Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time to conclude.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 15 seconds. Mr. Chairman, I would point out that no one here that has traveled to a foreign country has announced a new foreign policy but the Speaker of the House. No one here has pointed out how it is you can contravene the Constitution. We all take an oath, solemnly swear to uphold this Constitution. And no one here has pointed to a law that supersedes the Logan Act. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cantor).

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege to address you on the floor of the House on the House of Representatives. It is always a privilege. And this time in our history reflects I think one of the most pivotal times that we've had. We are at war for one thing, and it is a pivotal moment within that war. And we are watching terrorists from overseas that have attacked the United States. And as we are watching our national security on that hand and as we are debating how we proceed to victory over al Qaeda and those terrorists on that end, at the same time our southern border is being flooded with just masses of illegal immigrants on a nightly basis. And to give, Mr. Speaker, some perspective on the scope of that problem, we have this testimony before the Immigration Subcommittee, of which I am the ranking member, and I sat intensively through hearings and engaged in questions and actually testified myself for the better part of 5 years at this point, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the testimony that we get from the Border Patrol, as far as the Border Patrol representatives for the profession and the Government, identifies that 2 years ago on the southern border, our Border Patrol and other immigration officers interdicted 1,155,000, I believe, illegal immigrants attempting to come across our border. Last year, it was 1,188,000. The number increases. Now, one might argue that the effectiveness of our Border Patrol is reflected in the increase in the number of interdictions from about 1,155,000 to 1,188,000. But, Mr. Speaker, I would submit also that that could very well be a reflection of increased numbers coming across our border. It is not possible to identify whether the Border Patrol is more effective or whether they simply have a larger mass of people. But in any case, when questioned before Committee in testimony before Congress as to what percentage of the illegal border crossers they were interdicting, the number fell between 25 percent and 33 percent. I believe the quote in the testimony was, ``We think we catch between a fourth and a third of those who attempt to cross.'' Now, that is not a very good record when you consider that there are 1,188,000 illegals, and that could potentially represent a third of those that tried or a fourth of those who tried. So, I simply take that math and put that number at 25 percent, which is the lower part of the number, and then round it up to put it into a perspective in between the 25 and 33 percent. If you take that number and do the calculation, you come to about 4.6 million, let me see, about 4.6 million attempts. If you look at the interdiction numbers it amounts to and round it down, 4 million coming across our southern border on an annual basis, and that divides out to be about 11,000 a night coming across our southern border; 11,000, Mr. Speaker, every night on average. I say ``night,'' because during the day, the activity slows down. It doesn't stop. But at night it speeds up. I have gone down and sat on the border in the dark, and without night vision goggles and without the aid that we have of our security personnel down there, but I just sat there and listened, sitting next to that cattle fence, that is not a very good cattle fence, about 5 barbed wires and steel posts that are stretched out to where the wires are separated in the middle so that the illegal traffic can simply bend down and step over through the fence. I sat there and listened maybe 3 hours at a crack with a retired Border Patrol officer. I could see the shadows filtering through. I could hear the cars coming down on the Mexican side of the border. I could hear one of them dragging its muffler rattling as it drove down there. I could hear it stop by a big mesquite tree. I could hear the doors open. You hear people get out. You hear them drop their packs on the ground and the doors close kind of quietly, but the doors close. You can hear them pick things up in a hushed whisper and talk. Then they line up in single file, and they walk through the mesquite brush in the desert that 100 or 150 yards on down to our border and then file through the fence single file and go on up through the brush into the United States. Some of them, I will concede, are coming here because they would like to find a job and they would like to find a better life. Some of them will send money back to their family. Some of them, that pack they drop on the ground and pick up again is the pack of illegal drugs that they will be carrying into the United States and delivering to a predetermined location, perhaps 25 miles up into the United States across the desert along the highway where a vehicle is scheduled to pull off on a turnoff and have those packs of illegal drugs tossed into the back of that truck. Maybe some of the illegals get in the truck and go on up into the United States. Some of them turn around, walk back across the desert that 20 or 25 miles and go down and get another load. This goes on every single night on our southern border, Mr. Speaker, every single night. That isn't all the drugs that come across our border, but that is one of the methods that they use. If we put a vehicle barrier in place, in some places we have them, that amounts to a 5-by-5 steel tubing that is welded on our steel posts, and these are a 5-by-5 steel piling that are set in the ground, and a 5-by-5 steel tubing that is welded on there at about bumper height of a vehicle, that vehicle barrier will slow down and actually stop vehicles from driving across the border, but it doesn't stop individuals from walking right through there and carrying their packs of illegal drugs. The number that is most commonly represented by the Drug Enforcement Agency is $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming across our southern border on an annual basis. That $65 billion is, I believe, a street value. I don't know what it is worth at the border specifically. In fact, they don't know either. They have got some representations of the breakdown of who gets what share of the profit as it flows through the illegal drug cartels. But $65 billion worth on the street is no small number. That value in illegal drugs consumed by Americans destroys untold numbers of lives, an incalculable amount of human potential, and an innumerable number of children suffer because their father or mother or both are hooked on illegal drugs, methamphetamines, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, you name it, that comes across that border. Especially the methamphetamine that comes up into my part of the country, up the NAFTA Highway, as I heard some of my colleagues talking earlier, and the pain and the suffering and the death that has been dealt out by those illegal drugs, but pushed by $65 billion worth, the street value in the United States. First, Mr. Speaker, I want to make the statement that we have a responsibility here in the United States to address the illegal drug consumption in this country. As long as we have the kind of demand that demands $65 billion worth of illegal drugs on the streets, in noses and in the veins and in the systems of our American drug abusers, illegal drug abusers, there is always going to be somebody that seeks to meet that demand. Right now, the most efficient system that is set up, the most competitive system that is set up, the system that has the distribution wired in, is the illegal drug lords that control our southern border and the families that control their segments, the drug cartel families that control the segments of our southern border. Mr. Speaker, we can't solve this problem by addressing the border alone. We have to solve this problem by reducing and eliminating the demand here in the United States for illegal drugs. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to go on record, Mr. Speaker, and let you and let the rest of the body know that there are three ways that we can address illegal drugs. One of them is through interdiction. We currently do that. We try to stop all the drug pushers we can. We try to take all the drugs out of their hands we can. We try to take them off the street. We put them in prison. We put mandatory sentences on some of them, and some of them have faced those mandatory sentences. We are doing a lot of what we can do with interdiction. The only other two places we can address the drugs is rehab, and we have invested some money in rehab and we have gotten some pretty good results from those who have hit bottom, from those, Mr. Speaker, who want to. But the rehabilitation isn't going to solve the problem with the demand. So the third place is how do you reduce and eliminate the demand, and I will submit that the way to address this, if we want to dry up the demand of illegal drugs in the United States, we are going to have to provide random testing in the workplace and also in the educational field and also in the welfare rolls. Now, we have a drug testing law in Iowa that I worked intensively to get passed and drafted a lot of the components and worked those pieces through. I spent 2 years doing not exclusively that, but focusing a lot of my time getting that legislation passed, Mr. Speaker. What it provides for is preemployment testing, post-accident testing, reasonable suspicion testing and random testing. If you have those four categories of drug testing and you provide that for that in the workplace, in our educational institutions so our students are being tested, and in our welfare rolls, you will be able to, and we could as a society, if we determined we wanted to dramatically reduce the demand for illegal drugs, if we would put a drug testing system in place, we could dramatically reduce the demand. By doing so in the workplace under those four methods that I said, preemployment, post-accident, reasonable suspicion and random testing, we can provide and essentially guarantee a drug-free workplace. I first brought my focus on this when as in the contracting business I had a Federal contract. The Federal contract required me to sign a document that I would guarantee a drug-free workplace. Now, I take those contracts seriously. When I sign my name to something, I intend to follow through. That is my commitment and that has been my record. But it disturbed me that Iowa law didn't allow me to truly guarantee a drug-free workplace. I could watch out for it, I could check for it as much as I could, I could educate my employees, but I couldn't legally test my employees. So I did what I could to meet a drug-free workplace. I think I provided a drug-free workplace, but I don't know that. But it set me down the path of working on the drug testing side of it. We essentially don't have a conversation going on in America about how to eliminate drug abuse in America. That conversation doesn't exist in a meaningful fashion. We talk about all kinds of things, but $65 billion worth of illegal drugs representing 95 percent of the overall drug consumption in America coming across our southern border and the attendant violence that comes with that and the drug cartels that comes with that, the smuggling of drugs and people and human slaves that are put into the sex slavery business, and that violence and the crime that is naturally associated with illegal drugs, we are not addressing the demand. We are not particularly concerned about the abuse of drugs in the workplace. And I believe we have got to raise that issue. I believe that we need to bring the focus of America's society on dramatically reducing the demand for illegal drugs in this society so that we can provide a lot better culture for our children to grow up in than perhaps we grew up in. That is not being addressed, Mr. Speaker, and I want to raise this issue. But on the other side of this, the flip side of this issue is U.S. demand, $65 billion coming across our southern border representing 90 percent of the illegal drugs. The other side is on that side of the border, they are delivering that amount of drugs to us. They are producing many of them in Mexico and Central America and the northern part of South America. Also there is heroin and other drugs coming in from China that flow into Mexico. And that distribution network is the magnet that draws those illegal drugs into Mexico. The marijuana that comes in, the methamphetamines that are manufactured there. The pseudoephedrines that come in from China to Mexico to be processed into methamphetamine, that spells a society that doesn't have the rule of law. I will argue that we are deficient in our own rule of law here because we are not reducing the demand in the United States. But they are pouring across the southern border. And as much rhetoric as we have had about people that want to come here for a better life, we need to have a lot of rhetoric about what has happened to the lives of the people who have been sucked into this drug smuggling, who have been sucked into the drug consumption and become drug addicts? What about the lives of the American people who have been sacrificed on this alter of permissiveness that we don't have the will to shut down the abuse of illegal drugs in American and we don't have the will to shut down the flow of those illegal drugs across the border? As I watch that and I look at the violence, and here two years ago, Mr. Speaker, actually it was more than 3 years ago, I commissioned a GAO study, a Government Accountability Study, and asking this question, and that is, we saw the testimony of how many people didn't make it across the desert to come into the United States illegally. That number has grown in the years that I have been in this Congress from perhaps a little more than 200, to now over 450, and perhaps as many as 500 people dying coming across the southern border. That is a human tragedy. It is an agonizing human tragedy. The images of that easily come to mind to the American people, because we have seen a lot of news on it, we have seen film on it, we have seen pictures. The other side of that tragedy is of those that make it across the border, those 11,000 a night that try, the 66 to 75 percent of those that make it, or more, and I will add that when I talk to the Border Patrol officers on the border and I ask them what percentage of effectiveness do you have, what percentage of them are you catching that are trying to come across the border, 25 percent, 33 percent? They laugh at me. They say, no, that number is more like 10 percent. That is the most consistent number I get when I am speaking confidentially with the people that are boots on the ground, facing this enemy to our society, eye-to-eye, face-to-face. Perhaps 10 percent. I get numbers that go down as low as 3 percent. But it is the testimony here that is the highest that I hear, that perhaps a quarter to a third of those are interdicted. But of those that come across the border and get across the border, and we are losing 450 or 500 trying to come into the United States that don't make it across the desert, how many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it across the border? Those involved in the crime, and there is plenty of it, do commit crimes against American citizens. The measure of that crime falls into this category: 27 percent of the inmates in our Federal penitentiaries are criminal aliens. Some of them came into the United States legally and overstayed their visa. But most of them came into the United States illegally and committed crimes. That is 27 percent. If you look at the State penitentiaries, the same Government Accountability Office report has in there that they are only funding 25 percent through SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, that funds our States, our counties, our local prisons, reimburses them for the trouble of having to incarcerate criminal aliens here in the United States because the United States isn't able to control our borders, and the burden of enforcing that crime falls upon the local governments and the cities, increasingly. But the Federal Government is to reimburse them for incarcerating the inmates. In the GAO study, it shows that we are only reimbursing for 25 percent of the cost of the incarceration of criminal aliens in the local prisons, State and local. When you do the math, that 25 percent comes to about $22,000 a year by their numbers. That is a pretty typical number for the cost of incarcerating someone in a penitentiary. So if they are paying 25 percent and it is costing $22,000 a year for those that we do pay for, it is not $88,000 a year, so the only other conclusion one can draw is, at least in our State penitentiaries, that at least 25 percent of the inmates are criminal aliens. Now one comes to the conclusion that more than 25 percent of the inmates that are in our Federal and State penitentiaries are criminal aliens. They commit crimes against Americans. If they are committing crimes against Americans in the proportion that they are represented in our penitentiaries, that means more than 25 percent of the murders, more than 25 percent of the assaults, more than 25 percent of the rapes and more than 25 percent of the grand larceny, and the list goes on and on and on. We have few in our Federal penitentiaries that are in there just because they violated immigration law. They may be there under that charge, but if they are and that is the charge that they are under, it is most likely that they simply could not make another charge stick and the prosecutors chose to use immigration charges rather than something else. But just think, we are sitting here now with 16,400 murders a year in America. And if a fourth of those are attributable to criminal aliens, you are at 4,000 Americans a year. We crossed that sad threshold of those killed in action in Iraq, total, in addition to those killed in accidents in Iraq, over 3,000, a while back, Mr. Speaker. But that number compared to the number of over 3,000 a year, in fact the almost 4,000 a year that die at the hands of criminal aliens here in the United States, and that is every single year. So, each year, we have had more Americans die at the hands of criminal aliens in this country than we have cumulative total of all of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that have been killed in Iraq since the operations began in March of 2003. We have more Americans dying at the hands of criminal aliens on the streets and the roads and in the back alleys and homes of America each year than died on September 11, 2001. This total accumulates over and over again. In addition to that number, there also is a slightly larger number of Americans who die at the hands of criminal aliens who have committed negligent homicide, generally in the form of drunk driving, although not always. If you add these numbers up, my numbers show 12 Americans a day murdered at the hands of criminal aliens, and 13 die every day at the hands of criminal aliens who have committed negligent homicide, generally victims of drunk drivers. And I am not counting the criminal aliens who have been killed because of their own drunk driving, Mr. Speaker. So you add that number up, and it comes to 25 a day, 25 Americans a day. If the news media focused on that instead of some of their other priorities, I think we would have come to a conclusion on this illegal immigration issue that we are facing. But what is coming across that border and the violence that flows with it, and again, I will stipulate that most are good people. When they are our neighbors we like them. And when they go to work, we like them. And when they go to church, we like them. And when they raise their children and educate their children and when they assimilate into the American culture, we love everybody that comes to America to do that. We love those who come here legally. Those who come illegally subvert the rule of law. But the violence that is part of the society that they come from is significant. I have to talk a little bit about the levels of violence here in the United States compared to the countries that many of our immigrants come from. That is, our violent death rate here in the United States is 4.28 per 100,000. And the violent death rate in Mexico is 13.2 per 100,000. That is actually one of the safer countries in South and Central America. I was in Sao Paolo, Brazil, a little over a year ago. They told us to be careful where we go because in that city, they have over 10,000 murders a year. I don't know the violent death rate in Brazil, but I do know what it is in Honduras. It is nine times that of the United States. In El Salvador, they don't publish the violent death rate, and one can only presume what it might be and why they don't. But in Colombia, the violent death rate in Colombia is 15.4 times higher than the violent death rate here in the United States. So it stands to reason that if you draw young men, some of whom are involved in the illegal drug trade, from a society that is far more violent than that of the United States, anywhere from 3 times to 15 times more violent, you are going to see more violent crimes. You are going to see more murders, assaults and rapes. There are going to be more victims in the United States and more deaths. One couldn't expect anything else. That doesn't mean that we indict an entire country and all of their nationals because some of the citizens are violent. But that means we have more crime here because we are drawing a young men concentration from a more violent society, and a significant portion of those who are involved coming into the United States are those who are dealing in illegal drugs because the demand here for $65 billion worth of illegal drugs draws that in from those countries, and necessarily it has to come across our southern border. Mr. Speaker, I hope I have laid the foundation for my passionate belief that we need to reinforce our southern border by building a double fence/wall on our southern border because I don't believe that a virtual fence is going to deter $65 billion worth of illegal drugs. I have an understanding how powerful a magnet a $65 billion illegal drug market magnet is that draws those drugs into the United States with that kind of powerful profit incentive. They are going to be pushing against our southern border. When you go down there, and I sit there at night, and it is five barbed-wire strands, five strands of barbed wire, kind of a poor cattle fence, and they are going through one after another. And I can't quite count them all because it is pitch black, and I can only see the shadows, and I can hear the footsteps and the fence creak. And I can put my ear down to the post and listen to the fence stretch as they go through and kind of count. That is just one place, one location, one night, Mr. Speaker. But 11,000 a night on average every night. The numbers of people pouring across and the illegal drugs that are a part of that, America's economy is paying a tremendous price. Our society is paying a tremendous price. The potential, the human potential of our young people is slowly being undermined and destroyed by the illegal drugs that are coming in. But the force of those drugs cannot be eliminated simply because we want to put in a virtual fence. We want to argue that we are going to put in ground-based radar and we are going to fly the unmanned aerial vehicles over the top. We will put some cameras in place, but some of that doesn't work in bad weather. Sometimes you can't get down there in bad weather to enforce. Each time I asked the Border Patrol, does it help to build a double fence/wall, their answer is generally, nothing you can do will reduce the need for the number of boots on the ground. That is an interesting response, Mr. Speaker. How is it that if we build physical barriers on the border, follow through and complete the commitment of the congressional mandate that the President signed, the Secure Fence Act, and build 854 miles of a double fence and roads, and tie that together with the technology that is necessary to supplement those physical barriers, how is it, if we build those barriers, we need more boots on the grounds, not less? I am going to say, good physical barriers reduce the numbers of Border Patrol that we need. I am suggesting that we reduce those numbers; I am suggesting that we can invest our money more efficiently on the southern border than we are. And the wisdom of a double fence and wall on that southern border, if analyzed economically, holds up, and it holds up this way. We are spending $8 billion on the 2,000 mile southern border from San Diego to Brownsville. That is $8 billion every year, and that money goes to pay Border Patrol, buy Humvees, depreciate the Humvees and support them, and pay for the retirement benefits, training and equipment and helicopters, fuel, gas for our Humvees, the whole network that is necessary to keep the Border Patrol up and running. That is where the $8 billion goes. That is $4 million per mile. Now, me being a contractor who spent my life building things and pricing things and sometimes designing construction projects, I bring this down to unit price. I have to calculate things in unit price. Mr. Speaker, what would I do? Say, for example, I live in the country in Iowa on a gravel road and the four corners come together right by my house. If I had a border on my west road that ran from my house, a mile west right down the middle of that gravel road, I don't care how far it went east or west, but if it was my job to contain that one mile, and if Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security came to me and said, Steve, we think you ought to control this border, would you bid that for us? It is costing us $4 million a mile and two-thirds or three-quarters of everybody who is trying to get across the border goes across and goes off into the United States. Can you give us a price to give us more efficiency, a lot more than a fourth to a third efficiency? Give us something close to 100 percent efficiency. So if you are a stopping a fourth of the people at $4 million a mile, one would think, to get 100 percent of them, if we spent $16 million a mile, maybe just maybe that linear equation would work out. I don't think it will, but that is one way of thinking about it. So I would look at it and say, Mr. Secretary, $4 million a mile, how about giving me a 10-year contract, and I can control the illegal traffic on this border. Now I have $40 million to work with; $4 million for that mile, 1 year, times 10 years, a 10-year contract, $40 million. I would look at that and think, I am going to hire myself a bunch of Border Patrol and buy myself a bunch of Humvees, and I am going to drive them up and down that road and hope that they come across the people coming across the border at night. I wouldn't do that. I would have some people to guard the borders, yes; some people to be quick reaction responders, I certainly would. But I would look at that and say, if I make an early capital investment, if I built a wall on that border and a fence inside there a hundred feet, maybe another chain link fence inside that, I would set up some cameras and sensors, and it would be monitor-able from inside an air-conditioned office. Then I would have some Border Patrol to deploy if I needed them. But for $1.3 million, I could build this wall that I am about to build. And for the balance of another million dollars a mile, I could put in another fence and we could have a solid wall, double fencing, and we could have probably an access road to run along there, and we could shut off more than 90 percent of the illegal traffic, more than 95 percent of the illegal traffic. In fact, I believe that we could tighten that down so tight there wouldn't be anybody coming across. I say that because, not only does it make sense, I have seen the effectiveness of it. I went to Israel, and I took a look at the fence they have constructed in Israel. They were being bombed on a regular basis by suicide bombers from the West Bank. They'd blow themselves up and blow up some women and children and men, too, didn't matter to them so long as they could take somebody with them. And so for the Israelis to protect themselves from those kind of attacks, they put a fence in place. And some places it's doubled; some places it's a little more than that. There are some watch towers and guard towers. They have some wire on top. They have sensors. Some of the sensors that they have are classified so they don't let the enemy understand how to defeat it. But the fence structure that they put in place in Israel has been nearly 100 percent effective, and so I hear people here in this Congress will say, why do you want to build a fence and how tall do you want it to be? And I say, well, I'd put mine up 12 feet tall here, and then I'd put a wire mesh fence inside that's taller yet. Oh, 12 feet tall; if you do that, somebody's just going to build a 12-foot ladder and they'll climb over the top. That is what you call a red herring, Mr. Speaker, and in fact, there have been very, very rare anyone could defeat the fence in Israel, and however tall you make the fence, yes, you can make a longer ladder. But there's always another way to defeat the people who think that's the easy way. It's one of the reasons to make it double because we can interdict them in between. And the sensors pick up the efforts, but if you don't slow them down, they charge across the border and scatter out across the desert. You can chase some of them down, but you cannot chase them all down, Mr. Speaker. And so fences and walls are effective. They have been proven to be effective, and they're cost- effective as well. So let me just submit that that $40 million contract for that 1 mile for 10 years, the $4 million a year, for less than $3 million I can put in a concrete wall and a wire fence and I can put in sensors. And then I'd sit back and monitor that mile from my office with little warning devices on it and I'd have somebody on 24 hours a day. I'd have people on call and maybe somebody patrolling it in intermittent cycles, but we'd shut that mile down, and we could shut that mile down for an early capital investment of less than $3 million. And you'd only have $37 million left over for the balance of the 10 years to pay yourself a minimum number of border patrol and somebody to monitor the sensor devices that you have. We can put this together, but what we're doing is burning up a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars at $8 billion a year to get a fourth to a third efficiency when we can get 95, 96, 98 percent efficiency by investing in a structure instead. Now, if we do that, we put a barrier in place that's very, very difficult to defeat, not impossible but difficult, and so the drug smugglers that are trying to get here, they are going to decide they don't want to try to go through there. They're likely to try by air again or by sea or some other method. In any case, we'll dramatically reduce the amount of illegal drugs on the streets of America, at least for a time, until they find another way to defeat us. We have our choice. We can either work to defeat the illegal drug smugglers and try to keep those drugs off the street or we can capitulate. I'm not willing to capitulate, and I'm not hearing anybody in this Congress stand up and say that they want to legalize the illegal drugs. And so I think we need to fight them, and I think this is the place to draw the line. This is the battle line, and it's on our southern border. I've talked to the Mexican senators about it. I believe they understand, and they're doing some things on their side to help out. That's one of the battles that we have. We have a number of other battles, Mr. Speaker, and so it takes us, though, to this idea that legalize illegal drugs and then you don't have an illegal drug problem. That makes sense, doesn't it? But I'm not willing to go there, and we aren't in this Congress either. But the President and the open borders lobby have taken the stand that they think that we can't control our border, our southern border in particular, unless we legalize the 12 to 20 million people who come in here illegally. Now, I continually ask the question of the representatives from the administration as they march forward before the Immigration Subcommittee, explain this to me, how is it that you can't enforce the law until we give amnesty to 12 to 20 million? How is it that if we do grant this amnesty or grant a legal status to 12 to 20 million people, how is America safer? If you want to bring people out of the shadows, and never mind they came here to live in the shadows, that's a function of sneaking into the United States and getting jobs illegally. When they were in hiding, that's living in the shadows. When you try to bring them out of the shadows, why would they come out? What kind of people would come out of the shadows? It would be those that are guaranteed amnesty. Those undesirables are not going to come out of the shadows, Mr. Speaker. They're going to stay back there and they're going to run their drug trade and they're going to push their wives and their kids to go to work, and they're going to sit back and work in the black market. They're not going to come forward. We will not get people to come forward that are afraid that they will not be granted some kind of amnesty. But the President's idea on this and the open border lobby's idea on this is somehow, if we grant amnesty to the 12 to 20 million people, then we can focus our law enforcement resources on the bad apples, a huge human haystack of humanity, 4 million strong pouring across our southern border every year. And in that haystack of humanity are the needles called terrorists and criminals, drug dealers, undesirable elements, people that no society wants in them. And if we legalize that huge human haystack of humanity, somehow it makes it easier to find the needles that are in it. But I'll submit, Mr. Speaker, that those needles are not going to come out into the open unless they can be guaranteed some legal path, and those who will be legalized, and I reject that concept of destroying the rule of law and legalizing people that have broken our laws, but those who would be legalized would then get themselves a card where they could travel back and forth across the border at will. Now, I would ask, does the administration and the open borders lobby expect to see more or less border crossings if you legalize people that are here illegally? Are they going to go back and forth more? Are they going to go back and forth less? I'll submit they'll go back and forth more because they have their illegal passage that they do now; they will still have that option. Of course, they will have the option of the card that says now you can go back and forth at will. So we'll have more crossings across the border rather than less. When you have more crossings across the border, there are more opportunities to bring contraband across the border, more opportunities for terrorists to smuggle through, more opportunities for criminals to take advantage of the situation. And so I can't believe that there's a rationale in this argument that if you legalize 12 to 20 million people, if you legalize them, somehow America is safer. They're not any different people than they were before. They're the same people. They're just travelling back and forth more than they were. They're still hiding the drug smugglers within them. The crime will still take place, and the rationale that you won't have as much illegal smuggling going on or we can solve a big portion of the illegal problem, the rationale is the same rationale that says legalize illegal drugs, then you don't have an illegal drug problem. Legalize illegal aliens, then you don't have an illegal alien problem. That's as far as the rationale goes, but it surely does not solve the law enforcement problem, and no one in the administration can explain that to me, at least to the point where I could understand it, and I honestly tried, Mr. Speaker. So the rule of law is at stake. To grant amnesty is to grant a pardon to immigration law-breakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. That's the fairest, most balanced definition of amnesty. It's one that holds up against the criticism. The rule of law is the most essential element of American exceptionalism. If we didn't have the rule of law in America who would come here? They're leaving the other countries because they don't have the rule of law and they don't have the right to property and they can't be treated equally under the law and are not equal under the eyes of the law. But the rule of law says that everyone, every man and every woman, is equal under the eyes of the law, and that if you're going to be held accountable for a crime, you're innocent until proven guilty; and justice for a poor man is the same as justice for a rich man. That's the rule of law. And that's one of the essential pillars and the most essential pillar of American exceptionalism. But I don't know how many of those who are beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty plan I've talked to who say I'm for this amnesty, you need to grant a path to citizenship for people who came here illegally, and I ask them why, and they say, well, it was good for me; it was good for me, it was good for my family. But just that fact alone is surely not justification enough to tear the rule of law asunder and throw it over the side, Mr. Speaker. This rule of law is a precious commodity, a precious pillar of American exceptionalism, and if it's destroyed, we will never reach a glorious destiny in this country. It's essential that we preserve the rule of law, and if we grant amnesty to 12 to 20 million or more, that will attract another 12 to 20 million, but regardless, the family, the friends, the progeny of the recipients of amnesty will be strong advocates for amnesty in coming years. If they get a path to citizenship, they will run for office. They will advocate for it. They will support candidates who advocate for amnesty, and they will continue to destroy this rule of law. America will never be the Nation that we have been again and never become the Nation that we can become because we will have almost knowingly and willfully sacrificed the rule of law on the alter of open borders because some businesses want cheap labor and they see an advantage in that. And some people want cheap labor and cheap votes, cheap votes on the left side, cheap labor more on the right than on the left but it's on both sides, and you put that coalition together, and the squeeze that comes on American society and culture is the squeeze on the middle class. That's another pillar of American exceptionalism is the middle class. We have been building this Nation on an ever broadening and an ever more prosperous middle class. An opportunity if you're an uneducated person with some ambition, maybe you get out of high school and you decide I don't want to go to college, it's not for me, but I want to go punch a clock and work my way up at the factory or at the meat plant or whatever it is, I want to make a good enough living that if I don't even move up the ladder, if I don't ever do that, I can still buy a modest home and I can still raise my family and send my kids off to school with expectation of a better life. That's been a foundation of the American dream, an ever broadening and ever more prosperous middle class. Today, cheap labor has destroyed the opportunities for the undereducated, the high school graduate or the high school dropout that's an American citizen. They can no longer go punch a clock and feed their family and pay for a modest home because wages have been driven down so cheap. The people that are at the top of the scale believe that they will never have to compete and neither will their children ever have to compete with the cheap labor that's been poured into this country. They will live in gated communities, and they will send their children off to Ivy League schools and they believe they'll always have that foundation and that capital base to make their gated communities, and the guarded society will be the destiny for all of their progeny. But the middle class can't hope for that. The middle class has been diminished in its numbers, and it is a percentage of society, and the relative prosperity has been diminished significantly. And the unemployment among the underskilled Americans has grown in direct proportion to the amount of unskilled labor that's coming here illegally to take on the jobs. Mr. Speaker, I'm for the rule of law. I'm for the middle class in America. I'm for opportunity for everyone, no matter what their education level is. We simply have to have a policy here in the United States that favors Americans. And the rationale that says that we are going to be a Nation that is somehow or another the relief valve for all the poverty in the world needs to take into account that there's a limit to the number of people that can live in the United States. And those who advocate for open borders, I ask the question, how many are too many? Where would you draw the line? They will never engage in that debate because they know they lose the minute they try to put a number down. They will say that it should be on supply and demand, this economy. And so if there's a demand for more labor, we ought to bring in more labor. If we're going to be the relief valve for poverty in the world, Mr. Speaker, there are at least 4.6 billion people on the planet with a lower standard of living than the citizens in Mexico, at least 4.6 billion. Are we going to open our gates up at our ports of entry and bring the people in, any willing traveler, might be the way the President would phrase it? And the answer to that should be no. We can have compassion in a lot of ways, and one of them is to promote the American way of life around the globe. Be proud of who we are, be proud of our culture, be proud of our civilization, be proud of our history, be proud of the sacrifice of our Fore Fathers, be proud of the sacrifice of our current generation that's so proudly defended us around the world in the last 5 years. But we needed to preserve our destiny. We need to reject amnesty, Mr. Speaker, and so I think that it's essential that we build the wall and we hold together the rule of law and we preserve the middle class and remember who we're about and what we are as a people. By popular demand, I have occasionally demonstrated the construction of a wall so the people can understand, Mr. Speaker, how it can be done. I sat down and created a design for a concrete wall because I believe that it's harder to breach a concrete wall than it is a steel fence, and I think it's cost-effective. But I want to describe what I have designed here. Whenever we build for a fence or a wall, we need to have a foundation underneath it. There will be people that will try to dig underneath it, so I designed a slip-form concrete form. This would go in a trench. You would set a trencher in here with a specially made grading machine that would trim this out and pour this concrete footing with a notch in it, trench and pour the footing as you go, so the hole didn't have a chance to cave in. As we poured this we would just drive the machine along and it would be trenching and pouring concrete, so there would be a cured foundation for the wall that would be completed as the trench and slip-form machine moved on. This is what it looks like from the end. This would be what it looks like from the top, the notch in the top, and that groove there, it will be obvious where I put that. So as that trench is moved along, and the foundation of this wall sets like this, then I would bring in precast concrete panels. These panels would be about 13\1/2\ feet tall, and they could be about any width, but proportionately it looks like 6 to 8 feet. We could go wider, we could go 10 feet. Perhaps once this was cured, even the next day, come along with truckloads of precast concrete panels. They would sit on the truck like this, pick those up with a crane, swing them into place, set them down right into the notch of the foundation. Just this simple. It would take a little bit longer, but not appreciably longer to throw this all together in this fashion. It would be constructed 12- foot high precast panel, slip-form concrete wall. It would look a lot like that. I would set that down within about 3 feet inside the border. I put some wire on top here, stabilize this thing and provide it as a deterrent. With concrete, you can mount anything on top for sensors. You can do cameras, vibration, motion detectors, you could mount any kind of new technology on top of this concrete. It wouldn't be possible to take a cutting torch through here. If you brought a concrete saw in to cut a notch through it, the noise and the vibration would be transferred down the wall, and our sensor devices would likely pick it up, or we could deploy some Border Patrol to that location. But as you could see, I would go inside also another 100 feet, and I would put a mesh fence up, even taller than this, so that there will be essentially a no man's land in between the wall and the fence. There are a lot of designs that would work. This is only one design, but I designed this and put the structure of this together, and I can put the estimate together too. This can be installed for about $1.3 million a mile. Now, somebody was complaining about the cost of this. What is it, gold plated? Well, you can build a four-lane Interstate for about $4 million a mile, but that's what we are paying the Border Patrol to watch the border right now. Now, I appreciate the work that they do, and I respect the work that they do, and I support them. They need better tools to work with. This is one of them that can be helpful. This is one of the components, or a version of fence and wall is one of the components to the Secure Fence Act. This Congress has mandated that that fence be built, and we appropriated money to it last week to the tune of $1 billion. The year before, we appropriated $1,187,565,000 just to round it out to even dollars. We appropriated about $2.2 billion to building the Secure Fence Act, and that includes money for technology, for virtual fence, as well as real fence. We need to stop the flood at our southern border. We need to dramatically slow the flow of illegal drugs across that border. It will reduce the amount of crime perpetrated and committed against Americans. It will save lives. It will save at least hundreds of lives. It will probably save thousands of lives. It will be cost effective, and it will send a message that America is a sovereign Nation that will protect its borders, and that we will direct traffic, human traffic and contraband, through the ports of entry. We will need to beef up our ports of entry. We need to have more Customs and Border Patrol people there, and more sophisticated devices there. But if we can't stop the bleeding at our border, there is no amount of enforcement that we can do in the interior that will be effective. The best description I have heard is the description by Dr. Phil Gingrey, a Congressman from Georgia, who has worked the emergency room. His description is if you have a patient come in the emergency room when they are bleeding all over the place, and they are bleeding from multiple wounds, and they are bleeding all over the floor, the first thing you don't do is grab the mop and the bucket and start to clean it up. You stop the bleeding. That's what you do. We have a tremendous amount of bleeding on our southern border. We have got to stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient, and then we can have a debate on how to clean up the mess. It is a tremendous mess here in the United States, because the Federal Government hasn't enforced the immigration laws to the level it needs to, and that has been an open permission slip that has been granted now to a number of the employers who have taken advantage of it. They have hired the cheap labor. The third thing is birthright citizenship, automatic citizenship that is a magnet for 350,000 pregnant mothers every year who come here to have their children in the United States. It's not a constitutional right, it's a practice to grant them citizenship here because they are born in the United States. Those things work against our sovereignty. Those things work against the middle class, those things would be against the rule of law. I am going to continue to advocate that we construct this double fence of wall on the southern border, that we complete it and we follow through on the congressional mandate, and we insist that the administration follow through. We need to do border enforcement first, employer enforcement second. When we get those things done, we will have stopped the bleeding and shut off birthright citizenship as the other bleed. Then we could have a debate in this Congress about how to clean up the mess, and it is one, one tremendous mess. That's my advocacy, that's my policy, that's where I stand. I appreciate the privilege to address you tonight.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, this amendment that I bring and the simple function of it goes into the large $6 billion appropriations piece, takes out $1 million and puts back in $1 million, and it is for the purposes of directing customs and border protection and our border protection people to go in and take out the lookout posts that have been established, I will call them my military positions, from the Mexican border all the way up to Phoenix, through Tucson all the way up to Phoenix. In the time that I've spent on the southern border, the Border Patrol people have pointed out to me, the shadow wolves have pointed out to me, ICE people have pointed out to me that the lookouts that have been established there will be on top of those small mountains that overlook the transportation routes. And so what they do with their sophisticated, the drug smugglers, the drug cartel, with their sophisticated surveillance equipment, good optical equipment, good radio equipment, with scramblers and descramblers ahead of us, they position one or two people on top of those lookout mountains, and then they can tell their own people exactly where the Border Patrol are. They can run a decoy through those routes, and as soon as the Border Patrol converges on that decoy, they will sacrifice 200 pounds of marijuana. I've been there to help interdict that. Meanwhile, they run the truckload through when all those focused resources are on that lookout. That's one of the tactics. They deploy a number of tactics, but they are occupying and controlling what we would describe as military positions way inside the United States, all the way to Tucson and all the way to Phoenix. I've been there, I've looked at them, I've seen them, and Congressman Feeney is actually on his way to add to this debate. He's gone to the top of these mountains. We have pictures. I helped produce a map. This is a map of at least 75 locations. It may well go over 100 locations. I sat there and watched our border protection people put the Xs on the map. I stood there and looked at the mountains to them. I presented this to the Vice President. I presented this to the Secretary of Homeland Security, and what I get is a letter that is more or less designed to pacify me. And I believe that, if you're going to play cat and mouse with drug smugglers, you ought to take those tools away from them. We should be taking these drug smugglers off of these tactical positions the instant they arrive there and not let them sit up there and control military positions inside the United States, controlling the transportation routes for their drug smuggling, all the way to Phoenix. This is a fact. It's a well-established fact, and this Congress needs to send a message that the Department of Homeland Security needs to take them out the minute they're occupied. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, could I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I seek to close in this period of time, and I appreciate the chairman's remarks on this, but he's asking us to accept the argument that out of $6.6 billion Homeland Security is not going to spend $1 million to take out the lookout outpost on top of the mountains that the drug cartels are manning. And they man these things full-time, often two at a time, often with assault weapons on top. They build a little fortress up there with setting up stones like sandbags, and it's a military position. They sit up there with optical equipment, infrared equipment at night. They can see further than we can see, and they can communicate as well as we can communicate, many times better. So it wouldn't be rational to say we're playing a game of cat and mouse, but we're going to let this cat do whatever he wants to do and we're going to play the mouse. So Mr. Feeney and I authored a letter that went to Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff on August 30 of last year and asked him to take out these lookout posts and take those drug smugglers off the top of those mountains. That's the short version of it. We got the letter back, the answer back from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, not the Secretary, and their explanation from the letter was, ``Recently, agents in the San Diego sector, using advanced technology, discovered that scouts for a drug trafficking organization were watching Border Patrol movements and were trying to coordinate the crossing of narcotics into the United States. Using this intelligence, Border Patrol agents seized 400 pounds of marijuana and the vehicle used to transport the narcotics.'' That's their huge accomplishment for $65 billion worth of drugs pouring across our southern border and drug smugglers with assault weapons taking up tactical military positions to control our transportation routes. And so they explain to us that they have interdicted 400 pounds of marijuana, which isn't even an indictable offense in that region of the world. It was 250 pounds, but they had too many criminals so they had to raise to it to 500 pounds. These guys get a pass, and that's all the Department of Homeland Security is doing. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Feeney) who has just arrived, and I'm ready for his vigor and hope a chance to close.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for his gracious step that's he taken here and appreciate making sure that the breathless Mr. Feeney had an opportunity to say a few words because I know he ran up the stairs. This is an important symbolic vote, and we've worked on this for years. I didn't realize how difficult it was to convince the Department of Homeland Security what was going on here, but this letter in response that they have written where they bragged about interdicting one person with 400 pounds of marijuana is just somehow that's addressing all of these tactical positions that look over all of our transportation routes inside the United States. Congress needs to send a message we can't tolerate that inside this country. We wouldn't if we were at war. We're in a drug war. I thank the ranking member.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, my amendment strikes $5 million and puts it back in. It is directed to encourage the promotion of the Basic Pilot Program. We have had a number of hearings on this in the subject matter that has come before the Immigration Subcommittee of which I am the ranking member. And the statistics on that look very encouraging to the effectiveness of the Basic Pilot Program, the Employment Verification Program, if you will, or I will call it the ``Instant Check Program.'' What that program does is it allows an employer to take the information off the I-9 document from an employee applicant and introduces that into an Internet page, where that Internet goes off and checks the database of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security and comes back and verifies if you have the documents before you and the information from the documents that ensure that that is a legal applicant, at least the documents from a legal applicant. What we have seen is that 98.6 percent of the legal applicants are approved in the first try. And when they have to go back and clean up their records a little bit, you get to well over 99 percent accuracy within the Basic Pilot Program, and yet we don't have enough employers that are using it. This has been the substance of many of the proposals for Comprehensive Immigration Reform on how we are going to hold employers accountable and how they are going to verify that the applicants before them are applying with real documents and if those documents identify real people that are lawful to work in the United States. And so as much success as we have had with this, I want to ensure that we have the Department of Homeland Security promoting the Basic Pilot Program. They have the dollars in their budget to do that. This just commits those dollars and dedicates $5 million to promotion of the Basic Pilot Program. I will say that I have this program. I have run it myself. I have tried to fool it, everything I could do. The longest delay I could create was 6 seconds on an applicant, and the error rate, of course, is minimal. I would add that if we have flaws in our database, it isn't necessarily a problem with the Basic Pilot Program. It may well be that the Social Security Administration records are wrong, or the Department of Homeland Security criminal records in the NCIC perhaps need to be corrected. So the only way that I can see that you can complete that narrow area, that less than 1 percent that are flawed, is to use the program. If you use the program, you clean up the mistakes. That is what this amendment does, Mr. Chairman, is it directs $5 million and encourages the Department of Homeland Security to promote the Basic Pilot Program. And this has been something that has been consistent with those that promote the Comprehensive Immigration Reform plan, as well as those of us who believe we should do enforcement first. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. This is actually an amendment that I offered a previous year or two. And I don't recall if it was successful or not, I actually think it was, but I can't speak to that factually here tonight. But I can say that since ICE has the authority to go in and enforce on the work site, and they do do that, that also puts them in a position, in their cooperative effort with employers, to be able to use these resources to promote the Employment Verification Program, or the Basic Pilot Program, within the auspices of their regular enforcement, where they are interrelating with the employers on the work site.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the privilege to make another point, and that is that I believe that since we have ICE working all across this country, working with many of the employers, that the knowledge base and the promotion of Basic Pilot would be something that would be mobile and portable and flexible. Since it is an Internet-based program, all of these employers, at least the larger employers, have computers and Internet access. So the flexibility of this and the mobility of it I think is clear. The message that comes from this I don't think constrains ICE, but encourages them to do something I think they should be doing as part of their overall process. I would encourage the chairman to consider my remarks in his response.

Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman believes that this is a well thought out and constructive amendment, and although I appreciate the sentiment of the chairman, I would be reluctant to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman will yield further, I hope I have made my point that ICE is in a position to enforce. They are hands-on with the employers in the work site, and that is where the utilization of Basic Pilot takes place. I believe it is incumbent upon this Congress to encourage that ICE incorporates the promotion and education of this as part of the work that they do as they interrelate with the employers. Not just go in and raid and lock people up and haul them off, but to help work so employers can have confidence. If we leave this strictly within USCIS, they are not out into the employer workforce. They don't have that access to employers in the fashion that ICE does.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, moving forward in my last minute in conclusion, I just want to emphasize that ICE is out there in the field and they are dealing with employers on a daily basis face-to-face. USCIS is a stationary operation and they operate out of their offices wherever they might be located with the databases they have and the access that they have to the information. But USCIS wouldn't be in a position to come out and promote Basic Pilot on a face-to-face basis with employers. I would say the only entity out there that has better capability of interacting with employers, other than ICE, would be the IRS. It may be a good idea for us at some point to take up the idea of eliminating the tax deductibility of wages and benefits paid to illegals and let the IRS help with this enforcement. But what this amendment does is it encourages and directs that ICE go out and interact with the employers and promote with $5 million the utilization of the Basic Pilot Program. Mr. Chairman, I urge the adoption of the amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I thank Mr. Tancredo for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I would take it to this, that one thing that has happened with these sanctuary policies is the cities have gotten together, I think I looked at the same attorney opinion, and tried to find a loophole, and in many of these sanctuary policies it says if you are an employee of the city, you shall not gather information. If you are prohibited from gathering, then you don't have any information to share with the law enforcement people who do enforce our Immigration laws. That is one of the loopholes that is there. But the philosophy here is really the difference. There are two trains of thought. One of them says if you enforce immigration law in my community, people won't come forward and report other laws, like domestic abuse or whatever. And the other side is, how in the world can you enforce some laws and not others? This is a statute that is clear on the books. Mr. Tancredo is seeking to enforce that statute. And the decision needs to be made by the cities, do you like your Homeland Security funding? Is the funding that comes from the Federal Government that provides that security in those cities worth more to you than your sanctuary policy? That is the bottom line. Federal law has got to prevail.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding. I want to clarify what this amendment does. It does really two things. One is it directs the $1 billion already in the bill to go to the 854 miles of the most critical areas of the border that were identified in the Secure Fence Act. The first thing is put the resources where they are the most critical, where Congress has, by more than a 2-to-1 margin in the House, said let's do this. And the Senate has said by a more than 4-to-1 margin, 80-19, let's build this 854 miles. The second thing that the bill does is that it confines the billion dollars to fence and access roads. You have to have roads to build it, and you have to have roads to maintain it. What the administration has demonstrated is out of the $1.187 billion that we appropriated last year, they spent perhaps $30 million on real fence, the 13.01 miles that Mr. Royce addressed. The balance of that is on virtual technology. Now we need some virtual technology; but overall, this will provide in the end $2.2 billion. And of that, $1 billion is set aside for physical structures, fence and roads. The balance of that, the decision can be made by DHS as to whether that is virtual and real or whatever combination. So we are asking for $1 billion of the overall $2.2 billion to go to physical fence and access roads. That is consistent with what Congress has passed by a large margin. What is so important about this that isn't brought into this debate is the fact that there are $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming across that southern border. Ninety percent of the illegal drugs that come into America come there. The force of that $65 billion is overpowering, and no amount of virtual fence is going to stop a real drug cartel that is pushing on all 2,000 miles of that border and will find the weak spots.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, the timing of this discussion, I really asked to be recognized to address the Drake amendment, but as I listened to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I think there are some things that we need to take up and add to this particular discussion that he's opened up. And that is, what do we do about this conundrum of earmarks? First of all, we do have too many earmarks, and I've not been one that's said that that solves our spending problem here, but I think it puts bait out there for people to do things that, first of all, if the bloggers could see the things that are going on, they would weigh in on us, and perhaps that would be some of the regulatory function that the bloggers could perform. But a couple of nights ago, I sat down and went through two appropriations bills. One of them was the omnibus spending bill for 2005, 1,600 pages; another appropriation bill, 400 pages; all together, 2,000 pages. And I didn't read it all, wouldn't have been possible, but I leafed through that appropriations bill, and I find in there earmarks that wouldn't be identified as earmarks. I find in there language that says this funding shall go to this company as funded in previous years. And my recommendation to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who hopefully would hear what I would have to say, that being a bill I introduced last year called the CUT Act, ``cut unnecessary tab,'' as in a bar tab, unnecessary spending. But what it does is it solves the problem that's been identified here and, to some degree, described by the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and articulately addressed by Mr. Pence and others here on this floor. It puts us all up to public scrutiny. Sunlight is the antidote, and we ought to have enough pride in every earmark that we ask for that we would allow the public to see what we're doing with our spending. And when I look through an appropriations bill, 2,000 pages of them, and I see that even if you knew what you were looking for, you couldn't identify that earmark, you couldn't identify the amount. You might identify the company that it goes to, but unless you had an in with the committee staff and you could trace back through that paperwork, and no one outside this Chamber that I know of can do that without favors by a Member, and a lot of Members couldn't walk in there and get that information, including myself. We need to set this all up for the public scrutiny. So I spent a couple of years working through my proposal, and I'll hopefully be able to introduce the language again so it's here and goes into this discussion. But the CUT Act makes in order a bill to come to the floor once a quarter that is a rescissions bill and a rescissions bill only. It might just be a blank title offered by the majority leader or the minority leader on the other side, but every Member could bring an amendment down to that. And it takes this idea that once you go to the conference report and you offer it to the House and the Senate, up-or-down vote, no amendments, no one can know what's in there and no one can read it all, no one can analyze it if they can read it all, but if we put that all up and post it up on the Internet and let the world look at what we're doing and then bring a bill to the floor that's a rescissions bill and let any Member bring an amendment to strike something like the reference was to the ``bridge to nowhere,'' put that up on an up-or- down vote and accumulate that list of rescissions. Then, in the end, we've got an appropriations process that everyone in this Chamber, no one will have an excuse to say I couldn't find that amendment; I couldn't find that language; I couldn't take it out; it wasn't my responsibility. We all become collectively responsible for every dollar spent by this Congress, and if we do that, we truly have sunlight and we truly have a full responsibility. And that's the step that we need to take. The rest is rhetoric. The rest is hiding behind one side of political argument or the other, but if we're willing to put our earmarks up for an up-or-down vote and let this Congress go on record for any line item, then we truly have the sunlight on this that we've asked for; and I'd ask that consideration from the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. The people that want to stand up for reform, here it is, the CUT Act. And then in the moments I have left, I would add that I stand in support of the Drake amendment. And I grew up in a law enforcement family. You cannot enforce laws effectively if you're going to have local government or State law enforcement that decides that they can't engage in enforcing Federal law or vice versa. This has got to be a kind of working, compatible relationship so that the city police, county sheriffs, highway patrolmen and Federal officers all work in a collaborative arrangement. And we need to have the resources to train those local officers. When we have people on the streets that are picked up two, three, four, five or six times for a traffic violation or an insurance violation, or in an accident or a minor misdemeanor, and they're released back into society and then someone is killed or someone is raped or someone is robbed from, the price to this economy and this society is horrible and horrendous. And we can't get government to tell us what those numbers are, but I commissioned a GAO study here that was released in April of 2005 that produced those numbers, and I'll bring those numbers back to this floor.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, this amendment would reduce the Chief of Staff account in the Office of the Secretary and Executive Management to the fiscal year 2007 level. It represents a $79,000 reduction, and it would go from $2.639 million to $2.56 million. The bill's current funding level is a 3 percent increase over fiscal year 2007 as enacted. There has been at least $105.5 billion in new Federal spending authorized by the House Democrat leadership this year. The current Federal debt is $8.8 trillion, roughly $29,000 for every U.S. citizen. And it grows by over $1 billion a day. Entitlement spending, being Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, is out of control and within a generation will force either significant cutbacks in services or benefits or massive tax increases. The Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office have been warning Congress that the growth in direct spending, and that is spending that's on autopilot outside the annual spending process, is occurring at an unsustainable rate due to well-known demographic trends and other factors. Discretionary spending has also grown exponentially and must be brought under control. This amendment is the first step of many necessary steps in forcing fiscal discipline and sanity upon the Federal Government and out-of- control Federal spending. We must restore fiscal discipline and find both commonsense and innovative new ways to do so, and we need to find ways to do more with less. I have often speculated as to how this Congress would react if we brought a budget down here and presented a budget that would actually be a balanced budget without increasing taxes. We were on a trajectory to do that. And many of the things that have happened so far here in this 110th Congress have reversed that opportunity that we've had and made it far more difficult for us to be able to get to the point where we can balance this budget again. Most of us will look back and remember that at the time of the beginning of this current administration, we were caught in a real flux, we had a dot-com bubble that was an unexpected growth in our economy. It brought in Federal revenues that surpassed the anticipated revenue stream and actually surpassed the ability of Congress to react to increasing spending with the Federal revenue increase. So, when the bubble burst, it slowed down our revenue, and at the same time, since we hadn't anticipated the increase, we ended up with some surplus in this budget, and we paid down some debt. That was a good thing, and I would hope we could find a way to get back to that good thing, but the good thing didn't last very long because, at the same time we had the bursting of the dot-com bubble, we also had things we knew about that had to do with some corporate corruption. That was difficult on our economy and our adjustments. And nearly the same time, and from a national historical perspective it was the same time, we had the September 11 attacks, which in the end generated the very subject matter that is the appropriations of the Department that this bill appropriates. All of those things added together turned this increase or spending and slowed down our revenue increase. Now we've seen the growth in this economy. We have seen unprecedented growth in our Dow, for example. And we have a strong economy that surpassed my anticipation. It went beyond my optimism and exceeded that, Mr. Chairman. So, what I would submit is that this Congress needs to have the discipline every step of the way, wherever we have the opportunity discretionarily, to take us back down to the level where we can one day come to this floor, Democrats and Republicans, and offer a balanced budget and then talk about how we spend that money within that balanced budget without increasing taxes. That's the key, and that's the thrust, and that's the message, Mr. Chairman, that I bring with this amendment that simply reduces the COS office by $79,000.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in support of this legislation which would add Father's Day, the third Sunday in June, to the list of holidays listed in the U.S. flag code on which it's particularly appropriate to fly the American flag. It's altogether appropriate that Father's Day be added to the list of holidays on which the flag should be flown. Both fathers and mothers are essential elements to the basic family unit that has made America so strong. And so the flag should be flown proudly on both Father's Day, as provided by this bill, and on Mother's Day, as already provided in existing law, as a sign of respect for both mothers and fathers and the essential role the traditional family plays in raising new citizens in our democracy. I would add, I want to also thank Congressman Todd Tiahrt for bringing this initiative to Congress. It's interesting to note that there was a class in his district that when they were studying the history and studying the days that the Federal Government encourages display of the flag, they noticed that Father's Day was missing. They had written a letter to Congressman Tiahrt asking that he take action on this, and he has introduced a bill and it complements this bill before us. So I thank him for that and I wanted to emphasize how important it is for citizens to weigh in and to reach out and communicate with Members of Congress because here's a perfect example of how young people saw a gap, had their voice heard, and we have an opportunity here now to fill that gap. The first Father's Day celebration occurred in Fairmont, West Virginia, in 1908, and the first Mother's Day celebration occurred just 15 miles away in Grafton, West Virginia. So that neighborhood is the home now of Father's Day and Mother's Day. But it's a historical anomaly that Mother's Day and Father's Day were instituted so close in time, but it has taken until today for the House to pass a bill to add Father's Day to the day on which it's especially appropriate to fly the flag. President Calvin Coolidge recommended Father's Day as a national holiday in 1924; and in 1966, President Johnson made Father's Day a holiday to be celebrated on the third Sunday of June. The holiday was officially recognized in 1972, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon. I look forward to President Bush signing this legislation into law and encouraging all Americans to fly the flag of their own fatherhood celebrations, which will happen at my house. And as a father, I'm particularly pleased to be here on the eve of the next Father's Day, helping support this piece of legislation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.