today that say that the accumulated casualties over the last 5 years are more than this Nation can bear and that we should leave Iraq under any circumstances, according to their view, and let the calamity begin. Well, the calamity began in the aftermath of Vietnam, and the body count by the time the killing fields in Cambodia were totaled up was some number between 2 million and 3 million people. But today, because of the courageous actions on the part of all of our military, and that absolutely includes our Commander in Chief, the 25 or 26 or so million in Afghanistan breathe free. They voted for the first time on that piece of real estate on the planet, ever, because of U.S. and coalition forces liberating them. And there have been a number of elections in Iraq and another one coming up, a place where we can't say that they actually had a representative form of government. No constitutional republic existed there. Today, they have a significant measure of freedom, and in fact their safety and security has improved dramatically, partly and in a large way because of the result of the surge, also because of the result of the diplomacy that takes place, not on the part of some of the self- appointed emissaries that think that they should be the Lone Ranger on American foreign policy, those who don't seem to understand our Constitution or the Logan Act. No, Madam Speaker. I am talking about the American soldier, the American Marine, the American Airman, and the Sailors too, and particularly the Seabees that are on the ground, that are playing soccer with the Iraqi kids and handing out candy and nurturing them and saving children, saving their lives, and teaching them a little bit of English and learning a little bit of Arabic and being part of the cultural exchange. Those are the people that are earning the peace, and their lives are on the line, and every one of them is a volunteer. And they want to complete their mission, Madam Speaker. This brings me to a message that I received in my e-mail, I am going to say a couple of weeks ago that I received this e-mail. It is from a Captain Sean P. O'Brien, 5th Battalion, 25th Field Artillery, 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, a forward operating base somewhere in Iraq, and I will not divulge that location. I have watched as an older boy and then a young man, Sean O'Brien, grow up and learn patriotism and the cost of freedom, and know that some had to serve and some would sacrifice, and he volunteered to do so. He is a decorated veteran. He received a Purple Heart in Afghanistan, and went back into the theater of war and now he is there in Iraq. And he sent this e-mail to me, and, Madam Speaker, I would like to read it into the Record. Captain Sean P. O'Brien. Hello again from Baghdad. I am not sure what is going on in the news these days, but I would like to offer another perspective. As important as it is to the media to sensationalize a story, the nuisance of these attacks is just that. If there was ever a time that we were taking the wood to these jerks, it is now. The few that are causing the problems, and I mean the few, seem to be cut off, and they are fighting like it. They are making incredibly huge tactical errors, and their support seems to wane very easily in the face of the coalition and Iraqi Security Forces' resolve. I have seen with my own eyes the bravery of the Iraqi Army. They really are fighting for their country, and they are making the kinds of sacrifices we like to remind ourselves of our own heroes. The Iraqi police, not as successful, but still holding their own, especially when they know that we have got their backs. I hate this job. I hate being away from Dawn and the kids, but I love seeing the enemy's cowardice and the inconsistencies disintegrate into their death when they are met with deliberate and disciplined prosecution. They push teachers and kids out of schools and fight from the schoolhouses. They arrange coordinated attacks from mosques. I suppose, as any insurgent would, their best weapon is a booby trap. By the way, a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government is an insurgent. Please note, established government. The largest share of the attacks has been aimed at anything that represents the government, not so much coalition forces. Our mission is to protect the populous. The populous wants to be safe, and they demonstrate it. The Iraqi Army is getting stronger every day, and they give their lives for it. The enemy is very reactive and therefore easily predicted. Something to think about. We are not leaving here. No one has told me this, but I do know that over the last 60 years we still have troops in the following places: Korea, Japan, and Germany. What is the difference? Hazard pay? Only a rhetorical question, he notes. And Captain O'Brien goes on: All countries are now contributing culturally and economically. Is the sacrifice any different now than it was then? Was it worth it to help them out? Is it worth it now? To leave this place would be the same as standing by, idly watching your neighbors's house burn to the ground. It is irresponsible and it is morally wrong to ever consider such a thing. Freedom is so important. It is one thing to say it; it is another completely to watch someone die for it or for someone else's. All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no internal authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense once all peace efforts have failed. It is personal. The enemy wants to kill us because we are Americans. There is nothing else they want. They hate us; they hate who we are and what we represent. There is nothing to offer an extremist except extreme measures. However, all of that is just an effect. Is it moral to fight an effect and not a cause? Yes; when your inaction means a culture will suffer for generations. The real issue to consider is possibly: What is there to gain by a destabilized Iraq? And, who is to gain? At the end of the day, the evaluation of these conditions and for the moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have the responsibility for the common good. That is you and me, the American. And back to the destabilizers. Imagine a few of these cowards kidnapping a loved one of yours, beating them, and then filming your loved one on their knees. You hear the words ``Allahu Akbar'' chanting in the background, meaning ``God is great,'' and then you watch these hooded cowards saw the head off of your loved one with a dull knife. Fear is their only actual weapon, and this weapon is not effective in the face of a self-aware citizen army and populous such as the Americans and, soon, as the Iraqis will be. Interesting that Senator Obama wants to immediately sully the prestige of his sought office by offering an open meeting to those who want our Nation to burn. To give away the store is the best analogy I can think of. No matter. Captain O'Brien goes on: I have faith in the American people not to allow that conflicted man to represent the United States in any way. So naive, yet the amount of naivety seems to demonstrate that his intentions are calculated. You should be proud of our Joes and Joeys over here. All are still giving some, and some have and are going to give all. But don't mourn them; honor them, and understand the sacrifice they are making and for whom they are making it. Have a great day. It will be good to come back when we are done. Captain Sean P. O'Brien, 5th Battalion, 25th Field Artillery, 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, Baghdad. Madam Speaker, that is a sample of the e-mails that I get. And that I think is the most profound one and among the most compelling, and I think it tells the body and the American people what goes on in the minds and the hearts of our uniformed Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, and Sailors over there. And as I looked them in the eye on that soil and they ask me, how could anyone consider calling us home before we finish our mission? And they repeat to me that they are all volunteers. Every single one that serves in that theater is a volunteer. They volunteered for their branch of the service. They have, in doing so, that period of time that they have signed up or re-upped for is certainly a period of time in which they knew that they were likely to be deployed over to that part of the world. They are willing to put their lives on the line for our freedom, our liberty, and our posterity, Madam Speaker. And for us to sit back here and argue that we are tired; we are tired, when they are the ones that are fighting this war? What has America sacrificed? We have sacrificed some of our sons and daughters. We have given them a great deal in Iraq and around the world. Blood and treasure is priceless, and blood is far more priceless than treasure. We have given them a great deal, but the price that has been paid by the individual American is small in comparison to what is being paid by our military that are standing there in their uniforms, volunteering, saying: Let us complete our mission. Let us be victorious and then come home. Let us leave a legacy of freedom in Iraq and in Afghanistan and across the world. And think what the map of the world looks like. It sometimes takes courage. Sometimes it takes a level of leadership to do the noble thing. And, Madam Speaker, I wonder sometimes if we have lost our ability to take ourselves back to what is noble and what is right and what is good and what is just. But Ronald Reagan did the noble thing. He did the noble thing when he gave the speech when he said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' And, Madam Speaker, if the American people knew the story on how difficult it was for that language to remain in President Reagan's speech, how many Chicken Littles, how many people that wanted to play the cautious route, those that didn't have the courage, those that didn't want to be, could not and did not have the courage to do the noble thing, tried to pull that language out of Ronald Reagan's speech because they were afraid of what Gorbachev might do. They didn't like the idea that it would be adding to the tension and adding to the friction, because they were afraid of confrontation, Madam Speaker. And to fear confrontation means eventually you will have it, because it is the bullies of the world that will poke their finger in your chest. And if you fear the confrontation and step backwards to avoid the finger in your chest, then the bully will take a step forward and poke his finger in your chest again and again and again. Countries, dictators, tyrants are the bullies of the world. And when you reach the point where you are up against the wall, then you can decide whether you are going to fight or whether you are going to grovel. But I can tell you, he has chosen that ground, and you make that decision on his terms, not yours. The American people have been a bold people that have made the decisions on which ground to fight on our terms, not theirs. And Ronald Reagan made that decision when he stepped up and said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' And that laid out that inspiration. And a few years later, the wall came tumbling down. When that wall fell down in Berlin, I watched this unfold on the news, and that was when I knew I needed to go get cable TV and a broader news cycle, because the whole story for the analysts was how families that had been divided by the wall could now come together, and they were breaking champagne bottles in their family reunions on the wall. And some were there with hammers chiseling away at the Berlin wall. They missed the point. It was weeks and weeks and weeks before you could find a mainstream media, talking head pundit that even would utter the words that were close to the truth that most of us commonsense American people saw as we watched it on TV when the Berlin wall came down, hammers and chisels, a piece at a time. That was literally, literally, the Iron Curtain came crashing down. The Iron Curtain that was constructed across Europe at Yalta on February 11, 1945 came crashing down beginning November 9, 1989. And the analysts in America didn't understand what that meant, and they didn't understand what it meant when Ronald Reagan said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' They didn't understand what it meant when Pope John Paul, now The Great, uttered his words and weighed in on this and gave an inspiration to the Christian reformation of Europe. And, how those minds and those voices together gave inspiration, along with Margaret Thatcher who, when she looked at Gorbachev and talked with him and met him, said to Ronald Reagan, ``This is a man with whom we can do business.'' And I don't know how good of a business he did for the interests of the Soviet Union since it collapsed some time later, but the business that got done was this, Madam Speaker. The strategy, the noble strategy of playing some brinksmanship, taking some risks, being bold, doing the American thing, doing the free world thing, and the contest was this. And Jean Kirkpatrick said it as she stepped down as ambassador to the United Nations, I think the year was 1984. Ironic that it would be, actually. But I remember her saying, and I read this in an article in the newspaper about page 3 or 4 in a tiny little three column inches; she said, what is going on as she resigned her ambassadorship to the United Nations: What is going on here in the conflict in the world, the Cold War, is the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the question was, would the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before the Soviet Union checkmated the United States militarily? Mr. Speaker, that was the contest that was going on. Ronald Reagan understood that. Margaret Thatcher understood that, and I think Pope John Paul the Great understood that and upped the ante and took the risk and did the bold thing and challenged. When he challenged, it added inspiration to a people. When they found that the emperor had no clothes, that the bear had no teeth, the bear had no claws, and they found that the will was not there any longer on the part of the Soviet Union to exterminate people who were just trying to get over the wall for their freedom, then they defied authority, and almost bloodlessly the wall came down. The Iron Curtain came crashing down and freedom echoed all of the way across Europe clear to the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of millions of people breathed free because of that courage and that boldness and that nobility of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul. That kind of bold move is what it takes for people to achieve freedom. It was a bold move to draft and sign the Declaration of Independence and hang that out in the public square and understand that as they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, they well might be hanging in the public square as well, our Founders, that signed the Declaration. They took that risk, and many of their lives were ruined. But the birth of this country began and freedom was inspired. A bold and noble act brought forth the United States of America. A bold and noble act brought down the Berlin Wall, crashed the Iron Curtain, and a bold and noble act freed the Iraqi and the Afghani people. Mr. Speaker, taking myself back to those moments in history, the noble times when people have been bold and had the courage to take a risk and know that bad things could come out of a bold decision, but seldom do any better things come out of decisions that are not so bold. I could go through history and talk about the Declaration of Independence, as I stated. And additionally, Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the boldness with which he stuck to his guns and said we will preserve the Union, and almost at any cost, and it was a high price that was paid. And the boldness to which Abraham hung to the principle of freedom for all people. He said, ``As I would not be a slave, I would not be a master,'' and he acted on it. My information from an accomplished historian is a story that I have to qualify because even though I am assured it is a true story, it is such a good story. Many things are attributed to Abraham Lincoln, so I am a little cautious. It is inspirational regardless of whether we can verify it to be fact. I have done some steps to verify. I believe it to be a fact, but I am not certain. So I put that caveat in there, but I think it is important to consider this inspiration. As Abraham Lincoln was considering whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, he had deliberated on it for some time. The political climate was different then than we imagine it might be. And he called his cabinet together. He spoke to the cabinet. He said I have this Emancipation Proclamation, and I am seeking your counsel as to whether I should sign it. So he went around the table. They were all men in those days. And the first cabinet member, the first man said Mr. President, I don't think you should sign the Emancipation Proclamation because, after all you can't free anybody south of the Mason-Dixon Line because we don't occupy any of that territory and we have no authority since they have seceded from the Union, so it would be meaningless. President Lincoln listened. Then he went to the next cabinet member. The next cabinet member said, Mr. President, I think it is meaningless because you can't free anybody by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. And furthermore, the African Americans who live north of the Mason-Dixon Line are already free. So it would be meaningless. So he went to the third cabinet member who said, We have some people wearing our Union uniform that are fighting against the Confederates for other reasons. They want to bring the Union together, but they believe in slavery, and so you will lose some of the support of those soldiers who really aren't against slavery. They are there because they want to hold the Union together. They went around the table. The cabinet was smaller then, but there was a different reason from each cabinet member. But each one advised President Lincoln, no, no, no, no, all of the way around the cabinet table. Every cabinet member advised President Lincoln do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation. And the leadership of courage, the nobility of the man, President Lincoln looked at his cabinet members and he said, ``Well, gentlemen, the aye has it.'' ``The aye has it,'' Mr. Speaker. That is courage. That is vision. That is nobility. That's the thing that we see out of our soldiers in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And it is not getting easier in Afghanistan. The casualties are going up there. We do have support from a lot of our allies in Afghanistan, and we have significant support in Iraq from our allies there. But we must not fold, we must not blink, we must not fail. We should listen to our uniformed military who are putting up the sacrifice. If I hear over here again, ``I am tired of this war,'' find me a volunteer soldier that is not tired of war. But the numbers of those who support finishing this thing with the honor of a victory, and those who anticipate, as I do, an Iraq that is free, a moderate, Arabic nation that will be an ally that has significant oil resources in the Middle East, one who will be inspiring to the rest of that part of the world, that part of the world that has been in constant conflict and turmoil for centuries, we need to work with this principle that free people don't go to war against other free people. If we have free people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we do, that happens to be on the west and the east border of Iran, respectively. As they see the prosperity and the peacefulness and the opportunity and the freedom that exists today and will be an expanding freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, can anybody imagine that the Iranian people will not want to partake in that freedom and prosperity? They will be inspired by their neighbors. We can see that part of the globe bond together, free people, moderate Islamic nations who control their own government, people with a voice in the destiny of their nation. That is what I envision and what President Bush envisions. That is what we need to have the courage and the nobility to stand with. In the long run, first it saves American lives in the long run. Second, it changes the habitat that breeds terror. If you look around the world, we have a list of countries that are called nations of interest. The nations of interest are the nations that produce terrorists. The reason they do is because they have the habitat that produces terrorists. Some is poverty, some is religion, some is culture. There is a hatred of freedom there and there is a love of death, as we heard the gentleman from California in his presentation earlier this afternoon. That habitat can be changed. And we have lost Benazir Bhutto to this world, to this temporal world that we are in at this time. I got to know her and I had a number of conversations with her. Upon our first meeting, it was shortly after September 11, and I sat down with her one-on-one in Storm Lake, Iowa, I would add. And I asked her a series of questions. One of my questions was, How do we get to the point where we can achieve victory in this war since this is an amorphous enemy and it is not a command-and-control structure and there is not a piece of real estate that we can go and capture and occupy and say we won? How do we win and declare victory? How do we know when we have won? Her answer was you've got to give them freedom. You've got to give them a chance at democracy. If you do that, they will change their focus from hatred and terror toward their families, their communities, their neighborhoods, their country, and their mosques. If they do that, they will no longer be focused on hatred and I will pick it up from there. That is how we erase the habitat that breeds terrorists. Another way to describe it, Mr. Speaker, is if you're sitting on your porch and a hornet should fly along and sting you on the arm, you are likely to swat the hornet and rub the arm a little bit. If it happens 2 weeks later, that is two too many, but it is not so alarming. But if the whole hive comes and stings one of your children or grandchildren to death, maybe 200 or 300 stings by 200 or 300 hornets, and for an unforeseen reason kills one of your family members, you no longer sit on the porch with your Raid can and your fly swatter. You go find the hive or hives, and you eradicate the habitat that breeds that kind of venom. We are going another step here. We are eradicating the habitat that breeds that kind of venom, and we are replacing it with a positive habitat that breeds brotherly love and neighborly cooperation and common interest of commercial opportunity and an opportunity to weigh in to promote the destiny of their country. All of those things come from the kind of mission that our military has been on, the kind of mission that Sean O'Brien has been on, and these things can and will flow from our efforts should we have the courage and the nobility to stand. As I listened to my predecessor speakers, I am going to say illogical language about energy keeps coming forth from the microphones over on that side. I would challenge them, and I would yield to anybody that comes up with a single thing that the Pelosi Congress has offered that put more energy on the market, anything that puts more Btus in the marketplace, that puts more gas into the market, more diesel fuel, more ethanol, more biodiesel, more wind or coal or nuclear or solar? Any single thing that has been proposed by the other side of the aisle that has put more energy into the marketplace? I will yield if you can come up with an example. But I am going to say that answer is zilch. Not one, nada, no Btus more on the market. Every single move in these 15, going on 16 months of the 110th Congress, every single move by the Speaker's leadership has been to take energy off the market, make it more scarce. I don't understand how the constituents for the people who advocate such a thing can tolerate suspending the law of supply and demand, making energy more scarce, driving the prices up. Gas prices are up 50 percent since Nancy Pelosi took the gavel; 50 percent. We are paying $3.51 a gallon for gasoline today. Crude oil prices dropped a little today. They were almost $120 a barrel. They dropped about $6. That is about 5 percent. That is a good thing. But to listen to the other side, Mr. Speaker, they ask us to believe the idea that somehow George Bush controls global oil prices, as if $120 a barrel for crude oil is something that only Americans are paying, but Europeans are not and Australians are not and Africans and South Americans are not. The truth is this is a global market. If you really want to protect yourself from rising oil prices, you can hedge that on the futures market. Go buy yourself some barrels of oil. If you think oil is going up to $200 or $300 or $400 a barrel, buy some now. Invest in that now. Invest that in the futures. You can protect your interest on that. But this is a global price. George Bush can't control the oil prices. Here's a news flash. A President of the United States can't do that. He can affect them, yes. This Congress can affect them too. But it has to do with how you affect the supply and what you do with the tax and the regulatory structure. We need more refineries. We need to drill ANWR. We need to drill the Outer Continental Shelf. We need to drill the non national park public lands in America, and we need to build roads in distribution areas so that we can do that, so that we can deliver that oil to the marketplace. And if we look around at what technology is doing, when oil prices went up, what happened? Well, we know there's a huge oil supply in Northern Alberta in the tar sands, and we're working with the Canadians, and I hope the deal doesn't get destroyed by initiatives here that are anti-energy in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. But we need to bring that pipeline down from Northern Alberta, and we bring that down into the heart of the United States and refine that crude oil of the Canadians and that huge supply that's there, and we need to tap into ANWR, and move to the east from where the north slope is, similar terrain and topography, and bring that oil into the domestic market of the United States; more importantly, get it on to the world market so we can cut down on, increase the supply so we can reduce the cost of the energy that we have. If you saw that there was a report by USGS that they had identified an oil reserves in North Dakota, some spilling over into Montana; hopefully Mr. Pomeroy knows about this. I'm sure he does. 3.4 billion barrels of oil up there. And they have to go down nearly 2 miles and do horizontal sand fractionalization to make that happen. But that's a tremendous amount of oil that's domestic, two big oil finds. We also have the Chevron find down on the Gulf Coast within the last two years, a huge oil find. And the Brazilians have tapped into an oil find, a couple of different ones that look like they could rank in the top three of the oil reserves for the world. And we know that the west coast of Africa has a tremendous amount of oil. So let's get this going. Let's put a lot of oil on the market, a lot of energy on the market. And, Mr. Speaker, I'd direct the body's attention to what really does control the cost of energy. This is a little chart that we made up that, it is a pie chart. And this represents, this pie chart is 360 degrees. It is the whole of the energy that, as energy consumed in the United States, last year in 2007. This is in Btus. So in case you'll know what this number is, Mr. Speaker, being an astute individual. We consumed 101.5 quadrillion Btus last year in the United States of America. Of those 101.5 quadrillion Btus, it breaks out this way as a percentage: 23 percent natural gas, petroleum, gas, 39.24 percent, and you go on up the line. We've got coal at 22.4 percent, nuclear at 8.29. That's got to be a diminishing number because we haven't built a nuclear plant in the United States since about 1975 or maybe 1978. There happens to be one going in now in South Carolina. I am glad to see that. Let's expand the nuclear. It's very clean and very safe. It's the safest electrical supply that we have in the United States. The hydroelectric has not been expanding, either, and I'm all for expanding that. That sits at 2.3. Geothermal, small little piece there, wind, small little piece, solar, very small piece. Fuel ethanol, not as big as someone might think. .94 of 1 percent of the energy we consume in the United States is ethanol. And the biodiesel is .06 percent, not very big. And then wood and waste is bigger. I think that's going to be your biomass, remainder of the biomass component of this. The thing we need to do for energy in the United States is expand every one of these slices of the energy pie; put more Btus out in each one of these colored pie categories that we have; make this circle a lot bigger so that the number of Btus that we produce is great enough that it puts pressure and downward pressure on the market prices. That's our mission. That's an energy policy. And by the way, another slice of that pie needs to be conservation. That's not in there. We need to add conservation to that as well, Mr. Speaker. So as we move forward in this policy, let's keep in mind you can't suspend the law of supply and demand. We can't be living in ``Pah-la- la-losi Land.'' We've got to understand that what goes up must come down. That's the law of gravity. The sun comes up in the east, not the west. It doesn't come up in San Francisco, it comes up over on the Atlantic ocean side of this. That's not going to change, and no amount of talking about it will change where the sun comes up. And no amount of talking is going to change the law of supply and demand, except taxes and regulation, which are going up on our energy producers, not down. So I'll argue, Mr. Speaker, we need to supply more energy, not less. The idea that more expensive energy is a good thing for Mother Nature, that somehow, if you raise the price of gas to $3.51 or $4.50 or six bucks or seven bucks, that somebody's going to get on a bicycle and ride around town instead of driving around in their car, that may work in some occasions, but it doesn't work out very good for Grandma that's got to go 10 miles to town in January in Iowa. She can't put the chains on her bicycle and do that. She'll get in her car and she'll drive, and she'll pay a higher price out of her Social Security and her fixed limited income because you're driving up the price of gas; you're not driving it down. And it's limiting the quality of life, and people are having to make tough decisions. We need to take action to put more energy on the market, not less. And if we do that, we can see these prices go down, not up. And I'd add to that that the value of the dollar is a significant factor in this. The depreciation of the dollar, the dollar value needs to be shored up. A significant part of the cost of energy is because it takes more dollars to compete with the higher value currency in foreign countries, Mr. Speaker. And so that is a summary of some of the things I came to the floor here to address. I want to thank you for recognizing me and the privilege of speaking here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING

Mr. KING. I thank the gentleman from Michigan for coming down to the floor and adding to this dialog. Mr. Speaker, as I listen to Mr. McCotter and reflect upon his remarks that corporations are tax collectors, that they actually don't pay taxes, it's Ronald Reagan's position, my position, Mr. McCotter's position. They will pass those costs along to the consumer because in the end it's the last stop of the retail that pays the taxes. That is the people in the end. The consumers in the end will pay the price. If they raise the taxes, we will see the prices go up. If we make energy more scarce, the price will go up. If we are punitive towards companies that are producing this energy and risking their capital, their capital will go elsewhere. If that happens, then there will be less oil on the market, not more. The price will be higher, not lower. The energy will be more scarce, not less. Because of these policies that have come forth in the beginning of this 110th Congress, we see the action that has taken place here. We see what has happened from the very first day, Mr. Speaker, of the new 110th Congress, the day that Nancy Pelosi took the gavel, and it became clear that there was going to be an energy scarcity policy. Gas went from $2.33 over 15 months to over $3.51 a gallon, perhaps more than that today. That is a 50 percent increase in just 15 months. I have stipulated the reasons for that. Energy is more scarce, it's less certain. This economy is also in a decline. It's interesting to me that I don't hear a lot of discussion about the real reasons for that, Mr. Speaker. I look at it this way. When the new hands took over and picked up the gavels here to be chairs of the committees in Congress, in the House and the Senate, and we had the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel, from New York, who a long time had waited to become chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, we had pushed pretty hard to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, those tax cuts that slowly the authorization expires and will automatically kick in as dramatic tax increases in the next couple of years. I watched as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee went on the talk show circuit all over television, and I presume radio too, and he was constantly asked by the pundits, What will you do with the Bush tax cuts? Will you make them permanent? Are there some there that you will commit right now that you will want to save and protect of those tax cuts, or will you just simply want to see them all expire and have that automatic, huge, unprecedented record tax increase? Well, the chairman didn't address that subject matter, by my recollection, one at a time or in groups. But eventually as he did enough of the talk show circuits, the talk hosts would ask the question, and by a process of elimination, the capital investment in America pretty much concluded that no part of the May 28, 2003, Bush tax cuts would the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee want to see made permanent. Capital saw that and realized that by about late January-early February of 2007, just about the time gas prices started to shoot up here, Mr. Speaker. That is the time that the capital investment of America understood that capital was going to be more expensive, because the Bush tax cuts were not going to stay or be made permanent. When capital gets more expensive and it is looking down the line, it tightened things up. And you can go back and look at the record, Mr. Speaker. You saw industrial investment decline indexed directly to the period of time that Nancy Pelosi became Speaker, Charlie Rangel became the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and that gas began to shoot almost straight up here on this chart, going on to its 50 percent increase in prices over a 15-month period of time. At that same time, capital got more expensive, and because of that more expensive capital, industrial investment declined. That was the first indicator that we were going to have an economic problem on our hands. That was the lack of investment in industry that led all of this. Along behind it came the subprime mortgage component of it, which in the grand scheme of things isn't as big a hit on our economy as the higher gas prices. Then, as Adam Smith said, there are two components to the price of everything. One is the cost of the labor and the other is the cost of the capital. The capital price went up, then the cost of goods and services went up, and capital investment went down. We can expect this decline in our economy because of a number of things: Energy prices are skyrocketing because the policies that are coming out of this Congress are taking energy off the market, and capital prices are going up because the tax cuts are unlikely to be made permanent between now and 2010. So automatically those tax increases will kick in, and the investment markets see that. Those are the reasons that are watching this economy decline today. The subprime is a small part of it. But it is such a small part of it, when you think of what the subprime really is, it is about a $150 billion loss. We will burn about 142 billion gallons of gasoline. Those 142 billion gallons of gasoline, $1 a gallon for one year would pay for the subprime. So let's keep our rules straight. Let's understand we can't suspend the laws of supply and demand. Let's put some energy on the market. That includes conservation.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate being recognized to address you on the floor of the House, Mr. Speaker. In the 28 minutes that I have been allocated, I think it's important to address some of the issues that were raised by the gentlemen in the previous hour, the 30-Something Group. That is that, gentlemen, you simply cannot suspend the laws of gravity or the laws of nature, and what goes up must come down. Water runs downhill. And supply and demand control the prices in the marketplace. I have fought this energy issue on this floor of Congress for some years now. And the lamentations that I'm hearing that come from the gentleman from Florida, his concerns about motions to recommit used to be concerns about the Republican majority. They still remain concerns about President Bush, and they still remain allegations about why we have high gas prices, why it is people can't pay their bills. But the Pelosi majority would suspend the law of supply and demand. There wasn't any discussion about that. It was all about profiteering of the corporations. Well, the first point I will make is that we have got to have some people producing energy. And let's just say, for example, if Exxon makes $10 billion a quarter, and that adds up to 40 some billion dollars a year, and if this Congress steps in and says we have a different deal, we want to change the deal, we want to put some windfall profit tax on you and every other American corporation that is now making some profits off their investment in the oil fields, and as this leadership on the Speaker's side has done through the farm bill in particular, which is push to change the deal on our oil leases and renegotiate them because of their belief that the people who signed those contracts, those companies that are providing oil and gas and diesel fuel for us are making too much money, Mr. Speaker, a deal is a deal. And when the Federal Government signs a deal for oil leases and those companies agree to pay royalties on the oil they pump out on a per barrel basis, if the value of that barrel goes up, the Federal Government's deal can't change, just as if the value of the oil goes down. If it costs more to explore and find the oil and more to get it on the market, Uncle Sam is not standing there. Speaker Pelosi is not standing there with her checkbook saying, well, it didn't work out so well for you; so we want to fill in the hole of the loss that you had. No. A deal is a deal. And when you shake hands on it or you just say, yes, that's what I agreed to, that is by definition a contract. And when you have a congressional piece of legislation, when you have the Federal Government negotiating a lease, you don't change that deal. And this Congress steps in and makes noises about windfall profits tax. And there are people sitting on the board of directors of these energy-producing companies, these companies where the more energy they produce, the cheaper gas gets for the American people because the law of supply and demand commands the price. Gas gets cheaper when you have more of it produced. And when companies make money, they invest that profit into research and development and exploration. When they do that, that puts more gas and more diesel fuel and more oil on the market, not less. And that keeps the price from inflating or it lowers the price. So if this Congress, led by this Speaker, steps in to change the deal, the people on the board of the directors of those oil- producing companies, if they're logical, rational people and they control capital; so by definition they are logical and rational in my book, some of them are going to start to discuss how they can take those profits out of their oil company and invest them in someplace else where they might not be so vulnerable to a windfall profits tax or so vulnerable to a Congress that has shifted to evermore class envy, evermore resentful about capital returning to the stockholders, and when that happens--the mutual funds, the retirement funds, the 401(K)s, the investment funds of America that are our pension funds that supplement Social Security are many times invested in oil stocks and reserves and futures. The portfolio of America's retirement is what's being attacked by this Congress. And we have to let people and have to let companies make a profit when they invest and take the risk. You cannot suspend the law of supply and demand. But this Congress has. And I think you're off in Pah-la-la-losi Land thinking that you can suspend the law of supply and demand. You cannot. If we have more energy on the market, the price increase will either slow or it will diminish and be reduced. If we have less energy on the market, the price will go up if the demand also goes up. That is the equation that works here. So we have high gas prices, and it's pretty easy to figure out why. The American people that are awake tonight, Mr. Speaker, and especially those out on the west coast and in the mountain States, they will understand this equation, I think, fairly simply. There are three reasons that the gas price has been increasing. One of them is the world demand on gas and diesel fuel, on oil. That's why the per barrel crude oil price has gone up. By any measure it has gone up. The world demand has increased. We see the Chinese increase their demand, and as the Chinese demand increases, that puts more demand on the supply, and when the supply gets tighter, the price goes up. U.S. consumption has not diminished. It has marginally increased over the last few years. That uses up more. The oil reserves are being diminished some. And we're finding also oil in other places where we thought we couldn't produce it. There was an announcement here last week. USGS had announced what I believe was 3.4 billion barrels of oil in an oil shale a couple of miles down, most of it in North Dakota and some of it in Montana. That's a huge oil find. The tar sands in Northern Alberta have a massive amount of oil, and we're preparing to bring a pipeline down from there and build a refinery in the Midwest if local people are willing. And if we can do that, we can keep the gas and diesel fuel prices in America from inflating out of sight. And, in fact, if we can bring enough supply in, we can cause those prices to go back down. Supply and demand is one component of this, and it's a pretty important component. The use and consumption of more energy globally is another component of it. And a third component of the high gas price is a cheap dollar. This dollar has been diminished in its price. And the commodities across the world, it takes more American dollars to buy things overseas to purchase into the Euro environment, the European Union, for example. It takes more dollars to purchase in Asia. But their currency buys more. So because their currency buys more, it takes more American dollars to compete against that. So perhaps 35 percent of the value of this crude oil on the marketplace is because the value of the dollar has been diminished. If you could take 35 percent or roughly a third out of the gas price today, you're down there near $2 a gallon. But the point that I want to make about this in this poster, Mr. Speaker, is this: The remarks made by the previous presenters are not consistent with this factual information that I have in this chart. And it works this way: On the day that George Bush was inaugurated as President, and I mean the first day, January 20 of 2001, the average gas price on the street was $1.49 a gallon, Mr. Speaker. That price stayed fairly flat. It appreciated some. And by the time we got out to 2007, January of 2007, when this new Democrat majority in Congress was sworn in and Speaker Pelosi took the gavel where you're seated, Mr. Speaker, the gas on that day was $2.33. Now it's been about 15 months perhaps, perhaps 15 months of this Pelosi Congress, and gas has appreciated, gone up in price, from $2.33 a gallon to $3.51 a gallon. That's a 50 percent increase in the price of gasoline in America in 15 months. And that isn't because President Bush has done something to increase the price of gas. It isn't because he hasn't been helpful and supportive and worked to try to get us more domestic energy supplies. It's because the people on that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, the people on the Democrat side of the aisle, have blocked everything since I've been in this Congress that put more energy on the market. They blocked everything. And we fought this on this floor to open up ANWR for drilling, a massive amount of oil up there. There's no environmental concern in ANWR. We were successful in drilling the North Slope. And I will submit that there is not an environmental spill in that part of the country that has a lasting and damaging effect. There was a tanker, the Valdez, that did run ashore and have a spill. But that was a matter of transport. It wasn't a matter of drilling, and it wasn't a matter of processing or pipelining it out of Alaska. It was after it left Alaska that that happened. But there was not a measurable spill up north that caused a problem. There is no environmental impact that's been a negative up there in Alaska, and there is no rational reason to prohibit drilling in ANWR. Yet the vast majority of the Democrats blocked the drilling in ANWR. When we were close, when we were within a handful of votes of being able to punch those holes up there and have that oil flowing down in here into the domestic United States, that would have been back when gas was, let's say, about $1.80. Today, it's $3.51 and rising because of the barrier that was put in place by environmental extremists that do not have a rational argument that they can put up. All they do is put a green label on a bill, and as soon as it's green, the chicken littles on that side will run and vote for a green bill. I had people come to me and they said, We had the bill to drill in ANWR that allowed for, out of those millions acres, and I think it's 19.2 or 19.2 million acres, 2,000 of them to be used to punch holes down into the oil field. Two thousand acres. As the vote went up on the board, Mr. Speaker, people came to me and said, You are from Iowa; you know what an acre is. You have farms there. How much is an acre? I said, Well, 43,560 square feet. That didn't mean a thing to them, that is the size of a country school house lot. That didn't mean a thing to them. How about the size of a football field? Oh. Okay. Two thousand football fields. I think I will be a no because, after all, it's green. It's labeled green. Environmentalists don't want to punch holes up there. It's the best place God could have put oil, that I can imagine. You go up there and do it in the permafrost and you drive out on the ice. And when the frost melts in the summertime, there's no sign that there was any traffic there at all. The most extreme environmentalists you could come with on that side, Mr. Speaker, I could fly them over ANWR and they couldn't point down to an oil well. I will fly them over the north slope. I will fly them over at 2,000 feet and they can't eyeball an oil well in the north slope of Alaska because it's not what they imagine and it's not drilling up there in a pristine alpine forest. I am here to tell you there's not a single tree up there, Mr. Speaker. Not one. Even though the Sierra Club ran adds that said we can't disturb--well, the images on the screen were pristine alpine forests. There's not a native caribou herd. But the one on the north slope of Alaska, where we did drill successfully, went from 7,000 head to 28,000 head, for those of you out there in Rio Linda. That is 28,000 caribou where there was 7,000 before because now they don't drop the calves into the cold water on top of the permafrost, but get next to the nice warm pipeline and have their calves and they get nice and fresh then they gallop across the tundra. It's been a good thing for the environment, a good thing for the oil supply. Drilling in ANWR is a good thing. Drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, especially around Florida, is a good thing. These prices would not be this high if we had been successful in those efforts, if there hadn't been a Democrat green coalition that blocked every effort to try to put more energy on the market, more Btus on the market. Because the equation is this, all of our energy is all wrapped up together. British Thermal Units ties it all together, whether gas, diesel fuel, ethanol, biodiesel, solar, hydroelectric, whether it's nuclear, whether it's wind energy, whether it's clean burning coal, whether it's latent solar heat, all of those things put energy out of the market. They are all part of the overall energy pie chart. The more energy we can put there, the cheaper it's going to get. And the more things that you do to take energy off the market, the more expensive it's going to get. And your thoughts are either denying the law of supply and demand, or the thing that I heard many of you voice, this thing you have convinced me now is that you want to see more expensive energy. That is what I believe. Because I hear the dialog, I hear the debate. You want more expensive energy because somebody will park their car and get on their bicycle and ride that instead of driving their car. Doesn't work for grandma out there in Iowa that has got ten miles in January to go to town. But it might work for somebody in Florida to get on their bicycle. More expensive energy why? Because we get more quality of life? No. Because you have this myopic vision that you can somehow save the planet if we had $6, $8, $10 gas. That is why you're taken by every energy action of this Congress since Nancy Pelosi took the gavel that has taken Btus off the market, shortened the supply, tightened this thing up. The demand has gone up, the supply has gone down. The price has gone up 50 percent in the 15 months that Nancy Pelosi has been Speaker of the House. And I have to listen to the drivel that says there is some other reason because what, we didn't go after the windfall profits of the oil companies? I don't think so. That means everybody delivering oil is a crook and everybody is fixing prices and going along with it. It is supply and demand. That is the bottom line on this energy piece. As I look at my colleague from Michigan, who actually comes to the floor with a significant amount of expertise, I would be very pleased to yield such time as the gentleman may consume. Mr. McCotter from Michigan.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor. I would ask, as a point of information, do you anticipate Democrats coming to the floor for the next hour?

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I said, ``No good deed goes unpunished.'' I complimented the Catholics and didn't remark with regard to the Protestants.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the chairman for his levity in this debate and I reclaim my time. Madam Speaker, most recently, in July of 2006, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Office of Fraud Detection and National Security conducted a fraud benefit assessment on the Religious Worker Visa program. They selected 220 cases at random and found an astounding 33 percent fraud rate. That means one out of three was fraudulent. That is their finding. In 32 of the fraudulent cases, the religious institution either did not exist or only existed on paper, and 39 of their fraudulent petitions included fraudulent supporting documentation or material misrepresentations within a document. Other instances of fraud included cases where the petitioner could not be located or connected to any religious entity and where the petitioning religious entity was unaware that the petition had even been filed and was unaware of the beneficiary. Now that this Nation is involved in a global war on terror, we must be extremely vigilant, Madam Speaker. We must protect the safety and welfare of American citizens. We can't do that with an immigration policy that includes programs ripe with fraud. Another example would be in 2003 Mohammed Khalil and three of his sons were arrested in connection with submitting false applications to bring over 200 individuals to the United States using the Religious Worker Visa program. Prosecutors revealed that Khalil made statements to an undercover witness professing allegiance to Osama bin Laden. He also allegedly stated, ``Hopefully another attack in the United States will come shortly.'' These are the kind of people that we don't need in this program. We must be ever vigilant. This program needed some improvements before it was ready for reauthorization. Historically it has been reauthorized as a 5-year reauthorization. The initial proposal was to reauthorize it to make the program permanent. I appreciate the negotiations that have taken it down to a 7-year reauthorization. I would have preferred it be substantially less. However, information that has been made available to me after such time as we took action on the bill in the Judiciary Committee gives me some hope that USCIS, the U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services, has already taken some steps that likely would have reduced the percentage and certainly reduced the number of fraud cases. As I look at the verbal report from Director Emilio Gonzalez, the 2005 Religious Worker Visa applications were something slightly above 4,000 out of the 5,000 cap that is in the authorization. That was 2005. So that would be the year by which we have seen the highest percentage of fraud in the reports that I have seen, Madam Speaker. In 2006, the applications, by the report language that I received, is 3,048. So we have seen these numbers going down, presumably because of the increased scrutiny on the Religious Worker Visa applications. Then by 2007 we only saw, and this is by a verbal report from the director, 454 Religious Worker Visa applications. That is a dramatic 80-some percent reduction in the number of visa applications. I think it is safe to conclude that a significant amount of this, Madam Speaker, is the result of increased scrutiny on the part of USCIS. We need to be taking a particular look still, and I intend to sit down with Director Gonzalez and talk this through so I can get a full understanding of the decisions they made, the timing of their decisions and how that might have affected the Religious Worker Visa applications. But as I look through their report, I see a couple or three places that we should be looking. One is the special registrant countries. These are the countries that required extra scrutiny post-September 11th, and we know which countries those are. They are listed in the report. That happens to be the source of, depending how you want to evaluate the information, those countries that made those self-attested reports show that either 70 percent, 73 percent or 80 percent were fraudulent in the special registrant countries category. Then the non-affiliated groups, the groups that are not affiliated with a religious denomination, showed 63 percent fraud. That is worthy also of significant scrutiny, and I am hopeful that this has been addressed. And those numbers I believe also are shrinking. Then I looked at, for example, the countries of origin. There was one county that had 100 percent fraud of the report that was issued. That was Jamaica. So these are things that I think are red flags. I intend to sit down and have this conversation with Director Gonzalez and get a better feel for it. But that is the statistics we are dealing with today as this bill to reauthorize and extend for 7 years Religious Worker Visas is before this Congress. Then I would submit also that there is something that is actually missing in our policy. A nation that should be a nation that believes in free trade and smart trade also should believe in free and smart trade of our religious workers. I believe that we should have reciprocity. For us to welcome religious workers from countries that will disallow American religious workers from going to their countries and particular religions that come from America to go to those countries, I think is a great big gap in our oversight. Recognizing the time of this legislation and the inability to offer an amendment in a closed rule, I have drafted a bill, and I have that bill with me today and I won't be able to introduce it unless there is a request for unanimous consent, and I don't intend to do that, but this bill is the Religious Worker Reciprocity Act of 2006. What it does, it just extends reciprocal immigration treatment to nationals of the United States who are seeking resident status in order to work in religious vocation of other countries. In other words, it would simply say you send your religious workers here, we want to be able to send our religious workers there. I think that is the intent. And I would ask for support of that across the bipartisan effort, and particularly those that have taken particular interest in this issue. But I will be introducing that legislation in a subsequent day. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. In fact, I don't recall the unanimous consent request. Was that responded to by the Speaker?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I think this has been a very healthy debate. It has brought issues out into the Record that are going to be useful for us to reference. I pointed out that I do have data here that hasn't become part of the Record and I have withheld it for some reasons of discretion. I look forward to reaching across the aisle and working with the Members across the aisle to look into those concentrated areas of fraud and work together to see if we can find a way to establish a policy of reciprocity for religious workers, and, at the same time, celebrate the great religions of the world and the exchange of those religions.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman would yield, I would like perhaps 30 seconds just to wrap it up.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Okay, I didn't hear that. And I certainly don't reserve nor do I object to that e-mail from USCIS being introduced into the Record. In fact, I would like to read it into the Record. It says, ``The religious worker BFA non-immigrant had a 32.73 percent fraud rate out of a sample of 220 cases. The public version of the BFA did not further break down the 220 cases into religious categories. The fraud rate for Muslim organization has been spoken of many times on the Hill for some time. The reality is that because the population sample for Muslim groups in the BFA is so small, the rate of fraud is statistically insignificant. I am still waiting on the site check data.'' I believe that is the e-mail referenced by the gentlewoman from California, and I reference it here to speak to the data that is in the report rather than a comment about the data that is in the report. These 220 cases were drawn to give indicators for further scrutiny. When you see a 70, 73 or 80 percent fraud rate, there is an obligation to look into that and verify the sources of that fraud and also the indicators that it might be greater, not less. I don't imply it is, but we can draw just as much inference that it is greater than it is less from these statistics. I pointed out that Jamaica has a 100 percent fraud rate out of the sample in this study. That doesn't mean there aren't other denominations we shouldn't be looking at. But I am looking at each one of these cases, and I referenced the special registrant countries that are part of that list. The special registrant counties would be, for the record, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Egypt and Pakistan. For the record, when I referenced then the special registrant countries, those are the countries. This is the record. It is the data we are dealing with. I think that it is something that we need to pay special scrutiny to. But we should encourage the reciprocity and the exchange of religious workers. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I want to make sure that I am on record here as supporting religious worker visas. And one of the things that was well publicized during the Reagan administration was our ability to exchange students and business relationships and all parts of our culture with the rest of our world and bring people into the United States to get a feel and for us to learn from them and for them to learn from us. And I very much support that approach, and it has been important from the standpoint of promoting peace throughout the world. I find that whenever you get to know people, you find out that people are human everywhere with the same values, the same interests and the same ideals at our core. We have different religions sometimes, we have different economics, different clothing, different food, different building structures and different climates. That all comes together as components of who we are as nations and nationalities. But inside of us, we are all one people. And that is my belief, and it is my profound commitment to continue to support the religious workers' visa. Now I get to the ``or what?'' And that is that I have seen a significant amount of fraud in these applications. And I want to point out that where we will be welcoming Pope Benedict XVI here in Washington, D.C., and as I look through the statistics on the Catholic religious workers' visas, the fraud rate is very, very low as a proportion to the overall applications. So there is no implication in my remarks with regard to Catholics in particular, and many other denominations from that standpoint. But the special immigrant religious worker visa program was created in 1990 and has been a magnet for people not only to come and share their faith with us, but also a magnet for people to be able to utilize the program in the system that it wasn't intended for. The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs in September 2005 in their Fraud Digest reported that ``religious worker visas are known as some of the most difficult to adjudicate.'' The Fraud Digest then goes on to discuss various cases in which people were prosecuted for fraudulent use of the program. So, for instance, in 2004 a Venezuelan national was convicted in Virginia of visa fraud. He had filed 179 fraudulent petitions for religious ministers. In addition to creating fraudulent certificates of ordination, diplomas and other supporting documentation, he also obtained a valid 501(c)(3) tax exemption from recognized religious organizations without their knowledge. The Immigration Subcommittee has long been aware of fraud in their religious worker visa program. In 1997, a GAO investigation was requested by our subcommittee. The State Department conducted a field inquiry. They did that to get the views of consular offices as to the level and type of fraud. And in 41 percent of the 83 responding posts, some type of fraud or abuse was acknowledged. And the State Department also noted that under the program's regulations, almost anyone involved with a church, aside from the explicitly excluded occupations of cleaning, maintenance and support staff, arguably could be qualified as a religious worker. So this was an open door. And I recognize the chairlady of the subcommittee acknowledged that we need to tighten that up a bit. And that, I think, is the biggest reason why, in that particular quote from that report. In 1999, the GAO released a final report. The agency noted that the types of fraud often encountered in the processing of religious worker visas ``involved petitioners making false statements about the length of time that the applicant was a member of the religious organization and the nature of the qualifying work experience.'' The report went on to say that evidence uncovered at that time by INS agents suggested that ``some of these organizations exist solely as a means to carry out immigration fraud.'' That is what we should be guarding against. That is what we hope to be able to do with their new regulations that will be written as a result of the bill. At his motion, I would be happy to yield to the chairman of the full committee, Mr. Conyers.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise to address the legislation as so eloquently laid out by the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee. And, first, I would like to remark that I appreciate the cooperation in the negotiations that have taken place between Ranking Member Smith and the chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, Ms. Zoe Lofgren, as well as Chairman Conyers. And this is the right spirit to deal with a religious visas extension type of a bill, and the timing of this is perfect as well for it to be the very week that Pope Benedict XVI is arriving tomorrow morning here in Washington, DC, and I think a lot of our activity will be suspended while we commemorate the glorious day. I have looked at a number of the statistics throughout this, and I have some reservations about what has transpired with the religious worker visas over the last several years, and I expect to take up some of those issues a little bit later in the debate. But as the gentleman who is more eloquent in laying out this entire case is to my right, I would be very happy to yield 3 minutes to the ranking member of the full Judiciary Committee, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith).

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. If we took that position with every country on the globe, you could virtually guarantee our economy would collapse, not get stronger. We need to make every move that we can make to improve this economy. I'm really not as concerned as the pundits are, but it's prudent for us to open trade. Free trade, fair trade smart trade is a better code word for this, and it means jobs in America. The U.S. market is open to Colombia. They're saying, let's open our market to you. I'm happy to send Caterpillars down there. We buy them in my business. And I'm happy to send the pork down there that we produce and everything that we can compete with. This global market that we're involved in demands that we export, and the Western hemisphere demands that we lead. And that means we need to promote strong, strong relationships in the Western hemisphere. And as we watch the bullying tactics of Hugo Chavez, I think that cries out for us to shake hands with President Uribe and complete this Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California for yielding, and I thank him especially for gathering us together here for this Special Order. Being mindful of the clock, there are a few points I would like to make. And one of them is to address our trade deficit. We have had a trade deficit over the last several years that has grown an average of about 20 percent a year. Now, it's flattened out in this last year because the weaker dollar has shifted so that we have more exports in proportion. However, I believe the dollar needs to be shored up. And why would a nation that has a trade deficit refuse to allow a trade agreement that would open up a country to allow our goods to go in? I'm astonished continually at the continuing shift on the part of the Democrats. And I looked through the trade agreements that we have dealt with here since I have been in this Congress, and I'm thinking of trade agreements like Singapore and Chile and Australia and Morocco, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, DR-CAFTA. All of those gave us opportunities that were advantageous to us. And the logic in this is just as clear and simple: If you market something or if you're doing business with people, where you buy it from is where the jobs are. That's where the production is. We have production in the United States. We need to market more goods overseas. If we shore up the dollar, and I think we should, we're going to need to be more aggressive marketing our goods overseas. Colombia's sitting there waiting to open that up. I have to say a couple kind words about our pork producers. They sold $8.5 million worth of pork into Colombia last year, not a lot. They're losing money on every head today. They need to open up this market. It would be in multiples if we would simply allow that tariff that's in Colombia to disappear, which would happen immediately if we could sign into this free trade agreement. That's some of the components. But I am also more concerned about our relationships in the Western hemisphere. And as we watch Hugo Chavez teaming up and picking up the legacy of Fidel Castro and watching the unrest that's being promoted or watching tanks roll up to the border, these things are taking place in our hemisphere. And this Monroe Doctrine, I think, calls upon us to be good diplomats, good stewards of the money, and good promoters of trade, taking care of American jobs and protecting our opportunity to compete in the rest of the world. All of this comes together in this Colombia Free Trade Agreement. What happened here in this Congress was a shameful act. And Americans have to be viewed as having character, the kind of character that holds up when a business deal is a deal. We did more than shake hands on this. This Congress passed it. The President signed it. This agreement was negotiated under terms that said this trade agreement will come to the floor of this House and it will be brought forward for a vote, up or down, in 90 days. That's the deal. That's the deal it was negotiated under. That's the deal that it should have been brought to the floor of this House under.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan for yielding, and I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House with regard to integrity in the ballot system. I will say as a compliment to Mr. Holt, he and I have had a number of conversations about integrity in the electoral process. We share concern that the electoral process here in America have the highest level of integrity. I, for one, actually sat in my chair for all but a couple of 37 days following the election of the year 2000 watching television, scooting around and surfing the Internet, chasing down the rabbit trails. I was on the telephone. At the time I was the chairman of the Senate State Government Committee in Iowa, and I didn't want Iowa to become a Florida. As I educated myself, it was a crash course in the electoral process. I found fraud in elections in a number of States, at least solid newspaper and journalistic reports of fraud, and I became convinced that it was scattered throughout this country. And the pattern is hard to follow, but the conclusion I drew was if this country ever loses its faith in our electoral system, this constitutional republic will collapse due to a lack of faith of the people. So integrity in the electoral process is important. I would rather lose an election than lose the integrity of the electoral process. I come to this floor today to oppose this bill, however, because this is Tax Day, 2008, election year 2008, and we are watching the Presidential debates unfold and soon we will hear the congressional debates light up. To try to jump on this horse in the middle of this fast current of stream that we have racing toward an election, I think is a bridge too far for us to be able to get there without further damaging the integrity, rather than improving it. I would urge this House to step back, take a look, take a deep breath, and come together with some legislation that would provide, of course, for a paper audit trail, which I support, but one that does so in a reasoned fashion, not in the middle of an election year, not something that's designed to patch some of the flaws that came with the Help America Vote Act, but something that's well thought out, something that's bipartisan, something that's reasoned, something that's cautious, and something that will preserve the integrity of the electoral system that we have. And that's why I come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, for that purpose. And I support the position taken by the ranking member from Michigan and my colleagues, although I intend to continue to work with Mr. Holt. Another point that I would make is that we do have a disagreement in our viewpoint, and that is that I think we should, at the very last resort, impose obligations on the States. The States have run this electoral process. The Federal Government has a minimal involvement. And so my view is, if the States have integrity, we have to be very careful because the voters within the States will be determining the next leader in the free world. I think the number was just 527 votes in Florida made the difference on who the leader of the free world was in the year 2000. That integrity is important. We must hold it together. But I urge a ``no'' vote on this bill at this time.